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Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1% - 0 views

www.vanityfair.com/...top-one-percent-201105 society generations
shared by anonymous on 06 Apr 11 - Cached
  • While the top 1 percent have seen their incomes rise 18 percent over the past decade, those in the middle have actually seen their incomes fall.
  • Those who have contributed great positive innovations to our society, from the pioneers of genetic understanding to the pioneers of the Information Age, have received a pittance compared with those responsible for the financial innovations that brought our global economy to the brink of ruin.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 06 Apr 11
       
      This is, in fact, where libertarian economic policies fall down for me. Even if I were to consider them abstractly appealing, the reality is that the winner is the person who exploits, bends, and mutilates the rules, not merely to those who are most productive or creative.
  • An economy in which most citizens are doing worse year after year—an economy like America’s—is not likely to do well over the long haul. There are several reasons for this.
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • First, growing inequality is the flip side of something else: shrinking opportunity.
  • Second, many of the distortions that lead to inequality—such as those associated with monopoly power and preferential tax treatment for special interests—undermine the efficiency of the economy.
  • Third, and perhaps most important, a modern economy requires “collective action”—it needs government to invest in infrastructure, education, and technology.
  • None of this should come as a surprise—it is simply what happens when a society’s wealth distribution becomes lopsided.
  • The top 1 percent may complain about the kind of government we have in America, but in truth they like it just fine: too gridlocked to re-distribute, too divided to do anything but lower taxes.
  • But one big part of the reason we have so much inequality is that the top 1 percent want it that way.
  • The most obvious example involves tax policy. Lowering tax rates on capital gains, which is how the rich receive a large portion of their income, has given the wealthiest Americans close to a free ride.
  • During the savings-and-loan scandal of the 1980s—a scandal whose dimensions, by today’s standards, seem almost quaint—the banker Charles Keating was asked by a congressional committee whether the $1.5 million he had spread among a few key elected officials could actually buy influence. “I certainly hope so,” he replied.
  • When pharmaceutical companies receive a trillion-dollar gift—through legislation prohibiting the government, the largest buyer of drugs, from bargaining over price—it should not come as cause for wonder. It should not make jaws drop that a tax bill cannot emerge from Congress unless big tax cuts are put in place for the wealthy. Given the power of the top 1 percent, this is the way you would expect the system to work.
  • America’s inequality distorts our society in every conceivable way.
  • lifestyle effect
  • distorts our foreign policy
  • The rules of economic globalization are likewise designed to benefit the rich
  • they encourage competition among countries for business
  • if the rules were designed instead to encourage competition among countries for workers.
  • the erosion of our sense of identity, in which fair play, equality of opportunity, and a sense of community are so important.
  • anonymous on 06 Apr 11
     
    "Americans have been watching protests against oppressive regimes that concentrate massive wealth in the hands of an elite few. Yet in our own democracy, 1 percent of the people take nearly a quarter of the nation's income-an inequality even the wealthy will come to regret."
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Looking Closer » Blog Archive » Give us somebody we can blast into pieces! - 0 views

lookingcloser.org/...ebody-we-can-blast-into-pieces generations
shared by anonymous on 05 Apr 11 - Cached
  • We’re seeing more and more movies that suggest that the world is in crisis, and that our methods for saving it are failing. We’re looking for hope in all the old familiar places, and those stories are starting to seem unsatisfying.
  • anonymous on 05 Apr 11
     
    "We're seeing more and more movies that suggest that the world is in crisis, and that our methods for saving it are failing. We're looking for hope in all the old familiar places, and those stories are starting to seem unsatisfying. It used to be that we could find catharsis by demonizing another culture and making them the enemy. But globalization, technology, and an increasingly multicultural America have brought us into closer relationship with people who are different from us. It's harder for American storytellers to make scapegoats out of people who are different than us. We used to cast Russians and Japanese and Iraqis as "the Enemy." Now, we're more careful. We've learned that it's dangerous and foolish to portray another culture as thoroughly corrupt. And we're coming to see that Americans can be as corrupt as the worst of them."
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How Slavery Really Ended in America - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...mag-03CivilWar-t.html
shared by anonymous on 05 Apr 11 - Cached
  • anonymous on 05 Apr 11
     
    "On May 23, 1861, little more than a month into the Civil War, three young black men rowed across the James River in Virginia and claimed asylum in a Union-held citadel. Fort Monroe, Va., a fishhook-shaped spit of land near the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay, had been a military post since the time of the first Jamestown settlers. This spot where the slaves took refuge was also, by remarkable coincidence, the spot where slavery first took root, one summer day in 1619, when a Dutch ship landed with some 20 African captives for the fledgling Virginia Colony. Two and half centuries later, in the first spring of the Civil War, Fort Monroe was a lonely Union redoubt in the heart of newly Confederate territory. Its defenders stood on constant guard. Frigates and armed steamers crowded the nearby waters known as Hampton Roads, one of the world's great natural harbors. Perspiring squads of soldiers hauled giant columbiad cannons from the fort's wharf up to its stone parapets. Yet history would come to Fort Monroe not amid the thunder of guns and the clash of fleets, but stealthily, under cover of darkness, in a stolen boat."
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Immaculate Intervention: The Wars of Humanitarianism - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...ervention-wars-humanitarianism
shared by anonymous on 05 Apr 11 - Cached
  • Since World War II, a new class of war has emerged that we might call humanitarian wars — wars in which the combatants claim to be fighting neither for their national interest nor to impose any ideology, but rather to prevent inordinate human suffering.
  • In humanitarian wars, the intervention is designed both to be neutral and to protect potential victims on one side.
  • That no one intervened to prevent or stop these atrocities was seen as a moral failure. According to this ideology, the international community has an obligation to prevent such slaughter.
  • ...27 more annotations...
  • In international wars, where the aggressor is trying to both kill large numbers of civilians and destroy the enemy’s right to national self-determination, this does not pose a significant intellectual problem.
  • In internal unrest and civil war, however, the challenge of the intervention is to protect human rights without undermining national sovereignty or the right of national self-determination.
  • I call humanitarian wars immaculate intervention, because most advocates want to see the outcome limited to preventing war crimes, not extended to include regime change or the imposition of alien values.
  • They want a war of immaculate intentions surgically limited to a singular end without other consequences. And this is where the doctrine of humanitarian war unravels.
  • What we are seeing in Libya is a classic slow escalation motivated by two factors.
  • The first is the hope that the leader of the country responsible for the bloodshed will capitulate.
  • The second is a genuine reluctance of intervening nations to spend excessive wealth or blood on a project they view in effect as charitable.
  • The expectation of capitulation in the case of Libya is made unlikely by another aspect of humanitarian war fighting, namely the International Criminal Court (ICC).
  • While a logical extension of humanitarian warfare — having intervened against atrocities, the perpetrators ought to be brought to justice — the effect is a prolongation of the war. The example of Slobodan Milosevic of Yugoslavia, who ended the Kosovo War with what he thought was a promise that he would not be prosecuted, undoubtedly is on Gadhafi’s mind.
  • But the war is also prolonged by the unwillingness of the intervening forces to inflict civilian casualties.
  • The application of minimal and insufficient force, combined with the unwillingness of people like Gadhafi and his equally guilty supporters to face The Hague, creates the framework for a long and inconclusive war in which the intervention in favor of humanitarian considerations turns into an intervention in a civil war on the side that opposes the regime.
  • It should be remembered that many of Libya’s opposition leaders are former senior officials of the Gadhafi government. They did not survive as long as they did in that regime without having themselves committed crimes, and without being prepared to commit more.
  • At some point, the interveners have the choice of walking away and leaving chaos, as the United States did in Somalia, or staying for a long time and fighting, as they did in Iraq.
  • Regardless of the United States’ other motivations in both conflicts, it would seem that those who favor humanitarian intervention would have favored the Iraq war. That they generally opposed the Iraq war from the beginning requires a return to the concept of immaculate intervention.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 05 Apr 11
       
      For those generally anti-war, this is a less-than-delightful realization, but (I think) jibes with reality more. However, former President Bush and his advisers established justification (WMD's) that affected both intentions and expectations from people on all sides of the debate. Notwithstanding the good intentions of those who advocate humanitarian wars, the effect can never be what is desired.
  • Hussein was a war criminal and a danger to his people. However, the American justification for intervention was not immaculate.
  • That it also had a humanitarian outcome — the destruction of the Hussein regime — made the American intervention inappropriate in the view of those who favor immaculate interventions for two reasons.
  • First, the humanitarian outcome was intended as part of a broader war.
  • Second, regardless of the fact that humanitarian interventions almost always result in regime change, the explicit intention to usurp Iraq’s national self-determination openly undermined in principle what the humanitarian interveners wanted to undermine only in practice.
  • for the humanitarian warrior, there are other political considerations.
  • In the case of the French, the contrast between their absolute opposition to Iraq and their aggressive desire to intervene in Libya needs to be explained. I suspect it will not be.
  • Perhaps it was about oil in this case, but Gadhafi was happily shipping oil to Europe, so intervening to ensure that it continues makes no sense.
  • Sometimes the lack of a persuasive reason for a war generates theories to fill the vacuum. In all humanitarian wars, there is a belief that the war could not be about humanitarian matters.
  • Therein lays the dilemma of humanitarian wars. They have a tendency to go far beyond the original intent behind them, as the interveners, trapped in the logic of humanitarian war, are drawn further in. Over time, the ideological zeal frays and the lack of national interest saps the intervener’s will.
  • My unease with humanitarian intervention is not that I don’t think the intent is good and the end moral. It is that the intent frequently gets lost and the moral end is not achieved. Ideology, like passion, fades. But interest has a certain enduring quality.
  • A doctrine of humanitarian warfare that demands an immaculate intervention will fail because the desire to do good is an insufficient basis for war.
  • In the end, the ultimate dishonesties of humanitarian war are the claims that “this won’t hurt much” and “it will be over fast.”
  • If you must go in, go in heavy, go in hard and get out fast. Humanitarian warfare says that you go in light, you go in soft and you stay there long.
  • anonymous on 05 Apr 11
     
    "There are wars in pursuit of interest. In these wars, nations pursue economic or strategic ends to protect the nation or expand its power. There are also wars of ideology, designed to spread some idea of "the good," whether this good is religious or secular. The two obviously can be intertwined, such that a war designed to spread an ideology also strengthens the interests of the nation spreading the ideology."
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The Digital Generation Rediscovers the Magic of Manual Typewriters - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...31Typewriter.html forposting
shared by anonymous on 31 Mar 11 - No Cached
  • Another virtue is simplicity. Typewriters are good at only one thing: putting words on paper. “If I’m on a computer, there’s no way I can concentrate on just writing, said Jon Roth, 23, a journalist who is writing a book on typewriters. “I’ll be checking my e-mail, my Twitter.” When he uses a typewriter, Mr. Roth said: “I can sit down and I know I’m writing. It sounds like I’m writing.”
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 31 Mar 11
       
      I can actually appreciate the aesthetic conveyed here. However, the limitations of the technology aren't anything I'd like to relive. Jams, white out, jams, jams. Also, word processing has allowed writers to evolve ideas at a dizzying rate. True, we all miss typewriters, but going back to one? Where are the NYT articles talking about the quill and parchment rennaisance?
  • anonymous on 31 Mar 11
     
    "EVEN by Brooklyn standards, it was a curious spectacle: a dozen mechanical contraptions sat on a white tablecloth, emitting occasional clacks and dings. Shoppers peered at the display, excited but hesitant, as if they'd stumbled upon a trove of strange inventions from a Jules Verne fantasy. Some snapped pictures with their iPhones. "
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What Happened to the American Declaration of War? - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...pened-american-declaration-war
shared by anonymous on 29 Mar 11 - Cached
  • World War II was the last war the United States fought with a formal declaration of war.
  • the Constitution is explicit in requiring a formal declaration. It does so for two reasons, I think.
  • The first is to prevent the president from taking the country to war without the consent of the governed, as represented by Congress.
  • ...21 more annotations...
  • Second, by providing for a specific path to war, it provides the president power and legitimacy he would not have without that declaration; it both restrains the president and empowers him.
  • But that’s what the founders intended: Going to war should be difficult; once at war, the commander in chief’s authority should be unquestionable.
  • In understanding how war and constitutional norms became separated, we must begin with the first major undeclared war in American history (the Civil War was not a foreign war), Korea.
  • Truman’s view was that U.N. sanction for the war superseded the requirement for a declaration of war in two ways.
  • First, it was not a war in the strict sense, he argued, but a “police action” under the U.N. Charter.
  • Second, the U.N. Charter constituted a treaty, therefore implicitly binding the United States to go to war if the United Nations so ordered.
  • It was understood that if nuclear war occurred, either through an attack by the Soviets or a first strike by the United States, time and secrecy made a prior declaration of war by Congress impossible. In the expected scenario of a Soviet first strike, there would be only minutes for the president to authorize counterstrikes and no time for constitutional niceties.
  • Nuclear war was seen as the most realistic war-fighting scenario, with all other forms of war trivial in comparison. Just as nuclear weapons came to be called “strategic weapons” with other weapons of war occupying a lesser space, nuclear war became identical with war in general.
  • In Vietnam, the issue was not some legal or practical justification for not asking for a declaration. Rather, it was a political consideration.
  • Johnson did not know that he could get a declaration; the public might not be prepared to go to war. For this reason, rather than ask for a declaration, he used all the prior precedents to simply go to war without a declaration. In my view, that was the moment the declaration of war as a constitutional imperative collapsed. And in my view, so did the Johnson presidency. In hindsight, he needed a declaration badly, and if he could not get it, Vietnam would have been lost, and so may have been his presidency. Since Vietnam was lost anyway from lack of public consensus, his decision was a mistake. But it set the stage for everything that came after — war by resolution rather than by formal constitutional process.
  • All of this came just before the United States emerged as the world’s single global power — a global empire — that by definition would be waging war at an increased tempo, from Kuwait, to Haiti, to Kosovo, to Afghanistan, to Iraq, and so on in an ever-increasing number of operations. And now in Libya, we have reached the point that even resolutions are no longer needed.
  • The goal in war is to prevent the other side from acting, not to punish the actors.
  • One of the dilemmas that could have been avoided was the massive confusion of whether the United States was engaged in hunting down a criminal conspiracy or waging war on a foreign enemy. If the former, then the goal is to punish the guilty. If the latter, then the goal is to destroy the enemy. Imagine that after Pearl Harbor, FDR had promised to hunt down every pilot who attacked Pearl Harbor and bring them to justice, rather than calling for a declaration of war against a hostile nation and all who bore arms on its behalf regardless of what they had done
  • A declaration of war, I am arguing, is an essential aspect of war fighting particularly for the republic when engaged in frequent wars. It achieves a number of things.
  • First, it holds both Congress and the president equally responsible for the decision, and does so unambiguously.
  • Second, it affirms to the people that their lives have now changed and that they will be bearing burdens.
  • Third, it gives the president the political and moral authority he needs to wage war on their behalf and forces everyone to share in the moral responsibility of war.
  • And finally, by submitting it to a political process, many wars might be avoided.
  • The declaration of war is precisely the point at which imperial interests can overwhelm republican prerogatives.
  • I am not making the argument that constant accommodation to reality does not have to be made. I am making the argument that the suspension of Section 8 of Article I as if it is possible to amend the Constitution with a wink and nod represents a mortal threat to the republic. If this can be done, what can’t be done?
  • As our international power and interests surge, it would seem reasonable that our commitment to republican principles would surge. These commitments appear inconvenient. They are meant to be. War is a serious matter, and presidents and particularly Congresses should be inconvenienced on the road to war. Members of Congress should not be able to hide behind ambiguous resolutions only to turn on the president during difficult times, claiming that they did not mean what they voted for. A vote on a declaration of war ends that.
  • anonymous on 29 Mar 11
     
    "In my book "The Next Decade," I spend a good deal of time considering the relation of the American Empire to the American Republic and the threat the empire poses to the republic. If there is a single point where these matters converge, it is in the constitutional requirement that Congress approve wars through a declaration of war and in the abandonment of this requirement since World War II. This is the point where the burdens and interests of the United States as a global empire collide with the principles and rights of the United States as a republic."
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5 Things They Never Told Us - 0 views

www.cracked.com/...5-things-they-never-told-us
shared by anonymous on 25 Mar 11 - Cached
  • #5.You Don't Become An Adult, You Just Suddenly Are One
  • There's no class or test or paperwork to sign. One day you just realize you're a person who pays bills. You're a person who signs up for a club card at your local grocery store because, "Oh, I might as well, I'm there so often." You're a person who gradually is getting less and less familiar with whatever's going on in pop music. You can vote and rent a car and get married and have kids, and it's not weird, it's normal.You're an adult, and no one told you.
  • Remember when you were a kid and you saw adults as all-knowing authority figures who had shit figured out? As the people who were allowed to tell you what to do and make rules, because they were the ones who were running the world? That's what kids think when they see you, even though you're an idiot.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • #4.Almost Everything You're Doing is Absolutely Meaningless
  • The only skills you really need to learn in high school and college are how to socialize and be a functioning human in society, because that's the only thing you'll be consistently doing for the rest of your life.
  • College is important, but what you study? Not so much. Focus on learning how to be a human, and focus on networking and meeting the right people, because they are much better at hiring you than your GPA is. Professors and Deans and your parents will stress that your grades are important, but I guarantee you that, as long as they were good at their job, no one in the history of time has ever been fired because of their GPA.
  • You'll Never Have as Much Time, Energy, Or Excuses For Doing Dumb Shit Than When You're 14
  • At 14, you're not legally allowed to work in most states, school is a pointless breeze and you have nothing to be stressed about because you're not paying bills or fighting in a war and no one depends on you for anything. You just have boundless energy, and a stupid amount of free time and no accountability whatsoever.
  • anonymous on 25 Mar 11
     
    "Given the opportunity, there are probably a lot of tiny, superficial things you say to your fourteen-year-old self, (Get a haircut; Stop being a smartass; Maybe try not masturbating for, like, a night, and see what that does to the amount of free time you have). Small things you wish you'd known, because they would've made middle school, high school and whatever comes after slightly easier. There are also much bigger things, things about life and growing up that someone damn sure should've told you about."
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Agenda: With George Friedman on Libya and Israel - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...orge-friedman-libya-and-israel geopolitics libya
shared by anonymous on 25 Mar 11 - Cached
  • anonymous on 25 Mar 11
     
    "As NATO is taking control of Libya's no-fly zone, STRATFOR CEO George Friedman discusses a potential stalemate on the battlefield, and he explains why the new attacks by Hamas on soft targets near Tel Aviv enticing Israeli retaliation are a serious concern."
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Russia Rises Amid Geopolitical Events - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...rises-amid-geopolitical-events
shared by anonymous on 24 Mar 11 - Cached
  • In fact, Russia may be the one country that stands to gain from the various calamities in 2011.
  • First, the general unrest in the Middle East has increased the price of oil by 18.5 percent.
  • Second, the Libyan unrest has cut off the 11 billion cubic-meter natural gas (bcm) Greenstream pipeline to Italy, causing Europe’s third largest consumer of natural gas to turn to Russia to make up the difference.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • But the most beneficial of all events for Russia may be the psychological effect that the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant crisis is having on Western Europe.
  • One of the reasons Russia grew so strong over the past decade is that its rival, the United States, was focused elsewhere. Moscow has been growing nervous in the past year knowing that Washington is starting to wrap up its commitments in the Middle East and South Asia. There is a discussion now rumbling through the Kremlin whether the events in the Middle East may keep the United States focused there a while longer, giving Russia even more time to cement its nearly dominant position in Eurasia. Thus far, the Kremlin must be satisfied with what the first three months of 2011 have brought in terms of its own strategic interests.
  • anonymous on 24 Mar 11
     
    "The first three months of 2011 have had a steady flow of geopolitically relevant events. A youth named Mohamed Bouazizi, protesting corruption and government harassment in Tunisia, set more than himself alight on Dec. 17: He set an entire region on fire. Soon after, Tunisia and Egypt saw their long-time rulers fall. Libya essentially descended into civil war, and exit is uncertain. On Monday, almost exactly three months after Bouazizi's self-immolation, the Saudi-led Gulf Cooperation Council's forces entered the tiny island nation of Bahrain to prevent Iran from exploiting the anti-government protests there. The region's unrest continues with almost daily action in North Africa and the Middle East. Around the globe, the March 11 Japan Tohoku earthquake rocked the world's third largest economy and has caused the most serious nuclear accident since the 1986 Chernobyl disaster."
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5 Reasons Humanity Is Terrible at Democracy | Cracked.com - 0 views

www.cracked.com/-terrible-at-democracy_p2.html
shared by anonymous on 24 Mar 11 - No Cached
  • Polls consistently show that we think those who disagree with us politically are simply bad people, on a personal level.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 24 Mar 11
       
      What's fascinating is how irrelevant our partisan political affiliations are, on a day to day basis, but oh how we imagine them to be the center of our being.
  • Now take a look at this study, which compared a person's average political knowledge with their primary source of news. The results were surprising: The most knowledgeable groups were viewers of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. Hot on their heels? Fans of Bill O'Reilly and Rush Limbaugh.
  • Never mind the fact that it's a pretty bad sign when the most politically educated people in the country are relying on either comedy shows or political pundits for their news. The key is that these outlets are primarily about ruthlessly mocking and dismissing the other side. Yet they attract more knowledgeable voters, not less.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • In the world of psychology, they call this attitude polarization; the more times the average person spends thinking about a subject, the more extreme his position becomes -- even if he doesn't run across any new information.
  • once you get to the point where you're rooting so hard for one side of an issue that you're just short of painting your chest in team colors, then all that time spent reading up on the issues stops being about becoming an informed citizen and becomes more about accumulating ammunition for the next argument.
  • #1. We Hate Each Other Over Imaginary Differences
  • For example, a study asked Americans of various demographics and political stances about the ideal way they feel wealth should be distributed across the country. Young or old, male or female, Republican or Democrat, the answers they provided were almost identical.
  • Don't get us wrong; it's not that there are no disagreements, it's just that we vastly overestimate the degree to which we disagree, because the differences are all we focus on.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 24 Mar 11
       
      For instance: During the Obama-McCain debates, their stated foreign policy stance was virtually identical. It was only on matters of how quickly a withdrawal would occur, not whether, if and how. This was almost completely glossed over by the left. In fact, the broad continuance of foreign policy is evidence of a geopolitical 'pull' that exists beyond partisanship and personalities.
  • We don't want the news to just give us information -- we want a story, and every story needs a villain, a battle between good and evil.
  • Knowing this, the news media decades ago started covering politics like a war, or a sport (in the biz, they call it "horse race coverage") where the reporting is entirely about which side is winning -- at the expense of figuring out the actual impact the resulting election or legislation will have on you as a human being. We tune in for "Us vs. Them," so that's what they give us.
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What the Luddites Really Fought Against - 0 views

www.printthis.clickability.com/pt/cpt?expire=&title=What+the+Luddites+Really+Fought+Against+|+History+%26+Archaeology+|+Smithsonian+Magazine&urlID=447511797&action=cpt&partnerID=253157&cid=116159859&fb=Y&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.smithsonianmag.com%2Fhi
shared by anonymous on 23 Mar 11 - Cached
  • The word “Luddite,” handed down from a British industrial protest that began 200 years ago this month, turns up in our daily language in ways that suggest we’re confused not just about technology, but also about who the original Luddites were and what being a modern one actually means.
  • Despite their modern reputation, the original Luddites were neither opposed to technology nor inept at using it. Many were highly skilled machine operators in the textile industry. Nor was the technology they attacked particularly new. Moreover, the idea of smashing machines as a form of industrial protest did not begin or end with them. In truth, the secret of their enduring reputation depends less on what they did than on the name under which they did it. You could say they were good at branding.
  • on March 11, 1811, in Nottingham, a textile manufacturing center, British troops broke up a crowd of protesters demanding more work and better wages.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • So if the Luddites weren’t attacking the technological foundations of industry, what made them so frightening to manufacturers? And what makes them so memorable even now? Credit on both counts goes largely to a phantom.
  • In fact, no such person existed. Ludd was a fiction concocted from an incident that supposedly had taken place 22 years earlier in the city of Leicester. According to the story, a young apprentice named Ludd or Ludham was working at a stocking frame when a superior admonished him for knitting too loosely. Ordered to “square his needles,” the enraged apprentice instead grabbed a hammer and flattened the entire mechanism. The story eventually made its way to Nottingham, where protesters turned Ned Ludd into their symbolic leader.
  • People of the time recognized all the astonishing new benefits the Industrial Revolution conferred, but they also worried, as Carlyle put it in 1829, that technology was causing a “mighty change” in their “modes of thought and feeling.
  • anonymous on 23 Mar 11
     
    "The label now has many meanings, but when the group protested 200 years ago, technology wasn't really the enemy"
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Why Fukushima made me stop worrying and love nuclear power - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...pro-nuclear-japan-fukushima
shared by anonymous on 22 Mar 11 - Cached
  • A crappy old plant with inadequate safety features was hit by a monster earthquake and a vast tsunami. The electricity supply failed, knocking out the cooling system. The reactors began to explode and melt down. The disaster exposed a familiar legacy of poor design and corner-cutting. Yet, as far as we know, no one has yet received a lethal dose of radiation.
  • But energy is like medicine: if there are no side-effects, the chances are that it doesn't work.
  • And how do we drive our textile mills, brick kilns, blast furnaces and electric railways – not to mention advanced industrial processes? Rooftop solar panels? The moment you consider the demands of the whole economy is the moment at which you fall out of love with local energy production. A national (or, better still, international) grid is the essential prerequisite for a largely renewable energy supply.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • But the energy source to which most economies will revert if they shut down their nuclear plants is not wood, water, wind or sun, but fossil fuel. On every measure (climate change, mining impact, local pollution, industrial injury and death, even radioactive discharges) coal is 100 times worse than nuclear power. Thanks to the expansion of shale gas production, the impacts of natural gas are catching up fast.
  • anonymous on 22 Mar 11
     
    "You will not be surprised to hear that the events in Japan have changed my view of nuclear power. You will be surprised to hear how they have changed it. As a result of the disaster at Fukushima, I am no longer nuclear-neutral. I now support the technology."
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Rand and Aesthetics 3 - 0 views

aynrandcontrahumannature.blogspot.com/...rand-and-aesthetics-3.html objectivism criticalthinking
shared by anonymous on 22 Mar 11 - No Cached
  • She could not accept that people had different aesthetic tastes than her own. Her tastes were not only "objectively" better, but those with contrary tastes were lesser people.
  • Her favorite argument ad hominem on behalf of her aesthetic tastes (and against those contrary to her own) involves her idea of the "sense of life."
  • Rand's sweeping assessment demonstrates, if anything, the Dunning–Kruger effect, a cognitive bias in which clueless people adopt conclusions about things they are incapable of understanding.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • The bottom line is that Rand didn't like Beethoven because she didn't understand Beethoven, and she resented that those who appreciated what was beyond her ken. Hence the canard about "malevolence."
  • Since her emotions were based on "correct" premises, they were regarded as always being entirely appropriate.
  • And so, if Rand failed to respond emotionally to a work of art (or even worse, responded negatively), then there had to be something wrong with that work of art, irrespective of its aesthetic merits
  • If a person enjoys so-called "malevolent" art, this implies they have a "malevolent" sense of life.
  • anonymous on 22 Mar 11
     
    "Rand's "Sense of Life" as an argument ad hominem. All ethical arguments, according to the philosopher George Santayana, ultimately resolve into an argument ad hominem. "There can be no other kind of argument in ethics," Santayana warns us. Aesthetic arguments often suffer from the same problem, particularly when they are either used as the pretence for baseless psychological speculation or moral condemnation. In Rand, we find evidence of both. She could not accept that people had different aesthetic tastes than her own. Her tastes were not only "objectively" better, but those with contrary tastes were lesser people. Worse, in her public philosophy, Rand tended to be rather coy and ambigious about all of this, as if to give herself plenty of wiggle room so that she could deny that she meant any offense. But her scorn for contrary tastes is palpable, even if it isn't always explicit. And in her private life, she didn't always hold back her scorn. People, she declared, who did not share her sense of life were psychologically incompatible with herself."
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Libya, the West and the Narrative of Democracy - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...libya-west-narrative-democracy geopolitics libya
shared by anonymous on 22 Mar 11 - Cached
  • There is no question that the intervention is designed to protect Gadhafi’s enemies from his forces. Gadhafi had threatened to attack “without mercy” and had mounted a sustained eastward assault that the rebels proved incapable of slowing.
  • they want to intervene to protect Gadhafi’s enemies, they are prepared to support those enemies (though it is not clear how far they are willing to go in providing that support), but they will not be responsible for the outcome of the civil war.
  • Three assumptions have been made about this unrest.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • The first was that it represented broad-based popular opposition to existing governments
  • Second, it assumed that these revolutions had as a common goal the creation of a democratic society.
  • Third, it assumed that the kind of democratic society they wanted was similar to European-American democracy, in other words, a constitutional system supporting Western democratic values.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 22 Mar 11
       
      As regards item #3, I call 'projection.' As usual, the West interprets events in a manner that reinforces our own sense of self importance and historical righteousness.
  • Whether they supported the demonstrators in Tahrir Square is a matter of conjecture. They might have, but the demonstrators were a tiny fraction of Egyptian society
  • a narrative on what has happened in the Arab world has emerged and has become the framework for thinking about the region.
  • The narrative says that the region is being swept by democratic revolutions (in the Western sense) rising up against oppressive regimes. The West must support these uprisings gently. That means that they must not sponsor them but at the same time act to prevent the repressive regimes from crushing them.
  • Gadhafi did not run Libya for the past 42 years because he was a fool, nor because he didn’t have support. He was very careful to reward his friends and hurt and weaken his enemies, and his supporters were substantial and motivated.
  • Italy has an interest in Libyan oil, and the United Kingdom was looking for access to the same. But just as Gadhafi was happy to sell the oil, so would any successor regime be; this war was not necessary to guarantee access to oil. NATO politics also played a role. The Germans refused to go with this operation, and that drove the French closer to the Americans and British. There is the Arab League, which supported a no-fly zone (though it did an about-face when it found out that a no-fly zone included bombing things) and offered the opportunity to work with the Arab world.
  • Waging war for ideological reasons requires a clear understanding of the ideology and an even clearer understanding of the reality on the ground. In this intervention, the ideology is not crystal clear, torn as it is between the concept of self-determination and the obligation to intervene to protect the favored faction. The reality on the ground is even less clear. The reality of democratic uprisings in the Arab world is much more complicated than the narrative makes it out to be, and the application of the narrative to Libya simply breaks down. There is unrest, but unrest comes in many sizes, democratic being only one.
  • anonymous on 22 Mar 11
     
    "Forces from the United States and some European countries have intervened in Libya. Under U.N. authorization, they have imposed a no-fly zone in Libya, meaning they will shoot down any Libyan aircraft that attempts to fly within Libya. In addition, they have conducted attacks against aircraft on the ground, airfields, air defenses and the command, control and communication systems of the Libyan government, and French and U.S. aircraft have struck against Libyan armor and ground forces. There also are reports of European and Egyptian special operations forces deploying in eastern Libya, where the opposition to the government is centered, particularly around the city of Benghazi. In effect, the intervention of this alliance has been against the government of Moammar Gadhafi, and by extension, in favor of his opponents in the east."
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Lessons from the long tail of improbable disaster - 2 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...ABht0Ja_story.html long now long term planning systems
shared by anonymous on 18 Mar 11 - No Cached
  • The troubles in northern Japan, for example, are beginning to ripple through global supply chains, creating bottlenecks and shortages in dozens of industries. The way globalization increases economic efficiency is by leveraging the advantages of scale and specialization. Yet the bigger and more concentrated production becomes, the more vulnerable it becomes to disruption.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 18 Mar 11
       
      The principle argument in favor of broadly progressive economic policies. The thinking goes: Capitalism is focused squarely on efficiency, therefore, calamities wreak more havoc on supply chains because there is no 'buffer' to absorb the chain's redirection.
  • Many scholars
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 18 Mar 11
       
      Citation, please? I realize it's a blog, and I'd probably balk if people asked for citations for every one of my (sometimes boneheaded) assertions. However, knowing (just a little) where the criticism is coming from is highly useful.
  • more attention must be paid to the extra risks that come with all the advantages of modern life. There may be a significant cost involved in preventing low-probability disasters, or having sufficient infrastructure to deal with them when they cannot be prevented.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 18 Mar 11
       
      Add to that the fact that, even with tons of safeguards, disasters will still happen. That's life, once again, not conforming to our numerical expectations. It's impossible to properly *gauge* the value of a safeguard. We can't build something, flood it, build it some other way, flood it again, ad nauseum.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • If it seems that the frequency and size of calamities have been picking up in recent years, it’s only because they probably have.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 18 Mar 11
       
      I call 'observer bias' on this one. While expanding human settlement will, indeed, drive up instances of disasters, my supposition is that our communications technology gives a false impression of increased occurrences.
  • What all of these have in common is that they are all low-probability, high-impact events — the “long-tail” phenomenon, to use the jargon of risk modelers
  • Although we observe that calamities happen, we assume that they won’t happen to us, or they won’t happen again.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 18 Mar 11
       
      Back in Mpls, I remember reading about people who bought property on 50-year flood plains and then were shocked - shocked - that a flood wiped out their home.
  • Part of the problem is that we don’t know what we don’t know. The other part is that small miscalculations of probabilities can have large effects on outcomes when dealing with long periods of time.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 18 Mar 11
       
      These are two really great characterizations of the relevant cognitive shortcomings.
  • anonymous on 18 Mar 11
     
    "What all of these have in common is that they are all low-probability, high-impact events - the "long-tail" phenomenon, to use the jargon of risk modelers, referring to the far ends of the traditional bell curve of probabilities, or "black swans," to use the metaphor popularized by former Wall Street trader Nassim Nicholas Taleb."
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Playboy, pencils, bags of cash: Don Bluth's sordid gaming history - 0 views

arstechnica.com/...uths-sordid-gaming-history.ars gaming
shared by anonymous on 17 Mar 11 - No Cached
  • anonymous on 17 Mar 11
     
    "It was an odd invitation, and one that was impossible to turn down. Don Bluth was doing promotion for Tapper: World Tour, and he was available for interviews during the Game Developers Conference. The legendary animator had started at Disney, and then went solo to work on movies and projects as diverse as An American Tale, the Secret of NIMH, Titan A.E., and, of course, the Dragon's Lair arcade machine. Now, like everyone else in the world, he has made an iOS game, giving the bar-game Tapper a new look for modern audiences."
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We Need to Stop Saying That Games Tell Bad Stories - 0 views

www.popmatters.com/...ng-that-games-tell-bad-stories
shared by anonymous on 11 Mar 11 - Cached
  • I’m not saying that we should stop evaluating particular games’ efforts at telling stories and calling out the bad ones.  I’m just saying that Portal tells a helluva story.  It’s smart, it’s funny, it has a great villain, and it has rich themes.
  • I actually care about stories in games and why I will call out weak stories in games for being weak—because I know that games still can frequently be good, funny, dramatic, tragic.  But observing that good ones are outside the norm for the most part is something as obvious as rain being wet. 
  • the dross has been sifted and because garbage doesn’t survive well over the ages.
  • anonymous on 11 Mar 11
     
    "It has become a kind of self deprecatory mantra of the games criticism community: video games generally don't tell very good stories. Which is true. And we need to stop saying it. Heard of that medium called the movies? Yeah, most of them are terrible. Heard of film critics? Those guys know that movies are generally pretty lousy, but they don't talk about it all the time, nor do they apologize for it."
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Retracted autism study an 'elaborate fraud,' British journal finds - 0 views

edition.cnn.com/...autism.vaccines
shared by anonymous on 11 Mar 11 - Cached
  • anonymous on 11 Mar 11
     
    "An investigation published by the British medical journal BMJ concludes the study's author, Dr. Andrew Wakefield, misrepresented or altered the medical histories of all 12 of the patients whose cases formed the basis of the 1998 study -- and that there was "no doubt" Wakefield was responsible. "It's one thing to have a bad study, a study full of error, and for the authors then to admit that they made errors," Fiona Godlee, BMJ's editor-in-chief, told CNN. "But in this case, we have a very different picture of what seems to be a deliberate attempt to create an impression that there was a link by falsifying the data.""
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The Importance of Logic & Critical Thinking - 0 views

www.wired.com/...nce-of-logic-critical-thinking
shared by anonymous on 10 Mar 11 - No Cached
  • However, valid logic does not always guarantee truth or a sound argument. This is where it gets a little funky. Valid logic is when the structure of logic is correct in the way of syntax and semantics rather than truth. Truth comes from deductive reasoning of said logic.
  • All Daleks are brown. Some brown things are Cylons. Therefore, some Daleks are Cylons. Sci-fi fan or not, you probably know that this is not true. The basic lesson here is that, while the logic above might seem valid because of the structure of the statement, it takes a further understanding to figure out why it’s not necessarily true: That is, based on the first two statements it’s possible that some Daleks are Cylons, but it’s not logically concludable. That’s where deductive reasoning comes on top of the logic. The underlying lesson here is not to immediately assume everything you read or are told is true, something all children need to and should learn.
  • anonymous on 10 Mar 11
     
    "As parents, we are tasked with instilling a plethora of different values into our children. While some parents in the world choose to instill a lack of values in their kids, those of us that don't want our children growing up to be criminals and various misfits try a bit harder. Values and morality are one piece of the pie. These are important things to mold into a child's mind, but there are also other items in life to focus on as well. It starts with looking both ways to cross the street and either progresses from there, or stops."
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