On a practical matter

[archytas]

Around the world economics is in disarray. Most of the west is being
told it must face austerity and cut and sell its public sector to the
NuPolitburo of the filthy rich. China zooms ahead - except it has
built 64 million apartments no one lives in - including 12 ghost
cities. Deng has shades of Mao and is inflating GDP with a housing
bubble.

It's obvious the world needs to change. Human beings don't think much
and much of what we think up to feel superior to animals turns out to
be rot. We even find syntax in bird song. We now know that human
decision-making is not rational and there are good reasons to believe
over-focus on the rational does not produce Mr Spock but psychopaths.

I looked at the exams our 15-16 year olds do at school recently - in
the UK these are called GCSEs. Even the higher level is drivel and I
find it hard to fell right about incarcerating our young for this
crude testing over 11 years. The hack-drivel of university is no
better. I sometimes witness intelligent people being taught by idiots
with the answer book.

We lack an epistemology of 'things this big'. What we once called
bildung is now just a dreadful burden in what seems a freezing moral
climate as bad as Soviet Paradise (and there still is Sino Paradise)
or that of other vile imperialism. I don't mean to raise the Gulags
and various genocides of long history other than in wondering if the
same underlying crap with its more cuddly modern face is driving the
same old society of despair.

Lonnie talked of the game of exchanging 'names' in discussion on Kant
- I happen to think this wrong when trying to get at what might matter
for realist or other epistemology, but he undoubtedly has a point.
Intellectuals are bought off or bought up very easily in our economic
systems. Many of the conferences I attended were just places for us
to talk and let our hair down instead of teaching the rot expected of
us. They became Lonnie's Game with food and exotic locations.

How can 'cuts' be an answer to anything when there is so much that
needs doing? I understand the muck about the private sector cavalry
rushing in - but this is drivel on any empirical basis. Centralising
authority tends to raise Soviet Paradise, Mao's 'great leap forward'
and the like, but I believe there is 'another Politburo' that is
stopping progress towards a more decent society.

How do I explain this to people who struggle conceptually much beyond
accepting the word 'moon' when I point at it? Most argument burns out
in the exasperation of having to say that, say, "realism" isn't the
easy target they think it is. After that comes collapse into
standard varieties of character assassination like being accused of
being a commie because you can distinguish between Harpo and Groucho.

My question is 'where is the epistemology of big issues'? I'd
appreciate any answers - my own suspicion is that the data is obscured
as surely as some turd telling you Ratners' gold is ethically mined is
lying.

[Lonnie Clay]

The questioning of big issues has been driven into the domain of cranks and crackpots :

https://sites.google.com/site/lonniecourtneyclay/home/tc5526ataoldotcom

Psst! Hey buddy, want to go insane? LOLOL LOLOL

Let's talk about the deterioration of *society* over the past 50 years due to television then computers. Actually, it has been declining ever since the beginning of the industrial revolution, having reached its height in Victorian times. Some would even say that the mental capabilities have been declining  ever since the middle ages when the printing press was invented. Let's look forward in a quick whirl from before the printing press up to now.

1) Everybody had to *remember* important things, if they knew them. It took a *long* time to write things down, and besides - who would read it? People talked talked talked, about anything and everything. There were oral histories. News was passed from town to town by minstrels, gaining embellishments along the way. Not much was known in the way of technology, but we used the heck out of what we knew. Loyalty to family, relatives, home town, district, nation, mankind, God was practiced, not necessarily in that order. People were, as a general rule relatively selfless in the sense that to be known as "greedy" was a pejorative.

2) The printing press was invented, people started to learn how to read, being taught by their relatives. Centers of "learning" started to pop up outside of the religious enclaves. To be a person of letters became the hallmark of achievement. To be illiterate was to be known as stupid, regardless of how well a person could remember. Craftsmanship bloomed, along with trades and mechanical arts.

3) The industrial age began, with commerce being ruled by oligarchical elites who owned corporations and private enterprise. Power shifted from those who had held it by monarchial tradition to those who could find the "main chance" and exploit it. Guilds died out, being replaced by unions, and eventually mass production was the dominant means of production. People leaned how to do their jobs by reading manuals of instruction and the master-apprentice relationships withered. Not that learning to do a job was particularly difficult, with everything becoming rote and specialized.

4) Radio, movies, and television were invented, displacing with entertainments those hours of time outside the workplace where people once gathered together in public places or read books, newspapers etc. Computers were invented to begin the grand project of automating jobs out of existence. Personal computers were invented, permitting usage of computer power by the technologically incompetent through standard packages of software. The insidious infection of minds by computer gaming began, competing with literature, music, and movies for attention.

5) The internet was invented and blossomed, permitting people to really get rolling online with web sites, UseNet and Google groups, then Blogs. Nobody had to learn how to use a computer anymore, we had gadgets and GUI interfaces, so numbskulls could use computers as effectively as savvy folks. Having blossomed as an art before the invention of personal computers, computer programming skills withered away, being replaced by web design. Nobody needed logic to think about solving problems, because they just needed to point and click and text each other on computers or cellphones.

6) Guess what? The art of cursive writing is almost extinct, manual writing with pencil or pen on paper is dying. Now you have ipads, ipods, iphones, GPS, PCs, peak oil, and the oil price is driving the economy worldwide into the pits. Green is "good", smokestacks are "bad", nuclear power is anathema, solar is economically unviable, wind power is blossoming, tidal power hasn't been tapped, hydroelectric power is tapped out. Everything is electronic. Nobody knows anything without looking it up in a manual anymore. Nobody knows how to remember things except a select few self chosen or those mentored by them. Nobody knows how to learn except those who studied specially or who had conscientious parents.

7) See boy wizard Harry Potter waving his hands. Guess what happens if (for example) eight EMP devices are set off in low earth orbit to take out all electronics and crash civilization on Earth? Renaissance man arises. Wizards rule! What's *your* contingency plan?

Lonnie Courtney Clay (The Wizard Of Arlington)

p.s. I'm not making threats, just predicting.

[archytas]

There was a really good novel on this called Flicker. The Cathars
were putting stuff in black and white films that trained brains to go
digital so that we would eventually be either on or off - with no
return from off. The unsaid joke was that colour film ended the
'cunning plan'.

The current utter-bolloxs is that we need to keep 'growing economies'
to do well. Oddly, this must be done on the basis of cuts to the
quality of everyone's life except a parasitic few who go about
bwanking in public. Having screwed the economy to such an extent that
vast amounts more money are caught up doing nothing other than
covering up losses of vital fluid, these are the people to entrust
with our public services and everything so solid it can't melt into
air, all bought with a loan from us so they can buy everything out
from under. Hayek got the road to serfdom right, he just couldn't
tell who the bad guys really were.

The jobs never come back once manufacturing or mining leave an area.
One reason is that there is sod all to do really. We don't know what
productive work is and are pretty useless in praise of idleness.

[nominal9]

Society and its institutions is complicated.... Archytas...
I always favored the notion that those who actually "invent" should
have the most social power... the engineers, scientists and such...
but the middle men usually get all the power and profit... even the
big corporations were alright, or at least better, as long as the
original owner - inventors were at their head.... then along came the
corporate structure... stocks... options... controlling interest...
etc. the motivation was not any longer building and innovating
"product" but marketing it at the greatest profit for the
investors.....investors are fickle... they look for the quick profit,
take their gain then look for the next "growing venture" to glom on to
and bleed dry....

Marxism gets a bad name, from the Capitalists,... actually Marx was on
to something, apart from the "workers unite" usual reduction that is
given to his notions.... alienation... the separation of the worker
(or producer) from the actual product he or she creates and
makes....that's where to look for a possible cure to society's ills
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation

Alienation reversed, to give the majority of producers control of
their "product'.... might help... I always thought.

[archytas]

Marx and Henry George got a lot right. I believe we need some
constructive arguments that take more of modern science into similar
account. Deep questions remain on such models of thought in use.
Pretty much anything under discussion neglects much that could be
brought into consideration. We seem to conduct much of argument
without memory coming into the critical frame.
Ideology is not safe in most hands, perhaps not even our own.
Even science leads me to think the killing fields are close again. We
are not living in peace with homo erectus or the Neanderthals - other
than as assimilated in our gene history. The problems of 19th century
imperialism have not gone away either, It's easy to conclude we don't
take enough of human nature into account - most of the time we hear
this it comes with the signature that the speaker has little clue on
human nature.

One argument in current economics is that we don't have 'capitalism'
but more of a hidden politburo rigging markets. I would say
Berlusconi in Italy could give us clues about how easy a democracy is
to manipulate and this probably translates across the world.

In the end the questions are about just what the 'American Empire' is
really about and quite how we come to justify it. We have to remember
in this that we do operate under it and consider it better than
trusting the rest of the world not arm and just sweep over us. This
is true even as we are critical of it.

I don't believe philosophy is much use because human beings have
little general capability in it.

On Jun 29, 9:36 pm, nominal9 <nomin...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> Society and its institutions is complicated.... Archytas...
> I always favored the notion that those who actually "invent" should
> have the most social power... the engineers, scientists and such...
> but the middle men usually get all the power and profit... even the
> big corporations were alright, or at least better, as long as the
> original owner - inventors were at their head.... then along came the
> corporate structure... stocks... options... controlling interest...
> etc. the motivation was not any longer building and innovating
> "product" but marketing it at the greatest profit for the
> investors.....investors are fickle... they look for the quick profit,
> take their gain then look for the next "growing venture" to glom on to
> and bleed dry....
>
> Marxism gets a bad name, from the Capitalists,... actually Marx was on
> to something, apart from the "workers unite" usual reduction that is
> given to his notions.... alienation... the separation of the worker
> (or producer) from the actual product he or she creates and

> makes....that's where to look for a possible cure to society's illshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation

> ...
>
> read more »