cobblehillbilly

Sunday, January 5, 2014

Links

What Poor People Really Do: Ben Irwin: Huffington Post
What The NSA Really Does: Jacob Appelbaum: Naked Capitalism
Trials Of Clapper: Marcy Wheeler: Emptywheel
Debt Rises When Banks Raise Customer Rates: J. W. Mason
Market Morality: L. Bruni & R. Sugden: Journal Of Economic Perspectives

Friday, January 3, 2014

CULTURALLY CONSTRUCTED INDIVIDUALS

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
Mother Father Family Community Civilization

Food Tools Communication Language Literature

As consciousness organizes the mind, extensions of identity accrue adding to awareness the perception of belonging that comes with effective engagement. The first place in each of the above sequences is occupied by a primal awareness. By the second place, sociability and culture are already coming into effect. Associative feelings are interacting with deliberately crafted transfers of functional knowledge. Sociability is instinctive and innate; culture is adaptive and external. By the third place, consciousness is already integrating experience at the highest level found biologically outside the human community. But the typical human differentiation of meanings has just begun and proliferates at the level of the fourth set, the advent of society, it positively explodes as literature makes Civilization possible.

Our expanding awareness reaches deeper and deeper into our social and material environments. When the written word transubstantiated cultures into Civilizations it increased the depth of those environments exponentially.

The paired terms above describe the human (social) and functional (cultural/technical) extensions of our infant identity. As we come to recognize the people and tools within our perceptual sphere, first we develop the entirely functional relationships of our pre-linguistic state, but then, as language becomes available we begin to tell ourselves stories about who we are and how we relate to these people and things. This is the process of individuation and the stories we tell ourselves ultimately become our representations to ourselves of identity. This is how we define the relation of our goals and sense of self to the civilization into which we have been delivered.

Acculturation refines our relationships with both people and with things. Our need for self-definition engages us with our cultures stories.

In communities individual actions are constrained by group needs and individuals’ reciprocal need for groups. Personal effectiveness within the group devolves from aligning individual motives with the motives of the group, from self control. Agreements of meaning, what it means to the group for an individual to be brave for instance, make this possible: courage defends the group from threat at individual risk and the group confers prestige on the courageous as an expression of agreement of benefit provided. Courage has meaning for a group that then reinforces courage as a personal meaning

Brand, Paxman and the Democratic Aesthetic

I posted this BBC interview of Russell Brand by Jeremy Paxman recently as a Link because I was attracted to Brand's ethical zeal. I thought he called out a laziness on Paxman's part that seemed to me a fair proxy for the general inertness of most Western Liberalisms. But it keeps bubbling back to the front of my mind: there is something deeper going on here that yields both a more positive picture of Paxman and a potentially useful shift in perspective.

Brands's position is one of direct ethical experience: the people he knows and cares about are being systematically screwed by a system that is neither representative nor just. Paxman tries to maintain a position above this looking at the institutional implications of Brands' ethical assertions. When Paxman suggests one can't take political comments seriously from someone who refuses to engage with the political system, he is trying to draw Brand's energy into a system of political institutions in which, I suspect, Paxman believes deeply: he calls this amalgamation of systems "democracy" and is adamant that participation in its processes is the sine qua non of political engagement short of the might makes right kind of engagement typical of authoritarianisms.

Brand is having none of it because he has too much direct experience of the deleterious affects of Paxman's system, such as it has become. Brand has the imagination and curiosity to see the realities of environmental and human degradation rampant in the nominally democratic world he inhabits. I don't think anyone who pays attention and is honest about what they learn can any longer sustain the argument that, world wide or even in the West, our current technologies in combination with our existing political economics are by any stretch any where near sustainable. Not only this, but looking just at the political economics, there is no plausible argument that anything significant is moving in a positive direction. Much better arguments exist that political economic events are accelerating rapidly toward some decidedly bleak, even disastrous outcomes.

But Paxman's history is right: representative government has the best record throughout history in ameliorating broad popular problems and mitigating the distributional sclerosis entrenched institutions embody once institutional imperatives take on bureaucratic life of their own. So what is really

Links

Making Sure Ideas Don't Matter: Benjamin Bratton: The Guardian
And The Real World Consequences: Jim Yardley: New York Times
Bareback With The NSA: Yves Smith: Naked Capitalism
NSA Secret Toolbox: Appelbaum et al.: Der Spiegel
The State Of TBTF: Richard Fisher: MathBabe
Republicans Declare War On GOP: Matt Taibbi: Rolling Stone

Monday, December 30, 2013

Links

Revolutionary Idealism: Russel Brand: BBC
Revolutionary Practice: Patrick Cockburn: LRB
Revolutionary Theory: James Petras: The People's Voice
Animal Spirits: Philip Pilkington: Naked Capitalism
The Welfare Queen: Josh Levin: Slate

Saturday, December 28, 2013

CHAPTER I: INTRODUCTION TO THE WORLD

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
A fine film of salt dries on our skin and air fills our lungs, smell sears our sinuses, bright lights and sharp sounds strike our eyes and ears for the first time: we cry. Even in utero we were on our own with our perceptions. Postpartum, with luck, we have five senses sending stimuli through the gossamer filagree of incipient mind in a growing brain in a soft skull re-forming itself from its recent passage. We are susceptible to all sorts of environmental risks, not the least of which is to whom we have been born. Our undifferentiated perceptions feed into, amorphous thoughts reach out from motives innate and mysterious that time and maturity serve only to further obscure. Want figures large. With obvious somatic purpose, it is easy to understand want for food and shelter (eventually spawn): to the newborn, want is the only comprehensible experience. But it's avaricious, cavalier to distinguishing real needs from wonton desires. Want charms all our motives with the conceit of its own centrality, never holding itself to account; this it does from our first waking moment. Want is the minds experience of the will to be and to become, the chthonic legacy of ancient motives acting on it from its first waking. And want is minds’ everything until external feedback begins to organize and disaggregate the underlying impulses: to make meaning.

We are borne alone with our senses. Our mind is driven into the world by our bodies needs which are the basis of all meaning.

Mind is remote from the world and in learning to model it in a useful way is dependant on signals arriving from tools that measure specific properties of that world, our senses. This doesn’t make the world a construct, but it does makes us dependent on the models our senses construct for what

Links

Local Money, Local Resilience: Nicole Foss: The Automatic Earth
Something Tool Like, With No Real Use: Willem Buiter: Credit Writedowns
Sorcerers Apprentice: Jesse: Jesses Crossroads Cafe
Senescence Of The New Deal: Ian Welsh
Actually, Its' All About Power: Ezra Klein: WonkBlog

Tuesday, December 24, 2013

Air Rights

Michael Kimmelman has an interesting front page article in the Times today. With these questions,"do we need more public oversight when it comes to the city’s stratospheric architecture? Are we selling off our skyline to the plutocrats? Or are those who occupy these spaces serving up much needed tax revenue to the city?" he asks the most penetrating political questions to grace the front page of the Grey Lady in memory. Disregarding horse races between powerful actors, ignoring "partisan" "divisions" and instead considering what is universally obvious about the relationship of money and power to anyone who tries to live in Manhattan he asks why wealth alone should dictate the form of our shared human habitat.

"Do we need more oversight when it comes to the city's stratospheric architecture?" is an intricately pointed question. The author appears only superficially aware of what it is he has asked. In a sane world where the origin of most useable energy was recognized to be the sun, an urban zoning envelope would look like this:

Solar Envelope: Low Tech Magazine

Alas, ours is not such a world and Mr. Kimmelman glints off the surface of this glaring reality blind to the incentive structure that zoning is, assuming underlying property rights extend logically to the stratosphere. While urban living is vastly more efficient in total energy use than our current dominant suburban form, a land use model that took energy availability and long term sustainability seriously would look at the sun and its relationship to property boundaries in a form similar to the "mineral rights" under ground. Before even this though, the issue of oversight asks more than our current institutions can provide. Landmarks has uniquely and for the benefit of the wealthy determined their usufruct extends no higher than the aging and myopic eyes of that institution can focus: the last time I stood before that august commission, looking to modify a tiny penthouse, making it