Arlo, Sometimes you scare me into thinking maybe Marsha was right about us. Naw, if it was me, I would be vaguer and nastier. I would put less effort into the analysis. But nice job, Dude! Krimel
--------------------------------------------- [Ron] No thought to furthering a view or coming to a mutual agreement just line drawing in the sand and a dare to cross. [Arlo] "It's worse than that, he's dead, Jim." McCoy's not-so subtle sarcasm aside, I think his nod to a "bigger issue" is appropriate here, there is something bigger here than Platt's bombastic demagoguery, and that is the goal of this willful ignorance and outright deception of this talk-radio style rhetoric. Aside from the ad nauseum references to "communist regimes", murderous governments and that moronic book by Bork, it is evident that Platt knows not a thing about "systems ecology". As both Ian and I have commented on many, many time, the attempt here is to STOP the dialogue, to derail it and move it over to the slop pit of talk-radio rhetoric, and that is the true evil here. But let me step out of Platt's manure pile here, and make a brief comment on Krimel's "spark plug" post. There are two "processes" that stand side-by-side for me in this line of thought; focus and selection. The driver of the car has a whole different "focus" than the engine mechanic, and they both have a different focus than the machinist who crafts the plug (or any "part") and the engineer who ponders internal combustion physics. No focus is "right", they are all pragmatically oriented towards the task at hand. Hell, you could add the miner who extracts the ore that will become the plug or the police officer who's focus is on ensuring your engine is not moving your car too fast. "Selection" is about the process that "sorts sand" from the endless landscape, the talk in ZMM about the various ways to "dissect" the engine into intellectual hierarchies, or in this example the higher level of "car". John (from ZMM) never really got into a consideration of the "engine" any more selective than just "engine". And he didn't need to, so long as there were mechanics he could turn to if something went wrong with the "engine". But again I think its worth noting that Pirsig's comments from ZMM point to a landscape that is not "naturally divided" (my words), that is what we see as "discreet" is not in fact so. We divide, then we forget that our divisions are illusions of convenience, matters of pragmatic import, and culturally-derived, and come to wrongfully believe that these "separations" precede our "analytic knife", when in fact they are created by it. I think the whole nature of critical thinking (another one of Platt's bugaboos) is learning how to play with focus and selection. And I think that as we focus in or zoom out we can see the larger ecology (wait for it, Platt will comment on that word, you can be sure of it) in which "individuals" interact. (Indeed, I think the terms "individual" and "collective" are meaningful only in the context of the focus, and only following the moment of selection). Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
