Colour: the art and science of illuminated manuscripts – exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. Both beautiful and fascinating, in its tracing the development of the techniques of painting and the trade routes which supplied the ingredients of the paints. Images of many of the manuscripts displayed are available online.
A United Kingdom – powerful, moving and very timely film, in its reminder of the racial prejudices which prevailed not so long ago, with tremendous performances from Rosamund Pike and David Oyelowo.
Carol of the Bells – one of the nation’s top ten favourite carols (according to the ClassicFM poll), thanks surely to this superb arrangement performed by the boy choir Libera (with just a few additional musicians), and resonating in my head continuously throughout the festive season.
Saving Mr Banks – nice if romanticised account of the childhood of P.L. Travers and Walt Disney’s efforts to get her to assign him the film rights to Mary Poppins, suggesting one of the reasons why people tell stories.
Doctor Who, series 9 – my birthday box set, watched while ill at Christmas. At his best, Peter Capaldi is excellent as The Doctor: witty, ascerbic, with a really powerful screen presence. I particularly enjoyed the fact that in the Viking episode he wears checked trousers, recalling the original Doctor William Hartnell. Not many of the other Doctors in recent times could sustain an entire episode in which they’re the only character, as Capaldi does in Heaven Sent.
Sherlock Junior, by Buster Keaton– one of the truly great silent films, with massively inventive visual gags and a great postmodern key concept as Keaton enters the action of the film playing at the cinema where he is a projectionist.
Friday, 13 January 2017
Monday, 9 January 2017
Cuttings: December 2016
Wolfgang Streeck: the German economist calling time on capitalism - interview by Aditya Chakraborrty in The Guardian. "Not for the first time, the sandwich board-wearers are declaring the end of capitalism – but today Streeck believes they are right. In its deepest crises, he says, modern capitalism has relied on its enemies to wade in with the lifebelt of reform. During the Great Depression of the 30s, it was FDR’s Democrats who rolled out the New Deal, while Britain’s trade unionists allied with Keynes. Compare that with now. Over 40 years, neoliberal capitalism has destroyed its opposition.... Public discontent is fitful and fragmented, ready to fall into Trump’s tiny hands. Meanwhile, capitalism – unrestrained and unreformed – will die. This isn’t the violent overthrow envisaged by Marx and Engels. In The Communist Manifesto, they argued that capitalism’s 'gravediggers' would be the proletariat. Nearly 170 years later, Streeck is predicting that the capitalists will be their own gravediggers, through having destroyed the workers and the dissidents they needed to maintain the system. What comes next is not some better replacement but is more akin to the centuries-long rotting away of the Roman empire."
How do liberals halt the march of the right? Stand our ground and toughen up - article by Matthew d'Ancona in The Guardian, referenced in John Naughton's Memex 1.1 blog. "The lesson of 2016 is that you are in a fight, and you lost the first round. This is not the moment for vague 'One Nation' rhetoric. It’s a time of political combat – whether you like it or not. Resist kneejerk reaction, but don’t be afraid to take sides. Define your red lines and patrol them assiduously. This is the biggest political scrap since the cold war: autocracy versus democratic institutions; liberalism versus traditionalism; wall-building versus openness. The alt-right, Ukip and Breitbart understand that. Do you?"
How do liberals halt the march of the right? Stand our ground and toughen up - article by Matthew d'Ancona in The Guardian, referenced in John Naughton's Memex 1.1 blog. "The lesson of 2016 is that you are in a fight, and you lost the first round. This is not the moment for vague 'One Nation' rhetoric. It’s a time of political combat – whether you like it or not. Resist kneejerk reaction, but don’t be afraid to take sides. Define your red lines and patrol them assiduously. This is the biggest political scrap since the cold war: autocracy versus democratic institutions; liberalism versus traditionalism; wall-building versus openness. The alt-right, Ukip and Breitbart understand that. Do you?"
Seen and heard: November 2016
Humans series 2 – lovely to see a UK-based high-concept sci-fi series, especially one such as this which keeps on piling on the issues and the tension. Also nice to see Carrie-Anne Moss as the token American Dr Morrow (or should that be Moreau, as in The Island of Doctor Moreau).
Television’s opening night: how the box was born – fascinating reconstruction of the BBC’s first television transmission, or rather transmissions, since the broadcast was made twice using the two competing systems. Great experimental archaeology to reconstruct the now lost engineering of the Baird mechanical disc scanner.
Don Giovanni Behind the Curtain – a privilege to sing with Polymnia alongside the Glyndebourne chorus, in their introduction-to-opera show at Milton Keynes Theatre.
Close to the Enemy – drama series by Stephen Poliakov. Fascinating and compelling, as usual, although none of the characters are really likeable, even the one played by the very wonderful Alfred Molina.
Arrival – really super high concept SF film about communicating with aliens, except that it turns out to be actually about something else entirely which makes it even more brilliant. The plot and the short story on which it was based is nicely discussed here. I kept on being reminded of Jodie Foster’s Contact (obviously), also the pilot episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (‘The Emissary’), as well as a little known SF short story called ‘The Gift of Gab’ by Jack Vance. Amy Adams is great as the professional linguist; I’ve got myself a T-shirt of her handwritten whiteboard sign proclaiming ‘Human’.
Television’s opening night: how the box was born – fascinating reconstruction of the BBC’s first television transmission, or rather transmissions, since the broadcast was made twice using the two competing systems. Great experimental archaeology to reconstruct the now lost engineering of the Baird mechanical disc scanner.
Don Giovanni Behind the Curtain – a privilege to sing with Polymnia alongside the Glyndebourne chorus, in their introduction-to-opera show at Milton Keynes Theatre.
Close to the Enemy – drama series by Stephen Poliakov. Fascinating and compelling, as usual, although none of the characters are really likeable, even the one played by the very wonderful Alfred Molina.
Arrival – really super high concept SF film about communicating with aliens, except that it turns out to be actually about something else entirely which makes it even more brilliant. The plot and the short story on which it was based is nicely discussed here. I kept on being reminded of Jodie Foster’s Contact (obviously), also the pilot episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (‘The Emissary’), as well as a little known SF short story called ‘The Gift of Gab’ by Jack Vance. Amy Adams is great as the professional linguist; I’ve got myself a T-shirt of her handwritten whiteboard sign proclaiming ‘Human’.
Cuttings: November 2016
Susie Orbach: the poetry of therapy - article by Susie Orbach in The Guardian. "Like works of literature which introduce us to characters with increasing complexity and depth, the psychoanalytic endeavour involves the analyst and analysand in a quest to understand a multi-layered inner world.... As the deconstruction of known senses of self occurs, the words, timbre and tone may change. The therapist becomes alert to movement in language, to the disruption in the speech pattern, to the elements of surprise or reflection that halt a well-honed tale in its tracks, so that story or incident can be thought and felt about anew. The therapist’s language is particular to encounters with that individual. It is not therapy speak or psycho-babble. It is a bespoke relationship with a bespoke language.... The technical language of psychoanalysis is quite ugly and crude, but the words and ideas that emerge in sessions sing. Therapists discover that their own vocabularies are enriched by stretching to understand the subtlety of their analysands’ feelings and ways of being. The therapist may utter words they never knew they knew or had spoken before. The concepts that were suddenly urgent to explain, or the feeling that required meeting, produce new language and words in an order outside of ordinary conversation. That too has its beauty and its satisfactions."
The Corruption of Capitalism by Guy Standing: work matters less than what you own - review by Katrina Forrester in The Guardian. "Rentiers get their income not from labour but from rent on assets that they own or control. The global elite profits not just from desirable property or money moved offshore, but also from “intangible assets”: financial instruments such as stocks, derivatives and securities, or intellectual property, including brands and patents. While economists such as Thomas Piketty see capitalism necessarily tending towards rising inequality because of its own 'fundamental laws', Standing blames inequality on the 'rentier capitalism' that has flourished since the 1970s. This, he argues, has corrupted the dream of the free market. If capitalism is to work for the many not the few, what’s needed is what Keynes called the 'euthanasia of the rentier'.... This is a fascinating book that builds on a lifetime of empirical research, but its politics are hard to pin down. Standing is not advocating the redistribution of work or common ownership of assets, or union politics (even though today’s unions increasingly organise beyond the shopfloor). He wants policies that can mobilise defenders of free markets, too. Yet he sees rentiers as parasites producing nothing of value, and sometimes suggests only income earned through “hard work” can be deserved. This is an idea long out of fashion: it slips easily into a quasi-Victorian moralising distinction between deserving and undeserving poor, and a glorification of work that produces real material goods. Standing doesn’t go there, but implicitly inverts the categories to apply to a deserving and undeserving rich. It’s not capitalist profits that bother him, nor does he differentiate between the divergent interests of small and large businesses. The problem is the idle speculator who gives nothing back."
After The Maltese Falcon: how film noir took flight - article by Phil Hoad in The Guardian. "Like the enamelled 'black bird' everyone’s lusting after, there’s much to scratch at beneath the surface of The Maltese Falcon. It was the first mainstream hit to bring noir’s active ingredients together, but several had appeared in isolation in earlier films: the so-called 'proto-noirs'. Stranger on the Third Floor, a 1940 RKO B-production, had arresting expressionist dream sequences – the off-kilter visual style that German emigres brought to Hollywood and which was beginning to filter out of horror pictures into what became noir. (As its killer, it also had Peter Lorre, expressionism made flesh, and hypnotic as Joel Cairo in The Maltese Falcon.)... These premonitory outbursts suggested the US had something on its mind. The second world war is commonly cited in film studies as noir’s driving demon, with the troops returning to a different, more troubled world. But the pulp fiction that provided the bedrock for noir emerged after the first world war, the streetwise gumshoes and petty hoods marking a shift from the patrician, gentleman-sleuth crime fiction that had gone before. Hammett, Raymond Chandler, James M Cain and, the man who provided more direct story material for film noir than anyone else, Cornell Woolrich, were all already in full flow by the late 30s. The marginalised lives and lyrical sensitivity of French poetic-realist directors such as Marcel Carné and Jean Vigo provided another noir influence, as did the flood of Nazi-regime escapees – including Billy Wilder, Fritz Lang, Robert Siodmak and Edgar G Ulmer – who filled out its ranks. As well as cinematographic flair, a sense of paranoia and helplessness in the face of malignant institutions was their gift. The disillusioned mood creeping into Hollywood’s output towards the end of the 30s seemed more like a belated reaction to the great depression, rather than to a war the country wasn’t involved in yet."
The Power by Naomi Alderman: if girls ruled the world - review by Justine Jordan in The Guardian. "What would the world look like if men were afraid of women rather than women being afraid of men?... I don’t think I’ve ever seen the status quo inverted to such devastating effect as in Naomi Alderman’s fourth novel. It starts with teenage girls. At 14 or 15, the age when in our present world girls are waking to an awareness of their own sexuality tangled up in all the ways society will seek to stifle or exploit it, Alderman has them come alive to the thrill of pure power: the ability to hurt or even kill by releasing electrical jolts from their fingertips.... High-concept novels can be reductive, but Alderman’s book is multivalent. You can read the girls’ power as a symbol of untapped or unthinkable possibility as well as an SF plot device.... One of the most impressive aspects of the book is how it uses a new schematics of sex and power to illuminate our reality."
War, love and weirdness: A Matter of Life and Death 70 years on - article by Brian Dillon in The Guardian. "The opening scenes of A Matter of Life and Death are among the most audacious and moving ever confected by the cinematic magicians Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. After the whump of arrow on target that announces a production by the Archers, we are pitched into the blue-black vasts of space – the film-makers had consulted Arthur C Clarke about the design of their cosmos – where a voiceover guides us past eerie nebulae and exploding stars to our own fretful corner of the universe. On Earth it’s the night of 2 May 1945, a thousand-bomber raid has left a German city in flames, and British pilots have turned for home. Fog rolls across the screen, radios crackle with the voices of Hitler and Churchill. 'Listen,' says the narrator, echoing a line of Caliban’s in The Tempest, 'listen to all the noises in the air.'... The plot takes the risk of combining time travel, psychiatric melodrama and divine or supernatural intervention on Earth: all of which themes had recently been explored in other movies, though not yet in the same heady mix."
Facebook staff mount secret push to tackle fake news, reports say - article by Olivia Solon in The Guardian, referenced in John Naughton's Memex 1.1 blog. "The scrutiny over Facebook’s treatment of editorial content has been intensifying for months, reflecting the site’s unrivaled power and influence in distributing news alongside everything else its users share on the site. Fake or misleading news spreads like wildfire on Facebook because of confirmation bias, a quirk in human psychology that makes us more likely to accept information that conforms to our existing world views. The conspiracy theories are also amplified by a network of highly partisan media outlets with questionable editorial policies.... Part of the reason Google is better at tackling fake news than Facebook is that it lacks a popular social network (its own Google Plus service lags an order of magnitude behind Facebook) where stories get shared among users and where misinformation can spread like wildfire. It’s also because Google’s search engine favors webpages that are linked to by other established sites, which typically means fake news ranks lower."
Feel Different: Breaking Your Cell Phone’s Hold - article by David Antonio Perezcassar in Nautilus, referenced in MindHacks blog. "B. J. Fogg, a teacher at Stanford, started making waves when he introduced the concept of captology to the world. ... Fogg describes the field as the 'design, research, & analysis of interactive computing products created for the purpose of changing people’s attitudes or behaviors.'... In Persuasive Technology Fogg describes the way developers can use technology to change people’s behavior.... He might revive ... Skinner’s addictive research saying that persuasive technology’s 'reinforcers are most effective when they are unpredictable. Playing slot machines is a good example." He even describes examples of the addiction in effect, saying 'Some of my students have admitted to spending hours clicking over & over. Like pigeons pecking a lever to get a food pellet. My students, & thousands of other people, keep clicking.' ... While many apps have been made to help us get shit done, track our health, & learn new skills, the more popular (/addictive) ones continue to be those that sate boredom, track their users, & sell their users’ behavior to market research. ... Fogg, however, isn’t an amoral person. In his book he makes a point to stress the importance of applying ethics to the way designers create persuasive technology. Like Skinner, he sees a future where we use these manipulative machinations to promote longer, healthier, happier, lives."
The Election, Lao Tzu, a Cup of Water - blog post by Ursula K. Le Guin. "Americans are given to naming enemies and declaring righteous war against them.... The election of 2016 was one of the battles of the American Civil War. The Trump voters knew it, if we didn’t, and they won it. Their victory helps me see where my own thinking has been at fault. I will try never to use the metaphor of war where it doesn’t belong, because I think it has come to shape our thinking and dominate our minds so that we tend to see the destructive force of aggression as the only way to meet any challenge. I want to find a better way.... We have glamorized the way of the warrior for millennia. We have identified it as the supreme test and example of courage, strength, duty, generosity, and manhood. If I turn from the way of the warrior, where am I to seek those qualities? What way have I to go? Lao Tzu says: the way of water.... I know what I want. I want to live with courage, with compassion, in patience, in peace. The way of the warrior fully admits only the first of these, and wholly denies the last. The way of the water admits them all."
Has the internet become a failed state? - article by John Naughton in The Observer, referenced in his Memex 1.1 blog. "As far as cyberspace is concerned, the most interesting set of scenarios I’ve seen come from a US thinktank, the Atlantic Council. Its analyst, Jason Healey, sets out five candidates: [1] Status quo: a continuation of what we now have. 'Cyberspace is generally a safe place in which to do business and to communicate with others, even though criminals continue to engage in multimillion-dollar heists and steal millions of people’s personal details; national foreign intelligence agencies poke and prod for military and industrial secrets.' [2] Conflict domain: essentially an extrapolation of the militarisation of cyberspace that we are already seeing – a world in which cyberwarfare becomes common. [3] Balkanisation: cyberspace has broken into national fiefdoms: there is no single internet, just a collection of national internets. [4] Paradise: cyberspace becomes an overwhelmingly secure place where espionage, warfare and crime are rare. [5] Cybergeddon: cyberspace degenerates into a virtual failed state with all that that implies. Think modern-day Mogadishu. Some of these are more implausible than others. Healey’s 'paradise' scenario is pure fantasy. And the power of internet corporations – plus the reach and dominance of national intelligence agencies such as the NSA – suggest that some kind of (possibly repressive) order would be restored long before 'cybergeddon' would be reached. So we’re left with two real possibilities – some blend of Balkanisation and inter-state conflict, both extrapolations of trends that we can already observe."
The moral matrix that influences the way people vote - article by Nathalia Gjersoe in The Guardian Head Quarters blog. Jonathan Haidt and colleagues have [concluded, from literature review and field-work,] that the content of moral thinking is probably learned but that we are born already primed to think about morality along five channels (taken from http://moralfoundations.org): (1) Care/harm : This foundation is related to our long evolution as mammals with attachment systems and an ability to feel (and dislike) the pain of others. It underlies virtues of kindness, gentleness, and nurturance. (2) Fairness/cheating: This foundation is related to the evolutionary process of reciprocal altruism. It generates ideas of justice, rights, and autonomy. (3) Loyalty/betrayal: This foundation is related to our long history as tribal creatures able to form shifting coalitions. It underlies virtues of patriotism and self-sacrifice for the group. It is active anytime people feel that it’s 'one for all, and all for one.' (4) Authority/subversion: This foundation was shaped by our long primate history of hierarchical social interactions. It underlies virtues of leadership and followership, including deference to legitimate authority and respect for traditions. (5) Sanctity/degradation: This foundation was shaped by the psychology of disgust and contamination. It underlies religious notions of striving to live in an elevated, less carnal, more noble way. It underlies the widespread idea that the body is a temple which can be desecrated by immoral activities and contaminants (an idea not unique to religious traditions)."
The Corruption of Capitalism by Guy Standing: work matters less than what you own - review by Katrina Forrester in The Guardian. "Rentiers get their income not from labour but from rent on assets that they own or control. The global elite profits not just from desirable property or money moved offshore, but also from “intangible assets”: financial instruments such as stocks, derivatives and securities, or intellectual property, including brands and patents. While economists such as Thomas Piketty see capitalism necessarily tending towards rising inequality because of its own 'fundamental laws', Standing blames inequality on the 'rentier capitalism' that has flourished since the 1970s. This, he argues, has corrupted the dream of the free market. If capitalism is to work for the many not the few, what’s needed is what Keynes called the 'euthanasia of the rentier'.... This is a fascinating book that builds on a lifetime of empirical research, but its politics are hard to pin down. Standing is not advocating the redistribution of work or common ownership of assets, or union politics (even though today’s unions increasingly organise beyond the shopfloor). He wants policies that can mobilise defenders of free markets, too. Yet he sees rentiers as parasites producing nothing of value, and sometimes suggests only income earned through “hard work” can be deserved. This is an idea long out of fashion: it slips easily into a quasi-Victorian moralising distinction between deserving and undeserving poor, and a glorification of work that produces real material goods. Standing doesn’t go there, but implicitly inverts the categories to apply to a deserving and undeserving rich. It’s not capitalist profits that bother him, nor does he differentiate between the divergent interests of small and large businesses. The problem is the idle speculator who gives nothing back."
After The Maltese Falcon: how film noir took flight - article by Phil Hoad in The Guardian. "Like the enamelled 'black bird' everyone’s lusting after, there’s much to scratch at beneath the surface of The Maltese Falcon. It was the first mainstream hit to bring noir’s active ingredients together, but several had appeared in isolation in earlier films: the so-called 'proto-noirs'. Stranger on the Third Floor, a 1940 RKO B-production, had arresting expressionist dream sequences – the off-kilter visual style that German emigres brought to Hollywood and which was beginning to filter out of horror pictures into what became noir. (As its killer, it also had Peter Lorre, expressionism made flesh, and hypnotic as Joel Cairo in The Maltese Falcon.)... These premonitory outbursts suggested the US had something on its mind. The second world war is commonly cited in film studies as noir’s driving demon, with the troops returning to a different, more troubled world. But the pulp fiction that provided the bedrock for noir emerged after the first world war, the streetwise gumshoes and petty hoods marking a shift from the patrician, gentleman-sleuth crime fiction that had gone before. Hammett, Raymond Chandler, James M Cain and, the man who provided more direct story material for film noir than anyone else, Cornell Woolrich, were all already in full flow by the late 30s. The marginalised lives and lyrical sensitivity of French poetic-realist directors such as Marcel Carné and Jean Vigo provided another noir influence, as did the flood of Nazi-regime escapees – including Billy Wilder, Fritz Lang, Robert Siodmak and Edgar G Ulmer – who filled out its ranks. As well as cinematographic flair, a sense of paranoia and helplessness in the face of malignant institutions was their gift. The disillusioned mood creeping into Hollywood’s output towards the end of the 30s seemed more like a belated reaction to the great depression, rather than to a war the country wasn’t involved in yet."
The Power by Naomi Alderman: if girls ruled the world - review by Justine Jordan in The Guardian. "What would the world look like if men were afraid of women rather than women being afraid of men?... I don’t think I’ve ever seen the status quo inverted to such devastating effect as in Naomi Alderman’s fourth novel. It starts with teenage girls. At 14 or 15, the age when in our present world girls are waking to an awareness of their own sexuality tangled up in all the ways society will seek to stifle or exploit it, Alderman has them come alive to the thrill of pure power: the ability to hurt or even kill by releasing electrical jolts from their fingertips.... High-concept novels can be reductive, but Alderman’s book is multivalent. You can read the girls’ power as a symbol of untapped or unthinkable possibility as well as an SF plot device.... One of the most impressive aspects of the book is how it uses a new schematics of sex and power to illuminate our reality."
War, love and weirdness: A Matter of Life and Death 70 years on - article by Brian Dillon in The Guardian. "The opening scenes of A Matter of Life and Death are among the most audacious and moving ever confected by the cinematic magicians Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. After the whump of arrow on target that announces a production by the Archers, we are pitched into the blue-black vasts of space – the film-makers had consulted Arthur C Clarke about the design of their cosmos – where a voiceover guides us past eerie nebulae and exploding stars to our own fretful corner of the universe. On Earth it’s the night of 2 May 1945, a thousand-bomber raid has left a German city in flames, and British pilots have turned for home. Fog rolls across the screen, radios crackle with the voices of Hitler and Churchill. 'Listen,' says the narrator, echoing a line of Caliban’s in The Tempest, 'listen to all the noises in the air.'... The plot takes the risk of combining time travel, psychiatric melodrama and divine or supernatural intervention on Earth: all of which themes had recently been explored in other movies, though not yet in the same heady mix."
Facebook staff mount secret push to tackle fake news, reports say - article by Olivia Solon in The Guardian, referenced in John Naughton's Memex 1.1 blog. "The scrutiny over Facebook’s treatment of editorial content has been intensifying for months, reflecting the site’s unrivaled power and influence in distributing news alongside everything else its users share on the site. Fake or misleading news spreads like wildfire on Facebook because of confirmation bias, a quirk in human psychology that makes us more likely to accept information that conforms to our existing world views. The conspiracy theories are also amplified by a network of highly partisan media outlets with questionable editorial policies.... Part of the reason Google is better at tackling fake news than Facebook is that it lacks a popular social network (its own Google Plus service lags an order of magnitude behind Facebook) where stories get shared among users and where misinformation can spread like wildfire. It’s also because Google’s search engine favors webpages that are linked to by other established sites, which typically means fake news ranks lower."
Feel Different: Breaking Your Cell Phone’s Hold - article by David Antonio Perezcassar in Nautilus, referenced in MindHacks blog. "B. J. Fogg, a teacher at Stanford, started making waves when he introduced the concept of captology to the world. ... Fogg describes the field as the 'design, research, & analysis of interactive computing products created for the purpose of changing people’s attitudes or behaviors.'... In Persuasive Technology Fogg describes the way developers can use technology to change people’s behavior.... He might revive ... Skinner’s addictive research saying that persuasive technology’s 'reinforcers are most effective when they are unpredictable. Playing slot machines is a good example." He even describes examples of the addiction in effect, saying 'Some of my students have admitted to spending hours clicking over & over. Like pigeons pecking a lever to get a food pellet. My students, & thousands of other people, keep clicking.' ... While many apps have been made to help us get shit done, track our health, & learn new skills, the more popular (/addictive) ones continue to be those that sate boredom, track their users, & sell their users’ behavior to market research. ... Fogg, however, isn’t an amoral person. In his book he makes a point to stress the importance of applying ethics to the way designers create persuasive technology. Like Skinner, he sees a future where we use these manipulative machinations to promote longer, healthier, happier, lives."
The Election, Lao Tzu, a Cup of Water - blog post by Ursula K. Le Guin. "Americans are given to naming enemies and declaring righteous war against them.... The election of 2016 was one of the battles of the American Civil War. The Trump voters knew it, if we didn’t, and they won it. Their victory helps me see where my own thinking has been at fault. I will try never to use the metaphor of war where it doesn’t belong, because I think it has come to shape our thinking and dominate our minds so that we tend to see the destructive force of aggression as the only way to meet any challenge. I want to find a better way.... We have glamorized the way of the warrior for millennia. We have identified it as the supreme test and example of courage, strength, duty, generosity, and manhood. If I turn from the way of the warrior, where am I to seek those qualities? What way have I to go? Lao Tzu says: the way of water.... I know what I want. I want to live with courage, with compassion, in patience, in peace. The way of the warrior fully admits only the first of these, and wholly denies the last. The way of the water admits them all."
Has the internet become a failed state? - article by John Naughton in The Observer, referenced in his Memex 1.1 blog. "As far as cyberspace is concerned, the most interesting set of scenarios I’ve seen come from a US thinktank, the Atlantic Council. Its analyst, Jason Healey, sets out five candidates: [1] Status quo: a continuation of what we now have. 'Cyberspace is generally a safe place in which to do business and to communicate with others, even though criminals continue to engage in multimillion-dollar heists and steal millions of people’s personal details; national foreign intelligence agencies poke and prod for military and industrial secrets.' [2] Conflict domain: essentially an extrapolation of the militarisation of cyberspace that we are already seeing – a world in which cyberwarfare becomes common. [3] Balkanisation: cyberspace has broken into national fiefdoms: there is no single internet, just a collection of national internets. [4] Paradise: cyberspace becomes an overwhelmingly secure place where espionage, warfare and crime are rare. [5] Cybergeddon: cyberspace degenerates into a virtual failed state with all that that implies. Think modern-day Mogadishu. Some of these are more implausible than others. Healey’s 'paradise' scenario is pure fantasy. And the power of internet corporations – plus the reach and dominance of national intelligence agencies such as the NSA – suggest that some kind of (possibly repressive) order would be restored long before 'cybergeddon' would be reached. So we’re left with two real possibilities – some blend of Balkanisation and inter-state conflict, both extrapolations of trends that we can already observe."
The moral matrix that influences the way people vote - article by Nathalia Gjersoe in The Guardian Head Quarters blog. Jonathan Haidt and colleagues have [concluded, from literature review and field-work,] that the content of moral thinking is probably learned but that we are born already primed to think about morality along five channels (taken from http://moralfoundations.org): (1) Care/harm : This foundation is related to our long evolution as mammals with attachment systems and an ability to feel (and dislike) the pain of others. It underlies virtues of kindness, gentleness, and nurturance. (2) Fairness/cheating: This foundation is related to the evolutionary process of reciprocal altruism. It generates ideas of justice, rights, and autonomy. (3) Loyalty/betrayal: This foundation is related to our long history as tribal creatures able to form shifting coalitions. It underlies virtues of patriotism and self-sacrifice for the group. It is active anytime people feel that it’s 'one for all, and all for one.' (4) Authority/subversion: This foundation was shaped by our long primate history of hierarchical social interactions. It underlies virtues of leadership and followership, including deference to legitimate authority and respect for traditions. (5) Sanctity/degradation: This foundation was shaped by the psychology of disgust and contamination. It underlies religious notions of striving to live in an elevated, less carnal, more noble way. It underlies the widespread idea that the body is a temple which can be desecrated by immoral activities and contaminants (an idea not unique to religious traditions)."
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