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"To ask questions about how to live life, to question whether you should be doing what you are doing, is indeed admirable. But to conclude that a positive attitude can solve all problems is naive and denies the possibility to enact change, when necessary, on your circumstances."
"Is the participant-level even the right perspective from which to try to identify an explanation? I don't think so. Were conditions in this factory harsh because this owner was hostile or cruel towards these particular workers? No, rather because the competitive environment of profitability and accumulation created an inexorable race to the bottom. So we can't explain this factory's working conditions by referring to specific features of this factory and its owner. This logic is spelled out very clearly in Capital, and it is a system-level characteristic."
"In any case, while I agree that everybody has biases, I’m not sure that means I must also agree that everybody is equally biased. To butcher George Orwell, why couldn’t it be the case that all humans are biased, but are some humans are more biased than others?"
"They’re the conservative white men (CWM) of climate change denial, and we’ve all gotten to know them in one way or another. But we haven’t had population-level statistics on them until recently, courtesy of a new paper in Global Environmental Change (apparently not online yet, but live in the blogosphere as of late last week) by sociologists Aaron McCright and Riley Dunlap. It’s entitled “Cool Dudes: The denial of climate change among conservative white males in the United States.” Among other data, McCright and Dunlap show the following:
— 14% of the general public doesn’t worry about climate change at all, but among CWMs the percentage jumps to 39%.
— 32% of adults deny there is a scientific consensus on climate change, but 59% of CWMs deny what the overwhelming majority of the world’s scientists have said.
— 3 adults in 10 don’t believe recent global temperature increases are primarily caused by human activity. Twice that many – 6 CWMs out of every ten – feel that way. "
"I hate to say it, but I am afraid I put the greatest stake in the last scenario, the Fall Of The West. The greed and stupidity of our ruling class — theoretically run by elected officials with our consent, but in fact run by powerful interest blocs with little or no regard for our needs — is the abiding fact of the current economic crisis, which has been going on for decades. We cannot expect them to take actions that are harmful to their own interests, even if it means running the whole world off the cliff."
Cognitive capitalism -- just when we thought there were no new ways to get screwed
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Corporations are now, for all practical purposes, the only way anything can get done, made or distributed, or even imagined as a way of anything coming into being (except babies). Look around you. Is there anything, from the food in the fridge to the fridge itself, from the furniture to the very varnish on the floors or the clothes we wear that was not delivered unto us by corporations?
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Enter yet a third phase: Consciousness Capitalism! The private appropriation of human consciousness as a "nonmaterial asset." Or cognitive capitalism, in nerd and pinhead speak.
Which goes to show you can never underestimate the dark bastards at the helm. Yes, these guys are good.
Essentially, we're talking about stripping the human experience from life, then renting it back to humans. So how does one do that? Through the same Western European historical process used to fuck over the world in the first two rounds of capitalism -- propertization. Denying access to something because it's MINE-MINE-MINE-MINE!
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President Obama understands the featureless not-so-new American aesthetic. So well that he had the world's most politically correct, authority sanctioned, but absolutely worst poet, Elizabeth Alexander, read at his inauguration. ("We encounter each other in words, words spiny or smooth, whispered or declaimed, words to consider, reconsider") Like the soothing, ambiguous language of the Super Corporate State, it sounds as if it means something. Which is close enough for government work. More importantly, she has been vetted by proper authorities and is credentialed and licensed by Yale University to practice poetry. The marketing theme of the event was Obama's s alleged blackness. Alexander is a sorta black too, but not black enough to scare away business. Welcome to the domination of the business aesthetic. Literate people all over the world found Alexander's reading to be like one of those eye watering farts you just wait through until it blows away. Still, millions of Americans listened and cried, in accordance with the marketing theme almost on command, "happy to be born in America, where a black man can be elected president." Personally, I was sorry as hell I'd sworn off bourbon for the month.
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But seldom to never do we get news and information as to the global scale of the genuine emergency facing humankind. Bad news is bad for business, therefore said to be bad for you and me. We all accept that consumer confidence is the foundation of the whole shebang, the confidence game that is capitalism. Thus confidence and cheery optimism is mandatory among the citizen consumer-producer marks. Willingly we self-police our behavior, shunning, criticizing or mocking what we perceive as "negative people." We drive past the empty parking lots, abandoned housing developments, through networks of cameras and cops with radar guns, stun guns and real guns every few blocks, numb to it all, listening to government commercial propaganda officialized by Katie Couric and Ben Bernanke.
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Consider the modern environmental movement. We take personal responsibility; we accept the role we, individually, have played in destroying the environment, so we focus on the things we can do, individually, to at least not participate in it anymore. You know the litany as well as I do: eat organic, reduce, reuse, recycle, use incandescent light bulbs, take shorter showers, carpool, drive a hybrid, ride a bicycle, et cetera ad infinitum.
And yet, despite this, we know that even if everyone in the world heeded this advice, if we all achieved enlightenment tomorrow and a flowering of global consciousness put us all in tune with a higher frequency or whatever other spiritual or philosophical metaphor you’d prefer, it would not alter our present ecological course.
What would such a world look like? There would be a lot of small- and medium-sized banks that collected deposits and lent money to households and businesses. There would be brokerage and asset management firms that you used to invest your savings....
James Kwak argues for smaller banks.
in list: Economic Crisis
link to and commentary about Pimco and it's role directing parts of the government bailout program.
in list: Economic Crisis
"These are the companies that control the global stockmarket. That’s a frightening though. What it suggests is that the stability of the complex networks that make up our economy is hugely dependent on the ongoing survival of just a handful of companies."
But at least with regard to finance and business, the consensus seems to be clear: Success is the work of Great Men and Great Women, while failure can be pinned on the system.
Here are my key elements of a diverse system -- Diversity, Redundancy, Decentralization, Collaboration, Transparency, Openness, Fail Gracefully, Flexibility, Foresight
Annotated link http://www.diigo.com/bookmark/http%3A%2F%2Fwww.overcomingbias.com%2F2008%2F08%2Fno-self-trust.html
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Coming to terms with metaethics, I am beginning to think, is all about distinguishing between levels. I first learned to do this rigorously back when I was getting to grips with mathematical logic, and discovering that you could prove complete absurdities, if you lost track even once of the distinction between "believe particular PA proofs", "believe PA is sound", and "believe you yourself are sound". If you believe any particular PA proof, that might sound pretty much the same as believing PA is sound in general; and if you use PA and only PA, then trusting PA (that is, being moved by arguments that follow it) sounds pretty much the same as believing that you yourself are sound. But after a bit of practice with the actual math - I did have to practice the actual math, not just read about it - my mind formed permanent distinct buckets and built walls around them to prevent the contents from slopping over.
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