[FRIAM] capitalism vs. individualism

Thu Nov 7 11:19:36 EST 2019

Dave writes:

< That last step, believing the fictional story that you weave from your interpretation of cherry picked data, is fundamental to the idiocy of impeachment. While the story being told may have substance, it has no Reality, it has no Truth, and telling (yelling) that story will have no effect except other than increasing anger and hostility between and among all those with other stories to tell. >

I attended a National Night Out event.   One of my neighbors is a legal professional, a black man, who remarked a bailiff had mistakenly treated him as a defendant.   He walks up and down the street with his little girl that drives an electric car to keep her safe.  Another one of my neighbors is a grandson of a famous Indian physicist that worked with Einstein.   His wife is a doctor.   Next door is an Irish woman, a project manager for a tech company, and her husband who is Balinese, that does landscape design.  They have daughter that is just starting college.  There's the widower across the street that went to Cal and for graduate school but spent his working life as a building contractor.    He misses his son who is starting his career.   There's a Chinese man across the street who works in finance.  He's divorced but looks after the kids.   Down a few houses is an Iranian woman that works at Apple and her husband, who is white, that works at a ridesharing company.   Across the street is a white couple.   She is a professor at Cal and he works for Pixar.

All of these families are what someone like Patrick Buchanan might claim are "Fundamentally changing the character of America."   He may be right about that, but they are changing it for the better.   They are the new economy and the new middle class.   As far as I could tell, without any real probing, they all hate this administration and were glad to see the new folks on the street weren't of that persuasion.  There is a Reality I see.  The thousands of neighborhoods like this one, are the ones that ask Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff to please hand Trump his ass.  It is not some conspiracy of the democratic officials that have decoupled from their voters.

Where does this all go?   I don't know, but there are well-resourced people out here that are pissed-off and justifiably so.

Marcus
________________________________
From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> on behalf of Prof David West <profwest at fastmail.fm>
Sent: Thursday, November 7, 2019 12:36 AM
To: friam at redfish.com <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] capitalism vs. individualism

As a card carrying Hermeneutic (postmodernism historically derives from the Hermeneutics of Heidegger and his student Gadamer) the flaws of the article arise from the assertion that Capitalism is/has/embodies some kind of Truth and therefore un/non/anti-Truth will kill it. From the viewpoint of someone who knows/believes/understands everything to be Interpretation, this is a silly assertion.

The only way you can ascribe Truth to an ism, Capitalism included, is by disregarding ninety-percent of the "data" as irrelevant and claiming the self-consistent (mostly) residue to be that Truth.

And of course each ism cherry picks the ten-percent of the data (non-overlapping sets) that supports its interpretation of fact/reality/truth and vociferously defends it as the only correct way to see things or think about things  — and then makes the fatal mistake of believing, in a fundamentalist sort of way, their own story (interpretation).

That last step, believing the fictional story that you weave from your interpretation of cherry picked data, is fundamental to the idiocy of impeachment. While the story being told may have substance, it has no Reality, it has no Truth, and telling (yelling) that story will have no effect except other than increasing anger and hostility between and among all those with other stories to tell.

davew

[Personal aside: some ranchers in southern Utah gave me a "Keep America Great — Trump 2020" ball cap. I am tempted, sometimes, to wear it in solidarity with Adam Schiff and Democrats/Liberals who seem Hell bent on getting Donald re-elected. I don't do so because I am afraid of attracting violence from ultra-orthodox, fundamentalist, believers of the TrumpSatan story.]

On Thu, Nov 7, 2019, at 1:08 AM, Steven A Smith wrote:
> I feel trepidatious to even try to weigh in here, but try I shall
> (unless I delete my attempt before I <send>).
>
> I agree with Glen's point about the author conflating "C" with little
> "c" capitalism.   I am a reformed Capitalist who continues to practice
> capitalism on a daily basis, though not always *proudly*.   The author
> refers to capitalism as an "economic system" which I believe makes it
> closer to *C*apitalism.  Glen loosely defines capitalism as *private
> ownership of property* but i want to further refine it to be private
> ownership of *the means of production*, and then extend that to
> *excluding public ownership* as with "the Commons".
>
> My working experience/definiton with/of *C*apitalism is roughly the
> larger (even than an economic system) definition the author describes
> which invokes the extension of (absolute) individual rights over
> material objects to more abstract things like land (both small and huge)
> and perhaps ultimately political parties (Trump becoming defacto
> leader/ruler/owner of the Republican Party) or ideas (beliefs?).   Thus
> post-truth <==> Capitalism.
>
> I'd like to tie post-truth back to Capitalism more directly/tightly as I
> agree that the author did not necessarily do that well, but I'm not
> finding a good argument on the fly.   I appreciate the "gesture" he
> makes *toward* linking (C)apitalism with the broader idea that the
> individual not only has the *right* to believe anything, but nearly the
> *requirement* to do so.    With that seems to be a voraciousness which
> seeks to take *personal ownership* of all things, including "the
> Commons" represented by nature itself (air, water, viewsheds, solar
> irradiance) and more to the point of current events, the government
> (for/by/of the people?) itself.
>
> With that ramble out of the way, I want to address the question of
> "isms"... which I take to simply be "informal models" which can have
> both organic and engineered roots/natures.  They are also *collective*
> by some measure, being the aggregation or superposition of the
> individual (and subcollective) ideas/concepts of people.  Political
> parties, for example, have "party lines" (doctrine) which may well have
> been crafted by a few "scholars" with a particular ideal pattern in mind
> (e.g. Marxist Communism, Keynesian Economics), but in fact, they *also*
> evolve and morph with "the will of the people" or maybe more aptly "the
> imagination of the people".   In the spirit of the *world itself* being
> a *complex adaptive system* I would suggest that the "isms" of
> sociopolitics (e.g. Capitalism, Communism, Socialism, Fascism, etc.) are
> roughly regions of equilibria connected by high-dimensional bifurcation
> "points" (alternatively basins of attraction bounded by "saddles" and
> "ridges").
>
> To the extent that  such "isms" are made up of "beliefs" as much as
> "acts",  the full embedding space would need to include *all possible
> beliefs* to be complete, but in fact, it is the subspace that we happen
> to be exploring at any given time which is relevant.  On the other hand,
> there does appear to be a place for "most dangerous ideas" which
> represent a "seed" of organization which might introduce/find/create a
> "path" between these subspaces (isms) as well as yet others yet
> unknown.     Glen's idea that we not try to interpolate between the
> existing spaces (smooth the space-between with our own assumptions?)
> lest we miss some kind of interesting/useful structure in the
> intervening landscape seems motivated (if I'm even beginning to
> characterize what he said correctly).
>
> As a reform(ing)ed Capitalist, I am very interested in how the reality
> of private property (in the sense of "possession is 9/10 of the law")
> competes with those elements of the physical (and social?) multiverse
> which might be "best" (whatever best means?) left in "the Commons".   I
> have a strong sense that among my "possessions" there are many which
> require too much of the "force of law" to maintain as my own...   for
> example, anything I cannot keep on my person or in my sight is at risk
> of being absconded with.  A piece of real property which I do not reside
> or work significantly at (weekly if not daily) would seem to be at-risk
> of re-appropriation by others, and in the sense of stewardship, anything
> I "can't take care of" might not really be mine?  For example, in the
> plantations-operated-by-chattel-slavery, might be said to have belonged
> to those who cleared, plowed, sowed, and harvested the fields and those
> who built, maintained, and repaired the buildings more than the
> individual or family whose claim to "ownership" of the real property and
> it's improvements were well beyond their own ability to have created,
> much less maintained it.
>
> Mumble,
>
>  - Steve
>
> On 11/5/19 2:23 PM, glen wrote:
> > I'm not sure I agree. Even without unification into a singular whole, we can register novelty by clustering. Clustering in a space, obviously, requires a space of some sort. But spaces are defined by bases that are often only tiny slices/aspects of the things arranged in the space. E.g. we can organize TV shows by run-time, ignoring all other aspects. And if a new show has a run-time different from all other TV shows, then it's novel, even if in an uninteresting way.
> >
> > I've recently been exploring state space reconstruction methods for some of our more enigmatic model traces. EEMD revealed an interesting IMF for a periodicity I have yet to explain mechanistically. It's a bit infuriating because I wrote the damned model. Anyway, such a task is less about unifying the contributions to the signal than it is finding a basis from which to "debug" it. (Debug in quotes because the periodicity might end up being a counter-intuitive feature.)
> >
> >
> > On November 5, 2019 12:02:26 PM PST, Marcus Daniels <marcus at snoutfarm.com> wrote:
> >> Glen writes:
> >>
> >> "But re: avoiding modeling the space between the -isms, I'd argue that
> >> sometimes (only sometimes), it's best to leave the interstitial space
> >> unmodeled to avoid biasing the integration."
> >>
> >> "The best way to predict the future is to invent it."    The space
> >> unmodeled could contain a configuration (a new Ism) that is has better
> >> properties than the existing configurations, and the available
> >> observations are just what has been found so far.    If one is unable
> >> or unwilling to compress to commonalities -- to unify -- then one cannot anticipate novelty either. I have 500 channels of crap on cable (more, I guess), and I don't really need to watch it all to appreciate the exceptions to this.
> >
>
>
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