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"Gopnik is saying, in effect, that complex ‘problems’ like crime, poverty, climate change, peak oil, corruption, pandemics, and unsustainable growth economies, are not ‘problems’ that can be ‘solved’ at all, but rather, as philosopher Abraham Kaplan explained, predicaments that must be “chipped away at” and adapted to. Our species tends to loathe complexity, and prefers to oversimplify everything, and the politicians, lawyers, corporations and media play on that loathing by always proposing analytic (“A or B”) dichotomies and simplistic “answers” — which cannot possibly work. “Three-strikes” laws, “trickle-down” economics, emissions trading schemes, subsidies, religious taboos and inquisitions, austerity programs, prohibitions, bailouts, military invasions and “quantitative easing” — these are all massively expensive complicated “solutions” to complex “problems”, and they have all failed spectacularly.
“The intercession of a thousand small sanities”, as Gopnik so elegantly puts it, will never be a popular approach to coping with complex predicaments, especially as they grow, through the indifference and incompetence of leaders and vested interests and the sheer size and scale of the systems creating them, into crises and then into chaos and collapse. Yet it is the only approach which has a chance of making things better."
in list: questioning
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now it's the creation of poverty, not of wealth, that makes the world go 'round
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University, North America's new high school, is corporate funded and corporate branded and humanities' starved, with a deliberately crushing debt load upon students that corrals the choices of the less privileged towards machinery-sustaining, practical careers. The study of subjects that have not been sufficiently monetized and the accrual of empathetic knowledge are sniffed at as elitist pursuits, even as the student is financially wrecked by their mastery.
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For legislation to extend the payroll tax cut through the end of 2012, House Republicans are expected to push for a provision on unemployment insurance (UI) that is appalling even by current Washington standards. Neither President Obama nor Congress should accept any payroll-tax legislation that includes it. Here's why:
The provision, part of a full-year payroll-tax bill that the House passed in December, would deny UI benefits to any worker who lacks a high school diploma or GED and is not enrolled in classes to get one or the other - regardless of how long the person worked or whether he or she has access to adult education, which itself has been subject to significant budget cuts in the past few years and is heavily oversubscribed
As Matt Taibbi brilliantly points out today, we don't know what we want. We just want the rest of the world to know that we're outraged, and fed up with the 1% controlling our lives and our government and our economy and our media, and we want to urge the 99% to join us as we begin to begin to figure out what to do about it, now that we know the existing power structure is not going to do anything for us.
We don't want to be led. We don't want anyone in control. We don't want anyone to speak to the media or governments for us or to represent us or make decisions for us. We've tried that system and it doesn't work, at least not for the 99%. We want to create something new, together. We have absolutely no idea what it is, or what it will look like, or how long it will take. We don't need anyone's advice as we figure it out. If you want to help, come and join us, but speak with us and not to us. And most of all, listen and help us get organized. And be patient. It takes time to co-create something new, together, as equals.
in list: questioning
The protesters who were protesting the Prison Industrial Complex had been imprisoned on their street in their capital and were about to be arrested there for protesting. I stood in astonishment watching more than 700 kids being arrested and put on waiting buses. I stood on the sidewalk with members of the British press-we laughed about how the DC police chief had effectively created 700 committed protesters and how tonight new loves would start and heroes would be made. Many of us watching seemed to be looking on nostalgically but I stood there repeating the same question: "You need a permit to protest?" A decade later those very kids and bystanders won a class action suit against the DC police in the amount of US$13.7 million or about US$ 18,000 each for the entrapment that day of pushing them off of Pennsylvania where they had a permit to 20st street where they did not. The class action suit was for the defense of the first amendment right to free speech. They won and got US$13.7 million or US$18,000 each.
Did the settlement in favor of those who were arrested, for protesting show that they system worked and it was okay? For the system, yes it was okay. The system worked-the system hired lawyers, who earned fees for winning cash compensation for those who were arrested. The system transacted in the manner it was set up for. However, would it not have been more important to not have argued or settled for a monetary compensation-but rather for freedom of speech and the abolishment of permits for protest?
in list: open source, activism and commons
The latter is now used to denote those opportunist consumers who are, according to The Sun, "anarchists", despite not having the slightest idea of who Pierre-Joseph Proudhon was. He was the first self-declared anarchist, who in 1840, in What Is Property, defined anarchy as "the absence of a master, of a sovereign". Later, in The General Idea Of The Revolution (1851), he urged a "society without authority".
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The political and philosophical idea that is "anarchism" has become, headline by headline, dislocated from the current use of the word "anarchy". Anarchy used to mean the state to which anarchism aspires. Now, of course, it has come to mean disorder – the kind of disorder that comes with photographs of boys throwing bricks at riot police and kicking their way into electrical-goods shops. Anarchy is modern shorthand for the law of the jungle. How did this change come about? Where was the semantic leap from "without rulers" to "disorder"? That change came from above.
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"I am not an agent of discord. Man's government of his fellow man, no matter the name under which it lurks, is oppression: society's highest perfection lies in the marriage of order and anarchy." Similarly, Mikhail Bakunin answered the criticism that getting rid of leaders would result in the law of the jungle: "Do you want to make it impossible for anyone to oppress his fellow man? Then make sure that no one shall possess power."
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Water Cooler Games - videogames with an agenda
I would love to see added to the graph above a bar corresponding to federal support for basic scientific R
"To gain support at CSW 2009 (UN Commission on the Status of Women 2009) to open discussions at ECOSOC (United Nations Economic and Social Council) for a UN 5WCW (United Nations 5th World Conference on Women) by taking up the proposal from Finland, tabled
in list: gender questions
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Joelle Nebbe-Mornod on 2009-02-08english summary: In politics as in private life, "trust" and "mistrust" play a central role, writes Ute Frevert in Merkur. As former German chancellor Helmut Schmidt recently commented, politicians are in the awkward position of being dependent on the trust of the electorate, yet of forfeiting this trust as soon as they are seen to be making an effort to solicit it. And indeed, "today's political scientists commonly refer to parliamentary democracy as a system of institutionalized mistrust".
Frevert traces the notion of trust from its appearance during the March Revolution of 1848 (as an alternative to monarchial "loyalty"); through the Weimar constitution (whose architects neither trusted the people nor relied on their trust); and into National Socialism, which "saturated society with the semantics of trust" yet simultaneously encouraged distrust of "anti-social elements". National Socialism talked of trust but meant loyalty, writes Frevert: "Trust's retractable and oppositional strength was robbed".
The GDR government notoriously harboured a deep mistrust of its citizens. After the uprising of 17 June 1953, Kurt Barthel, head of the Writers' Association, wrote that the demonstrators had betrayed the trust placed in them by the socialist state, prompting Brecht's famous comment: "Wouldn't it be easier for the government to dissolve the people and vote for another one?" And the West German government, too, suspecting its citizens of an authority complex, drafted a constitution that tended against referenda and plebiscites.
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What we see as a result is this curious emergence of language itself as a concept. Making use of a fiction that reached down from a great height to penetrate a cultural reality that was infinitely more subtle and flexible, each nation establishes its borders, sometimes defines itself, certainly organises itself, and always affirms itself around its language. While we in Europe enjoy as many ways of speaking as there are localities and occupations, there are administrative and symbolic demands to fabricate the fantasy of a language that clerics and men of letters would appropriate to themselves. It is these who, in the wake of the politicians, help to eliminate the variety of ways people have of expressing themselves and of understanding one another.
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This is the intellectual backdrop against which people from ever more distant lands begin to arrive in a country like France from the 1920s and, in rapidly increasing numbers, the 1960s onwards. They bring with them customs, perspectives, mentalities and languages, all plainly at odds with the monolithic conception of language. The clash is violent enough to provoke vigorous demands for this language alone to be spoken. It is now acknowledged as the only language, the one people must use or face the consequences. Any misuse of the official means of communication becomes a moral failing, a breach of the law that binds people, nation, language and destiny together with alarming rigidity.
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in list: gender questions
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While I love being a mother, I resent the current cult of motherhood in our society. It’s something feminists need to challenge, instead of feeling it’s a thing they need to adapt to and be oh-so-polite about. When I was on maternity leave following the birth of my son, the loneliness I felt at being out of the workplace and spending all day with someone who couldn’t talk was compounded by the fact that when I did meet with other mothers, the contemporary cult of motherhood required me to hold my tongue. It’s not that no-one talks about the physical and mental challenges of being a mother. Women do, all the time (even though the same discussions on cracked nipples and tantrums in Sainsbury’s are treated as ‘taboo breaking’ each time they arise). The trouble is, while we’re all allowed to say how difficult it is, no-one’s allowed to say that it’s too difficult and needs to change, because that would be seen as undermining the very roles with which we’re struggling. So we get nowhere or, worse, we learn to seek value in all the things that could be so much better if only we’d try to alter them.
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This is not, by the way, another so-called feminist attack on mothers, but on a culture that encourages them not only to think so little of themselves, but to positively glorify themselves in doing so, as though this constitutes some kind of sacrifice on behalf of our children. In magazines, TV programmes, mothers’ groups and web forums, it seems to be taken as read that motherhood makes you less of a person. Rather than challenge this, as feminists have done and continue to do, the accepted response is to go along with it all, but say it doesn’t matter, as long as everyone appreciates how noble we are for having given up said personhood.
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