From the Postmodern Left we should believe all bad things begin from within the machinations of corporations and governments. That from below, especially an extremely disenfranchised group like the homeless, is the origin point of all that is good.
What about these homeless people who killed the person who befriended them?
In the current crisis, the union has been making big concessions, but it's too late. The transplant workers are new, young and country-style. Suddenly, they had real jobs and futures--instead of pumping gas or growing old working at burger joints. The Big Three workers are older, tired and often from urban environments. Doing less was always the goal, and they bragged about it, too, which is why auto workers may not be particularly popular, even in their own towns. Foreign manufacturers, with American plant managers, won over their factory workers with a new culture: uniforms for everyone, democracy in the parking lot and no executive dining rooms.
The foreign culture was about more than parking spaces. Its real focus was on eliminating class warfare from the factory floor. The Japanese and the Germans, too, put particular emphasis on teamwork and quality. Detroit talked a lot about quality but did not always deliver on its promises. Quality means everything from poor fit and finish, gaps between exterior and interior parts, hard plastic that looks cheap and transmissions that break down at 50,000 miles. My favorite Detroit expression was "perceived quality." That meant if you paid $30,000 for a car and found a scratch in the door, it wasn't a quality issue. Why? The car still ran, so it was "perceived quality."
Rationalism is a prerequisite for being considered a human with the full rights of an adult.
NIMBYism is the only honest and valid civic discourse.
Any claim to a universal unchanging valuation ( e.g. people should not be suffering in poverty, or all should be fed ) is not NIMBYism, and is not a political public policy stance, but rather a religious conviction. One cannot claim to be secular or offering an administrative objective when positing such valuations. When these religious convictions are domestic or foreign policy, they are fascist and imperialist.
The religion of Christianity is not the one correct religion, but does mark the evolutionary higher mark when spirituality become a literate and rational pursuit. The horrors and abuses of the Holy Roman and Greek Orthodoxy empires were more attributed to abandoning the higher mark of literacy and rationalism for the short sighted gain of converting illiterate peasants. Protestants resurrected the correct way ( literacy and rationalism ), which led to their dominance of other cultures. The "other cultures" practiced irrational and illiterate means to power ( whether spiritual, political, or military ), which is intrinsically lower and thus a means to less power when confronting a literate and rational entity.
A subtext, sublimated, and unspoken goal of the Political/Philosophical Left is a cessation of all coercion and violence as means to offense and defense of territory ( in layman's terms that means closing down all police and military operations ). The Right Wing reactionaries often think the Left is just plain stupid on this. But that misses the unspoken assumption of the Left: that the world works on a karma/righteousness basis, that if we cease all the mean stuff called police/military activity we will be more "innocent" and will reap some sort of karmic benefits. I offer this secular stance: there is no karma at work, no eye in the sky jotting down the absolute pacifist as a good person to be rewarded. The person that operates with no sense of strategy, banking totally on the exchange rates of a mystical construct is a fool. The person who would impose this foolishness on public policy is a liability to society.
Goal: Keep it short, cover the big brush strokes.
Generalized infrastructure ( Roads, Ports, etc).
These are as essential as air, food, and water to be an industrialized country. We do not leave these to the gambits of the market place.
Religion.
Ability to do it and ability to pay rent, work, bath, serve in the
military and walk down the sidewalk without doing it. The default
space is secular and loaded with NO ETHICS except economic norms,
efficiency, and expediency. The NO ETHICS means such statements as "I
value every human and want them fed and happy" to be a nice hobby and
religion, but not imposed on the default space.
Technology.
We are a hairless fangless species. For any member of our species to
abstain from technology, we need to help them along by killing them,
because a human absolutely without technology is dead anyway.
Competition.
It is good. Every instance it did not succeed and make a better place,
it was because it wasn't absolute enough, some people got to be stupid
or fat or slow and still got a prize.
Misery.
Life is hard. But it is not retarded. There is a kind of hardship that
does happen. But no reason to MAKE it miserable. The goal is the
pursuit of happiness. Being a hardass is ok. Being just freaking mean
and cruel is not part of the game. Being mean and cruel gets a public
endorsed wrath of ass paddling in front of your friends, or prison
time, or execution.
One generation (or more) ago.
One generation ago we are not responsible for. No reparations, no
righting of wrongs, no tipping the balance score, no historical
justice. If my father killed everyone in Russia or Africa, you give me
five minutes of attitude about it, see the ass paddling or prison time
in above statement. Counterpositive with this, generations of
innocence do not make a good people. The past does not make one
righteous or unrighteous. We look at now, and overtly judge everyone.
Freedom.
You are free to drink whiskey and play blues guitar all the time. Enjoy. You are
free to overwork, save, and then send yourself to Stanford. Enjoy. You
are free to live on the street, score some good pot every day, and
practice tai-chi in the park. Enjoy. Don't be rude to other people and
stay out of the way of anyone not a friend of yours.
Ambivalence.
Ambivalence is the root of all tolerance. Demand that we love, and we
will hate. Without ambivalence the economic relations degrade and we
revert to war.
"If the hard-disk is removed from the computer, the smart-phone becomes useful as much as the computer and the network is involved in our lives more than ever, the web environment will have a huge impact not only on general users, but also for developers and UIzard will be a good tool for the developers to practice and make their ideas real anywhere the internet is available."
-Ryu Sunt-tae linkI just read Cryptonomicon for the first time. I'm ten years late in reading it. I should have read it when it was published. The year it was published, 1999, was also the year Stephenson published In the Beginning was the Command Line. I must have read In the Beginning minutes after it was published. It was amazingly important to me.
1999 was the year I settled down from years of adventure travel in places like Antarctica and Alaska. I was a newbie at computers, and had a custom tower built and installed Red Hat 5.2. Barely even knowing how to type, I spent two months hacking the X11 monitor configuration on the command line to get startx (the desktop) to work, and also hacked the network config to get a cutting edge wireless service called Ricochet to work. Once I was online I found In the Beginning, and it affirmed my pursuit of Unix as the one true way.
But I didn't read Cryptonomicon. I wished I had. Cryptonomicon would have made me smarter and better prepared to contend with idiot anti-technology Luddites who dominate the Pacific Northwest alterna education environment.
Fast forward to now, 2009, and I've spent that last ten years learning to write code and honestly spend more time looking up some coding arcana rather than reading history or philosophy books like in my pre-computer life. So reading Cryptonomicon was divergent with my latest life patterns.
Cryptonomicon has a lot of In the Beginning running through it. A paragraph here and a full page there tells how, for example, 1) video compression 2) Van Eck phreaking, and 3) various crypto systems work. A lot of the time, you need to understand these tech tangents to appreciate plot twists and scenes.
A surprise was Cryptonomicon's immersion of the reader into World War II, and war in general.
For you Hollywood war movie fans, this book may be a real let down. It has its heroes for sure, but along the way it wears the reader out with the tastes and smells of war. I'm not saying its poorly written, I'm saying it is the best. When Japanese sailor Goto Dengo has an entire battleship crumble under him and is thrust into a sea covered in the ship's former fuel supply, then all those in the water scream as they inhale nothing but gas fumes, then picked off by sharks in the night, then the castaways eaten by New Guinea cannibals, then a Japanese rescue party rapes and cuts to pieces the natives, then random animals poison or tear to pieces the Japanese while on march,
...you get the idea. And that is just one phase of one subplot in the novel. Be prepared to read about 14 year old girls raped and then thrown out 10th floor windows. The book will make couch potato neocon war mongers tired of war, it will any reader tired of war, and in that way it does us a service.
There are amazingly entertaining and funny subplots and scenes also. The book accomplishes a strange mix of creating respect for both mental/math/genius types and action/ass-kicker/patriotic types. That mix of heroes with opposite skill sets (extreme in either the brainiac or patriotic way) is done with depth and sincerity.
Fast forward to the present, 2009, and I've purchased and started reading the hardback version of Anathem. The reasoning for reading it is a personal hunch that Stephenson writes with a view to urgent contemporary issues, within an enduring sort of construct. I loved Cryptonomicon, but as I said earlier, it may have served me better if I'd read it in 1999. I don't want to make the same mistake of procrastination with Anathem.
(characters in the book) Lawrence Waterhouse and Robert Shaftoe are now some sort of respected personages to me. Stephenson, you've won in your Metis Chapter contention: those archetypes are alive and embodied somewhere. At least I hope. But hey. maybe thats extramuros bullshytt.
In an economy of declining or totally imploded cash flows, prisons are underfunded or totally inoperable, what do we do with violent criminals?
The Axis Powers of WWII give us the cautionary tale of simply eliminating undesirables. While I personally would like to see a lot of violent criminals eliminated, mine is just a particular framework of ethics and sense of priorities, and the civic space is one that shouldn't just pander to my framework. I can say that about everyone else's framework also. In a place like the U.S., we have a patchwork of mismatched societies all with different fews to the worth of a violent criminal's life.
The only objective thing we can say is the criminal committed the act, after which we plunge into each schism's hatred, care, or even veneration of the criminal.
Then lets use this divisiveness.
Those who have some sort of care or love of the criminal provide sanctuary, for life. The contract with the larger society is the criminal never exits the sanctuary again. If there is ever a problem, there is an abrupt eviction and execution, or if the monastery prison is found extremely negligent of responsible for the "problem", then monastery receives some sort of harsh Killdozer-esque response from the wider society.
This Monastery Prison model provides for varying degrees of tolerance and care, but does not subject the general civic polity to the burdens of the most tolerant sect's worldview.
There is a news story on teen thugs shooting at each other at Alki Beach: News story here. There is a comment thread below the article, and I posted something there which is reproduced below.
Reply To Semaj23,
The posts have been harsh on thugs/gangbangers. But your post almost demanding counseling, forgiveness and the like for troubled youth is a step in the wrong direction also.
Societies worldwide have an endless assortment of poor or historically marginalized youth. The world owes them a fair shot at a respectable life, but does not owe them a free lunch of any kind . More close to home here in Seattle. With a Depression taking funds out of city programs, you can expect a lot less help for troubled youth. If the stance of sympathetics like yourself is that we owe gangbangers some sort of help, otherwise we can expect them to ruin our streets with their violence. Sorry, your style of sympathy is not going to fly. Society does not have to ask kindly, plead with, or counsel people to not be violent criminals. The gangbanger attitude of hate and violence is unforgivable. They are the new KKK, a type rallying around the volatile combo of stupidity and aggressiveness. Society wants them gone.
Scenario: Due to a large or small catastrophe you are cut off from the world wide web. The time of your cut off from the web may be a day, or a year.
It would be nice to have ONE FILE that is all the information you need, that you usually easily get from the WWW, wikipedia and Google. The info may be How To Create a Wireless Intranet, How To Create a Web Page, useful land topography or tide table info for your area, a set of specialized calculators, How To Create a Internet Relay Chat on a Wide Area Network.
ONE FILE that contains all the info, so that it is easily portable on a USB stick. ( Maybe be a little more prepared by having Firefox software for Windows, Linux and OS X on the same USB. )
Amazingly, a group has already produced a fairly mature answer to this design spec: http://www.tiddlywiki.com. There is even a project trying to make a Desktop/OS version at http://tiddlyhome.bidix.info/desk/. There is another TiddlyWiki project for saving confidential info at http://tiddlyfolio.tiddlyspot.com/.
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