Gov. Palin is running for VP on the John McCain GOP ticket.
What is good:
Alaska is essentially another nation, superior to the United States by being everything and more that the United States claims. This means she is a more progressive politician than anyone on the East Coast, by default.
Palin is so much more modern progressive than Hillary, the fate of having a woman nominated and it being Palin and not Hillary is a case of the right thing happening.
For Obama, this is a good thing because, in Lakoff terms, Obama has now framed the debate and imposed the talking points.
Change, maverick rookie and youth are those points, and the GOP choice for VP is the GOP following Obama's lead.
What is bad:
Alaska is a more progressive nation, but that works as a disadvantage to an Alaskan that comes into the heart and pinnacle of power of Washington D.C. To an Alaskan, the White House is a foreign dystopia with a hall of mirrors Palin would likely not master in a million years.
If Palin was President, the very worst behind-the-scenes K Street Republicans would likely control things. I think Palin would hold values that would be as good for the country as Obama, but she would be a puppet led by evil handlers.
I wish it was an Obama/Palin ticket, as I bet many Americans do.
Over at John Robb's blog he is musing on what a "Resilient Community", existing in a chaotic 21st century world, would look like. He brings up the abstracted platform of containerized shipping as a design inspiration for such communities.
Yes, yes, yes! Robb has hit upon something great.
I see the containerized shipping platform as a way to explicitly state the friction points in society. By friction points I mean
any point where objects/people/information must pass through a "checkpoint". A checkpoint is any point of observation labor and judgement -e.g. "is this package legal or safe?", "is this person a terrorist?", "is it safe to invite this person in my house?",
"should I marry him?", "are these pesticides safe? ", "is this email a virus ","is this email for joe_user@example.org","is that child tall enough to ride this rollercoaster?","are these tomatoes ripe?". Humans, as well as all animals, need these friction points.
Why am I calling it a "friction point"? Because the flow of objects slow or stop at that threshold. The threshold is sometimes all
physical, sometimes all semantic.
Shipping containers created a revolution by tidying up the transport and trade of goods. Before containers, goods were handled by dock workers at several transition points. This took time, the workers stole some of the goods, and the dock workers were a part of the union, socialist, mafia, and often Catholic culture. A southern trucker, with typical contempt for such working class northerner culture, saw these dock workers performing their trade on a dock and dreamed up how box the cargo up so the producers and consumers of goods could save money, and the vermin culture wouldn't have their livelihood. It worked,
and now that vermin culture is long gone.
Switching gears a little here, there has emerged an orthodoxy in the countercultural schemes for a platform. These orthodoxies tend to want no friction points, or simply place all friction in the semantic distinction between their alternative society and mainstream society (Mainstream is always judged bad, alternative is a frictionless zone of no judgement).
It is interesting to note the Burning Man culture as maturing through this, from wide open to needing security.
Back to John Robb's "Resilient Community" musings, and a platform. Humans need civilization, and it is time we containerized it for safe passage through time, by maturing to a point where all are conscious of the flow, and where/when the
free flow points and friction points should appropriately exist. Not a police state with police judging people's validity of movement, but a people state policing with a precision, decisiveness, violent intervention, wealth and innovation protection that makes police states of the past look like what they really were: weak, pathetically poor and stupid.
A little about the non-philosophical. Sealand rocks! I was once the bookkeeper that did all the bill of ladings for cargo loaded on Sealand ships in Akutan, Alaska. The captains were really smart and cool. It was also something I liked about coastal Alaska . I remember watching a steady stream of cargo ships passing by while moored in Southeast Alaska, and thinking how densely commercial and modern in a truly contemporary sense the shipping corridor of Alaska is. Its the perfect mix of wilderness, high bandwidth flow of trade, big transport infrastructure things like ships and planes, and no farms and few roads. Most of America is a mix of rural farm-culture politics and old urban-culture politics. Alaska was neither. Those big Sealand ships, along with airline travel, are what enables modernity in Alaska, and that (with no rural farm ethos to corrupt it) felt more cutting edge than anything in the lower 48. No wonder I love Alaska.
I am a TESC alumni, graduated with a Bachelor of Science in August 2003. Between September 2000 and June 2003 I was a resident of the TESC dorms. I was politically engaged on campus, putting up posters for a Capitol fountain gathering/rally reacting to Bush's gaining of the White House with a suspicious vote count, and also was in the TESC delegation at the NW
student's anti-war conference in January 2002. I give all this info to allow for some credence in what follows.
My opinion is, TESC needs police. The extreme and absolute way in which the students ( from the stage: "*Expletive* the police!") and yourself have labelled police activity on campus is the problem.
Yes, I am sure somewhere in America, likely on a Louisiana highway or West Texas town, a police officer is harassing a good and upstanding member of the community. This is horrible and we need colleges that are incubators of dissent, or better yet, the legal acumen needed to crush that kind of police abuse. Unfortunately, voices like yours, and the resonating student sentiment, want an easy fight where the war is not taking place, you want it conveniently on your own campus and away from where the danger and evil truly lives.
Your "Reflections..." commits a few errors. You set up the hierarchical structure of campus governance as the source of its illegitimacy, making the campus police an easy subsequent illegitimacy. You then use a softer looking form of hierarchy,
your own cult of personality, in the request that students and faculty keep this entire issue in-house and stay mute to police
investigation. You even admit that there are students and faculty that, of their own volition, want to talk or cooperate with the police ("Let us also oppose the collaboration of the Evergreen administration and some students and staff with police agencies"). My god Peter, thanks for showing us where, when and how abuse of power, the dark side of solidarity in secret societies, and the like take place in flat-hierarchy movements. Class A work there, buddy.
The other error in "Reflections..." is the distortions that occur near its closing statements. Wars, growing militarization, police. It is unfortunate the montage you present as an ultimate justification mixes up good guys and bad guys. The police officers in Olympia, and especially on TESC duty, probably hold extremely progressive world views. I've sat next to the Sheriff of Thurston County and had email exchanges with the TESC police officer while I lived there. Nice people judging by everything I saw. I don't believe they are causing any of the very real problems in our world.
This brings me to a subtle analogy on yours and a massive amount the TESC student body's values. I believe the police are recipients of stigma much like the untouchable class in India. That class in India has several middle class occupations that receive the stigma. It is hardly an analogy, but more like a direct truth that faculty such as yourself, and maybe a majority of students, see the police as an untouchable class. These police officers can commit no good act, nor offer a dialogue that assures us of their progressive values, that would wipe away the irrational and eternal hate many on the TESC campus have for them.
This dovetails back to us needing campuses that are incubators for positive change in our society. The incubation at TESC is becoming more renowned for Earth Liberation Front cells and cop hating, not a real return on our money or our faith.
Moving away from the murky world of values and intent, to immediate pragmatics in an imperfect world.
Once during my residence on campus I was one of only five or so students who witnessed this event: a naked student, possibly high on something, had jumped on a moving car and bashed his head in the windshield. I saw him walking, naked,
along the soccer field road. The police came up behind him, asked him to stop, he didn't respond, and they wrestled him to the ground, handcuffed him, and took him away without a scratch from their wrestling that I could see. This was a real incident, not conjecture. What would a police-less campus have done? I venture to guess, too little or too much.
Yearly the US has one or more shootings on a campus resulting in many people shot dead. Here is where your polemics meet a stark dose of reality: A guman is killing 5 people per minute on the TESC campus. What then, cop haters with no guns? What then?
Dunbar's number is the supposed cognitive limit to the number of individuals with whom any one person can maintain stable social relationships: the kind of relationships that go with knowing who each person is and how each person relates socially to every other person.
I am saving it here because the "we can only manage a social network of 150" cliche comes up so often.
It's weird, the pro-evolution crowd are the usually the same crowd that points to retro points in civilization as summations of the human condition. Social primates, village dynamics....big deal. We all know the one who makes it in New York City is the superior person, the hick in the village and monkey at the zoo are their inferiors. But in our era such talk is impolite. Thank god evolutionary advance isn't stopped by prohibitions in language.
CORRECTION: The last thing I said (above) about New York City and the superior person is wrong. In the blog comment below SerpentLord says a much more positive message that challenges Dunbar's number.
"This actually increases our obligation to be politically correct because the phrase "superior person" is just as technically backward as it is politically backward. It is a superior network, not a superior person which gives some people advantages over others.
It also allows us to address issues of "being connected" in a positive way (create an environment which helps people develop and exploit connections) rather than a negative one (create an environment which breaks up connections that give some people more advantages than others.) "
This gives a really good antidote against primitivism ( a contagion on the Left ) and crude elitism ( a contagion on the Right ). The Superior Network.
...Where does it end? Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the gifted young men who founded Google while pursuing doctoral degrees in computer science at Stanford, speak frequently of their desire to turn their search engine into an artificial intelligence, a HAL-like machine that might be connected directly to our brains. “The ultimate search engine is something as smart as people—or smarter,” Page said in a speech a few years back. “For us, working on search is a way to work on artificial intelligence.” In a 2004 interview with Newsweek, Brin said, “Certainly if you had all the world’s information directly attached to your brain, or an artificial brain that was smarter than your brain, you’d be better off.” Last year, Page told a convention of scientists that Google is “really trying to build artificial intelligence and to do it on a large scale.”
"Cyber means helmsman, implying steering, which should make obvious that Cyberculture is a group of people capable of steering through the web.
A search engine is the steering wheel.
So this report is mentioning the Neanderthals wondering about our village market as if they are equals, when they are not at all. They do not know or care about steering themselves through the web.
Dustbin of history, here is another class that did not evolve."
-POSTED BY: LANCE MILLER | AUG 12, 2008 1:56:34 AM
"Detroit's last great hope was the widespread love of its trucks and SUVs, combined with the undying loyalty of the blue-collar middle class. But the blue-collar middle class is dying more quickly than the truck and SUV craze—and it's doubtful either one is coming back."
First some assumptions and declarations: If I have an opinion, then it is almost impossible there are no others that have a similar opinion. I am an American citizen, living in Seattle, voting about 80% Democrat, 20% Republican. Will vote for Barack Obama for President.
It is now Monday, August 11th 2008, and Russia is winning in the military confrontation with Georgia that begin a few days ago. I applaud Russia. I applaud Russia only slightly because of the legitimacy of their claims, but more because of the illegitimacy of Georgia.
The illegitimacy of the alliance of Georgia with the "West", especially the USA.
The illegitimacy of Georgia's independence from Russia.
The illegitimacy in the form of stupidity in which you invaded South Ossetia with an inferior military, nay, an inferior State, when compared to Russia.
Dealing with the above list, let me expand a little. In the Wall Street Journal you've tried to claim Georgia as a last line of freedom, in your words; "Let us be frank: This conflict is about the future of freedom in Europe". To me your nation is not synonymous with freedom, and my country ( the USA ) is not doing what I would prefer. I want my country to return to the pre World Wars strategy of allowing Europeans to fight each other, and the USA get stronger in the process.
How really different is Georgia from Russia? Is the independence of the Republic more to do with allowing a band of people higher offices and wealth than they would have if a mere region of Russia? Worse still, is Georgia with status of nation in an attempt to wrest economic dominion from Russia and give it to France, Germany, Britain and the USA? To me if this is just a game of nations and corporations, "legitimacy" is a merely a propaganda point for marketers of agenda's, and it is refreshing to see real might in the form of airplanes and tanks trample the flimsy world of hype.
As far as your stupidity in activating your military, go among your streets and look at the dead. They lay there because they are
citizens of a weaker power that miscalculated, and equally so because my country and its alliance system are not there to aid.
I am not sorry for my country's lack of aid, and wonder if you are sorry for the acting aggressively while being an inferior.
Letter to my representatives: Fight for the USA, sell things to the world. Your intervention only in spots on the map where a corporation has a pipeline, on the grounds of an abstraction such as "freedom", is pathetic. Let the corporations hire their own mercenaries and guards. Don't obscure our language sending our soldiers to guard a mafioso crony's investment in the name of freedom. And outside the border of the USA where the people are killing each other, or war is happening, take some pictures, have NGO's send missionaries or hippies to tell them to be nice, take some videos of the dead for our news outlets (to make some cha-ching) , and thats it.
2004-2006 I was in the Whole Systems Design program at Antioch University in Seattle. In the summer of 2005 I took a course called "Visual Literacy Studio: Capturing Mental Images for Creative Thinking" in order to get enough credits to graduate in the standard target time of two years enrollment.
In the course instructor Farouk Seif imposed an anti-rational, anti-literate, anti-language point of reference when he said "in this course, and to be a whole systems thinker in general, we need to access a pre-language portion of ourselves to truly create". It was at that point I knew I was screwed. I have no memory of movement in my visual memories. I have only faint and infrequent memories of still pictures. When I remember a visual of a place I've been, there are no people or moving things in the visual.
I've been researching my autism more intensely these days. One cool thing occurring in the community is a pride, and slogans such as "neurological diversity" that contend that autistics are just another way of thinking, and there is also a growing opinion the asperger autistism is a good mental disposition for internet technology jobs. In my reading on autism I came across this:
"I don't think in pictures. I'm a kinaesthetic thinker, a systems thinker, a musical thinker. Mine is a physical and sensory world of pattern, theme and feel. My mind is like a mosaic, my conscious thoughts intangible until I experience them after they've been expressed- usually through arts."
-Donna Williams
(prolific autistic writer of many text books now used in special ed courses)
http://www.donnawilliams.net/about.0.html
One thing they talk about at Antioch is diversity. Almost every portion of dialogue is framed to allegedly respect diversity.
Unfortunately, Antioch is an old institution fighting a specific cultural war, and have hardened into an orthodoxy that can only pursue the overthrow of Anglo-American business-culture and heterosexual hegemony to free any 'people' who are under-represented or repressed by that hegemony. But my own under-representation in mainstream dialogue was not one of the "types" Antioch cared to enable a creative or professional development for, nor even acknowledge. I had spent years identified as a great performance artist in my hometown, and moved on to accolades in the music scene of Seattle, but when I arrived at Antioch I was constantly treated by students and faculty as a "computer geek" and prone to too much logic.
Antioch is famous for providing the underground railroad with volunteers, getting many slaves out of the South and on to freedom in the North. Now they provide an underground railroad, and the cars are jails of orthodoxy in which no minority,
either in skin color or neurological type, is well served. It is no wonder that most African-Americans that enroll in the C3 programs at the Seattle campus drop out within the first year. I wish I had been that smart.
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