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Spagat zwischen Wissenschaft und Popularismus: Rolle der Blogs

>> Da betritt ein Außenseiter, gekleidet wie ein Gentleman in St. Louis, die Szene. Er hat ein Spielbrett dabei und will der Pokerrunde das Dame-Spielen beibringen. Die Runde hört zu, während der die Regeln erklärt - und fragt schließlich: Wo sind die Karten? Für diese Runde müsse ein Spiel Karten haben, und ohne Karten sei Dame eben kein Spiel. Anders ausgedrückt: Die Naturwissenschaften erkennen nur ihre eigenen Wahrheiten an. Andere Argumente werden abgetan als unwissenschaftlich, und Unwissenschaftliches zähle nicht. Sehr gut, trifft aber nicht nur für die Wissenschaft und deren Methoden zu.

>> Da betritt ein Außenseiter, gekleidet wie ein Gentleman in St. Louis, die Szene. Er hat ein Spielbrett dabei und will der Pokerrunde das Dame-Spielen beibringen. Die Runde hört zu, während der die Regeln erklärt - und fragt schließlich: Wo sind die Karten? Für diese Runde müsse ein Spiel Karten haben, und ohne Karten sei Dame eben kein Spiel. Anders ausgedrückt: Die Naturwissenschaften erkennen nur ihre eigenen Wahrheiten an. Andere Argumente werden abgetan als unwissenschaftlich, und Unwissenschaftliches zähle nicht. Sehr gut, trifft aber nicht nur für die Wissenschaft und deren Methoden zu.

Not long ago I was sitting at home writing something for publication - I won't say what, except that it was a passage about a certain politician on the Hill. Out of habit I launched into a description that was full of nasty and personal language, and I was about to press on to the next part of the piece when suddenly I hit a mental speed bump. A voice in my head whispered - this really happened - "If you write that shit and Bernie Sanders sees it, he's going to be disappointed in you." So I went back and removed the gratuitous body blows from the article.

On July 29th, returning from a trip to Europe, Jacob Appelbaum, a lanky, unassuming 27-year-old wearing a black T-shirt with the slogan "Be the trouble you want to see in the world," was detained at customs by a posse of federal agents. In an interrogation room at Newark Liberty airport, he was grilled about his role in Wikileaks, the whistle-blower group that has exposed the government's most closely guarded intelligence reports about the war in Afghanistan. The agents photocopied his receipts, seized three of his cellphones - he owns more than a dozen - and confiscated his computer. They informed him that he was under government surveillance. They questioned him about the trove of 91,000 classified military documents that Wikileaks had released the week before, a leak that Vietnam-era activist Daniel Ellsberg called "the largest unauthorized disclosure since the Pentagon Papers." They demanded to know where Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks, was hiding. They pressed him on his opinions about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Appelbaum refused to answer. Finally, after three hours, he was released. Sex, Drugs, and the Biggest Cybercrime of All Time Appelbaum is the only known American member of Wikileaks and the leading evangelist for the software program that helped make the leak possible. In a sense, he's a bizarro version of Mark Zuckerberg: If Facebook's ambition is to "make the world more open and connected," Appelbaum has dedicated his life to fighting for anonymity and privacy. An anarchist street kid raised by a heroin- addict father, he dropped out of high school, taught himself the intricacies of code and developed a healthy paranoia along the way. "I don't want to live in a world where everyone is watched all the time," he says. "I want to be left alone as much as possible. I don't want a data trail to tell a story that isn't true." We have transferred our most intimate and personal information - our bank accounts, e-mails, photographs, ph

So the debt deal has finally been reached. As expected, the agreement arrives in a form that right-thinking people everywhere can feel terrible about with great confidence.

Imagine a world in which a man who is repeatedly investigated for a string of serious crimes, but never prosecuted, has his slate wiped clean every time the cops fail to make a case. No more Lifetime channel specials where the murderer is unveiled after police stumble upon past intrigues in some old file - "Hey, chief, didja know this guy had two wives die falling down the stairs?" No more burglary sprees cracked when some sharp cop sees the same name pop up in one too many witness statements. This is a different world, one far friendlier to lawbreakers, where even the suspicion of wrongdoing gets wiped from the record.

The point of all of this is, if you add up all of the MBS-related liability out there, the banks as it stands are facing an Armageddon of claims from all sides. It can't possibly be less than a trillion dollars, and it's probably much, much more. But the Obama administration's current plan is to let them all walk after paying a few shekels apiece into a $20 billion kitty.

I'll have more coming out about this in a few days, but there have been two disgusting developments in the realm of plutocratic intervention on behalf of Wall Street that everyone protesting should take note of. The fact that both of the following things took place in the middle of the full fever of OWS, when everyone is supposedly trying to placate anti-banker sentiment and Obama and the DCCC are supposedly pledging support of the protesters, shows how completely bankrupt this system is and how necessary street-level protests have become. Popular uprising is probably the only move left to stop developments like the following:

Hier finden Sie Abstracts und Mitschriften von Veranstaltungen, die die Deutsche Sektion und andere Organisationen aus dem Bereich der Verwaltungswissenschaften in der Vergangenheit organisiert und durchgeführt haben.