Three good critiques of libertarianism:
And, less seriously, this.
I’m attending the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) conference this week. I’ve read a lot of papers from past proceedings but this is the first time I’ve attended. (A few interesting talks and posters but so far nothing particularly applicable to work. Still a few days to go though.) Anyhow, best quote so far from the meeting:
You might think that you can move in any direction in the tomato space.
Ah, but you can’t! In all seriousness, the speaker was talking about a mathematical representation of tomatoes from unripe to ripe to sliced or diced. More generally, his topic was representation of objects undergoing transformations. It was an interesting talk.
III
UNCIVILISATION
Without mystery, without curiosity and without the form imposed by a partial answer, there can be no stories—only confessions, communiqués, memories and fragments of autobiographical fantasy which for the moment pass as novels.
– John Berger, ‘A Story for Aesop’, from Keeping a Rendezvous
If we are indeed teetering on the edge of a massive change in how we live, in how human society itself is constructed, and in how we relate to the rest of the world, then we were led to this point by the stories we have told ourselves — above all, by the story of civilisation.
This story has many variants, religious and secular, scientific, economic and mystic. But all tell of humanity’s original transcendence of its animal beginnings, our growing mastery over a ‘nature’ to which we no longer belong, and the glorious future of plenty and prosperity which will follow when this mastery is complete. It is the story of human centrality, of a species destined to be lord of all it surveys, unconfined by the limits that apply to other, lesser creatures.
What makes this story so dangerous is that, for the most part, we have forgotten that it is a story. It has been told so many times by those who see themselves as rationalists, even scientists; heirs to the Enlightenment’s legacy — a legacy which includes the denial of the role of stories in making the world.
Must Read
Should Read
At this point, cremation is my best bet for getting a hot smoking body.
You sometimes find in non-literate cultures [the] development of the most extraordinary linguistic systems: often there’s tremendous sophistication about language, and people play all sorts of games with language.
What all these things look like is that people just want to use their intelligence somehow, and if you don’t have a lot of technology and so on, you do other things.
Well, in our society, we have things that you might use your intelligence on, like politics, but people really can’t get involved in them in a very serious way — so what they do is they put their minds into other things, such as sports.
You’re trained to be obedient; you don’t have an interesting job; there’s no work around for you that’s creative; in the cultural environment you’re a passive observer of usually pretty tawdry stuff; political and social life are out of your range, they’re in the hands of the rich folks. So what’s left? Well, one thing that’s left is sports — so you put a lot of the intelligence and the thought and the self-confidence into that. And I suppose that’s also one of the basic functions it serves in the society in general: it occupies the population, and keeps them from trying to get involved with things that really matter.
From the outset there was reason to believe that, as head of the Securities and Exchange Commission, Mary Jo White would not be an effective regulator. Lo and behold that’s how things are playing out. Ms. White has pissed off Sen. Warren. Sen. Warren sent her a letter the other day expressing her displeasure.
Thank you, Weezer. And now here’s Rage Against the Machine with an alternative perspective… “Down Rodeo”!
Handing what we used to call The Commons over to private enterprises — especially private enterprises operating in the ethical wasteland of modern American corporations — doesn’t work. It is an invitation for the wolverines who run such enterprises to steal as much of the public treasury as they can and then stick us with the bill when they inevitably fail, because these corporations are not about building things. They’re about abetting the transfer of money upwards, to a stockholder class. They are vehicles for the financial services industry.