i haven't read any of the books, so i have no basis on which to judge the proof of your claim that they're derivative/plagiarized. however, i think in general those sorts of criticisms levied at works of art are meaningless.
for one, there's obviously a continuum between completely novel ideas and complete plagiarism. very few people come up w/ totally original works -- almost everyone has influences which you can clearly see. some just do a better job of combining those influences in new ways than others. deciding where on the continuum the point of acceptable innovation is is a tricky issue.
secondly, reinterpreting old themes and motifs and sometimes entire works is a valid end unto itself. tolkein, for example, made it a point in lord of the rings to rework lots of european mythology. in a slightly different example, musicians can do really interesting things in reinterpreting old songs -- e.g., when miles davis covered "my favorite things" from sound of music, no one criticized him for being unoriginal. another more current example is one of the songs off of busta rhymes' album "anarchy", in which the hook for the song is a really beautiful sample from a stereolab song (i'm blanking on both song names now). i was so pleased to hear that someone in busta's production team was a stereolab fan that i didn't mind at all that they were riding on stereolab's invention.
thirdly, it's pretty funny to hear criticisms of "derivative" works on a website whose membership for the most part fervently supports free and/or open source software. i mean the whole idea there is that derivative works are not only ok, they're often desirable. is that same standard not applied to non-software art?
Have multinationals hijacked globalism?
on
Globalization
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I'd actually say that the whole globalization movement has it's genesis in multinationals -- i.e., chartered corporations like the Dutch East India company. So, has it been hijacked by them? Not really, it's been their cause all along.
I don't see that any of *our* institutions have successfully promoted abroad. And I think it's fair to say that our State department, and the various commercial interests that lobby our government don't want to see a replication of this country's freedom (limited as it is) in the developing world. Free people are too interested in their own welfare and promoting their own interests. Global corporations want things like: cheap labor, cheaply extractable natural resources, captive import markets, etc. Freedom interferes with these things, because people naturally want to maximize their own country's autonomy.
From what I can see, Globalization in practice amounts to exporting unproven economic theory, and forcing developing nations to be the laboratories of capitalism, whether or not it serves their interests.
I'd be interested to hear counterexamples, if people can think of instances where the transfer of Euro-American social institutions has produced the kind of relative stability/prosperity that we enjoy.
what a name like "Future Technologies" doesn't sound earthshatteringly original to you? i mean, they're talking about the future man! and technology! it's gotta be cool. i'm going to start a company called NewCoolStuffThatsNeat.
. . . yeah, after listening to the poets, campus organizers, et al.
i wouldn't argue for a second with the idea that the military is a noble and vital profession. it most certainly is. but they should not be setting national agendas, since the focus of their professional training is the use of deadly force.
take a look at countries ruled by military dictatorships and ask yourself if that looks appealing to you.
I worked for an I-builder (building corporate websites as consultants) company for a year and a half. The thing that really signalled the end for me was when they brought in a few marketing execs and decided that as part of our voracious hiring strategy, the most important thing to advertise to potential job applicants was "company culture". This meant bragging about how we all got weekly massages, and company sponsored happy-hours, and free beer at the end of the day on Fridays, etc.
In other words, they started placing a lot of emphasis on totally superficial crap. The real way to attract good people, and therefore to stay in business, is to promise them (and deliver)interesting projects that are well-managed.
In my mind a "fun" job is one that has you doing interesting technical projects, and Nerf toys has nothing to do with it. Of course, a good work environment with a lot of personal freedom is essential too, but I think if you find good projects with good people involved, a fun work environment is likely to follow naturally. Unless of course you're working for the govt., or a govt contractor.
yeah, this sounds sort of like a cross between jini and the hurd to me.
the example they use of a new website becoming popular overnight and the system auto-replicating the data to increase availability sounds like it was taken straight from the freenet project.
damn, i need to start contributing time to freenet. sigh, if only i could get dsl in my hood.
hells yeah! forget adbusters.org's "buy nothing day", we're going to have a DO NOTHING day!!!
for real tho, we should start throwing our tech weight around a little bit more. damn the phb's and corrupt politicians. if tech workers unionized, they'd be in some real shit then.
oh, forgot, we've got to stand behind the president in this time of crisis like good little robots.
um, everyone realizes the hatred towards israel in that region. even the idiots. that's one point that's simple enough for us americans to understand. the problem is, the likelihood of us completely pulling out of israel is pretty low.
imho, the creation of israel was an extremely bad idea and another example of British/American arrogance. we thought that we could mandate this solution and it would somehow work despite all of the natural reasons why it would devolve into the constant state of war that it's been. i'll admit to not knowing that part of post-war history as well as i should, but it seems obvious to me that israel as an artificially created jewish state was destined to be in its current situation.
that opinion notwithstanding, we'd never go back on that decision for at least 2 reasons that i can think of:
1) it would involve admitting that the idea was an error, something that we never do. admitting culpability usually leads next to people demanding reparations and we can't have that.
2) a large, very active and very passionate (about israel) jewish electorate in the u.s.,
who carry a lot of weight with our elected officials.
it's a bad situation, but it seems unlikely that any of the primary actors are going to reverse any of their positions in our lifetimes.
uh, they "can't"? more like, they "shouldn't".
anyone with physical access to your lines can spy on your phones, and obviously anyone with hands can open your mail. governments abuse their rights just as much as people do. this is probably because they are made up of people.
the troll insult is meant to imply that you are someone trolling the discussion with a third party agenda (i.e., a paid representative of the gov't, or a corporation). not that i believe you are, just clarifying vocabulary.;)
i couldn't agree more. the thought of us being baited into a war w/ all of the fundamentalist islamic world (which will is a very real possibility if we enter a ground war in afghanistan) is a scary enough thing to contemplate by itself. the thought of that happening with that simpleton as president is much scarier. if people accused gore of being "wooden" in his public speaking, at least he was articulate. in one address i saw bush give on tuesday evening, i swear he must have repeated himself 4 or 5 times when talking about how we must restore our national security. i think his trainers must have told him "emphasize restoring security, george!" and the only way he could think of emphasizing was by repetition.
another pet peeve of mine in all of this news coverage (well, in bedstuy, brooklyn i only get cbs, since all the other tv station transmitters seem to have gone down with the WTC) is the constant message coming from leaders in congress of "we must stand behind the president". why? why do we necessarily have to back the president? this is a pivotal point in our country's history! now is the time for debate! we sure as hell have brighter minds in this country than george w. bush -- i think even the staunch conservatives can agree on that -- and we need the bright people with opinions to speak the fuck up.
i sure as hell don't want to go to war strictly to show my solidarity.
i mean, this country is not about consensus politics, that isn't how democracy works -- it works best when the a variety of ideas are allowed to battle it out. to me, that's important now more than ever. it's certainly better to debate the issues now than to half-step on this shit 2 years after we've started killing people. once a course of action has been decided on, that's the time to shut up and get to it. there hasn't even been a single opposing viewpoint aired in any of the coverage i've seen on tv, and since i work below 14th street, i've been home all day with the tv on. i feel very betrayed by our media, and by our politicians. they are leading us by the nose.
I am a citizen of the U.S., and watched the WTC collapse from my office window this morning. I sort of agree with you -- I certainly disagree that we should immediately rush off to kill someone. The fact is that we're being baited.
Obviously, everyone who knows anthing about our military history and us as a people, knows that our first reaction will be to grab our guns and start shouting for blood. That's the move they want us to make. We need to be smart and do things in a considered manner. Those who are responsible DO need to be punished. But there are other ways than sending a phalanx of bombers somewhere to rain fire and brimstone on their heads.
For one thing, that's obviously what these maniacs think they're doing to us -- just retribution for our various unpopular policies.
I don't know what the right move is, but more is at stake here than our national pride and safety. It could certainly spark an immense international conflict, and I'd advocate doing a lot of serious thinking before walking into WWIII. If we have to act with violence, then we should do so -- but I don't think that it's at all clear right now that violence is the best alternative.
I agree. I'm worried that there will be a big, ugly backlash in this country. Detroit, where I'm from has a large Arab population, and the tension between white blue-collar detroiters, arabs, and blacks is palpable enough without this shit happening.
I also think an act like this can only be calculated to push us into a war, so I hope we don't take the bait.
i almost wretched when i watched the second building collapse on tv, and then looked out the window (i'm near astor place in manhattan) and saw it vanish in a cloud of smoke. my first thought was: if that was a nuke, we'll all be melting in a few minutes.
i can see it from my office actually. it's so horrific -- people in the financial district go to work pretty early, so those buildings were full of people. as for bombs, with 2 planes crashing into the towers, i'd be very surprised if whoever orchestrated it didn't include some explosives in their plan.
In support of your points, as you said, Tolkein both rejected the idea that his work was allegorical and then he went a step further in the foreword to the edition that I own, saying that he detested allegory in general. He really thought allegory was a cheap literary device.
It's not difficult for governments to raise funds?
Well, yeah, maybe if they're the US, an EU country or Japan. For everyone else, they're busy trying to figure out how to reschedule their IMF debt so they can perhaps one day have an economy.
Do governments want to pay for medicine to be developed? Yes. In fact they do. As noted before, check our (the US) budget for AIDS research.
I think the best analogy for this is something like the Polio epidemics that swept this country in the early 20th century. I don't know that history all that well, but I doubt our government was charging people for vaccinations. And had it been a pharmaceutical company supplying the vaccinations, you can bet that putting their commercial concerns before the lives of children would have had an army of parents throwing bricks through their windows.
I'm all in favor of free enterprise, and pharmaceutical companies have as much a right to compete in the marketplace as anyone, but there's a time and a place for commerce.
call me crazy, but common sense seems to dictate that you don't attack a car full of men carrying loaded firearms. if you do, it must be the case that you are aware of the potential consequences and are prepared to face them. it's too bad that a person died, but as the cliched saying goes -- if you mess w/ the bull, you get the horns.
whatever. the question is a legitimate one. i tutored english classes in DC for a year in a public middle school, and the conditions there were very different than in the suburban schools i'd gone to. the textbooks were all out of date, the computer resources were minimal (which is probably less important than the textbooks), and there were too many students per teacher. add on top of that the fact that some kids that appeared to my untrained eye to have significant learning disabilities weren't able to get special attention (due to lack of resources), and it's a difficult situation in which to be a student or a teacher.
that said, it probably depends greatly on the role that the teachers expect you to take -- in my case, the teacher i worked with seemed to use me to get her "trouble kids" out of the classroom for a while. hopefully for the author, he'll be in a more productive environment.
personally, i like the old-fashioned peer-to-peer
approach when it comes to these things. you know, when you and your peers actually hang out and see eachother and do things together. call me a luddite, but i think that culture is defined by your social interactions, and when music ceases to be something that i participate in -- by going to shows, going out clubbing, occasionally playing music myself, then i deserve to be out of the loop. cool shouldn't come easy -- that dramatically reduces its value.
i understand that one might get all futurist and envision a world in which all of our social interactions are virtual. ooooh, william gibson! but i like being a meatsack, and keeping track of 150 friends doesn't seem all that limiting to me.
Slashdot Mirror
i haven't read any of the books, so i have no basis on which to judge the proof of your claim that they're derivative/plagiarized. however, i think in general those sorts of criticisms levied at works of art are meaningless.
for one, there's obviously a continuum between completely novel ideas and complete plagiarism. very few people come up w/ totally original works -- almost everyone has influences which you can clearly see. some just do a better job of combining those influences in new ways than others. deciding where on the continuum the point of acceptable innovation is is a tricky issue.
secondly, reinterpreting old themes and motifs and sometimes entire works is a valid end unto itself. tolkein, for example, made it a point in lord of the rings to rework lots of european mythology. in a slightly different example, musicians can do really interesting things in reinterpreting old songs -- e.g., when miles davis covered "my favorite things" from sound of music, no one criticized him for being unoriginal. another more current example is one of the songs off of busta rhymes' album "anarchy", in which the hook for the song is a really beautiful sample from a stereolab song (i'm blanking on both song names now). i was so pleased to hear that someone in busta's production team was a stereolab fan that i didn't mind at all that they were riding on stereolab's invention.
thirdly, it's pretty funny to hear criticisms of "derivative" works on a website whose membership for the most part fervently supports free and/or open source software. i mean the whole idea there is that derivative works are not only ok, they're often desirable. is that same standard not applied to non-software art?
I'd actually say that the whole globalization movement has it's genesis in multinationals -- i.e., chartered corporations like the Dutch East India company. So, has it been hijacked by them? Not really, it's been their cause all along.
I don't see that any of *our* institutions have successfully promoted abroad. And I think it's fair to say that our State department, and the various commercial interests that lobby our government don't want to see a replication of this country's freedom (limited as it is) in the developing world. Free people are too interested in their own welfare and promoting their own interests. Global corporations want things like: cheap labor, cheaply extractable natural resources, captive import markets, etc. Freedom interferes with these things, because people naturally want to maximize their own country's autonomy.
From what I can see, Globalization in practice amounts to exporting unproven economic theory, and forcing developing nations to be the laboratories of capitalism, whether or not it serves their interests.
I'd be interested to hear counterexamples, if people can think of instances where the transfer of Euro-American social institutions has produced the kind of relative stability/prosperity that we enjoy.
-w
what a name like "Future Technologies" doesn't sound earthshatteringly original to you? i mean, they're talking about the future man! and technology! it's gotta be cool. i'm going to start a company called NewCoolStuffThatsNeat.
dude. . . information anarchy! yeah!
that's going to be my new band name.
rawk.
hey -- good idea! they should totally make that open source.
. . . yeah, after listening to the poets, campus organizers, et al.
i wouldn't argue for a second with the idea that the military is a noble and vital profession. it most certainly is. but they should not be setting national agendas, since the focus of their professional training is the use of deadly force.
take a look at countries ruled by military dictatorships and ask yourself if that looks appealing to you.
I worked for an I-builder (building corporate websites as consultants) company for a year and a half. The thing that really signalled the end for me was when they brought in a few marketing execs and decided that as part of our voracious hiring strategy, the most important thing to advertise to potential job applicants was "company culture". This meant bragging about how we all got weekly massages, and company sponsored happy-hours, and free beer at the end of the day on Fridays, etc.
In other words, they started placing a lot of emphasis on totally superficial crap. The real way to attract good people, and therefore to stay in business, is to promise them (and deliver)interesting projects that are well-managed.
In my mind a "fun" job is one that has you doing interesting technical projects, and Nerf toys has nothing to do with it. Of course, a good work environment with a lot of personal freedom is essential too, but I think if you find good projects with good people involved, a fun work environment is likely to follow naturally. Unless of course you're working for the govt., or a govt contractor.
yeah, this sounds sort of like a cross between jini and the hurd to me.
the example they use of a new website becoming popular overnight and the system auto-replicating the data to increase availability sounds like it was taken straight from the freenet project.
damn, i need to start contributing time to freenet. sigh, if only i could get dsl in my hood.
hells yeah! forget adbusters.org's "buy nothing day", we're going to have a DO NOTHING day!!!
for real tho, we should start throwing our tech weight around a little bit more. damn the phb's and corrupt politicians. if tech workers unionized, they'd be in some real shit then.
oh, forgot, we've got to stand behind the president in this time of crisis like good little robots.
duh. there is no difference between democrats and republicans in terms of being warped by corporate influence.
no, the editors should be playing editor.
which sometimes means rejecting things.
-w
um, everyone realizes the hatred towards israel in that region. even the idiots. that's one point that's simple enough for us americans to understand. the problem is, the likelihood of us completely pulling out of israel is pretty low.
imho, the creation of israel was an extremely bad idea and another example of British/American arrogance. we thought that we could mandate this solution and it would somehow work despite all of the natural reasons why it would devolve into the constant state of war that it's been. i'll admit to not knowing that part of post-war history as well as i should, but it seems obvious to me that israel as an artificially created jewish state was destined to be in its current situation.
that opinion notwithstanding, we'd never go back on that decision for at least 2 reasons that i can think of:
1) it would involve admitting that the idea was an error, something that we never do. admitting culpability usually leads next to people demanding reparations and we can't have that.
2) a large, very active and very passionate (about israel) jewish electorate in the u.s.,
who carry a lot of weight with our elected officials.
it's a bad situation, but it seems unlikely that any of the primary actors are going to reverse any of their positions in our lifetimes.
uh, they "can't"? more like, they "shouldn't".
;)
anyone with physical access to your lines can spy on your phones, and obviously anyone with hands can open your mail. governments abuse their rights just as much as people do. this is probably because they are made up of people.
the troll insult is meant to imply that you are someone trolling the discussion with a third party agenda (i.e., a paid representative of the gov't, or a corporation). not that i believe you are, just clarifying vocabulary.
i couldn't agree more. the thought of us being baited into a war w/ all of the fundamentalist islamic world (which will is a very real possibility if we enter a ground war in afghanistan) is a scary enough thing to contemplate by itself. the thought of that happening with that simpleton as president is much scarier. if people accused gore of being "wooden" in his public speaking, at least he was articulate. in one address i saw bush give on tuesday evening, i swear he must have repeated himself 4 or 5 times when talking about how we must restore our national security. i think his trainers must have told him "emphasize restoring security, george!" and the only way he could think of emphasizing was by repetition.
another pet peeve of mine in all of this news coverage (well, in bedstuy, brooklyn i only get cbs, since all the other tv station transmitters seem to have gone down with the WTC) is the constant message coming from leaders in congress of "we must stand behind the president". why? why do we necessarily have to back the president? this is a pivotal point in our country's history! now is the time for debate! we sure as hell have brighter minds in this country than george w. bush -- i think even the staunch conservatives can agree on that -- and we need the bright people with opinions to speak the fuck up.
i sure as hell don't want to go to war strictly to show my solidarity.
i mean, this country is not about consensus politics, that isn't how democracy works -- it works best when the a variety of ideas are allowed to battle it out. to me, that's important now more than ever. it's certainly better to debate the issues now than to half-step on this shit 2 years after we've started killing people. once a course of action has been decided on, that's the time to shut up and get to it. there hasn't even been a single opposing viewpoint aired in any of the coverage i've seen on tv, and since i work below 14th street, i've been home all day with the tv on. i feel very betrayed by our media, and by our politicians. they are leading us by the nose.
I am a citizen of the U.S., and watched the WTC collapse from my office window this morning. I sort of agree with you -- I certainly disagree that we should immediately rush off to kill someone. The fact is that we're being baited.
Obviously, everyone who knows anthing about our military history and us as a people, knows that our first reaction will be to grab our guns and start shouting for blood. That's the move they want us to make. We need to be smart and do things in a considered manner. Those who are responsible DO need to be punished. But there are other ways than sending a phalanx of bombers somewhere to rain fire and brimstone on their heads.
For one thing, that's obviously what these maniacs think they're doing to us -- just retribution for our various unpopular policies.
I don't know what the right move is, but more is at stake here than our national pride and safety. It could certainly spark an immense international conflict, and I'd advocate doing a lot of serious thinking before walking into WWIII. If we have to act with violence, then we should do so -- but I don't think that it's at all clear right now that violence is the best alternative.
I agree. I'm worried that there will be a big, ugly backlash in this country. Detroit, where I'm from has a large Arab population, and the tension between white blue-collar detroiters, arabs, and blacks is palpable enough without this shit happening.
I also think an act like this can only be calculated to push us into a war, so I hope we don't take the bait.
i almost wretched when i watched the second building collapse on tv, and then looked out the window (i'm near astor place in manhattan) and saw it vanish in a cloud of smoke. my first thought was: if that was a nuke, we'll all be melting in a few minutes.
fuck off. violent assholes who like to crash planes into buildings are to blame.
i can see it from my office actually. it's so horrific -- people in the financial district go to work pretty early, so those buildings were full of people. as for bombs, with 2 planes crashing into the towers, i'd be very surprised if whoever orchestrated it didn't include some explosives in their plan.
In support of your points, as you said, Tolkein both rejected the idea that his work was allegorical and then he went a step further in the foreword to the edition that I own, saying that he detested allegory in general. He really thought allegory was a cheap literary device.
Well, yeah, maybe if they're the US, an EU country or Japan. For everyone else, they're busy trying to figure out how to reschedule their IMF debt so they can perhaps one day have an economy.
Do governments want to pay for medicine to be developed? Yes. In fact they do. As noted before, check our (the US) budget for AIDS research.
I think the best analogy for this is something like the Polio epidemics that swept this country in the early 20th century. I don't know that history all that well, but I doubt our government was charging people for vaccinations. And had it been a pharmaceutical company supplying the vaccinations, you can bet that putting their commercial concerns before the lives of children would have had an army of parents throwing bricks through their windows.
I'm all in favor of free enterprise, and pharmaceutical companies have as much a right to compete in the marketplace as anyone, but there's a time and a place for commerce.
call me crazy, but common sense seems to dictate that you don't attack a car full of men carrying loaded firearms. if you do, it must be the case that you are aware of the potential consequences and are prepared to face them. it's too bad that a person died, but as the cliched saying goes -- if you mess w/ the bull, you get the horns.
a black negro. wow. you're fucking brilliant.
not only antiquated (and most likely racist) in your word choices, but also redundant.
whatever. the question is a legitimate one. i tutored english classes in DC for a year in a public middle school, and the conditions there were very different than in the suburban schools i'd gone to. the textbooks were all out of date, the computer resources were minimal (which is probably less important than the textbooks), and there were too many students per teacher. add on top of that the fact that some kids that appeared to my untrained eye to have significant learning disabilities weren't able to get special attention (due to lack of resources), and it's a difficult situation in which to be a student or a teacher.
that said, it probably depends greatly on the role that the teachers expect you to take -- in my case, the teacher i worked with seemed to use me to get her "trouble kids" out of the classroom for a while. hopefully for the author, he'll be in a more productive environment.
personally, i like the old-fashioned peer-to-peer
approach when it comes to these things. you know, when you and your peers actually hang out and see eachother and do things together. call me a luddite, but i think that culture is defined by your social interactions, and when music ceases to be something that i participate in -- by going to shows, going out clubbing, occasionally playing music myself, then i deserve to be out of the loop. cool shouldn't come easy -- that dramatically reduces its value.
i understand that one might get all futurist and envision a world in which all of our social interactions are virtual. ooooh, william gibson! but i like being a meatsack, and keeping track of 150 friends doesn't seem all that limiting to me.