socialcritique - Yule Heibel on Diigo

Amsterdam cracks down on prostitution, cannabis: lessons for Victoria? « Robertrandall’s Weblog

Rob blogged about Amsterdam's re-think of its liberal laws regarding drug use (and prostitution, too). I left a *long* comment, a thinking-out-loud about how the factory system of education, coupled with a repression of creative risk-taking and innovation in the culture, enables and exacerbates turning to drugs.

Tags: robert_randall, drugs, socialcritique, drug_addiction, education, innovation, risk, youth, comments on 2008-12-13 -All Annotations (0) -About

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The Quivering Upper Lip by Theodore Dalrymple, City Journal Autumn 2008

Yes, he's an old curmudgeon, but there are valid questions and true insights in this piece, which among other things basically asks, whatever happened to self-control and isn't there something plain wrong with thinking that it's now imperative to let it all hang out all the time.
QUOTE
Certainly, many Britons under the age of 30 or even 40 now embrace a kind of sub-psychotherapeutic theory that desires, if not unleashed, will fester within and eventually manifest themselves in dangerous ways. To control oneself for the sake of the social order, let alone for dignity or decorum (a word that would either mean nothing to the British these days, or provoke peals of laughter), is thus both personally and socially harmful.

I have spoken with young British people who regularly drink themselves into oblivion, passing first through a prolonged phase of public nuisance. To a man (and woman), they believe that by doing so, they are getting rid of inhibitions that might otherwise do them psychological and even physical harm.
UNQUOTE

Tags: theodore_dalrymple, socialcritique, england, morality, commentary on 2008-12-06 and saved by 6 people -All Annotations (1) -About

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Gin, Television, and Social Surplus - Here Comes Everybody

Transcript of speech Shirky gave at April 23/08 Web2.0 conference. For me, ineresting to think about in relation to cities, and how industrialization created anxiety about and problems relating to crowding ("slums"). Now, "here comes *everybody*" means that there's another wave of "crowding" or ...crowds, and it's interesting to think about how this might play out.

Tags: clay_shirky, history, socialmedia, socialcritique, socialtheory, web2.0 on 2008-09-19 and saved by 115 people -All Annotations (12) -About

more fromwww.herecomeseverybody.org

The
transformation from rural to urban life was so sudden, and so
wrenching, that the only thing society could do to manage was to drink
itself into a stupor for a generation. The stories from that era
are amazing-- there were gin pushcarts working their way through the streets
of London.
The
transformation from rural to urban life was so sudden, and so
wrenching, that the only thing society could do to manage was to drink
itself into a stupor for a generation. The stories from that era
are amazing-- there were gin pushcarts working their way through the streets
of London.
And
it wasn't until society woke up from that collective bender that we
actually started to get the institutional structures that we
associate with the industrial revolution today. Things like public libraries and
museums, increasingly broad education for children, elected leaders--a lot of
things we like--didn't happen until having all of those people
together stopped seeming like a crisis and started seeming like an
asset.
It wasn't until people started thinking of this as a
vast civic surplus, one they could design for rather than just
dissipate, that we started to get what we think of now as an
industrial society.
The
transformation from rural to urban life was so sudden, and so
wrenching, that the only thing society could do to manage was to drink
itself into a stupor for a generation. The stories from that era
are amazing-- there were gin pushcarts working their way through the streets
of London.
And
it wasn't until society woke up from that collective bender that we
actually started to get the institutional structures that we
associate with the industrial revolution today. Things like public libraries and
museums, increasingly broad education for children, elected leaders--a lot of
things we like--didn't happen until having all of those people
together stopped seeming like a crisis and started seeming like an
asset.
It wasn't until people started thinking of this as a
vast civic surplus, one they could design for rather than just
dissipate, that we started to get what we think of now as an
industrial society.

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You can’t eat Whuffie (but it’s getting harder to eat without it) | ::HorsePigCow:: marketing uncommon

Tara Hunt wrote an interesting post on "whuffie" and what it means today. She also then broached the minefield of how (if) the whuffie factor gets monetized. The comments board is fascinating, and I also added my 2cents (actually, more like a $1.25 since I inflated those 2 cents into two too-long comments...).

I'm pretty sure my remarks are way too theoretical and esoteric, but they helped me make some connections and sort out a few things, so even if they're useless to others, I benefited. Not sure if that has anything to do with whuffie, but there you go...

Tags: horsepigcow, tara_hunt, blogs, whuffie, socialtheory, socialcritique, socialnetworks, comments on 2008-08-09 and saved by 3 people -All Annotations (0) -About

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Be Nice to the 'Creative Class'! :: Views :: thetyee.ca

Why does one too often get the impression that publications like The Tyee are fighting a rear-guard and even anachronistic battle? That somehow, somewhere different patterns are emerging, which its journalists just don't see, preferring instead the familiar world of what they knew "back in the day"?

Tags: thetyee, richard_florida, creative_class, vancouver, socialcritique on 2008-08-06 -All Annotations (0) -About

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RConversation: Silicon Valley's benevolent dictatorship

I posted this to my Facebook "notes" already, but it's such a great piece it needs to go on Diigo and the blog, too.

A must-read, especially for "the rest of us," analysis and commentary from Rebecca MacKinnon on what it was like at the July 08 FutureBrainstorm Tech conference at Half Moon Bay in California...

Among the things MacKinnon discusses, there's the question of what might happen to internet freedoms in some (engineered or actual) post i-9/11 "event".

And of course there's the matter of "benevolent dictators," which her title already alludes to. The "benevolent dictators are the guys currently running the major internet apps / venues. Reading MacKinnon's article, I was reminded of early "cradle to grave" type paternalistic capitalists -- for example, the people who ran Beverly, Mass.'s United Shoe Machinery Corporation, the first-ever company named in anti-trust suits way back in the very early years of the 20th (!!) century. Notably, not all mid- to late-19th and early-20th century capitalists fit the bill of the caricatured "Robber Baron" -- some were "benevolent." (Or paternalistic.) But when push came to shove, it didn't last.

Neither will this model?

Tags: rebecca_mackinnon, web_2.0, capitalism, business, democracy, socialcritique on 2008-08-01 and saved by 9 people -All Annotations (0) -About

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It was pretty clear that the CEO's, tech entrepreneurs, and venture capitalists whose lives and businesses revolve around Silicon Valley really do view the world in two parts: The Valley and Everybody Else - with the latter in concentric layers of tech-unsavvyness, remoteness, non-English-speaking-ness and primitiveness.
As author Rebecca Fannin pointed out on the Huffington Post, even China was barely mentioned: "Why was China ignored in the panel discussions? First, it's far away. Second, and more importantly, Silicon Valley is in a state of denial."
I was struck by the assumption permeating many discussions at Half Moon Bay: that communications technology (mainly, the internet and mobile devices) combined with capitalism will inevitably make everybody in the world more free. Just by virtue of being deployed as broadly as possible. Thus, as these people continue to make millions, they are also saving the world. Which makes them all feel terribly good about themselves.
Lessig predicted that the U.S. government will eventually find an excuse (perhaps after some kind of "i-9/11" attack) to clamp down on Internet freedoms in the United States - with the implication that law-abiding U.S. Internet and telecoms companies will have little choice but to go along with it (nor can we be very optimistic that Congress will let us sue these companies for helping the executive branch infringe on our constitutional rights).
Joi warned that not all kinds of capitalism lead to greater freedom or spread wealth and opportunities to everybody. "The capitalists aren't really that helpful, generally," he said. It depends on the business model deployed which really depends on the social intentions of the people running the business, and how much they care about long-term social and political repercussions. "We're forgetting that we had to fight to create an open Internet." Venture capitalists, he said, "assume that the Internet just works... that's very irresponsible," and they're not thinking about how specific business decisions impact overall levels of freedom, openness, and inclusion.
His point is that we have come to depend way too heavily on a small number of Internet and telecoms companies to conduct the most private and intimate details of our professional and personal lives. As long as those companies have values aligned with our own and are run by people we think have integrity, we don't see a huge problem. But what if the values cease to be aligned or political circumstances change?
The guys running Google, Apple, Microsoft, and many other companies represented at the Fortune Brainstorm are the benevolent dictators of the global information and communications system. But can we assume they will always be benevolent? What happens when they roll out services in not-so-benevolent authoritarian regimes? We need to push our service providers to be honest, transparent and not screw us over, which is why I've been involved for the past two years in developing a corporate code of conduct for free speech and privacy (which is likely to go public sometime this Fall). But that's not enough. Power over our communications and identities is much too concentrated in the hands of people who are more accountable to v.c.'s and shareholders wanting profits than to users who want their rights and interests protected. We need to have more choices - which should include plenty of non-proprietary, grassroots, open alternatives.

This Land: Visual Pollution | The New York Times

Fascinating slide show narrated by Kevin Fry of Route 1 (which runs 2000 miles from Maine to Florida), and which is in too many places a godforsaken strip mall. Fry's argument is that these places, built for cars not people, alienate us from any kind of authentic sense of place, and in turn this alienates us from citizenship, which is (and must be) local and specific. Relates to this article: http://tinyurl.com/2hkf25 too. (Slide show link via pricetags)

Tags: alienation, cars, kevin_fry, nyt, placelessness, socialcritique, sprawl, visual_pollution on 2008-01-02 -All Annotations (0) -About

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La dolce vita turns sour as Italy faces up to being old and poor - Times Online

- relates to my blog entry Dec.23/07,"High Rents=Mamma's Boys?" Interesting comments thread, with many agreeing w/ article, others saying that it's not so bad. In either case, stagnation seems to be setting in (symptom of what?, political corruption?, more than that?). Sounds like a Donna Leon mystery come to life (as fiction, that's great, but as reality, that's not a compliment...).
One of the comments came from http://www.ilquiquiri.com/ who pointed to (his?) YouTube video of his region festering under the garbage strike (see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6gpnIK-WY0) : very graphic.

Tags: corruption, development, italy, socialcritique, times_online on 2007-12-27 and saved by 2 people -All Annotations (0) -About

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Yet, at home, Italians are consumed with a sense of domestic decline. “When an
entire country goes into crisis over the ‘who are we and where are we going’
debate, it means we are reaching new heights of hysteria,” the writer
Umberto Eco said. “This explosion of provincialism is truly painful.
Personally I feel depressed.”

So do many of his fellow countrymen. There is a sense that while the past is
Italy’s glory, it is also its prison, with politics and business dominated
by a gerontocracy and the younger entrepreneurs and politicians held back.
Add Sticky Note
- - you can read/ understand Eco's comment as saying that the self-flagellation is "hysteria," is overblown, and is not based in reality (i.e., that he's contradicting the article's premise)
  posted by lampertina on 2007-12-27
“The problem is that the leaders of our governing class are greybeards
whereas, say, Spain’s are practically kids,” says Michele Salvati, a leading
economist. At this year’s Miss Italia beauty contest, the contestants were
all in their teens while the average age of the judges — who made headlines
by arguing over whether a girl’s bottom should be judged part of her charm —
was 70.
When Larry Gagosian, the dynamic American art dealer, opened a new modern art
gallery in Rome last week, some critics accused him of making money instead
of praising an attempt to put Rome at the cutting edge of contemporary art.
Vincenzo Cremonini, 44, who has expanded his meat-producing business at Módena
to include railway and motorway catering — including the new Eurostar
service from St Pancras — identifies three other factors holding Italy back:
bureaucracy, the slow judicial system, which is used by protesters to hold
up modernising initiatives such as the Turin to Lyons high-speed railway,
and the “selfperpetuating political elite”.

A book on Italy’s cocooned elite, La Casta (The Caste), a runaway bestseller
this year, pointed out that Italy had the highest number of official
chauffeur-driven cars in Europe, and that the presidential palace, the
Quirinal, cost four times as much to run as Buckingham Palace.
Add Sticky Note
- - more than Buckingham Palace? That's crazy.
  posted by lampertina on 2007-12-27
The workforce at Alitalia, itself a symbol of the Italian malaise, is
threatening a Christmas strike over the proposed sale of the troubled
national airline to Air France-KLM. Even La Scala opera house in Milan is
disrupted regularly by industral unrest. “Italy needs a Margaret Thatcher,”
Francesco Caltagirone, one of Italy’s top entrepreneurs, said yesterday. “We
need rigour and deregulation, a leader who will force Italians to make
sacrifices.”
Even the Italian nuclear family, once the bulwark (along with the Catholic
Church) of Italian society, is in decline, with growing divorce rates, a low
birthrate and the rise of single parenthood. The family still provides a
haven for young Italians, many of whom live at home until they are 30 — but
this, too, holds Italy back, as those who should be carving a niche for
themselves opt instead for Mamma’s cooking and laundry services. Many do so
because they cannot afford to make their own way.
Add Sticky Note
- - they live at home b/c they can't afford to move into their own place(s)
  posted by lampertina on 2007-12-27
The result is that Italians are the least happy people in Europe, according to
a poll conducted for the University of Cambridge by Luisa Corrado, of the
University of Rome. Danes turned out to be the happiest. Tellingly, in
Denmark 64 per cent said that they trusted their parliament. In Italy it was
only 36 per cent.
After the Second World War, millions of Italians emigrated in search of a
better life. The movement is now the other way, with nearly four million
immigrants in Italy. “The problem is that a country like Spain sees
immigrants as useful workers, whereas in Italy the headlines tell us they
are all criminals who go round robbing and stabbing Italians,” Carlo
Bastasin, an economist, said.

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Home Educator's Family Times Newsletter

Tags: anti_psychiatry, homeschooling, psychiatry, school, socialcritique, thomas_szasz on 2007-10-23 -All Annotations (0) -About

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