[FRIAM] loopiness (again)

[glen ☣]

In light of the idea that we don't talk about complexity here on friam, this article:

  Why Nobody Cares the President Is Lying
  https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/04/opinion/sunday/why-nobody-cares-the-president-is-lying.html

triggered my itch.  In it, Sykes says:

  > As uncomfortable as it may be, it will fall to the conservative media to police its worst actors.

I've relied on the argument that it's up to a community to police itself.  I suppose it's a remnant of my libertarianism, whose mantra (back then... don't know about now) was "self-governance".  After all, the libertarian (or anarchist, for that matter) rhetoric crumbles without self-governance.  My main target for this rhetoric has always been atheists.  The tendency of atheists to claim that atheism isn't a "belief system" allows them to abdicate on their responsibility to police themselves.  It's just laziness.

But the reason I'm posting this, now, is to posit that the concept of self-governance relies fundamentally on a coherent "self".  In our post-fact world, to which communities does any particular person belong?  ... to the ones you think you belong to?  ... to the ones that respond to your calls to action?  How do I know if I actually belong to a community or if I just "identify" with it?

My boss at one of the dot-coms I hired into once told me that I have less power to invoke my network than I think I have.  (It's most likely he was attributing to me what he attributes to himself because he seems to think he knows more about me than he demonstrates. ... but why he said it is irrelevant.)  I rarely "invoke my network", except to argue or get drunk. 8^)  But it raises the question of whether I even have a (substantial) network and whether I'm even part of any communities at all.

By what means do _parts_ represent their wholes?  Isn't this just another version of Russell's paradox?

-- 
☣ glen