Re: FW JK Galbraith and Basic Income
Once again, you have cut through the BS of my thinking. On the one hand, I
can find rational answers such as the Basic Income which I am sure will
provide a corrective for the capitalistic system. I can also agree with
others answers, such as WesBurt's proposals or some of the thoughts of Tom
Walker.
Then I enlarge the problem by thinking/reading of population, energy,
resource depletion, or the book I picked up at the library today called Dark
Grey which deals with the demographics of an aging population and how
economics has no answer in providing a system in which we can save enough or
tax enough for a pension system for the elderly. This morning, I read how a
research team in California are onto what they call the immortality cell in
which they have been able to extend the life of a fruit fly up to three
times it's normal lifespan. A couple of days ago, I read an online book
called Can America Survive in which the author makes a very convincing case
that the Earth could support a sustainable population of only 5 million
hunter/gathers and 5 million living in an industrial/technological society.
Though we might quibble with the numbers, it seems rational to believe that
we can't keep 6 billion mouths and assholes functioning on this small planet
indefintely.
And yes, every state is debt and almost every person on the planet is in
debt to someone, somewhere. So what happens when a chain of non-payment
begins? It boggles my mind. Unlike you, though, I do have some small
comfort - death happens to us all and I chose to believe in an afterlife -
in fact many afterlives. I guess we'll have to each die before we find out
who is right on that belief.
I have the comfort of knowing that I belong to this
peculiar species called homo sapiens, and we have the
ability to become aware of our problems -
besides having a bloody good time, in the
process, in lucky circumstances - and
ingenius enough to plan for the future - in which I
have vested - normal biological as well as emotional
interest - through my children.
This is plenty enough for me to go on with -
I need no comfort, I feel lucky and special without
god - the number of coincidences to continuously
produce this individual - special to me and a few
others,- and the ability to reflect on this
amazing morsel of the universe of ours for a short while -
or even manipulate it collectively - is good enough for me,
thank you very much!
Eva
Respectfully,
Thomas Lunde
--
From: "Durant" [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: FW JK Galbraith and Basic Income
Date: Wed, Jul 7, 1999, 10:14 PM
This is a utopia if based on capitalist
economics. (Or have I already mentioned this?)
Welfare capitalism was tried, and when the upswing
collapsed, it failed. Even the richest states are in debt,
even when they only spend pitifully small percentages
on welfare.
Eva
Thomas:
One of things I have always like about Galbraith is that he accepts that the
poor are entitled and deserve some joy and comfort and security in their
lives. Something which the majority of the moderate and overly affluent want
to deny. It is as if poorness is not enough, a little suffering is good for
the soul, especially if it someone elses suffering.
You know, being poor is not so bad, and most of us who experience it find
ways to still enjoy our lives. However, it is the constant pressure from
those more fortunate that somehow if we have sex, go to a movie, have a
picnic in the park we are violating our status in life. Give us a basic
income and get off our back, I think would be endorsed by the majority of
the poor. Allow us to have dreams for our children and we will live
modestly.
Respectfully,
Thomas Lunde
--
From: "S. Lerner" [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED],
[EMAIL PROTECTED],
[EMAIL PROTECTED]@dijkstra.uwaterloo.ca
Subject: FW JK Galbraith and Basic Income
Date: Tue, Jul 6, 1999, 9:52 AM
Much to my delight, the following appeared in today's Toronto Globe and
Mail: A13 ("J.K.Galbraith, who is 90, delivered this lecture last week on
receiving an honorary doctorate from the London School of Economics. It is
reprinted from The Guardian." )
Excerpt: "I come to two pieces of the unfinished business of the century
and millenium that have high visibility and urgency. The first is the very
large number of the very poor even in the richest of countries and notably
in the U.S.
The answer or part of the answer is rather clear: Everybody should
be guaranteed a decent income. A rich country such as the U.S. can well
afford to keep everybody out of poverty. Some, it will be said, will seize
upon the income and won't work. So it is now with more limited welfare, as
it is called. Let us accept some resort to leisure by the poor as well as
by the rich."
[EMAIL
Re: Easing Transition to Cybereconomy
Who was talking about any final solution? I find such a strawman a tad offensive. And, believe me, I was sensitive to the implication of the term; however, your uncompromising views do give the impression that you can see only one solution, and that that solution is the final one. But, even so, I do apologize for giving in to my baser instincts. Uncompromising means, not changing opinions even when presented rational reasons to do so. In the absence of such what can I do? What if my opinion is actually a good approximation to reality, such as, say, Newton's views on gravity? Was he uncompromising about these? Hmmm. So, in your opinion, there is a final solution after all! ?? Just because I find no adequate reason as yet to change my opinion, that doesn't mean that said opinion says anything that can be termed as final solution. You sidetracked your debate about the way I said it (uncompromisingly) to what I said - two different things in most books. In a compromise one need not give up one's opinions (to which one is always entitled); one may simply agree to put them on hold in order to get on with life. In the case of this listserv "life" is simply the stated issue for which it provides a forum. (A compromise may also involve each side in a disagreement merging views to produce a mutually-acceptable position, but I don't that's likely in this context.) Yes, compromise is a very essential part of human cooperation, no argument there. However, it is not always possible, or even necessary or useful. If we are consccous about something harmful, we have a duty to attempt, using the most convincing evidence, to shift other people to our view, so that we can cooperate to avoid the continuation of said harm. To both collectivists and certain environmentalists discussing such short range or limited issues is tantamount to shuffling deck chairs on the Titanic. But, as has been noted before, to muddle through a bit at a time, while frustrating, may be the best approach. It at least holds out the prospect that society may attain a singular (critical) point at which a paradigm shift occurs and the correct views are conceived and implemented. To muuddle through is the maddest possible strategy when you are aware, that the boat is sinking. - You should tell as many people as you can, so you may use the largest capacity of human inventiveness to avoid/survive the catastrophy. Human history is defined by the progress of "artificial" involvement in the paradigm-shift business. At this point, if you leave it to the muddle-through shortsightedness of the present captains of the media, you might as well pop a few pills and jump overboard to avoid all the chaos of the sinking. I uncompromisingly try my best to shift that horrid paradigm. The gist of syncronising cooperative production with cooperative distribution did not happen, the process of polarization of economical, thus political power is happening as much and more than in Marx's time. All compromises so far ended up with an untouched capitalist economic base. I agree, that the non-compromising revolutions failed, too, but we had a chance to find out exactly, why, and all those conditions that lead to the failure - such as poverty, illiteracy, thus the continuation of the despotic burocracy intact from the tsar - cannot be repeated with the awareness and expectancy of democracy - a paradigm shift that actually happened in my opinion, and waits for the opportune moment to assert itself... Eva The following is an extract from "The Communist Manifesto" by Marx and Engels. How much of this has already been implemented? Or found to be undesirable? Or outmoded by technological change? "The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, _by degrees_ (my emphasis), all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organised as the ruling class; and to increase the total of productive forces as rapidly as possible. Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property, and on the conditions of bourgeois production; by means of measures, therefore, which appear economically insufficient and untenable, but which, in the course of the movement, outstrip themselves, necessitate further inroads upon the old social order, 18) and are unavoidable as a means of entirely revolutionising the mode of production. These measures will of course be different in different countries. 19) Nevertheless in the most advanced countries, the following will be pretty generally applicable: 1.Abolition 20) of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes. 2.A heavy progressive or graduated income tax. 21) 3.Abolition of all right of inheritance. 4.Confiscation of
Re: An Aside: On Rational Thinking
Eva Durant wrote: Uncompromising means, not changing opinions even when presented rational reasons to do so. In the absence of such what can I do? What if my opinion is actually a good approximation to reality, snip Let's take a harder look at rational thought: as it happens, I wasn't as deep as you wanted me to be, by rational reasons I meant those that can be demonstrated to be best describing our experiences/ our reality upto the time of the decision. However, as the FPLC is working away happily, I might as well give you my reflections... "Rational thinking ... cannot predict the future. All it can do is to map out the probability space as it appears at the present, and which will be different tomorrow when one of the infinity of possible states will have materialized. Technological and social inventions broaden this probability space all the time; it is now incomparably larger than it was before the Industrial Revolution, for good or for evil. Who claimed any prediction of the future? Marxism claims with evidence that capitalism has an inbuilt contradiction, and that a system is possible and maybe more effective in maintaining human society without the capitalist anomaly. Everything else depends on the given particular initial conditions. From these probabilistic predictions may be drawn. People happen to trust the products of "rational thinking", they step into airoplanes and cars without giving much of a thought to probability, not to mention the million other such everyday effects of scientific thinking. "The future cannot be predicted, but futures can be invented. It was man's ability to invent which has made human society what it is. The mental processes of invention are still mysterious. They are rational, but not logical, that is to say not deductive. The first step of the technological or social inventor is to visualize, by an act of imagination, a thing or a state of things which does not yet exist, and which to him appears in some way desirable. He can then start rationally arguing backwards from the invention, and forward from the means at his disposal, until a way is found from one to the other." The ability to invent is secondary to be able to remember and to communicate. Every inventor is "standing on the shoulder of giants" who are unknown and number thousands of the same and several previous generations. When a given number of data is accumulated, and there is a given number of well fed people with access to this data and a bit of spare time from chasing the dynosaur, tilling the land or manning the checkout counter, there is a good chance that the "invention" will follow. Quantity turning into quality... I can't think of any of these "backward" inventions - can you? the rest seem to be semantic/relativistic mix, making strawmen arguments from wierd definition of rational thought - I'll get back to them later, you seem to be ahead in the "time management pardigm". Eva ( D. Gabor, Inventing the Future, Penguin Books, 1963, p. 161) "... criticisms of rational (decision-making) model: 1.Success in goal attainment means commitment to the goal, and commitment is an emotional -- thus nonrational -- state ... 2.All groups have several goals ... so that over-specialization may threaten survival ... 3 it is very difficult to gain agreement on just what goals or goal are being sought ..." (W. Breed, The Self-Guiding Society, The Free Press, 1971, pp. 95-96) "Several critics of the rational model suggest a second approach to decision-making -- incrementalism. "Two major weaknesses ... First ... reflects the interests of the most powerful groupings in society ... second .. ignores overdue innovations." (ibid., pp. 99-101) "The model (of decision-making) we recommend is called mixed scanning. "An example of mixed scanning: weather satellites hold two cameras. One takes broad-angle pictures covering large segments of the sky ... The other lens photographs much smaller segments but in much greater detail ... dual scanning device ... scans for signs of trouble. The second camera explores these danger points in detail ... "When criticism shows that a policy is ineffective, stop incrementing and turn to more encompassing scanning." (ibid., pp. 103-111) "Intellectual competence will be judged in terms of the ability of the student to synthesize the explosion of information. Most significant thinking will be reflective ... Men will succeed or not in the measure of their ability to order information into unity and to evaluate and judge (Aristotle's order of judgment again, his very principle for distinguishing wisdom from mere science)." (F. D. Wilhelmsen and J. Bret, The War in Man, University of Georgia Press, 1970), p. 35) "Kant's compla
Re: Easing Transition to Cybereconomy
"The pattern of events" is the dependent variable. You have to pinpoint the base for the reason of change, before the "pattern of events" happen to go the wrong way. Who was talking about any final solution? I find such a strawman a tad offensive. "The pattern of events" is the dependent variable. Now you are using the terminology of inferential statistics. sorry, I didn't mean to... You have to pinpoint the base for the reason of change, Presumably by "base" you mean the independent variables. If so, then I don't understand "independent variables for the reason of change". What I could understand is: what are the independent variables influencing the pattern of events? And that I've answered in various previous posts. But, in any event, one can only state that a relationship exists in probabilistic terms. I must have missed it, I can't remember you pointing out the irregularities in the economic mechanism. That is the (relatively) independent variable. I can't see the probabilistic side; capitalist means of production has particular consequences as seen over and over again. To rephrase: one has to identify the independent variables before the dependent variable goes the "wrong way". You seem to see this as a quality control problem, i.e. ensure that the dependent variable stays within certain limits. No, not really. The point is, that it is futile to manuver (sp?) those variables that are dependent on structures some of us content to leave as they are. While there may be some insight to be gained by adopting that metaphor, it is not one that I intended. I guess all I was saying was: Find a need, and fill it! (the entrepreneurial maxim updated to reflect a more complex environment). and proving to be as shortsighted and ineffective policy as can be, both in finding needs and filling them, even in the literal sense. Who was talking about any final solution? I find such a strawman a tad offensive. And, believe me, I was sensitive to the implication of the term; however, your uncompromising views do give the impression that you can see only one solution, and that that solution is the final one. But, even so, I do apologize for giving in to my baser instincts. Uncompromising means, not changing opinions even when presented rational reasons to do so. In the absence of such what can I do? What if my opinion is actually a good approximation to reality, such as, say, Newton's views on gravity? Was he uncompromising about these? Eva -- http://publish.uwo.ca/~mcdaniel/
KOSOVO 08/06/99 (fwd)
een desperate to avoid, since it can plunge the whole of the Balkans into war. Despite all the propaganda, NATO's Kosovo adventure has been an expensive disaster. Its main war aims have not been achieved. It has caused a serious rift within the ranks of Nato itself, and aggravated the crisis in Russia. The problem of Kosovo has not been resolved and the Balkans are more unstable now than they were before the war started. The devastation of Yugoslavia is very poor compensation for all this. And to make things worse, Milosevic remains firmly in power. If he is removed in the future, it will not be by American bombs or NATO's intrigues, but by the movement of the masses in Serbia itself. As for the cost of the war, this has already reached the figure of at least three billion pounds, and will continue to rise as the costs of reconstruction will have to be met by the West. As always, it is the working class which will pick up the bill for the crimes of imperialism. There will never be peace or stability in the Balkans until the working people take power into their own hands and carry out the socialist transformation of society. Alan Woods London, 8th June 1999 PS: As we publish this article, talks have been re-started and the UN is drafting a resolution. Read the other material about the crisis in the former Yugoslavia at: Crisis in the Balkans - A Socialist Analysis [Back to In Defence of Marxism] [Back to Europe] - End of forwarded message from Eva Durant -
Re:
Sorry - I thought you need light relief. Eva "Reflected-sound-of-underground-spirits?" -- Economics explained (Terry Pratchett, The Colour Of Magic)
Re: Destruction of Albania (Part I)
I have the feeling, that if a conflict has a chance (and this one has) to ignite WWlll, than we should talk about nothing else but how to stop insanity. Not much futurework in a destroyed world... Eva Durant I am re-posting our caveat of a few weeks ago. The war is front and center with all of us. Discussions about it could easily swamp all the lists on the net. So Sally and I appeal to all FWers and your netizen ideals and values to keep futurework to its main discussion focus. Thanx. = Dear faithful FWers. There is obviously a great deal of emotion and concern about events in Yugoslavia. War is a serious thing. However the futurework list was set up for a purpose. If we allow postings on this or that side of events regarding the war it is clear that a new thread on the war will begin. It is likely that such a thread would overwhelm postings concerning futurework. Thus we ask that you keep your postings to the general area indicated by our futurework notices and that you direct your postings vis-a-vis the war and related matters to those lists more relevant to events underway in Yugoslavia and neighbouring countries. Thank you Sally Lerner and Arthur Cordell -- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: Ray E. Harrell; Michel Chossudovsky Subject: Re: Destruction of Albania (Part I) Date: Thursday, May 13, 1999 4:17PM On Fri, 14 May 1999 02:26:20 -0400, Ray E. Harrell wrote: One point in all of this is that as an immigrant New Yorker I am prone to cynicism around the ability of Europeans to live together, (one war every 25 years for the past 1000 years). e.g. From the usefulness of the window shutters in Geneva, with the guns and one month food supply required by law in the basement, to the doors on new apartments in Milan that are made of steel with steel rod bolts going in four directions to keep out marauding armies. Funny, but here in Europe we don't have an army that has bombed 21 countries during the last 50 years (without having been attacked once). We also don't have the high rates of murder and prisoners that your peaceful country has. Nor do we need metal detectors in our schools to protect the kids from each other, or security guards on our campus to prevent the kids from massacrating their peers on Hitler's birthday. We also don't have militia-men who kill dozens of civilians by blowing up a gov't building. Geez, we don't even have racial riots in large cities after some state officers have beaten up a citizen for his race. But I'm sure we'll have all that pretty soon if we follow the lead of your peace-loving and tolerant country, Ray. You see I live in NYCity and we take a rather jaundiced look at people who gather together to kill their neighbors or steal their homes. Jaundiced indeed for a city that was built on just that. Greetings from a multi-cultural European country that had _2_ short (defense) wars in the last 500 years (but I guess this can't be read in your informative NYT), Chris
Re: Destruction of Albania (Part I)
The swiss were pretty rich and smug before Hitler's time. It is a good example, that if the society is effluent enough, the ethnic strife becomes a thing of the past. (Doesn't make them all that friendly and guest-loving though...) However, given our beloved capitalism, such peaceful, prosperous times are transient; insecurity and poverty will bring out all the alienation and aggressivity wherever you are whichever minority/majority is persecuted as the alleged cause for all misery. It could even happen to the swiss given an implosion of the financial/tourist/cookoo clock sector... Eva Funny, but here in Europe we don't have an army that has bombed 21 countries during the last 50 years (without having been attacked once). We also don't have the high rates of murder and prisoners that your peaceful country has. Nor do we need metal detectors in our schools to protect the kids from each other, or security guards on our campus to prevent the kids from massacrating their peers on Hitler's birthday. We also don't have militia-men who kill dozens of civilians by blowing up a gov't building. Geez, we don't even have racial riots in large cities after some state officers have beaten up a citizen for his race. But I'm sure we'll have all that pretty soon if we follow the lead of your peace-loving and tolerant country, Ray. How beautifully smug! I understand that your bankers made quite a lot of money from the gold and jewelry that the Nazis took from death-camp victims. Europe, if you read its history, was a cesspool of wars, repressions and mass exterminations. And it was Europeans who brought diseases and enslavement to the Americas, accounting for the destruction of civilizations and the deaths of perhaps 100 million people. I'm sorry, I didn't mean to get into this one, but on reading the above self-congratulatory puffery, I just couldn't help it. But perhaps I misunderstood. Perhaps you intent was some form of comic irony. Ed Weick [text/html is unsupported, treating like TEXT/PLAIN] !DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD W3 HTML//EN" HTML HEAD META content=text/html;charset=iso-8859-1 http-equiv=Content-Type META content='"MSHTML 4.72.3110.7"' name=GENERATOR /HEAD BODY bgColor=#ff DIVgt;Funny, but here in Europe we don't have an army that has bombed 21BRcountriesBRgt;during the last 50 years (without having been attacked once).nbsp; We alsoBRdon'tBRgt;have the high rates of murder and prisoners that your peaceful country has.BRgt;Nor do we need metal detectors in our schools to protect the kids fromBRgt;each other, or security guards on our campus to prevent the kids fromBRgt;massacrating their peers on Hitler's birthday.nbsp; We also don't haveBRgt;militia-men who kill dozens of civilians by blowing up a gov't building.BRgt;Geez, we don't even have racial riots in large cities after some stateBRgt;officers have beaten up a citizen for his race.BRgt;BRgt;But I'm sure we'll have all that pretty soon if we follow the lead of yourBRgt;peace-loving and tolerant country, Ray.BRBRBRHow beautifully smug!nbsp; Inbsp; understand that your bankers made quite a lot ofBRmoney from the gold and jewelry that the Nazis took from death-camp victims.BREurope, if you read its history, was a cesspool of wars, repressions andBRmass exterminations.nbsp; And it was Europeans who brought diseases andBRenslavement to the Americas, accounting for the destruction of civilizationsBRand the deaths of perhaps 100 million people.nbsp; I'm sorry, I didn't mean toBRget into this one, but on reading the above self-congratulatory puffery, IBRjust couldn't help it.nbsp; But perhaps I misunderstood.nbsp; Perhaps you intent wasBRsome formnbsp; of comic irony.BRBREd Weick/DIV/BODY/HTML
Re: Destruction of Albania (Part I)
What media coverage? We only got to know about the displeasure of some german greens about the war, when Joshka Fisher had paint thrown at his face. All debates against the bombing were under-reported, demonstrations non-reported. At least some well-informed lists should do some more informing such as passing on info about what to do. O don't know, that's why I am angry and frustrated. eva I feel very strongly as you. I worry about a nuclear exchange. Why not appear at a local protest against the war. Media coverage of protesters will do more to stop things than any amount of talk and flames on this or any list. arthur cordell
Shooting / History / Michael Moore (fwd)
forwarded by Eva It's helpful to understand the history Europe and the Balkans: (double click these website URLs to get there) http://www.lib.msu.edu/sowards/balkan/ and for current info: http://www.lbbs.org/ZNETTOPnoanimation.html http://www.iacenter.org http://www.keepfaith.com/ http://www.webcinema.org/war_diaries/ http://www.greens.org/kosovo.html Also, here's a perspective on our violent society from Michael Moore, of the TV show "The Awful Truth" http://www.theawfultruth.com TO BE DEAD IN DENVER DOWNTOWN PRISTINA Michael Moore, April 22, 1999 Dear Friends, There he was, The Great Consoler, standing at the podium, biting his lip, and speaking to a nation in shock. "We must teach our children to settle their differences through words and not weapons." Meanwhile, this same President, continues a daily slaughter of human beings. He says it's because the people he is bombing are doing their own slaughter. He has chosen to respond to their actions not with "words" but with death. Is it any wonder some of our children -- especially those in most pain, the "outcasts," the "uncool" -- decide to turn to murder and strike out against what they perceive to be a world against them? We live in a culture in America where violence is The Way We Get Things Done. If it works for their elders, why shouldn't the kids give it a try? As the kids at the high school near Denver huddled in locked classrooms in the hopes that they would not be the next one with a bullet in the face, they turned on the classroom TVs to watch the carnage and their own potential execution on CNN. One student, "Bob," got on his cell phone and called the local Channel 9 to give the on-air anchors a live play-by-play of events inside the school. "Bob," the anchors said after getting their precious, Emmy-winning sound bytes, "maybe you should hang up now and call 911." "Uh, oh, yeah," responded Bob, sounding a bit disappointed. His connection to the virtual world of television and cellular communication was more a part of his instinct to survive than his need to call the cops. Or maybe he trusted the people on TV more to get him out of there than the full-time armed officer who patrolled the halls of the high school. Not one gun of a well-armed force of police that showed up was able to prevent one death. A world away, kids just a few years older than Bob are dropping bombs that are killing kids just a few years younger than Bob. We know this because we watch it on TV. We learn why we're dropping these bombs also on TV. A man from the Pentagon shows us cool video game images of point-and-click targets that go "BOOM!" Cool. Another man in an important uniform shows us photographs from one of the Mother-of-All- Cameras, those satellites that sit thousands of miles up in space and have, I guess, REALLY long lenses. He shows us Photo #1. Here, he says, is "unbroken, untouched ground" from a week ago. Then he shows us Photo #2 where he points to the ground being "freshly turned-over, dug up, and replaced." This, he says, is evidence of "a mass grave." The reporters sit there like anxious pet dogs, lapping up the "revelations" and eagerly reporting them to us as "truth." But these journalists failed to ask the man in the important uniform one very important and obvious question: "Where's the middle photo?" If our satellite camera is always up there and running, capturing the before and after of a 300 foot piece of dirt, where's the "during" photo? The satellite cameras were snapping pictures the whole time, so where's the photos of the massacre itself? Where are the photos of the Serbs transporting the bodies to the "mass grave?" Where are the photos of the bodies being placed in the "mass grave" and covered with dirt? Where's just ONE photo of any of this? Was the satellite camera on the blink during all this activity? Was it only working before the ground was dug and then only after it was covered back up? Where are those photos, Mr. Clinton and Mr. Blair? Members of our so-called free press: Where is your courage to ask the obvious questions? Why won't you? Why are we being lied to? On the night of the Denver shootings, NATO (us) bombed the building containing the three Serbian TV entertainment networks. They didn't bomb the news station putting out the nightly propaganda until two nights later. They chose to bomb the entertainment networks first, one of which was showing "Wag the Dog" with its fake Albanian atrocity scenes, on a continuous loop. Yes! Bomb the entertainment networks, 'cause it's all just one big show for a violence-deprived public forced to sit through a year of mostly-unconsummated oral sex in oval offices. We'd much prefer the gore to Gore and Bill. "The Matrix," a film about a young hero in a trenchcoat who is able to blows away everything in sight, is the number one film this week in the country. And as the children of Denver ran from the trenchcoated killers, they were not
The Real Reasons Why We Are Bombing Yugoslavia (fwd)
I found this article a very feasable response to the question. Eva .. THE REAL REASONS WHY WE ARE BOMBING YUGOSLAVIA Guest editorial by Chuck Sher, Argus Courier, Petaluma, CA The current bombing of yet another sovereign country by U.S.-led forces is being justified on humanitarian grounds-U.S. leaders claim that we must stop the Serbs from a policy of ethnic cleansing and even genocide. But before you accept our government's claim at face value, let's take a look at U.S. actions, or inaction, and see what they reveal. If humanitarian concern was the real motivation for U.S. actions then why is our government not bombing Turkey for the brutal repression of their Kurdish population? Is it because Turkey is useful to the U.S. as an ally? Why is our government supplying arms to the Columbian government so they can commit thousands of politically motivated murders every year? As Noam Chomsky writes, "Columbia and Turkey explain their (U.S. supported) atrocities on grounds that they are defending their countries from the threat of terrorist guerrillas. As does the government of Yugoslavia." All sides in the Yugoslav civil wars (not just the Serbs) have committed atrocities. But can we believe reports of massacres of Kosovars (used as the rationale for intervention by the U.S. but disputed by Le Monde and Le Figaro, among other European newspapers) when they come from the lips of NATO inspector William Walker, who was Ollie North's underling and then U.S. ambassador to El Salvador during the late 1980s and who did nothing while U.S.-trained death squads terrorized that country? Why does our government not protest as Palestinians are slowly but surely squeezed out of Arab East Jerusalem and other parts of the West Bank, in direct violation of the Geneva Conventions which forbids an occupying power from importing its own population into territories captured in an armed conflict? Why does the U.S. not support the East Timorese in their struggle to free themselves from a genocidal Indonesian occupation of their country? And on and on. In each of these cases, the U.S. finds it useful to its geopolitical aims to let human rights abuses go unnoticed. Going back in history, we find that the U.S. record is clear-it bombs or invades any country it feels like, supports the worst Third World dictators, and then claims "humanitarian" motives as a fig leaf to cover our government's real motivations-to ever-increase the power of U.S. financial or geopolitical interests around the world. From the illegal and useless bombing of Sudan and Afghanistan; to the deaths of over a million innocent Iraqi civilians in the last eight years due to malnutrition and water-borne diseases (caused by U.S.-led sanctions); to the invasion of Panama, a sovereign nation, causing thousands of civilian deaths in direct violation of international law; to the murder of hundreds of thousands of peasants in Guatemala and El Salvador by their military forces, supported and trained by our government; to a real "scorched earth" policy which killed three million Vietnamese during the Vietnam War; to the original "ethnic cleansing" of Native Americans from their ancestral lands here-the U.S. has no moral authority to point a finger at anyone. Once you have eliminated humanitarian concerns as the motive for the U.S. bombing in Yugoslavia it becomes easier to find the real reasons. First, the U.S. has decided that NATO is a more pliant military tool than the U.N., Kosovo being a case in point-the U.N. would never have authorized an armed attack on Serbia but NATO would and did, at the U.S. government's request. This is a direct violation of international law and the U.N. charter, as well as NATO's own charter which stipulates that NATO is to be a purely defensive alliance. But being the world's only superpower means you never have to say you are sorry, or justify your actions according to the rule of law. Second, there are potentially trillions of dollars of oil in the Caspian Sea region which Western corporations want to control. Instead of a pipeline going through Iran or Russia, the U.S. plan is to build a pipeline through the Balkans and in order to do that we need compliant regimes who will do what they are told. Thirdly, U.S. policy in the Balkans, as elsewhere, is motivated by the Pentagon's need to have some rationale for spending almost $300 billion dollars every year so that it can be the unelected policeman of the world, on behalf of U.S. corporate interests. Is this where you want your hard-earned tax dollars to go? Finally, Yugoslavia was a relatively successful socialist country under Tito and therefore a threat to the ideological hegemony of the U.S. Starting in the 1989, the IMF and the World Bank (both controlled by U.S. financial interests), forced Yugoslavia to largely dismantle their public sector. This, along with U.S.-sponsored economic sanctions, has resulted in the
Re: It's not the economy, stupid
The burst of the speculative financial bubble, that has long lost it's link with the productive economy, will teach the new investor citizens much faster than any book... Eva Bill Clinton's "It's the Economy, Stupid!" strategy followed the same one used very successfully by Ronald Reagan in 1980. In Reagan's case, he asked U.S. citizens directly, "Are YOU better off than you were four years ago?" Not only does that slogan situate all important matters in the economic sphere (or the market, as typically conceived today) but also it reduces politics to a matter of simply calculating one's own immediate financial best interest. Additionally, such a tack effectively "dehumanizes" the market and the economy, divorcing economic indicators from their social, political and moral contexts--except as they relate to the individual who's in a strong enough respurce position to be thinking about raises, taxes, and stocks. As a strategy of political expediency, it's brilliant. In terms of deeper and longer-term implications for politics and ethics, it's disastrous. As Jacob Weisberg described so eloquently in the _New York Times Magazine_, Jan. 25, 1998, the U.S. has become a "community of investors," who understand politics largely by looking at their own pocketbooks at a particular moment. Fortunately, a number of important critiques of this perspective on human affairs have been advanced in just the past few years--see, e.g., Richard Sennett's _The Corrosion of Character_. --George Cheney George Cheney Professor and Director of Graduate Studies Department of Communication Studies The University of Montana-Missoula Missoula, MT 59812 USA tel.: 406-243-4426 fax: 406-243-6136 e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
present work
i found this article demonstrative...Eva THE PEOPLE MARCH 1999 VOL. 108 NO. 12 PROFITING FROM MAYHEM BY KEN BOETTCHER A half-page advertisement that recently ran in THE NEW YORK TIMES is a testament to the debilitating nature of work under capitalism and the stress, anxiety and anger that pervades the workplace and society at large under that system. It was an ad for the security services firm, Guardsmark, that warned of the dangers of workplace violence. Four lines of display type were superimposed over a photograph depicting the evacuation of an office building, presumably during or after an incident of workplace violence. "A loyal employee for 22 years," said the first line. "Last month he was laid off," said the next. "This morning he came back," said the next. "No one was ready for him," said the last. Elsewhere, the ad reinforced Guardsmark's point. "Incidents of workplace violence like this can happen anywhere, anytime. Even the best run companies can be victimized by it. If you don't think your company is vulnerable, think again: workplace violence costs American business billions of dollars annuallyIf you want the best protection for your employees, your visitors and your shareholders, depend on Guardsmark." There's little wonder that Guardsmark should find it useful to use the threat of workplace violence to sell its services. Many such companies do, if a random sampling of security firms offering their services over the Internet is any indication. Fear of workplace violence is not entirely misplaced, though the repressive "solutions" such firms generally offer hold little promise of stemming the growing phenomenon of workplace violence. According to a June 1997 report on "Violence in the Workplace" available from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), "an average of 20 workers are murdered each week in the United States." Further, "...an estimated 1 million workers--18,000 per week--are victims of nonfatal workplace assaults each year." As the report put it, "Homicide is the second leading cause of death on the job, second only to motor vehicle crashes." Not all of this violence is committed by employees. In fact, the portion committed by employees or former employees is about 30 percent, according to the Northwestern National Life Insurance Company. Perhaps more telling is that, according to information provided at www.workplace-violence.com by a firm called Critical Incident Associates, in 95 percent of all workplace violence incidents, the perpetrator is "a socially isolated loner, who is either a disgruntled employee, an angry client, a sexual harasser, an irate spouse or a jilted would-be lover of one of your employees." If a major key to workplace violence is that its perpetrators are "socially isolated loners," then the real wonder is that there is not more workplace violence. For the social environment in which we live--a general social atmosphere often described as the "cold, cruel world"--could hardly be constructed to more efficiently produce "socially isolated loners." Psychologists try to treat such individuals as having "personal problems" that each must cope with alone. However, an individual's "personal problem" in feeling isolated or alienated from other people is in reality a social problem, with its roots in the capitalist system and the culture it engenders. Under such atrocious social conditions, the real wonder is that there are as many reasonably well-adjusted human beings as there are. That there are some "socially isolated loners" who engage in violence at the workplace--or elsewhere--should surprise no one who understands the nature of the society in which we live. Security services like Guardsmark generally prescribe complicated identification procedures, invasive searches, drug testing, Orwellian surveillance or other schemes to curb workplace violence--measures likely to add to the anxiety and stress of work under capitalism. But the only measure that can actually end workplace violence is to end the violence done to workers by the capitalist social system by abolishing capitalism itself. - End of forwarded message from Ken Boettcher -
Re: FW: Re: In the interests of peace...
Recognizing independence unqualified is not a good idea - though you probably are aware of this, it can be the start of wars rather than the end. The hasty recognition of Croatia by Germany and then the West, without any guarantees of minority rights, started the whole damn yugoslav war. Whether the aim is to blackmail a bully or not, this is important. Eva I think it's a damn good idea, and I don't see anything simpleminded about it at all. It is certainly a bit off topic for this group, but I'm prepared to tolerate a brief digression. I wouldn't want to see it turn into a month long debate, though. My only reticence about it is I feel it's probably too late to be used effectively in Kosovo, as at this point it would just look like NATO backing up another step and drawing another line in the sand after the Serbs have stepped over the twenty or so drawn before. As a principle for dealing with military responses to national aspirations, I think it has great merit, though I would suggest that many nations might fear that the support of it would be against the interests of their own territorial integrity. However, it is an idea whose time has really come. The UN and other treaty organizations such as NATO have done a lot in the last 50 years to end wars between sovereign nations, so now most mass violence is confined to within the boundaries of states. Up til now, the international community has been reluctant to step in to `internal' affairs, but in the last few years, without major internation conflicts to command attention, the desire is growing to develop a mechanism whereby the security of groups under persecution by their state can be sanctioned by the world community. Your proposal offers such a mechanism. Knowing how world consensus proceeds, I expect it would take several years for this concept to gain acceptance, but I suspect it would find some champions immediately. We in Canada, with our own minority perennially considering devolution, have come, I think, to accept that the only mature way to handle this issue is by democratic choice, negotiation and compromise. I see it as part of the continual advancement of the "goalposts" of civilized behaviour. As peace becomes more widespread in the world, expectations of peaceful behaviour become stronger. -Pete Vincent
Re: FWD: (SK) Scary Genetic Stories
I thought you'd find this as interesting as me, the ways science can be reported - the need not to jump to conclusions too soon. Having said that, no way would I trust corpo- rations/multinationals or anybody with financial interest to make decisions for my future health/safety/environment. Eva I am impressed -- as ever -- by the amazing way too little information can be made worse for the reader (and better for the writer and his opinions) than enough information. Stunned, even, in this case, since I have first-hand knowledge of the stuff being discussed. For instance, the thing described in this article as "Jeff Palmer's" "genetic parasite" is a DNA sequence of about 2000 base pairs (if I recall, since I am one of many botanists who actually sequenced part of the damned thing, back when I was a budding molecular botanist in the summer of 1987) called a *transposon* or *transposable element*. These are the things that make leaves of some green plants have white blotches on them, and make what we call in this country "indian corn" have little red or purple radiant stripes on the kernels of some varietals. They have an interesting history, evolutionarily, since they are most likely the origin of viruses (i.e., all of them), and control expression of whole suites of genes in very interesting ways. They are what Barbara McClintock got her belated Nobel prize for. All higher (eukaryotic) organisms have transposons. Always have, apparently. And there's always been some suspicion of horizontal gene transfer. What I was sequencing during my golden youf was a close relative of this article's particular transposon, which turned out to be nearly identical in carrots and in rice -- which are not very closely related, phylogenetically. 'Tis to say, we pretty much knew that the DNA had got from one to another way back then, without being directly inherited. A group of researchers in Indiana University of the United States, headed by Dr. Jeffrey Palmer, have just reported in the current issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA that a genetic parasite belonging to yeast has suddenly jumped into many unrelated species of higher plants recently. But the **best** thing I like about this article is the word "recently" and the word "suddenly". Amazing, actually. Know what it means, really? I quote from the abstract of the article in question: "Extrapolating to the over 13,500 genera of angiosperms, we estimate that this intron has invaded cox1 genes by cross-species horizontal transfer over 1,000 times during angiosperm evolution. This massive wave of lateral transfers is of entirely recent occurrence, perhaps triggered by some key shift in the intron's invasiveness within angiosperms. " http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/95/24/14244?maxtoshow=HITS=10hits=10 RESULTFORMAT=author1=palmer%2C+j.+g.searchid=QID_NOT_SETFIRSTINDEX= Check it out -- "during angiosperm evolution". This being a *very long time*. This parasite is a piece of DNA called a group I intron that can splice itself in and out of a particular gene in the genome of mitochondria. Mitochondria are little power houses of the cell that oxdize food in order to turn it into a form of energy that can be used for all living processes. Until 1995, this parasite was thought to be confined to yeast and only one genus of higher plants out of the 25 surveyed had the parasite. But in a new survey of species from 335 genera, 48 were found to have the parasite. "Until 1995 this parasite was thought to be confined..." my ass, not to put too fine a point on it. It wasn't "unknown" -- I know a man who got his Ph.D. in 1988 for showing how it worked in rice, wheat, and carrots. Admittedly, that was a version in the coxII gene, but what the hey? Same idea. ... · Is it possible that the recent massive horizontal gene transfer from yeast to higher plants was triggered by commercial genetic engineering biotechnology itself? Here, students, we see what is perhaps the best rhetorical use of incomplete information. Note how we have moved laterally from never saying what "recently" means to the actual researchers (at least several tens or hundreds of thousand years) to what the author of this "review" feels it "should" mean to the now worried reader. Shift and separate. · Genetic engineering makes use of artificial genetic parasites as gene carriers, to transfer genes horizontally between unrelated species. These artificial parasites are made from parts of the most aggressive naturally occurring parasites like the group 1 intron discussed here. And this phrase "genetic parasite" is a fascinating coinage in its own right. While strictly speaking it is absolutely accurate, its X-filesian connotation gives it a very high score on the rhetorical scale. One could as well speak of the insidious use of cell-death-inducing "destructor genes" in creating things like, oh,
Re: New Y2K Computer Problem -- Time Dilation (fwd)
I thought I'd better to send you the follow-up (debunking?), too. Eva From the Los Angeles Times Monday, February 22, 1999 The Y2K Bug Has Company in the Form of 'Time Dilation' Computers: Pair who stumbled on the odd phenomenon insist it's a legitimate concern. Others call their warnings a scare tactic. This rubbish from Elchin and Crouch has been around for a while. Here are two of my messages to the Australian Computer Society's Y2K list: 24 February From Mike Echlin... Hi Carl, As you say its not easily replicated, and this is why a lot of people have wrtten it off, they tried a few times, didn't see it, so say, "not gonna hit me." But they are wrong, Every year or two a rumour circulates that a time bomb virus is out there, set to go off on a certain date and do dreadful things. Each time this happens, "current affairs" programs find a few poor people who didn't take the precautions and had computer problems. Warning!!! The PBhaha virus is set to come into operation on 22/9/1999. This evil program hides itself on your computer (it cannot be detected by any anti-virus program) until it detects that the date has rolled to 22/9/1999. When it sees this date, it generates a random number and, based on the value returned, causes either your hard disk or the fan in your power supply to fail. If either of these things happen when you turn on your computer on that date you have probably become a victim. This is a hybrid virus and is equally likely to affect PCs running DOS or Windows (any flavour from 1.1 to 2000), Macs, Linux boxes and HP network printers with hard disks. (A lot of Macs are immune to the fan problem, though.) Do not switch your machine on on that date unless you have adequate backups. But seriously - a couple of dozen computers from the hundreds of millions out there exhibit some non-reproducible anomaly in the BIOS or RTC date and this guy reckons Armageddon is here. Where's the pattern? Where are the large number of machines from the same manufacturer which all exhibit the same symptoms and which do it every time the test is applied? Time Dilation! More like "Brain Dilation". Perhaps we could call it "Brain Shrinkage, or "BS" for short. Crouch's website looks like a definite Quintessence candidate. === 5 March I spend a lot of my time online with people who are fighting quack medicine and other forms of ratbaggery such as those who claim paranormal powers of various kinds or are aware of events occurring through Forces Unknown To Science (FUTS). I was sceptical of Elchin and Crouch immediately, simply because they exhibit all the hallmarks of the mad scientist. Please note that scepticism does not mean immediate rejection, only a desire for truth. Cold fusion was not rejected immediately even though it looked highly probable that Fleischmann and Pons were either mistaken or deluded. It is classic quack or woowoo practice to quote slim anecdotal "evidence" and then demand that everyone else prove the findings to be false. Leaving aside the impossibility of proving a negative, the onus of proof has to be on the claimant, and, as we say in the sceptic business, "extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof". Many of these mad claims can be ignored because they are either obviously impossible (eg perpetual motion machines) or of no urgency. Unfortunately this one addressed a real problem with real urgency. This meant that real scientists had to spend real time and real money investigating the claims of these fools, claims based on the fact that highly improbable random events can happen. (The next time you hear of someone winning Lotto, remember that the win was less probable than your Windows machine running for 1,000 years without a problem.) The public have been scared silly by much of the talk about the Y2K problem and are susceptible to almost any stupid claim of a solution (I will talk about MFX2000 at another time). Like quack cancer cures or stories about planetary alignment, these things bring false hope (or fears) and demands for investigation. Like these other lunacies they waste everyone's time when there are real problems to solve. . Peter Bowditch [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.gebesse.com.au - End of forwarded message from Peter Bowditch -
Re: Beware Happy99.exe worm!!!
It's a rather dated hoax, don't you think? Never post such stuff to other people or lists as that itself is a spam "virus". Send it to your server maintenance people - they should either complain about it, or let you know if it is something real - never yet. Eva
What's New for Feb 26, 1999 (fwd)
As loads of you seem to be in awe of the sience establishment, I thought perhaps you are interested in these reports on its management, I forward these in the future if there is interest. Eva -- Forwarded message -- Date: Fri, 26 Feb 1999 16:56:27 -0500 (EST) From: What's New [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: What's New for Feb 26, 1999 WHAT'S NEW Robert L. Park Friday, 26 Feb 99 Washington, DC 1. NMD: WHO SAYS CONGRESS ISN'T DOING THE PEOPLES BUSINESS? We can all sleep better tonight. By an overwhelming 50-3, the House Armed Services Committee yesterday approved the National Missile Defense Act: "It is the policy of the United States to deploy a national missile defense" (WN 5 Feb 99). There is no mention of when, what it might cost, whether it should work, or the White House promise of a veto in its present form (12 Feb 99). 2. BROOKHAVEN: NO SIGNIFICANT SAFETY ISSUES FOUND AT HFBR. At the request of DOE, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission conducted a six-week on-site assessment of safety issues at the High Flux Beam Reactor. The NRC report concludes that: "Actions taken to characterize and control the tritium plume were conservative, and this plume does not represent a radiological hazard to public health or safety." Uh, does it mean that the decision to shutdown HFBR and terminate the Associated Universities contract was premature (WN 2 May 97)? Of course, we won't know for sure until the STAR panel completes its safety review (WN 12 Feb 98). 3. RADON: EFFECT OF SINGLE ALPHA PARTICLE IS STUDIED DIRECTLY. Just one year ago, a NRC report on residential radon risk (BIER- VI) relied on the dubious linear-no-threshold extrapolation from data on uranium miners to evaluate residential radon risk (WN 20 Feb 98). Using a charged particle microbeam system, however, researchers at Columbia's Center for Radiological Research have directly studied cell damage from multiple alpha traversals, which are experienced by miners, down to single alpha traversals in a lifetime, that result at residential levels. They found no difference between single traversals and zero. While the studies were done using mouse cells, they indicate that the linear-no- threshold model strongly overestimates residential radon risks. The new technique may also offer a way to evaluate the risk from high-energy, high-Z radiation in space travel (WN 20 Dec 96). 4. CIRCULAR A-110: EARMARK HAS UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES. The APS Executive Board on Saturday affirmed the position of the APS that scientists have an ethical obligation to make public the data on which their findings are based. The proposed revision of OMB circular A-110, however, which requires that all data resulting from federal funding be publicly available under the Freedom of Information Act (WN 12 Feb 99), is overly broad. The law could force premature release of data. It was slipped into the omnibus appropriations bill under the cover of darkness by Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL). At a meeting at the AAAS this morning, a staffer for Sen. Shelby confirmed that the target was the EPA, which had taken actions based on data that was not in the public domain. However, using an appropriations earmark to legislate, thus avoiding debate or hearings, commits the same sin. In a war between Shelby and the EPA, science was an innocent bystander. THE AMERICAN PHYSICAL SOCIETY (Note: Opinions are the author's and are not necessarily shared by the APS, but they should be.) - End of forwarded message from gj bart -
The JesusRaptor project (humor) (fwd)
Just to chear - well, some of you - up. Eva --- Forwarded Message Follows --- Vatican Announces Christ Genome Project VATICAN CITY - In a stunning development, Pope John Paul II, after a private screening of Jurassic Park, announced that the Catholic Church will embrace the technology of genetic engineering and embark on an ambitious project. Beginning with DNA recovered from the Shroud of Turin, Vatican scientists will begin the gene sequencing project immediately, with the ultimate goal of of producing a second coming sometime early in the next century. In working up to their goal, they will recover DNA from other sacred relics, producing a battery of saints and other holy men before actually producing the Son of Man. Relatives of the deceased could not be reached for comment. "We understand that this is a big change," the pope said, "and we ask for your patience. Obviously we are concerned with declining membership worldwide, and we hope this will stabilize our numbers and create a resurgence of faith. However, our main goal is to try and wrap this up and bring about the Kingdom of God on Earth by, assuming we stay on schedule, 2013; 2015 at the latest." Sharp criticism of the project came from the Baptist church, who claimed that the Vatican's virtual monopoly on bits of dead holy people should be restrained. The Baptist church is pushing for legislation to force the Vatican to allow scientists from other religions access to the DNA of important religious figures. "I don't know what they're complaining about," said a Vatican spokesperson, "Once we've sequenced the John the Baptist Genome, the license will be available for a modest fee. In fact, with our generous pricing structure and multi-saint discounts, they could afford several copies. Granted, he is not one of our first saints to be produced, but our schedule is available. Check us out on the web at http://www.vatican.com/christ_genome.html." A vatican scientist connected with the Christ Genome Project, discussing the project under condition of anonymity, said that the Christ Genome Project has a hidden agenda. According to our source, the ultimate goal is not, in fact, to clone Jesus, but to use recombinant DNA to create a `Jesusraptor.' "The Jesusraptor, about 9 feet long, would be able to chase down sinners at speeds of up to 60 kilometers per hour and dispatch them with the enormous claws on the big toe of each foot," according to our source, who provided us with various technical documents. Vatican sources denied this claim, adding that, "when we find out who is spreading these lies, we're going to excommunicate them, and then they'd better watch their back." *** Regards, Dave Palmer [EMAIL PROTECTED] As much as the author would like to spend precious minutes of the rapidly- dwindling time remaining in his life responding to your kind and thoughtful letter about how he is going to spend eternity in a lake of fire being eaten by rats, he regrets that he is unable to do so, due to the volume of such mail received. http://members.xoom.com/dwpalmer/home.htm * - End of forwarded message from David Palmer -
Re: Some thoughts on one of the threads
(Thomas:) It was the last sentence that resonated within me. I have long felt that we deny ourselves one of our birthrights - indolence and unemployment. I enjoy immensely - doing little or nothing and I enjoy immensely - the pleasure of following my impulses. Work and employment destroy those natural human attributes and make them into leisure activities that can only be indulged in after worshipping at the alter of employment. Biologically, I think we are not workers, but livers of life. I for one, welcome a future of leisure and indolence. ... I wonder what you mean by doing nothing. Reading, arguing on the internet (education and educating) used to be classified as work, even if some people enjoyed it. Some people get paid for doing physical or mental exercise. Spending time with your loved ones is part of looking after their physical/mental well-being - that is defined as work rhese days. I suppose sitting in front of the telly without any communication to other humans or snoozing under the sun in the garden or just sleeping all the time counts as doing nothing, but I haven't yet met people who could do these exclusively. Eva
Re: Democracy is the opiate of the masses.
Eva, I give up. I'm sorry if I was bad mannered. But you do seem to argue from an impenetrable ideology. Let me explain my point of view, perhaps equally impenetrable. Some years ago, I arrived at the conclusion that idealism and ideology are the worst things that have ever happened to humankind, even though I know that they go with the territory of being human. What has happened time and again in history is that great ideas have become religious or secular ideologies which have then become mantras and formulas, which have then been fanaticized, and have then become marching boots. Look at Christ becoming the Crusades, Calvin and the Inquisition; at Hegel and Marx becoming Stalin and the gulag; at Nietche becoming Hitler and the gas chambers. Because of the ever-present possibility of this sequence, I would be apprehensive about a motivated and mobilized working class which has achieved "consciousness" in accordance with some ideal or ideology. Would its members, like Mao's Red Guards, begin to turf the capitalists wherever they thought they found them? So, what you propose is, that we never ever analyse our history and think about how to avoid past pittfalls and make a plan for a better future? All the past ideology failed, because all the movements were taken over at some point - usually at the very beginning - by non-democratic processes, that did not allow the continuous re-examination of the aims, tactics and strategy - which is the core of a democratic movement. You probably say there is no point in such analysis, all human effort ends of being animal-like hierarchival and democracy is an unnatural phenomena... ... and I don't agree, does this amount to "inpenetrable ideology"? Afterall, I only argue for democracy, and even some capitalists seem to be in favour of that... ...allegedly. once we manage to be aware of the importance of maintaining the democratic process, we can work out how best to guard it from any deformation - we've seen it often enough, surely you clever people can come up with something - I do recognize that it is not idealism itself, but the distortion of idealism into iron-clad ideologies, that is the fault. Yet I would suggest that such distortion is more the rule than the exception. While I haven't lost sleep over it yet, I know that there are many millions of angry people around just waiting for the next great distortion and the next great crusade. If you could assure me that we could proceed to the ideal state owned and operated by the working class without persecution and bloodshed, I would buy it, but, knowing something of history and its ability to repeat itself, I might be pretty hard to convince. I think only the development of democracy can protect us from future bloodshed. I've just seen some frightening docu about the KKK and it's ilk in the US having a major upswing. And one knows when an ideology is problematic, not only from the hate content, but also from the hierarchical, militaristic character of the organization. (What was also shown, that they are able to grow in the present climate of capitalist "all for oneself" ideology with the complementary emotional desolation. They interviewed an ex-member of one of these groups, and asked him why he joined. He said these were the first bunch of people ever to send him birthdaycards...) I recognize that people's lives are organized around work. But I would argue that, in doing their work, people in general have little in common other than having to get out of bed and having to go to a place of work. People who do a particular kind of work or who work in a particular establishment have common interests, and if these are not being satisfied, they should take collective action, but action through negotiation and a democratically derived system of laws, with strikes as an ultimate threat. There are many instances in which broadly based opposition to unjust laws or circumstances make sense, but the issues in question usually transcend the interests of a particular group or class. Poverty and homelessness, for example, require the attention of all members of society. But on all such issues, I would like to think that whatever action is taken would be aimed at solving the problem, not at restructuring us into conformity with some ideological dogma about how a society should function. We've surely had enough of that. You miss the important point: there is a very obvious and sufficient common denominator: we are forced to work to earn a living, and the majority of us has no say in the process at all, and a large portion do not get even enough to live in dignity, for their troubles. Our lives are dependent on the tiny layer, that owns our means of productions; building, land, machinary etc, and most unfortunately makes the decision for our military/economist/environmentalist strategists, and it doesn't look like a good survival plan at all; the tendency
Re: Democracy is the opiate of the masses.
You're right as far as decisions are made
in Europe, but don't underestimate
the unions that started to be international, too.
Not quite what you expect from those often mentioned
bleedin' herd animals!
Eva
Since the Scandinavian nations (except Norway) and the Netherlands are now
in the EU, democracy is 'working' less and less in them. All important
decisions are increasingly "shifted" to Brussels and [thus] the international
big biz. ("The United States of Europe" is the aim, remember.)
Oligarchy with a democratic face (makEUp) is a more elegant way of
"managing the herd animals" than plain sincere scientocracy...
--Chris
Re: Democracy is the opiate of the masses.
... and the good ship Titanic takes her final plunge into the icy blackness. Our final scene is of a panicing herd -- arms waving and running in circles -- totally preoccupied with the political correctness of it all. I don't remember anyone using PC arguments. Another strawman. I am leaving this list for a while. about the best point made so far... Eva C U later, Jay
Re: Democracy is the opiate of the masses.
Trying to make a difference? So what? People have been trying to make a difference ever since people existed. And today, our water laps the portholes of our Titanic. When one's ship is on its way down, the only thing that matters is results. Rather than wasting time on a make-believe political system, wouldn't it make more sense to petition the rich directly for relief? Unless you mean euthenasia... The rich are not aware that they are on the same ship with us, save a few lonely voice such as Soros. Asking them to use all ther wealth to save the earth sound much more utopistic than anything I ever said. Anyway, if we are just a type of herd animals, we should not bother in any effort of diverting impending catastrophies - I don't know any herd animal who behave like that. Another of them damn contradictions. I bet Ray is chuffed with the idea that humans never ever made a difference. Eva Jay
Re: (Humor) Microsoft Democracy(TM)
Classless society happened before surplus was produced, and yes it was probably very cruel. The point is that it must have been successful, nevertheless, in establishing more and more stable and numerous human populations. It is an example for a classless society. We made our spiral of development over 100k years as homo sapiens - we are ready to use such efficient looking scenario again - this time without the cruelty and the fear of the unknown world - on a totally different conscious level. Eva Eva: Classless society happened to humans for 100K + years, our relatively short written history chronicled only the class society that also happened to us - with it's exploitation, privilege, cruelty, etc. You can believe that if you like, but I doubt very much that the first 100K of human were without class and cruelty. But then of course none of us were present, so how can we know? Incidentally, there is a very good novel written on the theme of prehistoric cleverness and cruelty -- Willian Golding's "The Inheritors", which deals with an encounter between Neanderthal and modern man. Golding is better known for "Lord of the Flies", which carries a somewhat similar message, though the setting is modern. Believe me, I too would like to believe that a series of social transformations, such as going from hunting and gathering to agriculture and thence to industry, accounts for the class system and resultant exploitation. But I really have no evidence that exploitation did not exist in earlier systems. And not only that. It is people themselves who brought about the transformations, and for their own ends. That is, the class system was not imposed on us by aliens from outer space. We created it, probably a very long time ago, and amplified and broadened it each time some new innovation made it possible to do so. Hunters were displaced by farmers, and farmers by industrialists, and each time those who were displaced became the lumpenproletariat who had to work for the farmers or the industrialists. Perhaps the driving cause is our need to invent and innovate, but that is something that we can't help doing. It is a consequence of having large brains and opposable thumbs, or some such thing. Ed Weick
Re: Democracy sociocybernetics
I don't think that the level of aggressivity is an ethnic trait or even genetic. Any such statement on "human nature" is very suspect. Have you ever noticed the bully the runt in a litter of puppies? Have you noticed some species of dogs as more predictably aggressive than other breeds? And please don't tell us as you always do that humans are 'different'; sure we're different, but we're still mammalian. The bully tend to be the biggest puppy, the one with the most expendable energy. Even in dogs, aggressivity is "taught" by the human who replaced the role of the alpha. Even bull-terriers in a strong-controlled but peaceful environment tend to grow up docile. You say we should not attempt democracy because no animals live that way? And for the same reason we should accept whatever an exploitative and visibly insane social structure throws at us? Than we shouldn't do poetry, science, etc, etc, or even debate on the internet, must be bad for us, it is against our animal nature, I haven't seen any mammals doing it... What a said apology for the support of the capitalist system! I am not aware of any present mongols being more aggressive than other peoples. Another example of nature/nurture adaptive fitness is high altitude athletes who's genetic heritage, childhood development, and training increase their capacities/skills. You are confusing physical/biologival and behavoral/social traits. Most research comparing such ethnic or race differences are scientifically contraversial to say the least. Evidence? Historical literature is full of genealogical lines with their dominant traits/characteristics. Do you think the attributions made in literature are unrelated to real experience? Pure tabula rasa fantasy? So we should accept all the unscientific stereotyping of historical literature as evidence? E.g. That wellknown fact of thousands years of history that women cannot think rationally? Etc, Etc.? Are you serious?? People in the absence of scientific methods end cientific data, made some patterns that had no real base, only a self-fulfilling expectations of set behavoral forms. I'm short, pensive, studied philosophy in univ., made enough $ trading in finance to retire young to organic gardening, and am 1/2 eastern euro jew, 1/4 german jew, 1/4 german christian. Kurtz (kurz) means short in german. Jews were historically good traders, and studied talmud (philosophy). In _Heart of Darkness_ (J.Conrad), Kurtz is a gloomy, philosophical businessman/trader. He is referred to in Eliot's poem "The Wasteland", and reappears as Colonel Kurtz in "Apocalypse Now". All coincidence? Must be, because I am a 100% east-European jew ethnically and I haven't done any of these things. Besides being tall. Jews learned to be good traders, as in a scores of medieval countries they were not allowed to do anything else. I happen to know dozens who are crap at it, couldn't give a damn, do other stuff well or live in poverty. The level of allowed/legit aggressivity is a social construct (level of control expected i.e. aggressivity tolerated), with individual variation being a mixture of nurture environment and the given chemical balance of the nervous system. OK. You acknowledge a "mixture" of nurture/nature. So why throw out the "nature" by speculating that nurture can overrule it? A first second order cybernetic feedback system is IMO the clearest way to approach the issues we've been slinging around these last weeks. Everyone has a hardwired possibility to become a psychopath in given circumstances. Nurture can overrule it except for a very few cases of physiological mental illness. It is not a speculation but a fact you see if you look around, our behaviour reflects the social/emotional defects or plusses of our environment. Please tell me what points you are making with these excerpts, I missed them. Eva excerpted from abstract below: "Third, this is caused by autopoiesis (Greek for self-production), the recognition of the fact that all living organisms are self-steering within certain limits, and that their behaviour therefore can be steered from the outside only to a very moderate extent." better format on: http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/Einmag_Abstr/FGeyer.html The Challenge of Sociocybernetics. By F. Geyer Felix Geyer SISWO Plantage Muidergracht 4 1018 TV Amsterdam Nederland [EMAIL PROTECTED] Full Paper Abstract: This paper summarizes some of the important concepts and developments in cybernetics and general systems theory, especially during the last two decades. Its purpose is to show show how they indeed can be a challenge to sociological thinking. Cybernetics is used here as an umbrella term for a great variety of related disciplines: general systems theory, information theory, system dynamics, dynamic systems theory, including catastrophe
Re: (Humor) Microsoft Democracy(TM)
Satire aside, it is obvious that fully developed direct electronic democracy is just a few years away. And we can expect the computer companies to develop special software to accommodate it. And we can expect the computer hackers to develop special software to fake the votes. Like video telephones, electronic voting is a technical solution that won't be feasible due to the "human factor". Yes, you're right, it could only worked if power and privilages were not involved in the decision-making process and all the channels of information were totally transparent for everyone. Guess what - this means an alternative social structure... Eva --Chris
Re: social darwinism again (fwd)
I thought anyone can be classified as social darwinists, if they think some sort of "survival of the fittest" applies to human society, or if they in fact describe human society as not distinguishable from that of "herd animals". You gave the impression of accepting opinions like these. Eva ... With respect to the title of this thread: "social Darwinism again". In order to even understand the subject matter, one would have to be able to differentiate between "social Darwinism" (politics) and "biological Darwinism" (science). Nowadays, there is a great deal of popular literature available on the subject. Jay
Re: Communism is just another stupid idea whose time has past.
People were not consciously structuring slavery, feudalism or capitalism. It happened to them as a consequence of the physical environment including technological/economical development and in turn, social relations. I am beginning to understand your thesis Eva. It seems to be one of two possibilities: I don't think you are really trying... e.g.: Hypothesis #1. "People" are defined by their actions. "People" can only do good things. Now, where did I say or even imply such nonsense? Hypothesis #2: "People" can do no wrong. Only the "system" can be wrong. again - a very clumsily constructed strawmen. Question: Over a hundred million people were killed during the last century. Isn't it possible that some of those who were doing the burning, raping, shooting, clubbing, knifing, and bombing were doing it because they LIKED it? I think the people you describe are defined as "psycopaths", and there are not many of them, and usually it is extreme unhumne conditions that produce them, but some physiological capacity for mental breakdown is also present. Conditions of poverty/war/demagoguery/chauvinism/ ignorance etc. allow such individuals periodically to be accepted as "normal". But it is not the normal "defining" state of humanness, same as being angel is not, either: Where on Earth, has the "system" EVER allowed the "people" to become the angels you claim them to be? I have never claimed people to be angels, merely humans. People act for the betterment of society, when they realise, that this is in their own selfish interest. Some people are a bit ahead in this realisation of social awareness, others had different experiences that made them think that the only way they can succeed (to achieve happiness) if they ready to subdue/exploit other people. I don't have any basis to pronounce value-judgement on them, I definitely do not think, that I am "good" or that the capitalists are "bad". Communism is just another stupid idea whose time has past. it would be nice if sometimes you could give me the feeling that you understand any of it before you pronounce your opinion. You are regurgitating 5 decades of well-brainwashed ideas of the US mass media. Eva Jay -- ** Beispiel-Signatur **
No Subject
(JAY:) These "egalitarian" societies work because they are small. Community members must be able to "recognize" other community memebers. That limits them to 300 or 400 individuals. me: If everyone have information about the trackrecord of somebody's capabilities in a directly any time open information system, we do not need to "recognize" community members in the larger community. And in the smaller one - such as living place and workplace control, such choosing people relying on personal experience is more efficient than the present system where the supervisors are pushed on from the top. By the way, I would call a hierarchy democracy, if it is built bottom-up, everyone is instantly recallable and everyone have the same access to information and life's necessities. Besides not being based on physical strength and darwinism, it seems a very natural social way to me, too... Ray: It not a question wheither or not human will have rulers, the only question is who shall rule. We are presently ruled by the rich. I would like to see different criteria. It's a fact of life that democracy (no matter how one defines it) is on the way out. me: it cannot be on the way out, as it hasn't been in yet! We should be ruled by ourselves, that's the best way to being ouselves; the most individualistic system there is... Eva
Re: an empirical observation Re: the end of 'wage slavery'
Eva, Thanks for all of the work. You were very articulate and I enjoyed the read. If your premise is correct then the rest of that post is unnecessary. There are those in every movement who state that the original premise has been betrayed.I think the Free Marketeers would say the same about their ideas. They certainly would argue with you about genuine Capitalism ever being tried in the world. Complementing me won't hide the fact that you did not bother to read my my post, as you are not responding to the points I made; I had given reasons for my arguments, I hadn't just re-stated them like you do here. (patiently and optimistically:) The original premise has not been betrayed, well demonstrated conditions created a well demonstrated pattern. Different conditions would have made a different outcome. Every theory have to be defined over a given and limited domain to work; Marx was good enough to define it for us, but if he didn't we would had to do the work of making it more universal. Just like relativity being more inclusive than newtons laws, not negating but making it more understandable as a special case of a more general framework. I haven't seen a systematic analysis of capitalism by free-marketeers or by capitalists as a development from past systems and as a pointer to a next phase. Free markets lead to child-labour etc, super-exploitation of humans and the environment, I yet to see an analysis why it didn't work in the pre-welfare past. Also, the free-marketists usually embrace social Darwinism that is ready to dispence with the "loser" majority of human kind which is totally against the trend of human development so far. I am aware of the specifics of what you were speaking but it was not the subject of my questions. I would contend that the teacher (apart from a school which is a kind of "education of scale") IS responsible for the success of their product. They are also responsible for the failure. If they do not wish to be known as such, then they should not accept the job of teaching that particular student. Or should forgo writing the book.I certainly do hold the founders of the various schools of religious, political and economic thought responsible for the chaos expressed in their names. I contend that without the original seed, the genetics stop there.Responsibility is, in my culture, one of the primal ideas. That is why we burn anything that has not been sold or given away by the dead. If the student is hungry and hasn't got the book which even if he had he cannot read, would you still blame the author of the book for any outcome? Uptil now history just happened TO people, so you cannot blame them - any of them - for it, it was like an outside, wild law of nature. Only now we have first time the option to act responsibly with both the information and the economic/technological conditions satisfactory for actively form our future. If you wish to go the route of Marx as founding the idea that "economics is the bottom of all human life and interactions" then I would have another, actually harsher set of questions since I consider it a statement not grounded in all of the facts of human civilization. In short, it is 19th century "romantic idealized thought." Thought from a time that had no idea of the foolishness implications inherent in their arguments. As I pointed out with the Hammerklavier fugue, even in the system of 18th and 19th century harmonic theory, there is the issue of time. When the system has been achieved it is replaced by another with different rules. In the 19th century they believed in A system, A morality, A religion, A universal theory of economics (their own), A Universal Art based upon European principles. Economics is the base of society, the efficiency and distribution of the human necessities make the rest go round - surely this is somewhat evident. In what way can you see marxism to be linked to morality and religion of the 19 hundreds? It has a totally different look at the family, art and culture than his contemporaries - the problem is, he's even too new for you... The absurdity of this should be apparent to anyone who has studied the various languages of the world.But from Johnson's Dictionary up through Marx's era it was the common belief that Latin grammar was the basis of all advanced languages. This lasted until modern psycho-linguists had to admit that it didn't fit English all that well either. Like the Sioux skull to the Phrenologists. I don't know if Marx signed up for this idea, he happened to have opinions on most sciences he was aware of, but even if he did a bit of liguistics, I can't see the significance. Galileo was wrong about heliocentriity because his contemporaries had a few wierd beliefs? If someone managed to nail a piece of reality, it just doesn't matter when and why it happened. You should know this,
Re: an empirical observation Re: the end of 'wage slavery'
...
No, I don't think that 19th century Socialism and Communism with its base in out
of date "scientific" theories is any better. These may as well base their
theories on Phrenology for all of the sense they make. They were all trying to
find their individuality by killing their Fathers. ("I'm sure I can write a
better Bible than that!)
...
If this is what you think, you did not understand what
marxism is all about.
That is the reason that I do my own work and am my own boss.I miss the
"safety" and am considered irresponsible by some for not having more of an
inheritance for my offspring, but it seems you can't have both in this
society. Sometimes it's better just to stay out of the way of those "economies
of scale."
not an available option for 99% of the people.
Eva
REH
Re: Global Social Policy Code (fwd)
Fascinating stuff, as my impression is that the IMF and the WB "gives" money to countries so that they can repay debts. Their constraints so far meant cut in social spending etc, so that debts can be repaid. I won't hold my breath waiting for any such measure to work in the interest of social benefits. Eva -- Forwarded message -- Date: Tue, 2 Feb 1999 11:19:20 + From: Bob Deacon [EMAIL PROTECTED] Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Global Social Policy Code WHO SHOULD DEVISE AND OWN THE PROPOSED GLOBAL SOCIAL POLICY CODE? The UK government, through the intervention of the Chancellor Gordon Brown, has made a significant contribution to the debate about how to regulate the global economy not only in terms of financial flows but also in terms of the social dimension of globalization. He has argued for a GLOBAL SOCIAL POLICY CODE. This would be a "code of global best practice in social policy which will apply for every country, will set minimum standards and will ensure that when IMF and WORLD BANK help a country in trouble the agreed programme of reform will preserve investments in the social, education, and employment programmes which are essential for growth" Moreover this code "should not be seen in narrow terms as merely the creation of social safety nets. We should see it as creating opportunities for all by investing more not less in education, employment and vital public services".(Speech entitled Rediscovering Public Purpose in the Global Economy, Harvard, Dec 15th 1998.) It is suggested by him that this code should be agreed at the next meeting of the World Bank meeting in spring1999. The question, therefore, is posed as to who and how will this code be devised. It has fallen to Robert Holzmann as Director of the newly created Social Protection division of the Human Resources Network of the Bank to formulate this. Some initial thinking was provided by the Social Development Section of the DFID of the UK government. It suggested that best practice in social policy involved a)equitable access to basic social services health, education, water and sanitation, shelter; b)social protection enabling individuals to reduce their vulnerability to shocks: and c)core labour standards. Two questions arise. First what does the track record of Bank policy making in this field suggest might be the slant of this new global code if left to them? For a final answer we must await the articulation within the next few months of the World Bank's Social Protection sector strategy paper. Some clues as to its orientation already exist. The social protection section, in the terms of its own publicity material, says it is meeting the challenge of inclusion by focusing on risk management by 'helping people manage risks proactively in their households and communities'. Within this remit it is working on labour market reform, pension reform and social assistance strategies including supporting NGO and community social funds in many countries. This suggests a strategy which emphasizes individual responsibility to insure themselves against the increased risks and uncertainties of globalization rather than one that puts emphasis on governmental responsibilities to pool risks and to universalize provision. Holzmann concentrates on pension policy (1997a,1997b,1997c,1997d) and has lent his support to the multi-pillar approach to pension reform (1997b) which would reduce the state PAYG schemes to a minimal role of basic pension provision, supplemented by a compulsory and fully funded and individualized second pillar and a voluntary third pillar. Second how should other global actors with a right to a view on this code: ILO, UNICEF, WHO, UNESCO, UNDP, the UN Economic and Social Secretariat, global trade unions, global civil society etc. have their say? If we are to build a global economy that takes the social dimension seriously then we need forms of global social policy formulation that stand in the tradition of consensus politics and tripartism. The initiative by the UN Social Policy and Social Development Secretariat to formulate a policy for the social dimension of globalization needs to engage with this GLOBAL CODE OF SOCIAL POLICY . The ILO and other UN social agencies need to make their input. A wide ranging discussion is needed , not a quick fix at the next meeting of the Bank. A code owned by all could be agreed at the Copenhagen plus 5 meeting scheduled for June 2000. A code for best practice in social policy should not slant too far in the direction of targeting and privatisation. It would have to explicate what the alternative poles of universalism and public responsibility might mean for countries at different levels of development. At the same time such an approach of universalism appropriate to the level of development needs to be coupled with explicit pro poor development polices to
Re: real-life example
Direct democracy cannot selectively exclude people. The elitists are a minority by definition. If they vote themselves out from the collective decisionmaking, we may have fun to see how they manage on their own. Eva Mentioning a version of your comments to a central european-born manager, I was a little surprised to receive the following tirade back I paraphrase 'Why would Direct Democracy be a good system? Intelligent people know from experience that most other people are idiots. Therefore most decisions will be made by idiots for idiots with idiots,. Those people are idiots. They will have only themselves, the idiots, to blame' With the visceral, if obviously intellectually inconsequential, anglosaxon desire for fairplay, tolerance and conflict-avoidance (Chamberlain at Munich comes to mind), I agreed pro tem, whilst mentally noting that I woudl like to ask whether you would be happy to include such a person in your direct democracy (or not). If you do, he will destroy it of course, and if you don't then of course it destroys itself. Do you then have to destroy him to preserve your democracy? And what kind of democracy is it that has to preserve itself by destroying its elitists? Colin Stark wrote: At 11:50 AM 1/26/99 -1000, Jay Hanson wrote: - Original Message - From: Edward Weick [EMAIL PROTECTED] and social complexity grew. While hunting and gathering societies needed only transitory hierarchies, more complex societies needed permanent ones. However, there is no reason on earth why these couldn't be democratic, allowing a particular leadership limited powers and only a limited tenure. Democracy makes no sense. If society is seeking a leader with the best skills, the selection should be based on merit -- testing and experience -- not popularity. Government by popularity contest is a stupid idea. Jay Democracy does not mean putting the most "popular" candidate in the job. A broad range of people (e.g. the workers in a factory) might choose a DIFFERENT leader from what the Elite would choose, but they will not be more likely to make a "stupid" choice. But beyond the "choice of a leader" is the question of the "accountability of the leader". In our N. American democratic (so-called) systems the leader is not accountable to ANYONE (i.e. is a virtual Dictator), except that once every 4 or 5 years the people (those who think it worthwhile to vote), can kick the bum out and choose another gentleperson who will be equally UNACCOUNTABLE, and who will thus, corrupted by power, become a BUM also! Hence the concept of Direct Democracy: " a SYSTEM of citizen-initiated binding referendums whereby voters can directly amend, introduce and remove policies and laws" Colin Stark Vice-President Canadians for Direct Democracy Vancouver, B.C. http://www.npsnet.com/cdd/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Listserv) -- Josmarian SA [EMAIL PROTECTED][EMAIL PROTECTED] UK tel/fax: 0044.181.747.9167 French tel/fax:0033.450.20.94.92 Swiss tel/fax: 0041.22.733.01.13 L'aiuola che ci fa tanto feroci. Divina Commedia, Paradiso, XXII, 151 _
Re: real-life example
(I think I mentioned it before BTW, I am Hungarian, as centre-european as any.) I don't think it is valid to link political ideas with ethniticy. Also, I can only picture DD as a global phenomena, once established, you cannot stop it, just like the internet. Eva At 07:16 AM 1/29/99 +, Mark Measday wrote: Mentioning a version of your comments to a central european-born manager, I was a little surprised to receive the following tirade back I paraphrase 'Why would Direct Democracy be a good system? Intelligent people know from experience that most other people are idiots. Therefore most decisions will be made by idiots for idiots with idiots,. Those people are idiots. They will have only themselves, the idiots, to blame' Are all intelligent people non-idiots? Are most intelligent people non-idiots? Do some people who consider themselves intelligent have limited experience from which to make such harsh, polarized, one-dimensional judgements of their fellow-humans? etc I do not value your friend's opinion What does he know of DD? With the visceral, if obviously intellectually inconsequential, anglosaxon desire for fairplay, tolerance and conflict-avoidance (Chamberlain at Munich comes to mind), I agreed pro tem, whilst mentally noting that I woudl like to ask whether you would be happy to include such a person in your direct democracy (or not). by definition, he would have one vote I would be neither happy nor unhappy You may be exhibit both tolerance and conflict-avoidance -- while I strive for the first, I have few tendencies to the second. But then I am Celtic, not anglo-saxon If you do, he will destroy it of course, and if you don't then of course it destroys itself. I do not attribute to him any more power than one vote, so I cannot accept your view Do you then have to destroy him to preserve your democracy? And what kind of democracy is it that has to preserve itself by destroying its elitists? The whole question is hypothetical. But I do not believe anyone has to destroy him Nor do I believe that all elitists are so narrow-minded I have little experience of Central Europe, and I am not advocating DD for Central Europe. I have met several E/Central. Europeans in Canada, and I am not unfamiliar with the characteristics you describe. In Canada such people are not numerous, and have little influence in the circles I move in. The biggest obstacle in Canada would appear to come from political, academic, and business Elites whose worlds are bound up in money and power -- obstacles enough without paying undue attention to people like your friend. I sincerely believe that DD is viable in Canada, US, and UK, the three countries with which I am most familiar Colin Stark Colin Stark wrote: At 11:50 AM 1/26/99 -1000, Jay Hanson wrote: - Original Message - From: Edward Weick [EMAIL PROTECTED] and social complexity grew. While hunting and gathering societies needed only transitory hierarchies, more complex societies needed permanent ones. However, there is no reason on earth why these couldn't be democratic, allowing a particular leadership limited powers and only a limited tenure. Democracy makes no sense. If society is seeking a leader with the best skills, the selection should be based on merit -- testing and experience -- not popularity. Government by popularity contest is a stupid idea. Jay Democracy does not mean putting the most "popular" candidate in the job. A broad range of people (e.g. the workers in a factory) might choose a DIFFERENT leader from what the Elite would choose, but they will not be more likely to make a "stupid" choice. But beyond the "choice of a leader" is the question of the "accountability of the leader". In our N. American democratic (so-called) systems the leader is not accountable to ANYONE (i.e. is a virtual Dictator), except that once every 4 or 5 years the people (those who think it worthwhile to vote), can kick the bum out and choose another gentleperson who will be equally UNACCOUNTABLE, and who will thus, corrupted by power, become a BUM also! Hence the concept of Direct Democracy: " a SYSTEM of citizen-initiated binding referendums whereby voters can directly amend, introduce and remove policies and laws" Colin Stark Vice-President Canadians for Direct Democracy Vancouver, B.C. http://www.npsnet.com/cdd/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Listserv) -- Josmarian SA [EMAIL PROTECTED][EMAIL PROTECTED] UK tel/fax: 0044.181.747.9167 French tel/fax:0033.450.20.94.92 Swiss tel/fax: 0041.22.733.01.13 L'aiuola che ci fa tanto feroci. Divina Commedia, Paradiso, XXII, 151 _
Re: real-life example
Hitler was not elected, he's got in power through a militarry-type take-over with the financial and power support of the capitalist class that was terrified by the previous victories of the german worker's movement. He used his power to terrify and brainwash the people. Don't tell me that there was a free flow of information and no intimidation by the time there were "elections". You might as well say that Brezhnev was "elected". Well, torture is not legal anymore in most countries. There is international popular pressure against countries where it is or where it is used illegaly. The problem is, that it is not in the interest of the capitalist countries to do anything about it, because they make good profits in these countries. It was the people who made the law to outlaw the slave trade. They could only do it, when all the information about it was available and those who made the profits from it were defeated. Human society is not static. What was accepted behaviou a generation go, can be totally abhorent now. Normal people control their aggressive, sexual etc.urges, only when society somehow breaks down are conditions arising that allows such controls to break down. How would your benevolant technocrat scientists overcome all this innate nastiness you talk about? You repeat your stuff without answering any of these points. Eva That's exactly my point. Given the opportunity, it would happen anywhere, at any time. There is nothing inherent in man that keeps him torturing and murdering his fellows. For example, the practice of human torture was "legal" for at least 3,000 years and formed a part of most legal codes in Europe and the Far East. Remember that Hitler was elected by "the people". Moreover, the men who ran the camps during WW2 were, for the most part, average people. Remember the Slave trade? Just some conscious family men trying to make a buck and put their kids through school. Let "the people" make all the laws? Bad idea! Jay
Re: democracy
I only respond to bits that are clear enough for me to comprehend... From the latter message about the only concept I managed was "concern"... From the one next - individual freedoms would be only lessened for a small minority, for the rest I think a change to the future I advocate would mean more individual freedom. I don't know how you define intelligence. I thought we are all capable listen to reason and make decisions for a future we can visualise, but most of us don't have the opportunity to do so. Eva Eva, You persist in not addressing the words of your antagonists, respond based upon your revisionist interpretations, ignoring parts that would be inconsistent with your ideal. See the second para. below. Note that Jay I fully expect humans to either revolt/self-destruct *or* to wake-up to the lessening of individual freedoms required for the 'common good'. The "intelligence" you seek to objectify is nothing more than total adaptive fitness to habitat, including creative scientific aspects. Humans are not divisible in actuality, only by theoreticians. Steve Not contempt, Eva. Concern. The decline isn't limited to mental (brain/nervous system). No species is composed of exact replicas/equals. Adaptive fitness is a reality. Humans are the only species known that attempts to make differences disappear - a physical impossibility. For those dealing in 'souls' or 'spirits', I have nothing to say, and you have nothing to show us. This doesn't make deep democracy impossible; recall Garrett Harden's "mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon" as the rational way forward. (see Jay's site: dieoff.org)
Re: Lundemocracy
Sounds good to me... However, I think we can only give an approximate framework, with a few stopchecks, the system will stear itself to the most efficient way. Eva A LUNDEMOCRACY. I like Thomas's idea. A significant improvement over currently operative models of democracy. But I would make these modifications. (1) that citizen education for parliamentary participation be compulsory, IF participation is to be compulsory, OR: (2) that participation in parliament not be mandatory, but the right to participate be conditional on attainment of certain communicative and other competencies, ie, on a 'driving' licence. (3) that a person's participation be limited to two or three main decision-making domains. Few, if any, people have the capacity to absorb the theory and info. in all areas in order to make reasonable decisions. Better that people choose those areas in which they have a genuine interest. The rule: don't participate in a decision if you don't have have time to properly deliberate on the information and have not well considered the underlying theoretical assumptions. (4) that full right to effect decisions in the chosen domain be bestowed only after a 'learning' period - say a year or two, during which time one serves as an observer/commentator. (5) that one has the right to choose to continue to serve as a parliamentarian in an honorary capacity for an extended period say up to 30 years (subject to confidence maintaining procedures). (6) that such a democracy be glocal (ie, local and global), using the Internet as the 'Virtual Parliament'. Such a democracy would render national politics redundant. THE POSSIBILITY TO DESIGN AND TRIAL SUCH A PARLIAMENT NOW EXISTS. THE EXPERIMENT DOES NOT NEED THE SANCTION OF THE CURRENT INTERNATIONAL ORDER. BETTER THAT IT BE TRIALED, DEVELOPED BY AND IMPLEMENTED AMONG THOSE INTERESTED RATHER THAN IT BE UNDEMOCRATICALLY FOISTED ON AN UNWARY PUBLIC. Thomas Lunde wrote: I have long puzzled over this question of democracy and I would like to propose the Democratic Lottery. For it to work, there is only one assumption that needs to be made and that every citizen is capable of making decisions. Whether you are a hooker, housewife, drunk, tradesman, businessman, genius or over trained academic, we all are capable of having opinions and making decisions. I suggest that every citizen over 18 have their name put into a National Electoral Lottery. I suggest "draws" every two years at which time 1/3 of the Parliment is selected. Each member chosen will serve one six year term. The first two years are the equivalent of a backbencher in which the individual learns how parliment works and can vote on all legislation. The second two years, the member serves on various committees that are required by parliment. The third and final term is one from which the parliment as whole choses a leader for two years and also appoints new heads to all the standing committees. This does away with the professional politician, political parties, and the dictatorship of party leadership of the ruling party and it's specific cabinet. It ensures a learning curve for each prospective parlimentarian and allows in the final term the emergence of the best leader as judged by all of parliment. Every parlimentarian knows that he will be removed from office at the end of the sixth year. We could extend this to the Senate in which parlimentarians who have served for the full six years could participate in a Lottery to select Senate members who would hold office for a period of 12 years. This would give us a wise council of experienced elders to guide parliment and because the Senate could only take a small increase of new members every two years, only the most respected members of parliment would be voted by parlimentarians into a Senate position. This would eliminate political parties - it would eliminate the need for re-election, it would eliminate campaign financing and all the chicannery that goes with money. It would provide a broad representation of gender, ethnic groupings, regional groupings, age spread and abilities - and though some may question abilities, the prepronderance of lawyers in government has not proven to be superior. If the idea of a representative democracy is for citizens to represent citizens, then a choice by lottery is surely the fairest and has the least possibility of corruption, greed or the seeking of power to satisfy a particular agenda. Respectfully, Thomas Lunde -Original Message- From: Colin Stark [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: January 27, 1999 4:42 PM Subject: Re: real-life example At 11:50 AM 1/26/99 -1000, Jay Hanson wrote: - Original Message - From: Edward Weick [EMAIL PROTECTED] and social complexity grew. While hunting and
Re: re:democracy
I pointed out (often), that there are fundamental conditions for a proper working democracy, and these conditions did not exist in our history so far. Then the reasonable observer would conclude they never will. What about universal literacy? What about the technology to make information universally available and open for everyone? What about the capacity to produce all basic necessities in abundance? What about basic experience in democratic de- cisionmaking? To my knowledge, some of these conditions only existed for less than 100 years and on the others we are still working on. So, who is this reasonable observer? Eva Jay
RE: (Fwd) HANDBOOK OF EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY (fwd)
I'm glad there are people who can compose more concisely...Eva Why do they believe this? First, explicit evolutionary thinking can sometimes eliminate certain kinds of errors in thinking about behavior (Symons, 1987). ... and so on. Evolutionary theory is only intended to explain how living organisms evolve. Applying it to any other field of inquiry puts you on VERY shaky ground. *** Regards, Dave Palmer [EMAIL PROTECTED]
re:democracy
Jay: ... As it has turned out, modern evolutionary scientists have found that the Founding Fathers were right: true democracy won?t work. Natural selection and genetic development created a human tendency for dominance, submission, hierarchy, and obedience, as opposed to equality and democracy. As one political scientist recently put it: "[ Evolutionary scientists ] Somit and Peterson provide an informative account of the evolutionary basis for our historical (and current) opposition to democracy. For many, this will be an unwelcome message ? like being told that one?s fly is unzipped. But after a brief bout of anger, we tend to thank the messenger for sparing us further embarrassment." ... Natural selection and genetic development works in a much larger time scale than social depelopment that may change human hierarchical, obedient etc behaviour in less than a generation and such socially conditioned behaviour forms are not genetically inheritable. Anyone who uses the winners/losers biological evolution argument for the development of human society is ready to blame the failures of social structure on human characteristics, and ready to condemn sections of society, rather than to condenm inefficient social structures. A straight and sinister road to fascism. Eva
re:democracy
Ed W.: ... Somehow I'm not at all surprised that this is your point of view. But then how is merit to be determined? Testing and experience, you say, but who will assess this? Surely an intelligent and informed public should have something to do with it. But, I suppose you would then argue that much of the public is neither intelligent nor informed, a point which I would, alas, have to agree with. ... Not informed , yes. But not intelligent?? I wasn't aware of any decline in public intelligence. Any data? Voting and tv vieing habits are not valid - they belong to the "not informed" bit. I am seriously concerned now. How many of this list have this total contempt for most of humanity??? Eva
Re: How science is really done
Yes, scientists are human, but when we try to define something, shouldn't it define what is, not what its practitioners mistakenly assume it to be ? Science in its description of itself denies the entire right brain creative side of itself. It does this because the mythology of science is objectivity and subjective pattern making is heresy to that mythology. Yet in fact science is a blend of the two. Science is a method. I detest any separation of thinking into "artist" and "scientist". I think we all do and need both, but this has nothing to do with the way science works. Eva Mike H Mike H: Regarding the subject of what is science and definitions which emphasized observation and rejection of theories when counter factual data is presented, I thought the two following documents would be of interest. Scientists do not as a rule observe and then theorize. They typically do it the other way round. When they find the data does not confirm the hypothesis, the usual reaction is not to reject the hypothesis, but to assume it was a bad set of data and proceed to draw another set. Scientists are human, they not always adhere to their own principles. That doesn't make those principles defunct. The good news is that the method always wins out in the long run, when all the data is in the public domain, and peers have a free run at the re-analysis. I sent on your piece on Gold for a review... Eva "So the universe is not quite as you thought it was. You'd better rearrange your beliefs, then. Because you certainly can't rearrange the universe." -- Isaac Asimov Robert Silverberg, _Nightfall_ [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: How science is really done
Both describe reality in different ways. One person is able to do both. I don't think artists are predisposed against being good at science and vice versa. Eva Science is a method. I detest any separation of thinking into "artist" and "scientist". I think we all do and need both, but this has nothing to do with the way science works. "Detest" doesn't say anything. Because both hands are the body doesn't mean that both hands are the same. REH
Re: democracy
Anyone who uses the winners/losers biological evolution argument for the development of human society is ready to blame the failures of social structure on human characteristics, and ready to condemn sections of society, rather than to condenm inefficient social structures. A straight and sinister road to fascism. Interesting thought but the economists who wrote the "Winner Take All Society" define this issue in the reverse. The ones pushing Winner/Loser or Social Darwinian "Creative Greed" solutions blame the social governmental structures as not being efficient in their very nature. According to them, only the private companies that have to live by the free market "natural selection" competitive process have the potential for efficiency, which is often interchanged with "productivity" although that is a confusing use of the two words. Because they think without the intrusion of govrnments, the winners/losers separation would be more perfect for them. So that they can blame then every ill on just their "inefficiently evolved" victims. ... The propaganda of the left is amply criticized in the media in the West but a truly non-military economic competition between structures of the far left and right has never happened so we can't really call Capitalism, Socialisms, Communism or any other economic ism scientific or Darwinian in that sense IMO. you lost me here. Just because they haven't competed, doesn't mean we cannot draw conclusions, even scientific conclusions. Your examples that I deleted show the shortcomings of the competitive setup for sustainability and RD. Even just these two problems cannot be solved based on market compotition system and there are more such fatal flows. So surely, you try to achieve a society without these flaws. As Ed Weick pointed out last year on this list. Such "scientific" economic writings as Marx and others are less science and more philosophy in spite of the Complexity Engineer's love of Huyek's writing structures. If I remember right Ed said that they didn't really qualify being called Economists in the modern scientific sense. But Ed will have to say whether my memory is correct or just all in my head. I find Marx's analysis scientific, because he manages to point out the features of capitalism that are unable to achieve a balanced economical and social development. It makes sense to leave them out from a future structure. This is what he proposed with very good reasoning, using all the historical and scientific data he had. That he had also had the philosophical support of dialectic materialism is just an extra plus. Eva REH
Re: (Fwd) RE: (Fwd) How science is really done
I passed it on again, I hope you won't mind, those people seem to have time to read every article... I just respond to a few things: (Mike H.) It was methane that was detected on Pluto and in the tails of comets, according to Gold. methane is the very simplest CH compound. I belive astronomers found more complex stuff than that, but not any longer C chains. We have an astrochemistry department, I could ask... I know the difference between a theory and a hypothesis and the sentence quoted does not demonstrate such a confusion. Your reader also totally misses my point. People like Wegener and Gold are not merely told their data or their hypotheses are wrong - they are pilloried and vilified for decades. Certain metaphors or images or ideas come to dominate science and any contradiction is met with almost hysterical denial at times. This kind of behaviour is a clear indication of of the non-rational in science, which was the point I was trying to make. The non-rational is particularly important when it comes to creating original ideas - creativity is a marriage of intuition, emotion and rationality. Time after time, if you read the history of science and technology, ideas come to people as epiphanies at the most unusual and unexpected moments, not as a conscious result of systematic and conscious analysis of the data. The patterning typically happens in the unconsious. Poincare famously had one of his most important insights, quite unbidden, as he stepped off an omnibus, for example, though admittedly that was in mathematics, not science. Theories seem to surface when there are enough data/ information is hanging around. Doesn't matter how suddenly an idea surface, in the majority of cases if that particular chap hadn't see the light, there was somebody else quite near to it. (Wallace? start with w anyhow) In a very few cases some individuals indeed are "ahead of their time". Which means, that there are insufficient data around to convince the science establishment, which yes, can be a bit slow moving. However, relying on accumulated data, peer review etc seems to be a very good method (best) of working so far. Remember, the vast majority of ideas DO turn out to be wrong - which also is part of the constructive database identifying the areas where there is no need to look again. The old greeks had some astounding speculative ideas about dialectics and materialism, just to mention the two that impressed me most... but they also had a million of other such speculative ideas that did not work out... They had no chance of separating the valid from the wrong, they had no sufficient data, sufficient tools. As an example of a theory which did not arise from the data, take Darwinian evolution. Historians of science accept that Darwin got the idea from classical economics, from reading Malthus, if I remember correctly. Then when he went on his famous voyage on the Beagle, the biological data fell into alignment with the Malthusian idea in his mind. It is not even a true theory, by the way, it is a tautology. But it is politically incorrect to say in the hearing of biologists who are inclined (metaphorically) to stone you for it. I believe there was a chap around that also had the same general idea as Darwin. I also believe that his main stimuli for his theory came from his travels to sepaated habitats. Also his attempts to adapt his theory to human society was a complete failure. but let's see the skeptics response on this one, they are very much into Darwin... I can't figure why would the oil industry shun Gold's ideas - they are not interested in the science establishment, only in money, and new technology is not even involved. Eva
bounced
sorry if it is a duplicate Eva -- I passed it on again, I hope you won't mind, those people seem to have time to read every article... I just respond to a few things: (Mike H.) It was methane that was detected on Pluto and in the tails of comets, according to Gold. methane is the very simplest CH compound. I belive astronomers found more complex stuff than that, but not any longer C chains. We have an astrochemistry department, I could ask... I know the difference between a theory and a hypothesis and the sentence quoted does not demonstrate such a confusion. Your reader also totally misses my point. People like Wegener and Gold are not merely told their data or their hypotheses are wrong - they are pilloried and vilified for decades. Certain metaphors or images or ideas come to dominate science and any contradiction is met with almost hysterical denial at times. This kind of behaviour is a clear indication of of the non-rational in science, which was the point I was trying to make. The non-rational is particularly important when it comes to creating original ideas - creativity is a marriage of intuition, emotion and rationality. Time after time, if you read the history of science and technology, ideas come to people as epiphanies at the most unusual and unexpected moments, not as a conscious result of systematic and conscious analysis of the data. The patterning typically happens in the unconsious. Poincare famously had one of his most important insights, quite unbidden, as he stepped off an omnibus, for example, though admittedly that was in mathematics, not science. Theories seem to surface when there are enough data/ information is hanging around. Doesn't matter how suddenly an idea surface, in the majority of cases if that particular chap hadn't see the light, there was somebody else quite near to it. (Wallace? start with w anyhow) In a very few cases some individuals indeed are "ahead of their time". Which means, that there are insufficient data around to convince the science establishment, which yes, can be a bit slow moving. However, relying on accumulated data, peer review etc seems to be a very good method (best) of working so far. Remember, the vast majority of ideas DO turn out to be wrong - which also is part of the constructive database identifying the areas where there is no need to look again. The old greeks had some astounding speculative ideas about dialectics and materialism, just to mention the two that impressed me most... but they also had a million of other such speculative ideas that did not work out... They had no chance of separating the valid from the wrong, they had no sufficient data, sufficient tools. As an example of a theory which did not arise from the data, take Darwinian evolution. Historians of science accept that Darwin got the idea from classical economics, from reading Malthus, if I remember correctly. Then when he went on his famous voyage on the Beagle, the biological data fell into alignment with the Malthusian idea in his mind. It is not even a true theory, by the way, it is a tautology. But it is politically incorrect to say in the hearing of biologists who are inclined (metaphorically) to stone you for it. I believe there was a chap around that also had the same general idea as Darwin. I also believe that his main stimuli for his theory came from his travels to sepaated habitats. Also his attempts to adapt his theory to human society was a complete failure. but let's see the skeptics response on this one, they are very much into Darwin... I can't figure why would the oil industry shun Gold's ideas - they are not interested in the science establishment, only in money, and new technology is not even involved. Eva [application/octet-stream is not supported, skipping...] - End of forwarded message from /DD.msdos=PSCNHQ$/LAURIER2$[EMAIL PROTECTED] -
bounce 4
-- If energy (oil?) is in short supply, can one afford to be "fair"? we can be only fair if the decision is made collectively on how to use a scarse resource, especially if the all the information and the options are well known by everybody. Eva Just wondering ... ! Bob Eva Durant wrote: You have the contradiction in your own paragraph: "as just as possible" vs "best possible way" I can't see contradiction. The two have large overlapping section. -- ___ http://publish.uwo.ca/~mcdaniel/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] [application/octet-stream is not supported, skipping...] - End of forwarded message from /DD.msdos=PSCNHQ$/LAURIER2$[EMAIL PROTECTED] -
bounce x
-- just one more... Eva Scientists do not as a rule observe and then theorize. They typically do it the other way round. When they find the data does not confirm the hypothesis, the usual reaction is not to reject the hypothesis, but to assume it was a bad set of data and proceed to draw another set. These observations are well born out in the following article about scientific heretics and particularly Thomas Gold, because he generated new data on the origins of oil and gas and geophysicists are not rejecting the conventional theory but Gold's data. These observations are not so born out, because what they are not saying is that scientists observed, theorized, observered, experimented, theorized, and observed some more to get the current theory *before* Thomas Gold came up with his new theory -- which flies in the face of all those past observations. As an astrophysicist he is well aware that hydrocarbons are found in meteorites and on planets like Pluto where there is absolutely no chance of their having originated from plants - the conventional theory of petroleum geologists. Hydrocarbons does not necessarily mean petroleum. As a matter of fact most hydrocarbons found off-planet (we don't know about Pluto, BTW, very little chemical information from there as yet) is in the form of very simple hydrocarbons, such as methane, not the more complex stuff. No-one is claiming that all methane must come from biological processes. -- James H.G. Redekop | [EMAIL PROTECTED] Web Programmer | http://www.residents.com/ The Residents UUNET Canada | http://www.residents.com/Goons/The Goon Show [EMAIL PROTECTED] | http://www.residents.com/Tzoq/ Home Page [EMAIL PROTECTED] [application/octet-stream is not supported, skipping...] - End of forwarded message from /DD.msdos=PSCNHQ$/LAURIER2$[EMAIL PROTECTED] -
Re: real-life example
You have the contradiction in your own paragraph: "as just as possible" vs "best possible way" I can't see contradiction. The two have large overlapping section. I think I'd be most upset if I were of your crew; they are NOT stupid, if it WERE the question of life or death, they would have made the same choice as you. With hindsight you are aware a larger set of data i.e. you know how long the gas actually lasted. You behaved like a stingy employer, you should have taken more gas. You lost weight, had an interesting experience, the democratic choice was a good one. Jay, I hate to be personal, but you'd brough up this example, and it demonstrates that you count yourself as apart from the rest of us, The Good and Benevolent Leader With the Only Correct Solutions... ... and as often happens to such people - you are wrong! Eva A few years ago, I was skippering my sailboat on a 50 day trip from Guam to San Francisco. Sailboats carry a finite amount of propane for heating drinks and cooking. Moreover, if one runs out of anything a thousand miles from land, one is out for the remainder of the trip. We took the great circle route and it got quite cold in the northern latitudes. My four crew members liked hot chocolate and coffee before going on watch. However, I informed the crew that if they used propane to heat their drinks every time they went on watch, we would run out before reaching San Francisco. I assumed if we ran out of propane the worst would be that we all would lose a little weight, but since everyone could stand to lose a few pounds anyway, I decide to let the crew decide. They decided to take a chance and keep heating their drinks. Well, we ran out of propane about half way across. Can you imagine eating raw brown rice? It was a memorable experience. Collectively we lost about 100 pounds. Had the crew forgone the hot drinks, they would not have suffered any harmful effects and we wouldn't have run out of propane. The "just" answer was to have hot drinks, but the "right" answer was not to have hot drinks. Had there been lives at stake, I wouldn't have given them the choice. A world that is over carrying capacity and about to run out of fuel is just like my sailboat, except for one thing. If the fuel runs out this time, billions are going to die. I wouldn't give them the choice. Jay -- www.dieoff.com -- ** Beispiel-Signatur **
Re: one's fly is unzipped
but not a good enough point in respons the one I made; humans are motivated more for pleasure/happiness than reproduction. That's why babies have to look cute and toy-like at least in our culturaly freer society Even than quite a sizable number decide not to bother. Where is the selfish gene? If it wasn't there, we wouldn't be here. But our quantity turned into quality; our social/ economical environment influences our choices more than the biological one. Otherwise how could we explain the suicidal tendecy of the present system?? Surely the selfish gene wants the human species to survive... Eva Jay -- ** Beispiel-Signatur **
Re: one's fly is unzipped
Or, maybe, the selfish gene wants *my * DNA to go forward. Maybe we have no 'program' for the human species. Coming from a wide open world (the hunter gatherer saga) there is nothing in our internal makeup to cause us to cooperate at the level of survival of the human species. This latter behaviour is all learned behaviour. Ever since we became social beings - a very long time ago indeed - the individual "program" was secondary, soldiers, sacrifice victims, (or even volunteers) priest etc, etc, were not allowed to breed even if they were prime specimen. The tendency of more and more ethnic + national + global integration - even before capitalism - is one of the best observable social fact: cooperation works, outcasts perish. Some of the social features - such as language - is indeed hardwired and evolved since the first humanoids. Eva Who knows? Time for more coffee. (but after reading Harrell's posts-- no more berries from abroad!!!) arthur -- From: Eva Durant To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: one's fly is unzipped Date: Tuesday, January 26, 1999 4:13AM but not a good enough point in respons the one I made; humans are motivated more for pleasure/happiness than reproduction. That's why babies have to look cute and toy-like at least in our culturaly freer society Even than quite a sizable number decide not to bother. Where is the selfish gene? If it wasn't there, we wouldn't be here. But our quantity turned into quality; our social/ economical environment influences our choices more than the biological one. Otherwise how could we explain the suicidal tendecy of the present system?? Surely the selfish gene wants the human species to survive... Eva Jay -- ** Beispiel-Signatur **
lump of labour stuff
It is obvious, that people's life should not depend on the ambiguous ways work is defined and measured. Work is a social collaborative activity, so the products should be socially shared. Simple really... Eva
Re: Defining Sustainable
Ok, I'm trying to be short, not rude... But this research effort reminds me of some age old stuff of the 60s or so, when they decided, that the colour of the walls would help the productivity of the workers... Cutting the boringness and team work would also for carworkers... Open vs closed spaces... No revolution here: when the shareprice drops the unit closes down and the employee that perhaps was lucky enough to have a few experimental years of pampering, gets sacked. I've just received a post about your "knowledge workers" (if you mean computer specialists) being the slaves of the future... If you mean others by this, we just had a thread about the downgrading of academic work, whether in the "hard" or "soft" disciplines. I'd prefer to concentrate on a bit more revolutionary aspects of the workplace... we could play with the thought how we picture a truly democratic workplace, but I don't think that your project superwisors and founders are really interested in that... Eva First thanks to everyone for the comments that are worthy of more thought and research. ___ An Introduction: My name is Deborah Middleton currently I am a graduate sudent at York Univeristy in the Faculty of Environmental Studies. In my previous life I have been an Interior Architect constructing alternative work environments for corporations such as The Bank of Montreal, Nortel (I was responsible for the alternative work environments at the new HQ in Brampton). Over the past five years I have been mapping the emergence of collaborative work and the role of the physical work environment in enabling knowledge sharing, creativity and learning. I am currently a member of a research groun working to understand the emergence of these informal work practices that we are defining as softwork. Perhaps sustainability is not the right word and perhaps another would be better suited to the exercise of constructing a definition of the individuals context in knowledge based industries. But sustainability is where some of my ideas are at in this point of my work (word smithing). Other suggestions are most welcome. The application is to answer the following question in my research proposal. "What is the capacity for the individual within the knowledge based corporation, to redirect and influence organizational change towards sustainable business practices (social and environmental)?" The demand for knowledge workers far out runs the supply, this I believe has resulted in a shift in business focus on recruitment and retention of employees. And thus a possible shift in power between the corporation and the individual (freeagent), where the individual for the first time is in a more powerful position to choose who to work for and under what conditions and to what ends. This is one of the driving reasons that workplaces are transforming to become more comfortable and creative places (recruitment appeal). They are also seen as providing comfort for the obsesive work that goes on in places such as Microsoft. There is an interesting demographic and cultural component at play also that is reconstructing acceptable norms of social behavior. The role of the values of the individual is also shaping their view on work. I am finding that a backlash against the traditional corporation, heirarchy, status and the conditions of white collar work is happening. And not only within startup young entrepreneurial companies but in places such as the Royal Bank of Canada (ie. The Royal Bank Growth Co.) Is this a possible opportunity for the emergence of a movement to change how we work. I believe that it is just this. One just has to browse through FastCompany to find examples of the shifts taking place. Deborah
Re: Fwd: Controversy over genetically modified organisms (fwd)
... Africa has is just now reached its physical limits and is beginning a massive dieoff -- population control by increasing death rate instead of decreasing birth rate Is this really true? (see simultaneous article, Will Humans Overwhelm the Earth? In Afrika wars and AIDS are not relating to population densities. They relate to tribal ars with considerable western intersts still, fighting for economic domination and dismal healthcare. Africa is a more sparsely inhabited continent than the others, even the fertile bits. East-Anglia and Belgium e.g. are far more densely populated and there is no sign of dioff. Eva Caspar davis
Re: Fwd: Controversy over genetically modified organisms (fwd)
I found this post informative, so I forwarded it to you as the science is a bit lacking in fw. Eva Kevin wrote: I guess my first question is: How is this diabolical genetic engineering any different from the time-honoured practice of breeding? Farmers, cattlemen, ranchers, all intervene in the "natural" order of things in= order to select for certain traits that are deemed desirable. So how is directly altering the gene different from getting your sow with pig from a certain boar? Ludwig Krippahl wrote: [snip] -In genetic engineereing you place 'foreign' DNA on an organism, which does not occur in breeding -To do that you need vectors, wich may be problematic in themselves, and are unecessary in breeding. I think that, as with any technological advance, it has its dangers if not used carefully. However, I feel the dangers are being blown out of proportion (this technology has been used successfully for vacine production and general protein sinthesys for some time). Perhaps it would be good to add a few points. In the place of "engineering" should be the word "art" or "science". The only point where we can really speak of "engineering" is that we can make any kind of protein sequence or RNA sequence we wish. Exactly what it *does* -- if anything -- is typically another matter. Moreover, how to target an organism in the "engineering" sense, is still basically a guessing game. Breeding is usually seeking a "phenotype" (selecting a particular "measurable" characteristic) as opposed to a genotype which my not even be "measurable". By "measureable" I mean that it displays a characteristic like resistance to disease, a particular color of fir, etc. Much of breeding is aimed a visible characteristics, but in agriculture, there are certainly plants that are breeded for resistance to infection etc. In such cases, you might call "breeding" a crude form of genetic "science". Perhaps it is important to point out the benefits of such research, which are many I think. * The AIDS, hepatitis C virus, and some other pernicious vermin will most likely be conquered only via genetic engineering (when it really becomes "engineering"). Hence, our best weapon against pathogens is knowledge, not fear. * Most cancers and chemotherapies will eventually turn to genetic engineering (when it really becomes "engineering") to rid this scourge. Hence, our best solution to transcriptional corruption is knowledge, not fear. * Possibly when we really understand life cycles of cells, we may even be able to develop therapies for cell regeneration. Hence, our best "alternative medicine" is knowledge, not fear. Of course, without some form of ethics, we might have reason to fear such capabilities, but once again, whether we are fundamentally theistic or a-theistic, the best form of ethics come from a desire to understand this world and seek to do right, not a blind fear that some utterly diabolical boggyman (with black hat) could succede in some nefarious scheme or a fear that some Cosmic Dictator who will become angry if we find out how the world works. We already have plenty of potential to destroy ourselves many times over if we want to hurry up the end of the world. Wayne [EMAIL PROTECTED] - End of forwarded message from Wayne Dawson -
Re: reply to Ed Weick re simulation
Well, good luck, afterall, if it turns out to be a valid simulation it will show that whatever the initial conditions, capitalism ends up in crisis... I hope the results will be well publicised and the participants rework the operators until they find successful functions, my guess is that they will end up with something like what Marx proposed... Eva After a few kind words by Pete Vincent, For my part, I found your post excellent ... Ed Weick replied: I, on the other hand, do not. I have seen little evidence that you really know anything about the global economy that you hope to model. I don't, really -- you're right about that, Ed. Who does, though? But I can write a simulator, put data into it, and see what happens. And I can make it all public, so people like yourself can make constructive criticism. If I had to do everything myself and had to find all the mistakes myself, it would be a hopeless task, but I think I can count on a lot input by very sceptical people such as the ones on this mailing list, and perhaps a bit more concrete help too. Later in a more sober mood Ed wrote: Nevertheless, I do feel that the questions I have raised about the simulation that Douglas Wilson is proposing are valid: Is there really something to be simulated? If so, what? Will the proposed simulation lead to a better understanding of economic phenomena? And, do we not already have a considerable understanding of the global impacts of megaphenomena such as population growth and energy resource depletion? ... The only real response I can make to each of these questions is that a good simulation should answer them. I don't know the answers, but I think I can get some answeres, even with only the prototype. Ed wrote: On whether there is something to be simulated, I pointed out in a previous posting that, despite headlines and hype to the contrary, economic activity is still overwhelmingly domestic, not international. This makes me wonder how a "global economy" might be defined for the purposes of simulation. I feel too that, in a global simulation, broad political realities would have to play a central role. How might they be factored in? The first dataset will consist almost entirely of numbers from a variety of sources, and from that I expect to produce what discrete mathematicians call a weighted graph -- not a chart or picture, but a network of nodes or vertices linked by edges. We can then apply connectivity and cutting algorithms to see how well connected the graph is -- I expect more connectivity than Ed would, but that remains to be seen. If broad political realities play a central role, that should be visible in the results. For example, a program called Metis, originally written for balancing the load amongst several processors in a supercomputer can try to divide the graph (or network) into two (or more) parts of approximately equal size making few cuts or cuts of low weight only. In cold war days this probably would probably partition the graph into the well-known East and West blocs, but now, well, who knows? I would suggest that, in a simulation of the kind being proposed, it matters a great deal what kind of overall global world is being assumed, since the nature of that world would determine who provides economic support to whom, who is willing to sell strategic resources to whom, who provides weapons to whom, and other such things. I want to make as few assumptions as possible. I don't want to assume any "kind of overall global world". That should be a result, not an assumption. Which leads me to the issue of whether a model of the "global economy" would really be helpful. In a previous posting I asked what it might tell about whether China might devalue the yuan, knowing full well that it couldn't tell us much. But perhaps it could tell us quite a lot about the consequences of yuan devaluation. ... [much omitted] ... But in doing this, it is probable that we would get down to a level too micro for a global model -- or the global model would have to terribly comprehensive. Initially the model will indeed have to be "terribly comprehensive", and should err on the side of containing too much data, rather than too little. I suggest that we just don't know enough to make a smaller, less comprehensive model. Later, having some results from a simulation based on a lot of data -- tens of thousands of numbers -- it may be possible to simplify, based on what we have learned. Now to the megaphenom stuff - the end of cheap energy, population growth, the concentration of population in unsustainable cities, pollution, the effects of climate change. Here there is both a very great need for simulation and the possibility of doing something useful. But you are no longer dealing with the global economy. You are dealing with
Re: FW: Re Chaordic change and the Story
as soon as people realise that communism means democratic socialism which is as much antithesis to stalinism as to capitalism, more people will "come out" as it were... I am proud to be a communist as defined originally, e.g. Marx's Manifesto. Eva As often happens, I totally agree with you, Eva. I had better be careful, or people will think that I am a COMMUNIST, God (if there is a god) forbid :-) Colin At 08:31 AM 11/26/98 +, Eva Durant wrote: Half of the population is above average intelligence, and that half is better at communication... The point is, that without active and conscious participation you cannot affect any change; so we have no choice but to go for democracy. Every option has risks, this one has the most chance. Cooperation was always the main survivor feature of humans, more and more wide-ranging and integrated over the centuries, with tyranny and chauvinism the periodical backswing. Global conscious collectivity seems to be the next logical progression - hopefully, this time leaving no chance (uninformed, left-out mass base) for medieval reaction. Contempt for humanity have never worked, for sure. Eva
Re: chaordic structures
Or most of us gets informed and active in the change into a democratic and cooperative world, which besides being sensible about waste and integration, has a chance to be educated/inventive/creative about solutions. Eva We can do it our way: perhaps in the context along the lines of the new social system that I have proposed. Or Big Brother will do it his way: full speed into the wall, then it's the police state -- a modern blend of the Holocaust and Orwell's 1984. Jay -
Re: a few words about economics and future work
In the early days of the Soviet Union there was an attempt to match people to jobs (or tasks) through some central bureaucracy. Of course bureaucracies don't work very well, but even if they did work, perfectly, they could not have accomplished that task because of the combinatorial explosion of possibilities. In the early days of the soviet union, when most of the marxist theorists haven't been killed by the civil/intervesionist war or later, Stalin, there was a genuine strife for democracy and a wide range of new/modern concepts of freedom for those times. However, their failure has not much to do with any combinatorial tasks, but with the facts, that most people couldn't read or write, most people had not enough to eat or place to live, most people had never heard of the concept of thinking for themselves rather than being told what to do by their landlord/ clergy or the tsar. In graph theory and computer science the problem of matching workers to jobs (or any equivalent bipartite matching problem) is called the assignment problem. Good modern algorithms for solving the assignment problem are roughly O(3), which means that they scale up as to the cube of the number of nodes. Using my aging 120 MHz Pentium it takes about half an hour to solve an assignment problem with a few thousand nodes. To solve a problem with a few million nodes would not take 1000 times as long, but the cube of that, one billion times as long. So there is probably not enough computing power in the world today to solve the assignment problem the Soviet bureaucracy set themselves. Even this estimate doesn't sound that dounting in the view of the present and possible future computing capabilities. However, there would be several different level of assigning anyway, say by local housing groups, education groups, workplace groups, district, town, country etc areas of collective decisions. Hey, if there is an energy problem/hiccup, it can even be done without computers... OK, this is an oversimplification. But the basic point should be clear. The organization of society is the kind of combinatorial optimization problem that is hard to solve. Actually as combinatorial problems go, it is one of the easy ones, most are not just hard but virtually impossible. But somehow most economists don't address the combinatorial explosion. A flaw in the economics curriculum, I suppose. Even the present system managed to work upto a point without a lot of combinatorics so far... Unemployment is a good example. One constantly hears governments talking about job creation, as if there just aren't enough jobs to go around. To me unemployment is evidence that it is hard to FIND a job, not that there are too few jobs. Lots of women fail to find a husband, but you don't hear governments talking about man-creation or a shortage of men. Well, the fact is, that while more and more people come to the job-market, there are less and less jobs. When last time there was an advertisement for a middle grade technician job in our department, there was 102 applications, 6 of them with Phds. If you into sharing the existing job-hours, basic income or other ideas mentioned on this list, you have to think of an economic structure that could work with such a human needs and not profit oriented problemsolving. For each individual to find a good job, society as a whole must solve a very difficult combinatorial optimization problem, a bipartite matching or assignment problem. Not an impossible problem, but we certainly won't solve it as long as we ignore the combinatorial problem altogether and try to do job-creation. I wish it was the question of just a bit of clever mathematics... It would have been solved by now; we have teams of able mathematicians all over the place looking for decent Phd projects... Eva So, there you have it -- after complaining about Jay Hanson's mistreatment of economists I go on to criticize them myself. But, people, please, it's not personal, and it's not a prejudice, I just think the universities need to add a few graph theory and computer science courses to their economics curriculum. dpw Douglas P. Wilson [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.island.net/~dpwilson/index.html
Re: FW: Rapid job growth in the not for profit sector
There is a miserable unemployment problem in the UK for skilled, unskilled and highly educated people. Most young people have only chance of gaining the "experienced" word into their CV if they work unpaid for one of these "non-profit" organisations. Usually doing a job that used to be paid in the past, under a manager, who's making as good money as can be. The structure of these bodies are usually archaic and even less democratic than ususal, no trade unions, etc. Most of these organisations live on government grants and subsidies, including charities. This "privatisation" is a waste of money and loss of professionality. Eva From the Economist The non-profit sector - LOVE OR MONEY FOR economists, the non-profit organisation is something of an evolutionary oddity. Without the forces that drive conventional firms-shareholders, stock options and, of course, profits-it has still managed to thrive in the market economy. Indeed, a pioneering international study*, published this week, shows that the non-profit sector now accounts for an average of one in every 20 jobs in the 22 developed and developing countries it examined. In the nine countries for which the change between 1990 and 1995 could be measured, non-profit jobs grew by 23%, compared with 6.2% for the whole economy. In some countries, they grew faster still: by 30% in Britain, according to Jeremy Kendall of the London School of Economics, who carried out the British end of the study. Why this remarkable expansion? Non-profits span a vast range. Some sell goods and services (such as American hospitals) and compete head-on with profit-making firms; others are religious bodies and campaigning groups, supported largely by donations. In between, in Europe, are the Catholic and Protestant non-profits, such as Germany's Caritas, which provide many social services, and are financed by the state, but independent of it. Because the Netherlands has many such bodies, it tops the list for non-profit employment (see chart). To find a definition that fitted all 22 countries meant including institutions such as universities, trade unions and business associations. Graph - Non profit share of total employment 1995 - Source John Hopkins University A clue to the success of non-profits is that their growth seems to have been fastest in countries where government social-welfare spending is high. That suggests they complement government provision, rather than substituting for it. Indeed, public money partly finances many non-profits-such as Britain's housing associations, which rely on a mix of state cash and rents to house the poor. They are, in a sense, an off-balance-sheet arm of government. At their best they are flexible and innovative. However, as non-profits become more important, so do their shortcomings. One is what Mr Kendall delicately terms "accountability lapses": non-profits tend to reflect the interests of many different groups, but those of the consumer often come low on the list. Boards of directors of non-profits are typically much larger than those of firms, but they serve a different function. As Rosabeth Moss Kanter, a management guru at Harvard Business School, puts it, they "are often treated like cheerleaders who have to be given good news so they'll go out and raise funds." Another problem, says Lester Salamon, one of the study's main authors, is finding competent line managers. Moreover, management may be more complex than in a conventional company. Because a firm typically makes money directly from its customers, it has an incentive to provide what they want. In a non-profit, the money may come not from the clients-the homeless, say, or the elderly-but from a mixture of grants, donations and charges. Training for running non-profits is still scarce. Michael O'Neill, of the Institute for Nonprofit Organisation Management at the University of San Francisco, reckons that 10m people and 100m volunteers work for non-profits in America; but no more than 1,000 students a year pass through management courses such as the ones he runs. Across the country, at the Harvard Business School, the social-enterprise programme that James Austin directs aims to ensure that MBAs who go into mainstream business know something of running non-profits. Mr Austin recently surveyed 10,000 HBS graduates and found that about 80% were involved in non-profits in some way; 57% sat on the board of a non-profit. In fact, points out Ms Moss Kanter, the largest non-profits can attract professionals to the top jobs. John Sawhill, a former McKinsey partner, heads America's Nature Conservancy; Frances Hesselbein ran the Girl Scouts of the USA and graced the cover of Business Week. "Among certain groups of people I know," she says, "it now has a certain social cachet to say that you are starting a
Re: The Soviet system: who was screwing whom?
All I know, that Hungary couldn't have rebuilt the terrible destruction of the war without soviet energy and raw material, and that hungarian shops always had more food in them - even in the early 50s - than the soviet ones. I suppose we should stop referring to anecdotal evidence, perhaps some figures are available somewhere. I guess they stripped a load of assets - I doubt if this was pre-meditated, probably the motive was to revenge (or being seen to revenge) the fascists. As Czechoslovakia was more of an occupied country and not a fascist ally as Hungary, I am puzzled. Though they also had a better developed industry - perhaps there was more to take. Eva Ed Weick wrote: Many writers have refered to the Soviet system as "state capitalism". A fellow blacksmith who lived near Prague said to me (in 1980), Es gibt kein Communismus! Es gibt nur Staat Capitalismus. There is no communism! There's only state capitalism. With regard to "who was screwing whom", he also recounted his experience just after the war. As a young teenager, he watched the Red Army direct the loading of trucks with every piece of industrial machinerey and materiel that could be found and ship it off to Russia. He was exceptionally fortunate to have a power hammer in his shop (commonplace among N American and western European smiths) because it had fallen from a truck headed for Moscow, broken a casting and been pushed into a ditch. A Czech smith had found a way to lug it home and, more remarkably given the conditions, repair it. Perhaps the notion of the SU having been the net exploiter is/was tilted by recollections of immediate post-war events. - Mike
Re: how many people have to die?
Any philosophy or political idea can become a dogma, if applied as such, being identified as Absolute Truth. This, ofcourse says nothing about the validity and applicability of said idea. Marxism/leninism as defined by it's originators does not claim any such identity, it was born from dialectic materialism, that denies such absolutes. The present capitalist market system is not based on any philosophical/political idea, it happened. Any ideology that apologises for it sprung up when this system was already with us. The dogma is that it cannot be changed to something better. Or on this list: if we just change some of it's institutions, than it would somehow work better. Sorry, the fundations of the economic relations that need changing. Eva There are no societies without religion, even, or especially, those which believe themselves to be entirely secular. In our century, in our society, the concept of development has acquired religious and doctrinal status. The [World] Bank is commonly accepted as the Vatican, the Mecca or the Kremlin of this twentieth-century religion. A doctrine need not be true to move mountains or to provoke manifold material and human disasters. Religious doctrines (in which we would include secular ones like Leninism) have, through the ages, done and continue to do precisely that, whereas, logically speaking, not all of them can be true insofar as they all define Truth as singular and uniquely their own. Religion cannot, by definition, be validated or invalidated, declared true or false - only believed or rejected. Facts are irrelevant to belief: they belong to another sphere of reality. True believers, the genuinely pure of heart, exist in every faith, but the majority generally just goes along lukewarmly out of cultural habit or material advantage. When, however, the faith achieves political hegemony as well, like the medieval Church (or the Bolsheviks, or the Ayatollahs), it is in a position to make people offers they can't refuse, or to make their lives extremely uncomfortable if they do. Eva It's a great book! Faith and Credit: The World Bank's Secular Empire by Susan George, Fabrizio Sabelli Paperback - 282 pages (September 1994) Westview Press; ISBN: 0813326079 http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0813326079
Re: DANGEROUS CURRENTS
I thought the government manages the state, and as such, it is the state. If there are periods of better social provision, you may be sure it is so, because a powerful - a bit more farsighted - strata of the capitalist/financial strata wield influence over the government that time. Whatever "good" achieved at these time is in fact to avoid social unrest and to prolongue the system. So these "successes" are transitory, look at the quick erosion of the education/health/social services in the UK. If you think this "process" will give us a democratic and sustainable future you are sadly mistaken. Eva ...cut... I don't believe that what is needed is a replacement of the system. As we have learned time and again in history, corrupt systems are almost always followed by corrupt systems. However, I do feel that advanced democracies such as Canada were, at one time, on the point of achieving something special, a society which really did work in the interests of its citizens. At one time government operated on the belief that it had a very different role in society from business -- that business must work in the interests of its shareholders but government must work in the interests of citizens. I'm beginning to wonder if this belief has been so eroded and government's view of itself has so confused as to make government virtually ineffective. Ed Weick
Re: FW: David Korten: Democracy for Sale (fwd)
Adam Smith wrote TWO books- one of these is infamous Wealth of Nations and the other, neglected child is the Theory of Moral Sentiments. In other words, smith saw the need for capitalism to be tempered by responsibility. Surely the less responsible capitalist makes more profit, thus puts out of business the others. They are in it to survive in the chaos of the markets, human considerations antagonise the basic essence of capitalism. And therein lies the problem. At both ends of this arbitrary spectrum between fre market and common ownership is the intervention of the State, not as a regulator, but as a parent taking responsibility for errant children who want to play but not pay. Eva has resurected two staw beings, both of which can be knocked down by either side in order to avoid the difficult issues of responsibility. Marxist economics relies on english classical political economy, perhaps you should read some first hand before you form your opinion. I have to assume you have not yet done this, as you misrepresent marxist theory - and me - here. Where did I pass responsibilities? Marx did not look at the state as a "responsible parent". He new that the state represent the status quo of the ruling economic order, thus he knew that full democracy in both the social and economical sense means a society without the state, that would be deemed to "whither away". This, of course, is why Jeffereson wanted a republic and NOT a democracy. He, of course, believed that only a certain class of persons would have sufficient interest and willingness to absorb the responbility. The common ownership, as Orwell showed, in his novels is frought with the same dangers as the Genral Bull Moose model of rampant corporate control. Orwell had written good novels describing the system of the USSR. However it was not his job to make a rational analysis of the economic/social construct there. Luckily this was done by marxist analysts in a very consistent and convincing manner. In the USSR et al though there was common ownership, the economic control was in the hand of a burocratic elite and the state represented this elite. There are obvious and well demonstrated conditions that caused this lack of democracy to occure, such as the backward state of development in Tsarist Russia, including the illiteracy rates and no experience in democracy whatsoever, also, the conditions of the afternath of an immensly destructive war, and there are quite a few more such coincidental missing of the economic/social initial conditions Marx prescribed for a successful socialist democracy to develop. Luckily, at present, these conditions are, if anything, over-ripe for the next stage of social development which is the conscious democratic control to replace chaos and destruction. The penduluum is not operating in a plane carving a path between two alternatives. It is a chaotic system operating in several diminesions which have been ignored by the political flat landers. Capitalism and the markets are a chaotic system. So is a lot of the physical/biological systems we learned to manipulate in our favour. The only way we can manipulate the economy to serve human sustainable survival rather than short-term destruction to go on, if we have full collectively responsible democratic control over it. It sounds boring and axiomatic perhaps, but that is not a rational argument against it... I'd love to have a rational/objective argument. It's so much more comfy (at the moment) to be an apologist for capitalism, give me a good argument and I pack in marxism. Eva cheers tom abeles
was: petfood
Should cheer up Jay... Just imagine if all the money/land/ resources spent now on tobacco would be spent on better things... However, short term profit and one easily collectable state revenue is part of the system that cannot be concerned about human needs. I think it is more than the pet-food money, though this data is overlooked. Eva - Forwarded message from Mark Graffis -
Re: SOCIETIES AND ECONOMIC SYSTEMS
I agree with you; the leadership of the union tend to be right wing and to thrive on apathy. The only initiative comes from pressure from the memebership - when it happens. Eva mass unemployment cuts the unions bargaining power due to cut in membership and that competitive pool of unemployed who are ready to work for less in worse conditions. Also the mass media for the last 30 years was constantly hammering the idea of unionism. Unemployment may well cut union bargaining power, but short-sighted strategy cuts union political power much more. Over the past 30 years, unions (in general) have chosen to focus on income over organizing and on seniority over solidarity. This could be explained as a defensive strategy brought on by necessity. Or it could be explained as a conservative strategy brought on by institutional inertia. I'm sure it's been a bit of both. The problem with a one-sided "unions as victim" analysis is that it really gives the unions no direction to change -- other than whine about how tough things are. Union bureaucrats are all too happy to have something to complain about. That way they can keep playing the conservative game and rationalize the predictable all too predictable losses as due to anti-union hostility. And militant rhetoric is no guarantee of strong union political strategy. My observation is that union officials who "talk tough" often seem to believe that's enough. Regards, Tom Walker ^^^ #408 1035 Pacific St. Vancouver, B.C. V6E 4G7 [EMAIL PROTECTED] (604) 669-3286 ^^^ The TimeWork Web: http://www.vcn.bc.ca/timework/
Re: pet food
The capitalist argument usually is the same as with the defence of the arm-industry: just imagine all those who have to be made unemployed if we scrap the pet-food industry... Less revenues from taxes... etc, etc. The socialist argument is, that if the economic system stayes the same both here and in the said african country, the same crisis will be reproduced, with most aid - as previously - ending up in the hands of the local or even international capital. The IMF/ etc insist on all sort of economic strategy guarantees by countries receiving loans, but nobody demanding guarantees on human rights, such as adequate food, shelter and education... which makes it clear how the "totally free markets" and "totally free competition" would work. Eva In accord with a local (australia), highly unpopular politician's catch cry could someone out there 'please explain' and without junk economics I refer to michael gurstein's post 29/9/1989 wherein he forwards the NYT article covering the UN's 1998 Human Development report. The second last statistic refers to the US + Europe expenditure on pet food and health. How would an economist figure it if pets were sudenly outlawed in the USA and Europe (ignoring the social cost but including the disposal cost!) and this US$17 billion might be redirected to provide basic health and nutrition for everyone in the world? how does the ledger look in the these affluent areas if this industry is dismantled? would there really be $17 billion available? how do these UN people arrive at their estimates of costs for basic health and nutrition? would you feel better making a weekly contribution to a UN fund for this purpose rather than buying x-number cans of "biffo" or "quick cat" or packs of "super bird" maybe even some percentage of their ingredients comes from the LDCs? regards Jock McCardell
Re: Demographic Fatigue Overwhelming Third World Governments
So the burden is again nicely appropriated on inept undemocratic national governments/elites/dictators/warlords living off the bribes/support of the west/multinationals and on women, instead of the underlying economic insanities that continuously take resourses and options away from people in the developing countries. You cannot educate people who haven't got enough food/water. -At the moment- it could be enough with a decent distribution system which needs a global overturn of the present way of doing it. No change no hope. Eva HOLD FOR RELEASE 06:00 PM EDT Saturday, September 26, 1998 Demographic Fatigue Overwhelming Third World Governments Many countries that have experienced rapid population growth for several decades are showing signs of demographic fatigue, researchers at the Worldwatch Institute, a Washington, DC-based environmental research organization, announced today. Countries struggling with the simultaneous challenge of educating growing numbers of children, creating jobs for swelling ranks of young job seekers, and dealing with the environmental effects of population growth, such as deforestation, soil erosion, and falling water tables, are stretched to the limit. When a major new threat arises-such as AIDS or aquifer depletion-governments often cannot cope. Problems routinely managed in industrial societies are becoming full-scale humanitarian crises in many developing ones. As a result, some developing countries with rapidly growing populations are headed for population stability in a matter of years, not because of falling birth rates, but because of rapidly rising death rates. "This reversal in the death rate trend marks a tragic new development in world demography," said Lester Brown, President of Worldwatch and co-author with Gary Gardner and Brian Halweil of Beyond Malthus: Sixteen Dimensions of the Population Problem. In the absence of a concerted effort by national governments and the international community to quickly shift to smaller families, events in many countries could spiral out of control, leading to spreading political instability and economic decline, concludes the study funded by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation. Marking the bicentennial of Thomas Malthus' legendary essay on the tendency for population to grow more rapidly than the food supply, this study chronicles the stakes in another half-century of massive population growth. The United Nations projects world population to grow from 6.1 billion in 2000 to 9.4 billion in 2050, with all of the additional 3.3 billion coming in the developing countries. However, this study raises doubts as to whether these projections will materialize. Today, two centuries after Malthus, we find ourselves in a demographically divided world, one where national projections of population growth vary more widely than at any time in history. In some countries, population has stabilized or is declining; but in others, population is projected to double or even triple before stabilizing. In 32 countries, containing 14 percent of world population, population growth has stopped. By contrast, Ethiopia's population of 62 million is projected to more than triple to 213 million in 2050. Pakistan will go from 148 million to 357 million, surpassing the U.S. population before 2050. Nigeria, meanwhile, is projected to go from 122 million today to 339 million, giving it more people in 2050 than there were in all of Africa in 1950. The largest absolute increase is anticipated for India, which is projected to add another 600 million by 2050, thus overtaking China as the most populous country. To understand these widely varying population growth rates among countries, demographers use a three-stage model of how these rates change over time as modernization proceeds. In the first stage, there are high birth and high death rates, resulting in little or no population growth. In the second stage, as modernization begins, death rates fall while birth rates remain high, leading to rapid growth. In the third stage, birth rates fall to a low level, balancing low death rates and again leading to population stability, offering greater possibilities for comfort and dignity than in stage one. It is assumed that countries will move gradually from stage one to stage three. Today there are no countries in stage one; all are either in stage two or stage three. However, this analysis concludes that instead of progressing to stage three as expected, some countries are in fact falling back into stage one as the historic fall in death rates is reversed, leading the world into a new demographic era. After several decades of rapid population growth, many societies are showing signs of demographic fatigue, a result of the struggle to deal with the multiple stresses caused by high fertility. As recent experience with AIDS in Africa shows, some countries in stage two are simply
Re: Judge for Thyself Who is Right
None of your characters are right in this tale; There is no such thing as absolute freedom (Jesus), the best way to define it is by e freely, individually made (continuous, dynamic) collective decision. No totalitarian elite - however intelligent - will be able to provide happiness for us. We can be only supportive of decisions we understand and we were part of making. Eva From: Durant [EMAIL PROTECTED] actually, after a while there is enough experience to do it better, that is what human progress is about. We are able to learn Human "progress" is an illusion. Judge for Thyself Who is Right by Jay Hanson Dostoevsky's parable is set in sixteenth-century Sevilleat the height of the Inquisition. On the day after a magnificent bonfire, in which nearly one hundred heretics were burned alive, Jesus descends and is immediately recognized. The cardinalthe Grand Inquisitorhas Him promptly arrested and thrown in prison. That evening, the door of Jesus' cell opens and the old, ascetic Inquisitor enters to confront Him. For a few minutes there is silence, then the Inquisitor delivers the most profound and terrible attack against Christianity. The Inquisitor charges Jesus with betrayal of mankind, for deliberately rejecting the only ways in which men might have been happy. This singular moment occurred when "the wise and dread spirit, the spirit of self-destruction and non-existence," tempted Jesus in the wilderness by asking Him three questions. First, the spirit asked Jesus to turn stones into bread. Jesus refused because He wanted mankind free, and what would obedience be worth if it were bought with bread? Thus, He denied men their deepest cravingto find someone who would take away the awesome burden of freedom. Then, the spirit asked Jesus to throw Himself from the pinnacle of the temple, "for it is written: the angels shall hold Him up lest he fall". Again Jesus refused, rejecting miracles because He wanted faith given freely. But the Inquisitor explains that man cannot live without miracles, for if he is deprived of them, he immediately creates new ones. Man is weaker and baser by nature than Jesus thought. "By showing him so much respect, Thou didst ... cease to feel for him " Jesus' last temptation was to rule the world, to unite all mankind "in one unanimous and harmonious ant-heap, for the craving for universal unity is the third and last anguish of men" He refused once again, and thereby rejected the only ways in which men might have been made happy. The Inquisitor explains "We are not working with Thee but with him [the spirit] We have taken the sword of Caesar, and in taking it, of course, have rejected Thee and followed him. Oh, ages are yet to come of the confusion of free thought, of their science and cannibalism [But] we have corrected Thy work and have founded it upon miracle, mystery and authority. And men rejoiced that they were again led like sheep, and that the terrible gift that had brought them such suffering, was, at last, lifted from their hearts And all will be happy, all the millions of creatures except the hundred thousand who rule over them. For only we, who guard the mystery, shall be unhappy Peacefully they will die, peacefully they will expire in Thy name, and beyond the grave they will find nothing but death." "And we alone shall feed them" the Inquisitor continues, "Oh, never, never can they feed themselves without us! No science will give them bread so long as they remain free. In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet, and say to us, 'Make us your slaves, but feed us.'" Jay
Re: Marx required angelic robots
Marx required angelic robots for his utopia: The basic principle is "from each according to their ability to each according to their work". In a democratic system with limited resources this is a natural way of distribution. No angels required, only the old suspicious and evil species we know. And finally, the highest stage of the classless society would be reached; in which the principle is "from each according to their ability to each according to their needs". If the resources are plentiful, this is a natural way of distribution in a democratic system. Again, no angels, only people who are able to direct their own lives. Needless to say, Marx's grand hallucination wound up in the trash can because of the human propensity to act human (follow genetic programming). Marx should have paid more attention to Hobbes: "... in the first place, I put forth a general inclination of all mankind a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death." -- Thomas Hobbes Except when power is shared, and not denied from a majority. We only rape and pillage these days, when society breaks down. So society and social structure is not to be ignored, if you are keep refering to genetic programming, as a decisive factor, you ignore this fact. The Gulags, Cambodia and Fidel Castro have not much to do with the marxian definition, but are a useful history to point us to a future where we know how important is to safeguard all the democratic guarantees. "democratic guarantees" reflects your "Rousseauistic belief in human perfectibility". What's changed Eva? How can "more of the same" yield anything other than "more of the same" results? What changed is that now we have an other historical evidence - namely, that socialism cannot succeed without democracy, you cannot supply it by a well-meaning or technocratic or meritochratic elite - so we won't be perfect, but damn suspicious, so any future socialism would include a full openness and probably overzealous check/guarantees on democracy... Eva Jay - COMING SOON TO A LOCATION NEAR YOU! http://dieoff.com/page1.htm
from Edupage (fwd)
Just to put you minds at rest... Eva NET DEPRESSION STUDY CRITICIZED Various researchers, including Vanderbilt University's Donna L. Hoffman, are criticizing the recently released Carnegie Mellon University study that suggested that the Net may be a lonely place, causing depression in many people who used it extensively for e-mail, chat, and similar purposes. Noting that the subjects of the study were not randomly selected (and not matched with a scientific "control" group of people who didn't use the Net but were otherwise like the people in the study), Hoffman says the CMU research is "not ready for prime time. This is not saying that Internet does not cause depression. Maybe it does -- but this research does not prove that." She adds that the CMU finding is hard to believe because it runs "counter to experience, anecdotal evidence, practice and scholarly research." (Washington Post 7 Sep 98)
Re: Tactical seperation of free trade in goods and finance capital?
I've read the review and have gone back to reread parts of the Manifesto itself. What incredible idealism the Manifesto contains! And what perversions in the name of that idealism have actually occurred! ok, I slept on it and I cannot leave it... what is more Idealism in the manifesto, than any belief that the capitalist framework would bring solutions to the problems still aptly described and still persisting, with the added closup to environmental catastrophy? Socialism or barbarism still well describes the scenario. However, perversion did occur, but there are well defined and presently avoidable or not even re-creatable conditions that were leading to the same pattern of deformity. Eva
Re: more from Johns Hopkins
Even among the former Communists, (good 19th century scientists) this has been turned to a puritanical rigidity If you mean Marx et al, you're wrong. The most picked up and ridiculed of their ideas by contemporaries were those on free love, which they developed from the french utopian socialists if I remember correctly. Eva REH
Re: It's our final exam
Yes, "games people play" became a cliche after the pop-psych book by Eric Berne. What I'm concerned about is that persons do not *integrate* these different roles, and the different aspects within a single role. For a "brain worker" to slavishly work overtime seems to me incongruous. But, instead of the "brain worker" thinking: "I think, and thinking is an activity which requires leisure", and "I work enforced overtime to produce more stuff, which is an attribute of the addembly line", and *putting the two together and saying: This doesn't add up", the "brain worker" (1) uses his or her brain, *and* (2) works the overtime, but doesn't try to conceptually integrate the two. I call that *splitting* (multiple personality disorder). People usually are good at adapting to each social situation without mental problems. Multiple personality disorder is still not an established phenomenom, and like most depressive/schrisophenic etc illnesses are to do with chemical insufficiencies of the brain - only the trigering/stimulating such episodes/illnesses maybe due to social circumstance. Eva \brad mccormick -- Mankind is not the master of all the stuff that exists, but Everyman (woman, child) is a judge of the world. Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED] 914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua, NY 10514-3403 USA --- ![%THINK;[SGML]] Visit my website: http://www.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/
Re: chimpanzeehood and human nature
The gist of my statement was, that all societies which were controlled by the owners of private property created a culture where women were part of the property-relations to make heritage of property possible. Do you dispute that nomadic and agricultural societies fall into this category- not mentioning here the obvious feudal/slave/bourgois structures. We are still fighting the massive remnents of these cultures that denied the freedom and equality of women, and we still have a long way to go... even if your (unfortunately) miniscule community appearantly has a different history. I don't think anyone is qualified to speak for the "magyars" or the "brits" or the "zulu nation", as all of these represent a multitude of attitudes, religions, customs, politics etc. I am not speaking "for" anybody, but sum up some obvious patterns that persist in most societies. Eva (Hary Janos is ok... just an afterthought for the notion that teaching music would somehow make a revolution in thinking: it happened through the Kodaly system in a few countries; didn't make much difference except creating a few generations who could sing more songs, learned enjoyed music, produced more than the average number of good musicians. No revolution.) Eva, my apologies for not catching this post which was before my past one asking for a reply. My server only gave this post to me today for some reason. The Great Civilizations in North America were nearly all matrilineal including the Long House Houdinosaunee who gave Ben Franklin the systems that are the foundations of the U.S. Constitution. (They didn't accept the matrilineal element but did include a great deal of the "Great Law of Peace" in the Constitution).The exception to this may be the Pueblo peoples. I have called a Hopi friend of mine on that and hope he can tell me more about their very complicated formulas, however, I am not enthusiastic about my ability to comprehend. My own people the Cherokee were until 1828 Matrilineal at which point they realized that they would not survive without at least trying assimilation. So they met, drafted a written constitution and formed a mirror government to the U.S. Government including changing women's equality and property rights. (Needless to say this made the women go into a 150 year depression, only remedied with a return to traditional values and spiritual practices.) It didn't make any difference the "crackers" still stole the plantations, the cotton and fruit plantations and the herds of thoroughbred horses, sold them for pennies and marched the Cherokee to Oklahoma on a death march. Orphaning my great-grandfather in the process. The greatest City of North America was at Kahokia and was matrilineal as were all of the Mound Builder cultures.The great cultures of the Southeast and the Navajo in the Southwest were as well.The Great Speaker at Tenochtitlan was originally matrilineal although the reform of Tlacelel calls that into doubt at the time of Cortez. Some of the more nomadic cultures were not. Unfortunately those cultures are the ones that the movies and anthropologists wrote about. They were the more romantic of the bunch as opposed to people like the first psycho-linguist Sequoia (Cherokee) or Ely Parker. "Donehogawa" (Seneca) who was the gatekeeper of the Iroquois Confederacy a Lieutenant of Grant in the Civil War and the head of the Department of Indian Affairs. He was also a very wealthy engineer. The ways of Washington and the games with the "Indian Wars" out west were so discouraging that he resigned and continued both his business and his traditional ways.So you can take it from me. We were and are matrilineal inspite of and long before Rousseau and John Locke. As for the Inca. There are many new books being written by the people themselves and I would refer to those before taking the invaders words for much.But they are not my people and I won't speak for them.I would do the same for the Magyars even though I have sung Hary Janos and studied with Otto Herz and Bela Rozsa. Now that all being said, I re-state the original question: how do you justify your opinion about all women everywhere as property with the fact that in most Native American communities the women owned the property and could put the husband out of the marriage by simply putting his shoes in the door? Ray Evans Harrell Eva Durant wrote: I think this must be the exception, in tribes where the idea of surplus/private property of the means of production such as land and the separation of of work did not occur. I don't remember any such matriarchal structures mentioned in the inca and other city-dwelling or nomadic ancient americans. Westerners yearn so much for an idyll of back to nature, that they tend
Re: Decline in Civic Association
Sorry, I am totally lost, I cannot connect your response to what was discussed. Eva Eva, don't be a bore. There is plenty of research in the works of Geertz, Edward Hall ect. that proves that we are radically different once we get beyond the "we are all the same once we take off our clothes" stage. You should consider the French attitude towards world musics. Up until the French shamed us all, we were saying there is only music and we have it. Now we know there are many and that all expression is site/time specific. The chances are that it is the same for scientific expression as well. Are the arts and anthropology really that far ahead of the sciences? REH P.S. you never answered my post about the reverse cultures of the New World in our relationship to gender and ownership. Eva Durant wrote: Well, I was teaching a wonderful black dramatic soprano today and her answer to this particular question was that there was something in the Caucasian gene that didn't allow for serious long term cooperation.The statement sounds racist but somehow you all seem to be coming up with the same answer except you include her culture in your cynicism. REH Homo sapiens is one species. The gene variation between "white" and "black" individuals may be less than between "same colour" people. What a load of nonsense. I haven't heard of any cultures having a particularily peaceful past. We'll only get peace and cooperation when we discontinue the class-system and everyone has the same access to wealth. health, power, education, creativity, etc., not the least arm control. (Jay's "gamekeeping" would just continue the old tradition of violent power-struggle.) Eva
Re: Decline in Civic Association
Well, I was teaching a wonderful black dramatic soprano today and her answer to this particular question was that there was something in the Caucasian gene that didn't allow for serious long term cooperation.The statement sounds racist but somehow you all seem to be coming up with the same answer except you include her culture in your cynicism. REH Homo sapiens is one species. The gene variation between "white" and "black" individuals may be less than between "same colour" people. What a load of nonsense. I haven't heard of any cultures having a particularily peaceful past. We'll only get peace and cooperation when we discontinue the class-system and everyone has the same access to wealth. health, power, education, creativity, etc., not the least arm control. (Jay's "gamekeeping" would just continue the old tradition of violent power-struggle.) Eva
Re: chimpanzeehood and human nature
I think this must be the exception, in tribes where the idea of surplus/private property of the means of production such as land and the separation of of work did not occur. I don't remember any such matriarchal structures mentioned in the inca and other city-dwelling or nomadic ancient americans. Westerners yearn so much for an idyll of back to nature, that they tend to re-create some of the "ancient" customs that were disrupted by their very arrival... Eva Eva, how do you justify your opinion about all women everywhere as property with the fact that in most Native American communities the women owned the property and could put the husband out of the marriage by simply putting his shoes in the door? Power was vested in the clans and in the clan mothers who chose and still choose the members of the council. Only they can depose a leader and in my nation only the "beloved woman" can declare war. In my two divorces the wife got all of the property and left me only with what they didn't want. It is not easy being in a traditional marital arrangement. That is why we so rarely leave them. You seem a bit Eurocentric here. REH Durant wrote: (David Burman:) On the contrary. The evidence strongly suggests that our original foreparents were egalitarian in their practices, with agricultural surpluses and advanced cultural development, but with no signs of fortification that would suggests the need for defence from others. This contradicts the commonly held patriarchal assumptions that agricultural surplus was the necessary and sufficient condition for domination and war. These societies valued the feminine power to create life over the masculine power to take it. I wonder on what sort of evidence such assuptions are based. There is some evidence that climatic changes in central Asia precipitated a gradual change to sky god worshipping, male dominant and dominating modes of social organization. These changes are thought to have been associated with loss of agricultural productivity which resulted mass migrations and ultimate overrunning of the peaceful populations they encountered, while taking on a modifyied form of the cultures they conquered. The most recent of such invasions, and hence the only one in recorded history, was Mycenian invasion of Crete. From this material, it seems that the history of conquest and domination that we assume to be human nature, is really an historical blip of a mere 5,000 years. It makes more sense to me to assume, that women had more power while gathering was a more guaranteed "income" then the other activities. In flood plains where agriculture was "easy", it developed, where it was not, nomad animal-rearing, thus wondering was the norm. Both activities lead to surplus, private property, which required heirs, thus women became part of the property ever since. Conquest and domination was part of human life - as it was part of animal life. However, I agree, it is not necesserily "human nature", as human behaviour changes much more rapidly as to be possible to define it. Eva [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: [DEV-L:73] integrating the economically disadvantaged i
Your fatalistic misery built on an entropy misconception is not at all constructive; let's do ourselves in because the Earth is doomed in x million years. - see Ron Ebert's response in an other message. It's not "x million" Eva, the scientific concensus is about 24. We were talking about the effects of entropy. The real short-term collapse you have reason to worry about is nothing to do with entropy, it is due to a system that is not able to coordinate people to save themselves. My point is - it is unnecessary to introduce l'art pour l'art scientific phrases to fog the real issue - we need urgently a social/economical change that is able to motivate people to work together; to distribute goods according to human need, such goods as food, production capacities, energy, contraception, IT and democracy. At the moment the most creative human resources are wasted in military and insane energy-gobbling production of superfluous goods, because this satisfies market/profit needs in a totally flawed chaotic and uncontrollable mechanism. Eva In 1992, both the US National Academy of Sciences and the Royal Society of London warned in a joint statement that science and technology may NOT be able to save us: "If current predictions of population growth prove accurate and patterns of human activity on the planet remain unchanged, science and technology may not be able to prevent either irreversible degradation of the environment or continued poverty for much of the world." "The future of our planet is in the balance. Sustainable development can be achieved, but only if irreversible degradation of the environment can be halted in time. The next 30 years may be crucial." [ http://dieoff.com/page7.htm ] Never before in history had the two most prestigious groups of scientists in the world issued a joint statement! Now, six of these years are gone, and global devastation is still increasing exponentially while giant trans-national corporations relentlessly drive billions towards their deaths. Either you believe scientists or you don't. I do. Jay -- www.dieoff.com
Re: Demodernizing of Russia (fwd)
You ignored the point I tried to make; borroing expressions from physics such as entropy and using them willy-nilly to make an economic or social statement look as pseudoscientific as astrology is. Eva Except that this fatalistic "let's use the laws of thermodynamics" - would perhaps make some sense if the Earth was a closed local system. It is not even that. Eva It's because the "reality" of it is too much for people to cope with. The "reality" is that Russia is merely the next country to be flushed down the entropy toilet. It certainly wasn't the first, and certainly won't be the last. None can escape. Jay -- www.dieoff.com Russia wasn't flushed down any entropy toilet: It was flushed down the *economic* toilet (i.e., its head was placed under the water and held there till the body stopped struggling) by the "White" forces (the good guys always come in white!) of global capitalism. Surely Stalin was highly "entropic", but the West's strategy of *strangling* the Soviet economy to cause the Russian peole to revolt -- a policy which began in 1917 and finally "succeeded" a few years ago (that's at least 70 years' sustained intention) cannot be called "entropy" but rather malice of purpose. Reagan was *so* proud of his "greatest achievement": that the victim finally suffocated on his watch! *Now* we can have entropy in the "free market" (Brownian motion) of liberated mother Russia and its unleashed "satellites" (loose cannons on the deck)! Oh, boy! \brad mccormick -- Mankind is not the master of all the stuff that exists, but Everyman (woman, child) is a judge of the world. Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED] 914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua, NY 10514-3403 USA --- ![%THINK;[SGML]] Visit my website: http://www.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/
Re: Crony capitalism
WE and our individual behaviour are the product of our social/economic environment. Those of us who are conscious of this fact should make all the effort to change the social/economic structure to serve human needs and not chaotic haphazard capitalist market/profit orders. Eva I find it rather sad that we see the world as a series of stereotypes which we present to ourselves again and again to reinforce or views of what we believe to be reality. Like all of us, those whom we label as capitalists are human beings caught in a flawed system. Indeed, like all of us, they are greedy and want more for less. But, like all of us, they can also have a social conscience and be altruistic. In at least some cases, such as that of Robert Owen, they led social reform and played a very important role in minimizing the worst effects of industrialism. I also find it a little sad that we continue to see the world as "us" and "them". It is not we ourselves who are eating up the world and becoming bloated, but corporations. During the past couple of years, perhaps longer, I've seen more and more gas guzzling sports vans and pick-up trucks on the road, most often with only one person inside. "Aha!", I must now say to myself when I see the next one go by, "that is not an ostentatious person driving that vehicle, it's a greedy corporation!" Or, if I cannot persuade myself that it is a corporation, I may perhaps at least be able to convince myself that the driver didn't choose the vehicle of his own volition, but was somehow inflamed with greed and ostentation by a corporate advertising campaign. It is a long time since I last quoted by favourite historic personage - a possum named Pogo - who uttered one of the greatest truths of all time, "We have seen the enemy and he is us." What I find saddest of all is that we have never taken those words seriously. Ed Weick
Re: Crony capitalism
Gee, if you'd just listen to me, you could have saved a lot of your valuable time... Eva ... List, I came to the conclusion that no overall policy, certainly no government-led policy, could solve unemployment problems or determine the nature of future work. Keith
Re: Crony capitalism
I am sorry, but at times I get pricked by all the self-congratulatory tone around here... If you didn't already know, sarcasm is pretty cheap. I've experienced yours before and I wish you'd learn some ordinary courtesy. Gee, if you'd just listen to me, you could have saved a lot of your valuable time... I agree with you about the UK - it is clear that they are re-doing some of the failed tory initiatives under new fancy labels. Without touching the economic structure they cannot but fail; there are no "new jobs" whether the unemployed are trained or not. Training consists of ways of grovelling to potential - usually illusory - employers, some basic wordprocessing skills and long sermons about being your own fault and not the decrepit social conditions if you won't succed. Eva As for the latest, brand-spanking-new employment policy of the UK government -- the NEW DEAL (about the fourth major governmental effort in the last 20 years) -- and only 12 months or so old -- what has happened? About one-quarter of the prime group that were targeted (young people) have dropped out and have subsequently lost all their unemployment benefit (what do they do? -- turn to crime?). One half of the remainder are disillusioned with the poor training they are getting (costing about 30,000 UK Pounds each), and the other half who manage to get into low grade jobs (employers being heavily subsidised for each trainee) will be ditched (and some have been already) at the first signs of economic downturn. Politicians and civil servants have very little idea of what the world of work is really like and anything they say or plan about it is usually ludicrous. Keith Hudson, General Editor, Handlo Music, http://www.handlo.com 6 Upper Camden Place, Bath BA1 5HX, England Tel: +44 1225 312622; Fax: +44 1225 447727; mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: An interesting question
just to be my simplistic self again, I cannot see how such a desirable outcome could preserve such outmoded concepts as national states. To maintain the global standard of living sustainably, we would need international integration on a yet unimaginable extent. UK has had to come to term with not being an empire, in fact being one of the weaker economies of a progressively integrated Europe even in the present non-cooperative epoch. Japan was excepted as the second largest economy for decades now. Eva Castoriadis asks the following question about "development": Assuming that development really did work, and that all the backward countries caught up with the West, how would "we" (The USA, Britain, France, Germany...) respond to becoming minority figures in a world dominated by Asian, African and Latin American countries? Such a situation would likely mean that "our" influence in the world would be drastically reduced: The United States would, vis-a-vis a China and India, Indonesia, Egypt, Brazil, Mexico, etc. that were as technologically advanced as but much more populous than us, become at best like Sweden or Portugal or something (well, not quite -- we have less social welfare...). Would "we" stand for that, and for the way we'd then be really pushed around by the forces of a global economy? I found this a very interesting question, which I don't think I've heard posed before. Any thoughts? \brad mccormick -- Mankind is not the master of all the stuff that exists, but Everyman (woman, child) is a judge of the world. Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED] 914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua, NY 10514-3403 USA --- ![%THINK;[SGML]] Visit my website: http://www.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/
Re: chimpanzeehood
Agriculture became a catastrophe because, according to Jared Diamond, all evidence (skelletons and bones from humans) shows that before agriculture was developed humans were never suffering from hunger and malnutrition. But some time afterwards it became usual that there were times in humans lives when they were starving so much that it is possible for scientist to read it from their bones. before agriculture developed the number of humans was probably comparable with apes. Agriculture was a success story in the amount of food and other human goods produced. The first massive population growth was the result of these early feudal civilisations. The problem - as I mentioned previously - was the divisive and hierarchical social structure ... And from answering these questions agriculture was developed by humans. Humans will try to research and develop the potential of everything, for good and bad. Most for good I believe. And when the potential of something is fully developed limits are reached and there are crises. It is painful, but sooner or later we will find other things to develop. Whole civilizations and economies reached their limits. It is painful, but life goes on. Civilisations have worked uptil now as usually destructive forces of nature. This is not necessarily so. The curiosity you mentioned above does include the thirst to learn the patterns and manipulate it consciously is the obvious next step. If we have hopes/history about managing to control/use all sorts of natural phenomena eventually, this next step is our only hope to break the cicles of rise and fall. If you are happy with the notion that we made as much impression on this earth with our art and industry as apes, then obviously you are not motivated to keep us going. I am the product of social and genetic programming to think and act for survival... I have to take responsibility for being a human being (homo sapiens) and try to act accordingly. Eva -- All the best Tor Førde visit our homepage: URL::http://home.sol.no/~toforde/ email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: unemployment, growth, migration
Your hypothesis would mean that the number of unemployed in a given country is linked to the number of immigrants. I am not aware of such a relationship. The number of unemployed is however linked with the capacities of workplaces used; at present the UK is working at 1973 capacities, and the (unofficial) number of unemployed is around 4 million - near 10%. If you don't like the idea of "creating" workplaces that are superfluous and not environtally friendly, don't jump on the supramacist or whatever bandwaggon of blaming the immigrants, but blame the system that cannot sort out the ample resourses so that we may all contribute to our own convenience and satisfaction, and take what we need for comfortable but sustainable living. Eva ... The creation of new jobs is the goal of politicians of all persuasions. But creating jobs increases the number of people who are out of work! Here is how this happens. A community has an equilibrium unemployment rate of, say, 4%. A new factory is built, and the unemployment rate drops to 2%, until people move into the community to take the jobs and raise the unemployment rate to the equilibrium 4%. But this is 4% of a larger population, so more people in the community are out of work. For every hundred jobs that are created in a community, about four more unemployed people are created in the community. Because of our freedom to move, it is impossible in the U.S. to create and maintain an island of low unemployment by creating new jobs. Ms. Burke is telling it like it is. Thanks. Sincerely yours, Albert A. Bartlett Each increment of added population, and Each added increment of affluence, Invariably destroys an increment Of the remaining environment. Albert A. Bartlett: Professor Emeritus of Physics University of Colorado, Boulder, 80309-0390
Re: chimpanzeehood (and other -hoods...)
As science stands today, the genes are only the
hardware that cannot function without the software;
and the software depends on the social/cultural/
emotional environment. If M.Thatcher, Hitler etc.'d
had a decent, warm, secure upbringing - then there
would have been somebody else to fill their place;
there would have been still wars and attrocities
committed in the name of "race" and "country"
but in actuality in the name of capitalist competition for
markets - in this old century of ours.
Eva
Jay Hanson wrote:
Tor Førde:
But about 10.000 years ago a catastrophe happened: agriculture was
developed. And from then on began humans to suffer from malnutrition,
starvation and suppression.
Diamond says that there once was a garden of Eden, but he does not say
that we are born sinners in any way, unlike what Jay Hanson says.
Are you saying that people were "good" until attacked and corrupted
by "agriculture"? GBut "agriculture" didn't invade Earth from outer
space, we invented it -- it's in our genes.
Jay www.dieoff.com
Maybe we can all agree: *Everything* that any living
being ("lebendiges Gewesen"(sp?)) has ever been or done
is in our genes.
That would include Hitler, Stalin, the Talibans(sp?)
in Afghanistan, all the noble savages (and the less noble ones...).
Husserl, Darwin, Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, Oprah,
Linda Tripp, Dolly [Sheep] --
and my own maternal grandfather who looked and acted (and
thought? --yes, he did have at least rudimentary
language) like a Neanderthal (stereotype, not science!).
When I think about him, I am reminded that the retreat of the
glaciers at the end of the last Ice Age was not (and
"the ascent of man" is not...) uniform As I grow
older I am painfully reminded that no person can rise
above their "background" -- for though I read Husserl,
converse with "you folks", create art, etc.,
my flesh grows barnacles (dermatological excrescences).
Therefore I mean it "personally" when I quote Abel
Gance ("The only thing that somewhat relieves the
degradations of aging is to create.") and Husserl (to the
effect that the life of the mind depends on securing
peaceful everyday life, "The spirit alone lives, all
else dies", etc.) and others.
It's *all* (and innumerable other possible lives, better
and worse, which I have not in fact lived...)
"in my genes"
\brad mccormick
--
Mankind is not the master of all the stuff that exists, but
Everyman (woman, child) is a judge of the world.
Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED]
914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua, NY 10514-3403 USA
---
![%THINK;[SGML]] Visit my website: http://www.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/
Re: chimpanzeehood
We are not computers, we are animals. The genetic distance that separates us from pygmy or common chimps is only 1.6% (the two chimps are separated by 0.7%). In fact, we are the chimp's closest relative with the gorilla differing by 2.3%. We are neither computers nor animals. such factoids are not evidence for anyhting, just like the other favourite "fact" used to be about "humans not using 90% of their brain capacity". The human mind is a billion-year accumulation of innovations through countless animals, and through countless environments for specific reactions to specific situations. Genes for a panic response to threat are millions of times more likely to pass on to future generations than genes for contemplation -- the runner wasn't as likely to get eaten as the thinker. I don't think our ancesters could outrun the sabre toothed whatever. They survived by being able to think, communicate, remember; light fires, make communal noise, throwing stones. Thinking was better for survival. And thinking "evolves" differently than the species, so stop sticking to your outdated social darwinism. "Survival of the fittest" is not even a fair representation of the theory of evolution. I can't think straight, but I can run like hell. G you must have had a better pe teacher than I,my running technique is attrocious. Eva Jay -- www.dieoff.com p.s., Please pass the bananas
Re: FW: ...what's wrong with the ideologies we have so far?
It seems to me, that not ideology but dogma has been described, the two are not necessarily the same. I wasn't aware, that "corporationism" is an ideology. I think it is a form of self-defence for capitalism, incorporating some necessary seeds such as integration and planning for future analysis, but being inefficient due to their anti-democratic and burocratic nature, I agree. Eva Ideologies provide each their own single, simple and inevitable answer to questions that are intrinsically complex and characterized by uncertainty. With ideological certainty available we -- the whole civilization -- fall into a state of zombie-like (my word) unconsciousness, a state in which the exercise of "common sense, ethics, intuition, memory and, finally, reason" fail. Dominant idologies for the last 120 years or so have been dominated by corporatism. An ideology of, or derived from, corporatism has no place for a conscious individual participant in the democratic process and no venue for the "obligation to act as a citizen." It has room only for putatively rational management and negotiation between competing "interests". Saul begins his own summary, near the end of chapter 5: What I have described in these five chapters is a civilization -- our civilization -- locked in the grip of an ideology -- corporatism. An ideology that denies and undermines the legitimacy of the individual as the citizen in a democracy. The particular imbalance of this ideology leads to a worship of self-interest and a denial of the public good. The quality that corporatism claims as its own is rationality. The practical effects on the individual are passivity and conformism in the areas that matter and non-conformism in the areas that don't. - Mike --- Michael SpencerNova Scotia, Canada [EMAIL PROTECTED] URL: http://www.mit.edu:8001/people/mspencer/home.html ---
Re: [Fwd: BUT WHAT DOES IT MEAN?]
I hate to say it, but you are speaking platitudes that don't stem from original thought, but from more ancient platitudes. That has to be so when the typical reference of "proof" is, "it is so because HE said it's so." The Social Scientist is apparently well read, but lacking even one iota of the original thought that makes the Real Sciences so successful. Actually, I don't give a danm Who said what. I just look for sensible reasoning. The powerful did indeed enslave every able bodied person -- for what reason, to ensure that *they* would have enough to eat. Some food had to be allotted to the slaves, or they could not last long. Most people lived in hunger and consequent misery. Where was all that "enough" Food you cite. Food happened to be the preoccupation of all effort, because there was dire scarcity. Why else was it called the Agrarian era, that lasted since time began until a century ago? Ever since the specialisation of labour people produced more than they needed per head of the society. Whether the slaves were fed or killed depended on the wishes of those who owned them, who also owned the land. The feudal era lasted a short time in comparison with the hunter/gatherer/ nomad societies, only 5-10k years. Food was only a scarsity if there was a catastrophy such as draught, plague, or if war killed too many people etc. If food was the main preoccupation, how come there was time and resource for culture, art, religion etc? Besides the pyramids. The power was in the hand of those who owned the main mean of production: land. If food would have been allocated evenly, there would have been plenty for everyone. Same as now; we have an enourmous overproduction of food globally, yet the majority of humans are starving. As to the "unimaginable luxury" you spell out, did it include modern bathrooms, refrigerators to store excess food, the latest technology in anything? What did it "cost" to build the pyramids. Only whatever food it took to feed the slaves who built them. What else would you do with all that labor? If they were not fed, whether they built the pyramids or not, they would die. What I know of it, the ruling elite had luxury far ahead of the technology, which meant much larger part of the socially produced goods being spent on them. Surplus labour - as you term it - means surplus food. Why invade other peoples? To take over their lands, the raw material for more Food production. for more land and slaves. Even in modern times that was the excuse Hitler used for starting a war. Lebensraum. Why was there dire inflation in Hamburg? Because there was an insufficiency of Food, and just increasing the Money supply did nothing to increasing the Food supply. Propaganda slogans usually do not represent reality. Hitler fought the 2nd WW for exactly the same reason the first one was fought for; a larger slice of the developing global colony/market dominated by France and the UK. It doesn't make sense if all you want is re-creating the same by resuscitating private property relations. How can your well-defined democracy work if one group - the owners of the means of production - have more power than the others? My studies in Law indicated that there never was nor is any such thing as private property, though a great deal of lip service is paid to that notion. I think it is economics that deals with this area of social science... One owns only what he brings into the world and takes out with him, absolutely nothing, not even his corporeal body. The group of which he is a member is far more powerful than he is, by sheer numbers, and depending upon the Real Wealth that the group may possess, will allow custodianship to the individual in direct proportion to the wealth of the group. However, the group insists that when the individual finally leaves us, he will follow certain rigid rules on who will be the next custodian, or the group will decide. Fascinating, but not impressive reasoning. Private property - owning the means of production - was and still is the source of an unjust, unbalanced society, where even in the richest country there are very poor people. The group is dominated by the members who own most of the wealth. This is well demonstrated in our "democracies" whichever party is "in power" it does the bidding of the most powerful elites, at present mostly those dominating the multinationals/financial capital. Wealthy groups, measured by how the essential. least critical "staff of life," food, is available to supply everyone, such as some of us today, can afford to allow full custodianship of everything to everyone. Really? So how come I cannot buy land, cannot buy factory or just stop working and retire to the country? UK is still one of the richest countries... That wretched decision a century ago to replace the once scarce essence of life, Food (of the triumvirate including Air
Re: BUT WHAT DOES IT MEAN?
Durant wrote: I had no response to my arguments; Science is only a tool and even art would be non-existent without scientific problemsolving. What is the date on the invention of the modern scientific process? Method? The old one was just the same as the modern, even including the peer review...: observe, make pattern, make hypothesis, experiment, if it doesn't work make new hypothesis, if it does work, use it and pass it on. At what point you think science became your nasty, modern version? It is the social/economical/cultural system that poses and applies/buys science; so blame that for any "miscarriages". No I blame the personality of scientists who believe that science has all the answers and everyone else is stupid. You are well, plain silly than, as there are probably larger percent of the public - probably even artists!, than scientists who believe that science has all the answers. I prefer to listen instead to people like Bohm and Gell-Mann who seem to understand what it means to be a complex adaptive system, dependent upon all of the tools given us by the Creator. So if we cannot pick it up - like chimpanzees the sticks, than we shouldn't use it? The problem lies with Eve's satanic thirst for knowledge?? Intelligence evolved as an efficient survival tool, it is a "natural" human characteristic to use science, probably at least as "natural" than to use art. I have yet to see any good reason to refer to a Creator, but that is another issue. Don't use a lot of names, summerise what they said. I don't except ideas just because a lot of Big Names said so, it also has to make sense to me. I'll read everything you say once I retire, until than I just don't have the time... Especially those perceptual tools that are developed prior to conscious thought and that give rise to such. ? The simple fact is that science has a history with the wolf that makes trusting them tough at times. It was science as a tool that fascilitated changes in industrial practices for the better. But it often was the morality of religion that made them use the science. you mean the economical/social/cultural system No the spiritual, social, aesthetic, economic system. Science and technology were the nails but not the thought that conceived of the building. the spiritual is part of the cultural. Every different culture have a different god, remember. Otherwise here you just repeated what I said. As Mike Hollinshead has pointed out on many occasions as he described the actions of the non-conformist industrialists who were Quaker. Science wants to take credit for them, but they no more deserve that credit than the piano does for the pianist. when did science wanted to take credit for the few quakers? Or for anything for that matter; accrediting blame or credit is not part of science, but of the social/cultural establishment. Sorry to be repetitive, but there seems to be a difficulty with getting through... I think you are mistaking the creative balance that goes on between the material sciences and engineering and the cultural sciences like anthropology and the practice of excellence as expressed in the arts and the morality that comes from the contemplation of Ultimate Concerns. That would be a pretty wobbly table with only one leg, if I understand you correctly, but you could dance on a table with four legs. There is a creative balance?? I thought we established, that science is not used properly at the present. Our argument is about the role of scientists; you say they are the root of evil, I say they just reflect their social/economical environment, like everybody else. They create, like artists do, but their creations are not used in the best interest of the people, that happens with art, too. ... The U.S., Spain in middle and South America as well as Portugal, and England in North America. 100 million people at first contact, with a decline of 23 out of every 25 with no appreciable growth in birth rate until a low was hit in North America of 100,000 at the turn of the century. After forced sterilizations were rescended in the 1970s there has been a bounce back of 1.5 million certified Indian people at present. sorry, you totally lost me here. We would be just an other type of ape without any art if we had no science. Well, according to that definition we were just a bunch of apes up until the 17th century. So the piramids, the exact forcast of floods, the chinese, arabs, indians, greeks, romans, arabs etc, etc had no science?? I repeat, we had science since the appearence of the first homo sapiens. Uptil the 17th century science was monopolised in most places by the religious hierarchy, as part of their magic, to help to keep people in their various castes. But then that evil book-printing was (oops:) invented/ against the wishes of your Creator no
Re: BUT WHAT DOES IT MEAN?
So the "thinker" and the "herd" are different species... there is no evidence of this and all theories that attempt to use such notions were very limited in their efficiency besides being sinister. Jay, I think you are into some sort of personality-cult stuff... Not different species, the two still mate and have children. Thinkers are defective believers -- unable to believe in the Good Tooth Fairy, Santa Claus, Progress, and so on. There are a reality and some theories based on feedback from reality. Consequently I believe that gravity exists and that the Earth exist and that my environment exist until I get counter-information. So I work on this reality to suit my and hopefully other lives better. I think most people are in this category, even if they haven't a chance to contemplate about it, so I am the heard and the leader in one person - as it should be. Eva
Re: soap and water
The pie had a remarkable growth in this century, and if all the waste of research and resources for arm and car production for example turned into socially useful activities, such as environmental protection, the scope is limitless. If you see a limited pie, your only scope is the annihilation of most of humanity. We have to count on the population levelling out - which can only be achieved with adequate distribution of the pie, To make the juiciest and biggest pie you have to try to think outside of the present economic framework. Eva Please enter the following into your computations; these are not subject to dispute except for "rounding errors". Approximately 1/4 million humans are added to the population DAILY. That is the net amount that births exceed deaths. The "pie" that is divided, whether sustainable or not, is therefor, on average, yielding a smaller slice/human. Unless, of course, that one claims that the "pie" is increasing in size. Last I heard, the planet was not expanding. This is independent of the impact that the consumption of the pie has upon it's future size, on the natural production upon which life depends. All the tokens in the world cannot increase natural production. To argue over policies of distribution without being concerned with the size of the pie, it's renewability, and the # of sharers is to my mind nonsensical. Cheers, Steve Kurtz But does it improve the SoL for the less well off individuals in those less well off countries? Richer countries may have to "pay" for their lesser well off neighbours but our standard of living on average is much higher. Is part of the "problem" with globalization, that Western nations will have to take a pay cut! (( washes mouth out with soap and water )) ;-) Tony's claim touches the key issues: 1. Must globalization increase the overall pie? This is the gain that the mathematical models do predict unambiguously for (idealized) free trade - that the total economic product is maximized. Some folks claim that the gain would be adequate to keep any piece from shrinking. 2. (If so,) must increasing the overall pie increase particular pieces? For example, the smaller ones? This is more problematic, even mathematically. The relevent theory is that of 'Comparative Advantage', which argues for specialization. Unfortunately it appears that the particular specializations must be able (even eager) to easily change over time, something that seems rather difficult to pull off in practice. 3. (How) does increasing the size of a piece affect the distribution of that piece
Re: UK Employment zones: will they work? (fwd)
I admit I did not follow this thread closely, what I'd like to know, where the EXTRA jobs are coming from for these targeted people? Eva I would like to share my concerns about an apparent contradiction in the UK Employment Zones approach. Reform of active labour market measures in Canada and the UK in the 1990s has involved increases in targetting (but not money), by which I mean the number of discrete programmes aimed at those with distinctive needs (youth, the long term unemployed, older labour force participants, etc). This creates a rigidity when administered on a regional basis. When administered at the local or regional level, the administrators have a specific budgetary allotment for, say, youth, and a different allotment for the aged, both of which are pretty much set. If one locale (zone) has more youth unemployment than unemployment among older workers, too bad; they must spend the allotment as budgeted and programmed. In this context, the UK Employment Zone proposals (if I'm reading the proposals correctly) show promise, for they allow localities the flexibility to reallocate funding according to needs - budgetary decentralisation with a small measure of local policy discretion. But wait, what about all these other conditions? Those over 25 and are classified as long(ish)-term unemployed (over 1 year) are targeted - a slight claw-back of decentralization. A minimum amount must be spend on certain key targeted programmes - a restiction on policy making capacity of the zone. Project success stories will be replicated across Britain, whether they are suitable to other regions or not - a reduction in local flexibility. And what happens when the central governments wants to target another class of labour market participant? Budgetary centralisation and a reduction in local policy discretion, that's what. In fact, this is the cycle that has taken place in Canada: (1.) demands for more flexibility come from local programme offices of the federal ministry; (2.) budgetary allotments between programmes are made more flexible; (3.) new demands emerge for another targeted programme, such as youth; (4.) central level of government demands such-and-such amount spent on the new initiative (or package of iniatiatives), and local flexibility is reduced. With the Blair government embarking on an on-going redesign of the welfare state, the likelihood of new targeting measures seems very high. What this boils down to is one question: are these local experiments to create ideas for redesigning of the larger system, or are they pilot projects in decentralisation of the entire system? (Surely, the maintenance of a small and perminent cadre of priviledged zones is politically unsustainable as backbenchers lobby behind the scenes for special status for their own constituencies.) This is an either-or proposition, each with its own perils, for making compromises between the two creates an overly complex system - a state that active measures sometimes seem prone to gravitate towards. The Australian scenario would be the risk: programme targeting becoming so complex and success so difficult to monitor that, eventually, those held accountable get fed up with the unwieldliness and chop the system down to size. Thank you for your attention. Cheers, Peter Stoyko - Peter Stoyko Carleton UniversityTel: (613) 520-2600 ext. 2773 Department of Political ScienceFax: (613) 520-4064 B640 Loeb Building V-mail: (613) 731-1964 1125 Colonel By Drive E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Ottawa, Canada, K1S 5B6Internet: http://www.carleton.ca/~pstoyko -- On Tue, 21 Apr 1998, Michael Gurstein wrote: -- Forwarded message -- Date: Tue, 21 Apr 1998 19:51:41 +0100 GMT From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: UK Employment zones: will they work? UK Employment zones: will they work? Zones d'Emploi britanniques: marcheront-ils? The Blairite solution to poor prospects for employment is to identify parts of Britain where these problems cluster and then concentrate resources. Smart. Will the policy work? Employment zones are areas where the usual national programmes for the unemployed will be ditched in favour of running trials of local initiatives. The five areas chosen to pilot the scheme all have high concentrations of the long-term jobless. "Employment Zones will give communities the flexibility to devise local solutions which best meet local needs," said the Employment Minister, Andrew Smith, when he invited bids for zone status last September. Plymouth, Liverpool, north-west Wales, south Teeside and Glasgow began running their
Re: Agreement.
However, without North-Sea oil, Denmark and Sweden run into a lot of economic difficulties in the last decades and the first "solution" was to attempt to cut back social benefits. The Suiss are a special case, but I think they also rely on the world money market ultimately. I doubt if the capitalist structure could gradually change into something else, any rate, even looking at Norway, we haven't got that timeframe left (unfortunately), the environmental damage/wars and poverty will force on us rapid change one way or the other. Eva . I regard the agreement that has been reached about making education a part of work a natural contination of the development that has been going on here for more than a century. It is known that 150 years ago when the common man began to become more interested in politics and to work for the rights of larger groups to get the right to vote, among the founding groups were lots of "reading clubs", peasants who joined together to buy books which they shared and discussed, and these "reading clubs/societies" became an important part of their education. Education and democracy have always been closely connected, and education was always regarded as valuable among all groups. But more important is the tradition of investments. Recently was a quite large Norwegian history published in twelve volumes by a publishing company called Aschehoug. I have read most of it. It is written there about the years 1890-1900 that if one was to look for something like the "Asian tigers" at that time, Norway would have been among them, because at that time was Norway investing a larger part of ite GNP than any other European country, although it was among the poorest countries in Europe per capita/person. Since then Norway has always been, and is still, among the countries in the World that have the largest investments as part of GNP. I would call it a part of the "Norwegian credo". We believe in investments, and are only comfortable when a large part of GNP is being invested. And to put a larger part of GNP into education will fit very well in with our Credo. I looked recently into an old textbook from school, from about 1970, and in 1967, before any North Sea oil at all was developed, did only three other European countries have a larger GNP per person than Norway. Those were Switzerland, Sweden and Denmark. Investments done during a long time were already paying off before the oil came on stage. Big investments and strong unions are the solution! Tor Forde Ed, You make a good point which reminded me of our own example of the same phenomenon: Alberta. What often passes for good management in that province is actually a whole lot of oil and natural gas in the ground. In the case of Norway, it seems to me that they are on the right track. It is often said that the best use of non-renewable resources is for the development of renewable resources. Norway's most important renewable resource is its its people and investment in that resource is the very best use that could be made of its revenues from the North Sea. Compare that with Canada's 10 year record of what I would call disinvesting in people. As always, it is mentally challenging to talk to you. Rudy Rogalsky Rudy, Good to hear from you. I agree with you. I don't what much about the Norwegian political system. Perhaps Tor can help us out. It may be more centralized than ours. We have a terrible time doing anything positive because of jurisdictional splits between the federal and provincial governments, and because we have become deeply mired in the belief that governments should behave like businesses, always watching the "bottom line" and balancing budgets year to year. (Eva: it is not only Marx who is dead, Keynes is too.) Best regards, Ed Weick - End of forwarded message from Tor Forde -
Fwd: thermodynamics...
Physics Story A thermodynamics professor had written a take home exam for her graduate students. It had one question: "Is hell exothermic or endothermic? Support your answer with a proof." Most of the students wrote proofs of their beliefs using Boyle's Law or some variant. One student, however wrote the following: First, we postulate that if souls exist, then they must have some mass. If they do, then a mole of souls can also have a mass. So, at what rate are souls moving into hell and at what rate are souls leaving? I think that we can safely assume that once a soul gets to hell, it will not leave. Therefore, no souls are leaving. As for souls entering hell, lets look at the different religions that exist in the world today. Some of these religions state that if you are not a member of their religion, you will go to hell. Since there are more than one of these religions and people do not belong to more than one religion, we can project that all people and all souls go to hell. With birth and death rates as they are, we can expect the number of souls in hell to increase exponentially. Now, we look at the rate of change in volume in hell. Boyle's Law states that in order for the temperature and pressure in hell to stay the same, the ratio of the mass of souls and volume needs to stay constant. So, if hell is expanding at a slower rate than the rate at which souls enter hell, then the temperature and pressure in hell will increase until all hell breaks loose. Of course, if hell is expanding at a rate faster than the increase of souls in hell, then the temperature and pressure will drop until hell freezes over. It was not revealed what grade the student got. _ DO YOU YAHOO!? Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com
Re: Evolutionary Science (and the evolution of mankind's
Here is the short version of the laws of thermodynamics: #1. You can't win. #2. You can't break even. #3. You can't even get out of the game. Jay I did some physics in my distant and fuzzy past, but I cannot remember these... Eva
Postmodernism Revealed as Hoax (fwd)
I thought some of you would enjoy this... Eva Geraldo, Eat Your Avant-Pop Heart Out By MARK LEYNER JENNY JONES: Boy, we have a show for you today! Recently, the University of Virginia philosopher Richard Rorty made the stunning declaration that nobody has "the foggiest idea" what postmodernism means. "It would be nice to get rid of it," he said. "It isn't exactly an idea; it's a word that pretends to stand for an idea." This shocking admission that there is no such thing as postmodernism has produced a firestorm of protest around the country. Thousands of authors, critics and graduate students who'd considered themselves postmodernists are outraged at the betrayal. Today we have with us a writer -- a recovering postmodernist -- who believes that his literary career and personal life have been irreparably damaged by the theory, and who feels defrauded by the academics who promulgated it. He wishes to remain anonymous, so we'll call him "Alex." Alex, as an adolescent, before you began experimenting with postmodernism, you considered yourself -- what? Close shot of ALEX. An electronic blob obscures his face. Words appear at bottom of screen: "Says he was traumatized by postmodernism and blames academics." ALEX (his voice electronically altered): A high modernist. Y'know, Pound, Eliot, Georges Braque, Wallace Stevens, Arnold Schoenberg, Mies van der Rohe. I had all of Schoenberg's 78's. JENNY JONES: And then you started reading people like Jean-Francois Lyotard and Jean Baudrillard -- how did that change your feelings about your modernist heroes? ALEX: I suddenly felt that they were, like, stifling and canonical. JENNY JONES: Stifling and canonical? That is so sad, such a waste. How old were you when you first read Fredric Jameson? ALEX: Nine, I think. The AUDIENCE gasps. JENNY JONES: We have some pictures of young Alex. ... We see snapshots of 14-year-old ALEX reading Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's "Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia." The AUDIENCE oohs and ahs. ALEX: We used to go to a friend's house after school -- y'know, his parents were never home -- and we'd read, like, Paul Virilio and Julia Kristeva. JENNY JONES: So you're only 14, and you're already skeptical toward the "grand narratives" of modernity, you're questioning any belief system that claims universality or transcendence. Why? ALEX: I guess -- to be cool. JENNY JONES: So, peer pressure? ALEX: I guess. JENNY JONES: And do you remember how you felt the very first time you entertained the notion that you and your universe are constituted by language -- that reality is a cultural construct, a "text" whose meaning is determined by infinite associations with other "texts?" ALEX: Uh, it felt, like, good. I wanted to do it again. The AUDIENCE groans. JENNY JONES: You were arrested at about this time? ALEX: For spray-painting "The Hermeneutics of Indeterminacy" on an overpass. JENNY JONES: You're the child of a mixed marriage -- is that right? ALEX: My father was a de Stijl Wittgensteinian and my mom was a neo-pre-Raphaelite. JENNY JONES: Do you think that growing up in a mixed marriage made you more vulnerable to the siren song of postmodernism? ALEX: Absolutely. It's hard when you're a little kid not to be able to just come right out and say (sniffles), y'know, I'm an Imagist or I'm a phenomenologist or I'm a post-painterly abstractionist. It's really hard -- especially around the holidays. (He cries.) JENNY JONES: I hear you. Was your wife a postmodernist? ALEX: Yes. She was raised avant-pop, which is a fundamentalist offshoot of postmodernism. JENNY JONES: How did she react to Rorty's admission that postmodernism was essentially a hoax? ALEX: She was devastated. I mean, she's got all the John Zorn albums and the entire Semiotext(e) series. She was crushed. We see ALEX'S WIFE in the audience, weeping softly, her hands covering her face. JENNY JONES: And you were raising your daughter as a postmodernist? ALEX: Of course. That's what makes this particularly tragic. I mean, how do you explain to a 5-year-old that self-consciously recycling cultural detritus is suddenly no longer a valid art form when, for her entire life, she's been taught that it is? JENNY JONES: Tell us how you think postmodernism affected your career as a novelist. ALEX: I disavowed writing that contained real ideas or any real passion. My work became disjunctive, facetious and nihilistic. It was all blank parody, irony enveloped in more irony. It merely recapitulated the pernicious banality of television and advertising. I found myself indiscriminately incorporating any and all kinds of pop kitsch and shlock. (He begins to weep again.) JENNY JONES: And this spilled over into your personal life? ALEX: It was impossible
Re: Re UK Policy 3rd Way - Mayor ?s
Alas, yes. I rather liked Mikes sentiments in a mail to me, though how we put them into practical effect I'm not sure. It just seems to abstract for most people nowadays to build a political movement on... +++ It's not that abstract, just self-organised and self-started groups will be the norm, specially in the cases of big economic crashes. Like a big LETS scheme, with factors more motivation and factory/office takover by the workers. That's how I picture it anyway... This structure built from the bottom would automatically annul any existing state structure - though there could be a dual power for awhile, hopefully no violence, as all means of violence would have the same thing happen to it, as they are workplaces, too. Eva
