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Bilderberg Group
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Kama you wrote a very long post on a subject that isn't really involved in this forum. I'd suggest you try humanities. You'd get a more measured and intelligent response from a variety of reasons.Thanks for the measured response. As said, I wouldn't be able to give you a pragmatic solution to our collective problems, wish I could. I agree the surveillance concept is totalitarian, and has severe privacy implications, and then scale/span/intensity issues. But its a direction which we are moving in, both technologically and socially, anyway, so the costs both in implementation and privacy are steadily shrinking. Tracking through data-mining from multiple traces are already moving towards this; we already all carry mobiles being the cheap example.
And all that is all well and good, you're essentially suggesting that we make a class of people (public servants) undergo the most extreme level of surveillance. Again would you take a job if you had to account for your actions/location 24/7?If the results of the decisions that those quiet businesspeople make cause crowds of the local village, excluded from the decision-making process, to gather outside protesting, I'd definitely think about making them open meetings...
Crowds? Did you read Jon Ronson's article? The "crowd" was three journalists.And you seem quite allergic to it. Also an observation. Like any tool, it has uses and problems. But is has a certain affinity with CT, for better or worse. You can be attached to something and annoyed by it, I get that a lot.
Not allergic, contemptuous. I'd suggest you read "How Mumbo Jumbo Conquered the World" by Francis Wheenhis chapter about post-modernism, entitled simply "the demolition merchants of reality". He describes how, since Michel Foucault's writings captured the intellectual mood in the early 1980s, many students in the humanities have been taught "that the world is just a socially constructed 'text' about which you can say just about anything you want, provided you say it murkily enough." He quotes the left-wing American Barbara Ehrenreich, who explains that her daughter was marked down for using the word "reality" without quotation marks.
Post modernism is a pretentious idealogical dead end allowing certain people to pontificate and justify everything from the Iranian revolution, to allowing Luce Irigaray's to say that E=mc2 as a "sexed equation", since "it privileges the speed of light over other less masculine speeds."
Mathematics as a forum of sexism? Post Modernism is well frankly the content filter would not allow me to print what I consider post modernism to be.On Salmon and Solutions:
I hope I'm swimming against the stream; if you don't like where you are being carried, its that or apathy. Not swimming hard enough yet, but hey...
Yes all the examples were localised, they were models or examples of things people have been doing or are developing. If they were 'done' already, it wouldn't be necessary. Some of them, like Transition Towns, have exceptional growth rates as social movements, and are leveraging social awareness into change, and most have (relative) ease of implementation. I'm not pushing for some kind of immediate autarky on some kind of commune, hand-building steampunk PDA's from potatoskins; a lot of the localist argument is that the world-system is highly vulnerable to systemic shocks, of which the current fave is liquid fuels and energy, though food and water supply are also key.
We've been working of a globalist system for over 300 years. I agree that we shouldn't be getting grapes from Israeli and flowers from Kenya, but I cannot for the life of me see what the feck this has to do with bliderberg.The objective is not to instantly replace everything with a shiny new world designed by Kama and Friends, but that when shocks come, you have greater resilience to them. Our current system appears highly vulnerable, and has very few failsafes, because redundancy is often uneconomic, especially if the risk is priced low: as subprime seemed to show, risk in derivatives was consistently underpriced. Especially if you assume, even as hedged bet, a Peak Oil scenario, there are similar risks on the more mundane material economic level. Relocalization can reduce the impact of those risks.
I'm sorry but if I was playing bullshít bingo, I'd just be shouting "house".
There have been at least three house price crashes in my lifetime. It happens. Stock markets rise, and they fall. Simply smattering your posts with a couple of buzz words and referencing a current global issue isn't an argument.mI don't know, so I'll cede the point. I'd need to know more on collaborative democratic design, but I believe there are movements towards this coming from open source design principles. But I haven't seen any hard enough examples to try and argue it.
The difference between writing code and building a bridge is just so fecking vast.Yes, I would much prefer if global trade was more democratically based, I don't think I'm alone in that. Negotiating strategies like Green Room lockouts at the WTO are almost exactly what I mean by untransparent and exclusionary legislation without representation. It might be efficient, but its not right.
Nothing I disagree with there.
Now how do you suppose that happens?I think pharmaceutical research would work a lot better without current patent law, with freer sharing of research information, with a marginal effect on incentive. Transparency isn't democracy, but...
Why wouldn't it affect incentive. It may cost 5 cents to make the 2nd pill, however tens of millions go into research to make the first one.I'll take that as a compliment, even if it saddens you; and unlike streams, tides flow back again. If the tide was going that way to begin with, I wouldn't be qq'ing so much and pointing out small wavelets turning back against the general trend.
A question though: do you disagree primarily in principle, or on pragmatic grounds?
Pragmatic. Lots of people stand outside G8 summits, and WTO meetings, with signs saying "Smash the WTO", asking them to build a working alternative though...Exactly. Now, I've said what my 'conspiracy' is, both in terms of what I think is going wrong, and what I blame, and what scares me. I'm curious if you could tell me what yours are? What are the 'real problems'?
Pretty much the same. I'd suggest you read Joesph Stiglitz's Globalisation and it's Discontents as a good primer. I think your solutions are naive at best.
(Besides loony CT heads and PoMo longwinded fools such as myself
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And thanks again for your developed and thought-provoking response.[/QUOTE]0 -
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