One definition of a mystic may be a person who seeks to understand and control the phenomena around him more deeply than those around him.
In pre computing meatspace externally measurable success in such endeavors was generally poor, and internal success seemed to correspond quite distinctly to the extent to which the mystic could circumscribe his environment.
With the advent of computers there exists a "world" in which the "mystic" really *can* understand and control his environment, with a success directly related to his intelligence and dedication. It is little wonder that we para-mystics have been laboring furiously for the last thirty years or more to extend the overlap between cyberspace and meatspace. We have traded
our "magic" in cyberspace with those desparate for control and power in meatspace for standing outside our realm.
Sometimes I wonder if it is wholly coincidental that I hail in part from the family Faust.
Yup. Today many people who call themselves
libertarian "see" only the "free market" aspect
and miss the real point about "liberty". (Bill
Maher commented "I'm a libertarian... but not
about guns." - which is probably the most telling
statement you can make about not understanding
libertarian ideals.)
You touch on something the LP has consistantly
missed, and which should be a keystone if they
were truly serious about libertarianism as a
philosophy: The Corporation. As a lib, I
believe that most "private" corporations (an
oxymoron - a corporation is a "fictitious entity"
created by the state) should be abolished.
Articles of Incorporation should be issued very,
very rarely, if at all, and only in very special
circumstances.
IMO until the LP addresses this, or at least opens
discussion in a serious way, they are going to
remain a marginal entity. Or some other
political entity is going to pick up the ball.
As I replied on LT in re the quoted passage, it is
amazingly humorous that PB would dare to ask
whether one would found rather found a biz in a
nation/state now suffering the historical whiplash
of near 100 years of communism vs. a still
prosperous nation where entrepreneurism has been
celebrated for more than 200 years, then claim
that the obvious answer has something to do with
the "goodness" of state authority.
As for derision of libertarianism's spontaneous
order I point out that the supposed "paradox"
between libertarianism and "open source" is no
paradox at all; "open source" is a living,
breathing example of that spontaneous order in
action.
Isn't it amazing just how many "big boys" would benefit if it became widely accepted that "mental disorders" were common. Drug companies stand to make a fortune as previously noted. The psychologists/psychiatrists get a big boost in social standing as well as a long term renewal of an invite to the first class car of the gravy train. The AMA gets its cut. Lawyers have an easier time filing and getting acceptance of more and more colorful disability/discrimination/liability claims. The government bureaucracies foresee a bright and rosie future with new empires to build. And the courts have an easier time with less likelyhood of successful appeal in declaring anyone they dislike as mentally ill and henceforth a "ward of the court".
Didn't we used to sneer at the USSR under communism for declaring anyone who vocally disagreed with official policy as mentally ill? Or is that memory merely a paranoid delusion?
Is it wrong to believe that most people can deal with their own affairs?
Catch 22v2.0: Belief in one's own sanity is a symptom of mental illness.
Nobody, especially, the politicians pushing this expects this to accomplish its stated intent - actually *solving* a problem would diminish a politicians potential for futuer public exposure - and given the technology of the internet it never could work.
It's real intent is:
1) buy headlines for hungry politicos. 2) establish more patronage and bureaucratic sinecures for nephews and nookums. 3) Give the politico's and their bureacrat twiddlers hooks to fine/prosecute and otherwise harrass any particular ISP or commercial content provider who may annoy them too much. 4) Likewise create another ploy for theoretical "probable cause" to hassle and harrass any private individual who may rock the boat too much in the future. And finally... 5) To accustom us even more to pervasive and invasive intrusion by government into our private lives.
So, Katz, to prove you're really part of the real-world you had to write about John Boy's demise, but to prove that you're "superior" you had to write a critique of the coverage.... Unfortunately, your lack of any real substance leaves it quite transparent that you want it both ways. You're naked and your ambiguously ambivalent insecurities dangle unimpressively for any who care to see.
FWIW you missed the real story, which is NOT that newer technologies provide more ways to saturate the world with pandering emotionalism, but that the alternate "news" technologies combine with a growing comtempt of mass media among the literate to render mass media "news" ever less relevant. In consequence the mass media news providers, dependent upon their shrinking ever less skilled audience both financially and to sate the fat ego's that uniformly attire mass media "journalists", simultaneously more shrilly and pompously (if indirectly) assert their own importance while pimping riper trash to a lower denominator with each passing day. The resulting circus is far more amusing than most of the fare proffered as "news" - if you care to watch. I don't.
Actually, VV came much closer to the true problem than Katz did. In comparing schools to prisons they were close to the truth and missed only by not exploring the comparison more closely. "Modern" schools are factories, factories to mill the unique edges, distinctive extrusions, and characteristic cravasses from our individualities.
"The purpose of public education is to teach reflexive obedience to arbitrary authority", I tell my daughters. It began with military training in central Europe, was adopted and expanded upon as a tool of political inculcation by British socialists and was siezed upon and remolded by American industrialists in the image of the factories for which they were to produce refined ore (workers!).
Schools don't harbor a repressive social order by accident - production of repressive/suppressive social order is their very purpose. They exist not so much to teach math/history/language etc. as that we must all get up at a certain time, accept an external committments of our time, obey a variety of strangers and accept their authority based upon the social structure, limit our "freedom of speech" to acceptable norms, follow the dress code and others I've probably been to thoroughly "mainstreamed" myself to recognise. And it is no accident that those who most exemplify social order and obedience - the players of team sports - are the exhalted of this microcosm.
Nor is it an accident that those who don't/can't fit are handled most roughly. The horrors visited upon the physically inept are bad enough, but the Geek Tragedy arises from the fact that the nominal purpose of mass education - edification of the intellect - has little to do with its real purpose. By definition the intelligent have access to a larger conceptual space than the normals and are thus more likely to cross into expressions and behaviors which the consumer/worker factory finds unacceptable, and hence must restrain coercively and "taught" not to repeat.
While industrial economics ruled, this system worked well enough: the socially successful in school were "successful" in life enough to reinforce the school social system in partly self fufilling feedback. Now as factory industrialism nears extinction it doesn't work so well.
The nose-picking dork with the palm-top on his belt that the jock beats up on after school may be not just the jock's boss a few years after school, but could be the jock's father's boss in a part time job tomorrow. Of course the sports and poms recognise this inversion of the natural order and vent their despair with renewed hostility.
Meanwhile perceptive and interactive space (cable, vcr, games, inet) have exploded in the last decade. Those who may be socially maladroit in meat space can often find ego validtion in conceptual space at a point so far removed from mundane conceptual space that feedback from the school social milieu will more likely be percieved as arbitrary sadism than a directional inducement. Likewise normal conceptual space has expanded and thus been diluted and diffused to the point where the elite of the worker/consumer factory school are often at a disadvantage to, and outperformed by the pasty fat kid who's on the computer all day.
But schools go on - they have an embedded politically powerful bureaucracy to ensure it - pretending that they can produce cohort after another of ample worker/consumer droids for factory jobs which no longer exist, in ever larger, more expensive factory schools.
The largest single problem manifest at Littleton is not violence in games or movies, not guns, not the clash of geeks and jocks, gays and homophobes, not social angst and alienation nor hatred and intolerance themselves. The problem lies in a state sponsored and backed system of institutionalized homogenization of young minds; confining an ever more socially and intellectually divergent group into unintended and often unwilling contact, conflict and competition while imposing an external social order which no longer fits the real world.
Slashdot Mirror
One definition of a mystic may be a person who seeks to understand and control the phenomena around him more deeply than those around him.
In pre computing meatspace externally measurable success in such endeavors was generally poor, and internal success seemed to correspond quite distinctly to the extent to which the mystic could circumscribe his environment.
With the advent of computers there exists a "world" in which the "mystic" really *can* understand and control his environment, with a success directly related to his intelligence and dedication. It is little wonder that we para-mystics have been laboring furiously for the last thirty years or more to extend the overlap between cyberspace and meatspace. We have traded
our "magic" in cyberspace with those desparate for control and power in meatspace for standing outside our realm.
Sometimes I wonder if it is wholly coincidental that I hail in part from the family Faust.
-- TWZ
Yup. Today many people who call themselves ... but not
libertarian "see" only the "free market" aspect
and miss the real point about "liberty". (Bill
Maher commented "I'm a libertarian
about guns." - which is probably the most telling
statement you can make about not understanding
libertarian ideals.)
You touch on something the LP has consistantly
missed, and which should be a keystone if they
were truly serious about libertarianism as a
philosophy: The Corporation. As a lib, I
believe that most "private" corporations (an
oxymoron - a corporation is a "fictitious entity"
created by the state) should be abolished.
Articles of Incorporation should be issued very,
very rarely, if at all, and only in very special
circumstances.
IMO until the LP addresses this, or at least opens
discussion in a serious way, they are going to
remain a marginal entity. Or some other
political entity is going to pick up the ball.
Anybody want to start a political party?
As I replied on LT in re the quoted passage, it is
amazingly humorous that PB would dare to ask
whether one would found rather found a biz in a
nation/state now suffering the historical whiplash
of near 100 years of communism vs. a still
prosperous nation where entrepreneurism has been
celebrated for more than 200 years, then claim
that the obvious answer has something to do with
the "goodness" of state authority.
As for derision of libertarianism's spontaneous
order I point out that the supposed "paradox"
between libertarianism and "open source" is no
paradox at all; "open source" is a living,
breathing example of that spontaneous order in
action.
Didn't we used to sneer at the USSR under communism for declaring anyone who vocally disagreed with official policy as mentally ill? Or is that memory merely a paranoid delusion?
Is it wrong to believe that most people can deal with their own affairs?
Catch 22v2.0: Belief in one's own sanity is a symptom of mental illness.
-- TWZ
Nobody, especially, the politicians pushing this expects this to accomplish its stated intent - actually *solving* a problem would diminish a politicians potential for futuer public exposure - and given the technology of the internet it never could work.
...
It's real intent is:
1) buy headlines for hungry politicos.
2) establish more patronage and bureaucratic sinecures for nephews and nookums.
3) Give the politico's and their bureacrat twiddlers hooks to fine/prosecute and otherwise harrass any particular ISP or commercial content provider who may annoy them too much.
4) Likewise create another ploy for theoretical "probable cause" to hassle and harrass any private individual who may rock the boat too much in the future. And finally
5) To accustom us even more to pervasive and invasive intrusion by government into our private lives.
-- TWZ
So, Katz, to prove you're really part of the real-world you had to write about John Boy's demise, but to prove that you're "superior" you had to write a critique of the coverage
FWIW you missed the real story, which is NOT that newer technologies provide more ways to saturate the world with pandering emotionalism, but that the alternate "news" technologies combine with a growing comtempt of mass media among the literate to render mass media "news"
ever less relevant. In consequence the mass media news providers, dependent upon their shrinking ever less skilled audience both financially and to sate the fat ego's that uniformly attire mass media "journalists", simultaneously more shrilly and pompously (if indirectly) assert their own importance while
pimping riper trash to a lower denominator with each passing day. The resulting circus is far more amusing than most of the fare proffered as
"news" - if you care to watch. I don't.
-- TWZ
Actually, VV came much closer to the true problem than Katz did.
In comparing schools to prisons they were close to the truth and
missed only by not exploring the comparison more closely. "Modern"
schools are factories, factories to mill the unique edges, distinctive
extrusions, and characteristic cravasses from our individualities.
"The purpose of public education is to teach reflexive obedience
to arbitrary authority", I tell my daughters. It began with military
training in central Europe, was adopted and expanded upon as a tool
of political inculcation by British socialists and was siezed upon
and remolded by American industrialists in the image of the factories
for which they were to produce refined ore (workers!).
Schools don't harbor a repressive social order by accident -
production of repressive/suppressive social order is their very purpose.
They exist not so much to teach math/history/language etc. as that we
must all get up at a certain time, accept an external committments of
our time, obey a variety of strangers and accept their authority based
upon the social structure, limit our "freedom of speech" to acceptable
norms, follow the dress code and others I've probably been to thoroughly
"mainstreamed" myself to recognise. And it is no accident that those
who most exemplify social order and obedience - the players of team
sports - are the exhalted of this microcosm.
Nor is it an accident that those who don't/can't fit are handled most
roughly. The horrors visited upon the physically inept are bad enough,
but the Geek Tragedy arises from the fact that the nominal purpose of
mass education - edification of the intellect - has little to do with
its real purpose. By definition the intelligent have access to a larger
conceptual space than the normals and are thus more likely to cross
into expressions and behaviors which the consumer/worker factory finds
unacceptable, and hence must restrain coercively and "taught" not
to repeat.
While industrial economics ruled, this system worked well enough:
the socially successful in school were "successful" in life enough to
reinforce the school social system in partly self fufilling feedback.
Now as factory industrialism nears extinction it doesn't work so well.
The nose-picking dork with the palm-top on his belt that the jock
beats up on after school may be not just the jock's boss a few years after
school, but could be the jock's father's boss in a part time job tomorrow.
Of course the sports and poms recognise this inversion of the natural order
and vent their despair with renewed hostility.
Meanwhile perceptive and interactive space (cable, vcr, games, inet)
have exploded in the last decade. Those who may be socially maladroit
in meat space can often find ego validtion in conceptual space at a point
so far removed from mundane conceptual space that feedback from the
school social milieu will more likely be percieved as arbitrary sadism
than a directional inducement. Likewise normal conceptual space has
expanded and thus been diluted and diffused to the point where the
elite of the worker/consumer factory school are often at a disadvantage
to, and outperformed by the pasty fat kid who's on the computer all day.
But schools go on - they have an embedded politically powerful
bureaucracy to ensure it - pretending that they can produce cohort after
another of ample worker/consumer droids for factory jobs which no longer
exist, in ever larger, more expensive factory schools.
The largest single problem manifest at Littleton is not violence in
games or movies, not guns, not the clash of geeks and jocks, gays and
homophobes, not social angst and alienation nor hatred and intolerance
themselves. The problem lies in a state sponsored and backed system
of institutionalized homogenization of young minds; confining an ever
more socially and intellectually divergent group into unintended and
often unwilling contact, conflict and competition while imposing an
external social order which no longer fits the real world.