<html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; line-break: after-white-space;" class="">Very good material to work though, Glen, thank you,<div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">I remember reading Walden for the first time when I was somewhat young, but not super-young, and thinking “Thoreau, you’re an idiot (or better said, a loudmouth)”.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">Walk into town to buy a new axe-head every time the material on your old one is worn far enough down that you can’t sharpen it any more. Go re-invent iron smelting and then write about it.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">Interestingly, within the past 12 hours, somebody sent me a link to a talk Nora Bateson gave in Copenhagen about a documentary she made of her father and the “ecology of mind” thing:</div><div class=""><span style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" class=""> ( </span><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8lA8jsQkNw">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8lA8jsQkNw</a><span style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" class=""> )</span></div><div class=""><font color="#000000" class=""><span style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" class=""><br class=""></span></font></div><div class=""><font color="#000000" class=""><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" class="">I haec no history with this stuff, and her sort-of self-congratulatory affect puts me off (or maybe I just wrongly read that into the face of somebody I don’t know at all). But the theme that one wants to perceive things heavily in terms of their relations seems like a hard thing to object to. It’s funny, now that I am surrounded on one hand by category theorists, and on the other by meditators, that I can parse the same conversation as being about two rather different things.</span></font></div><div class=""><font color="#000000" class=""><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" class=""><br class=""></span></font></div><div class=""><font color="#000000" class=""><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" class="">Eric</span></font></div><div class=""><font color="#000000" class=""><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" class=""><br class=""></span></font></div><div class=""><font color="#000000" class=""><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" class=""><br class=""></span></font><div><br class=""><blockquote type="cite" class=""><div class="">On Aug 21, 2021, at 12:23 AM, uǝlƃ ☤>$ <<a href="mailto:gepropella@gmail.com" class="">gepropella@gmail.com</a>> wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><div class=""><div class="">I couldn't find it earlier, but now I have:<br class=""><br class="">What I learned from an unlikely friendship with an anti-masker<br class=""><a href="https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fwww.theguardian.com%2flifeandstyle%2f2021%2faug%2f19%2fanti-masker-unlikely-friendship&c=E,1,GApCWomC4MnHKQ3-4O79s-zNaaL9x2lWWqXeTwvE2W35KWgALOkLBfSvMg4DaqE9vIy2VgKmRm5uYyS2gT6iKOZRCgmeIrLF-aU1Wu3rLvnkYmEcqUA,&typo=1" class="">https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fwww.theguardian.com%2flifeandstyle%2f2021%2faug%2f19%2fanti-masker-unlikely-friendship&c=E,1,GApCWomC4MnHKQ3-4O79s-zNaaL9x2lWWqXeTwvE2W35KWgALOkLBfSvMg4DaqE9vIy2VgKmRm5uYyS2gT6iKOZRCgmeIrLF-aU1Wu3rLvnkYmEcqUA,&typo=1</a><br class=""><br class="">It's that article that made me think about the relationship between weaponized interdependence and fascism seething underneath a functionally equivalent phenotype. In Pandian's article, his friend "Frank" says: “I’m good with dividing the country," Frank declares. "One side gets the west and one side gets the east. We are self-sufficient. Your side is not." The key lies in that interdependence. One of the dominant themes amongst the "free speech" crowd, complaining about weaponized interdependence, is their blindness to the benefits of interdependence. <br class=""><br class="">Most of the "preppers" I've met will claim up and down they're not racist, or anti-government, or blahblah. They claim to just want to be self-sufficient, which is laughable to a dork like me who knows the logistics behind the tools and weapons they think make them independent. Are you really going off grid if you're using tech developed in China or by the US funding agencies? But therein lies evidence we're using leaky vaccines ... facilitating the functionally neutral, seething fascism.<br class=""><br class="">In the end, the emergence of things like QAnon, the Stop the Steal attack, etc. is one side *failing* to weaponize extant interdependence. Forget issues like Twitter suspending Trump or the Taliban. Think more like competent gun control and *universal* healthcare. Those networks are not being weaponized to good effect.<br class=""><br class="">On 8/20/21 6:24 AM, uǝlƃ ☤>$ wrote:<br class=""><blockquote type="cite" class="">This seems relevant:<br class=""><br class="">Weaponized Interdependence: How Global Economic Networks Shape State Coercion<br class="">https://direct.mit.edu/isec/article/44/1/42/12237/Weaponized-Interdependence-How-Global-Economic<br class=""><br class="">Two other things that seems relevant, particularly to the quorum sensing conception, are latent variables in causal inference and neutral networks in evolution. Rebecca's recent video essay on leaky vaccines may also ring some bells: https://youtu.be/_J-zWtoG9ZM, which seems akin to the relationship between disinfectants and hospital super bugs.<br class=""><br class=""><br class="">On 8/19/21 10:52 PM, David Eric Smith wrote:<br class=""><blockquote type="cite" class="">Thanks Steve,<br class=""><br class="">I hadn’t heard about this latest little bit of lunacy. Marcus is right; what must the guy’s life be like that, to very likely end up in jail for not really anything seemed like a good idea?<br class=""><br class="">Martin Scheffer ought to be all over this, with his “early warning signals”, using analysis of the magnitude-frequency distributions of collective fluctuations to predict “tipping points”. We hear about Rosa Parks. We don’t (unless we work in the area) understand the long string of events that preceded, and in important ways, led up to Rosa Parks and made the event she precipitated possible.<br class=""><br class="">Eric<br class=""><br class=""><br class=""><blockquote type="cite" class="">On Aug 20, 2021, at 10:17 AM, Steve Smith <sasmyth@swcp.com <mailto:sasmyth@swcp.com>> wrote:<br class=""><br class="">EricS<br class=""><blockquote type="cite" class=""><br class="">Fascist Quorum Sensing<br class=""></blockquote><br class="">When 'Q' emerged in the right wing popular attention, I did make a brief connection with "Quorum" in the sense you reference it, though more specifically as Bee Swarm/Nest trigger/choice. Having once been a holder of a DOE 'Q' clearance, the very idea that that level/style of clearance would give him the kind of insider information attributed to him/her/them was absurd. Some of the other clearances, *maybe*, but not obviously the 'Q'.<br class=""><br class="">The news today with the lame-O-bomber wannabe kicked off another round of DHS/domestic-terror-watch warnings that another "quorum" is trying to rise up. The (liberal) news media is giving lip-service to not "amplifying" his signal, etc.<br class=""><br class="">Seems like something similar (but not responsibly scientific) about how the Taliban was able to flip the whole country almost overnight is afoot. <br class=""><br class="">- SteveS<br class=""><br class=""><blockquote type="cite" class=""><br class="">(For those who don’t do this for a living, the reference is to the phenomenon in bacteria like Anthrax (B. anthracis), which will multiply inside a victim for many generations with no real chemical activity besides a normal parasitic metabolism, but will secrete signaling chemicals. When those chemicals hit a threshold concentration because the population has multiplied enough, which the bacteria all know because they all have the same genome, they switch state, turn on the chemical attack machinery, and dissolve the victim on a timescale far too short for any inflammatory or immune response to do much about them.)<br class=""><br class="">Google does not show anyone as having used it yet, even though it is a no-brainer.<br class=""><br class="">The idea being to say something productive about the abruptness of it all. <br class=""><br class="">From Gingrich and Norquist up through end-2020, the right thought its best strategy was to do the usual dissembling and dogwhistling, just at higher intensity. Something has switched and they think this —specifically — is the time to make a run for it and to parade the fascism instead. <br class=""><br class="">While the strategic-games crowd (and military people etc.) will say they have long written about shifting modes, the idea that there can be an unplanned component at the popular level akin to quorum sensing might have something to be said of it.<br class=""><br class="">Even on the question of whether trump mattered, I can see a sort of SFI angle on it, with the idea of “slow timescale variables” that Jessica Flack makes central to the rubric that for a while (perhaps still) she was calling “construction dynamics”. The idea that a sort of order-parameter stuck thing can smooth out fluctuations and make an inference problem easier and more stable, or a transition in domains more likely. Here the fast variables would have been the Lindsay Graham characters, who flutter like day-traders among all possible positions, trying to guess from minute to minute what is safe. Those guys would not have put Steven Miller’s face on TV, because they would have judged that he was too ugly to use.<br class=""><br class="">Enter trump, whose 2024 motto can be “The Worse, The Better”, who said “I can make ugly work.” But it didn’t change the system state in a few months, or even in a year. The flutterers took years of reassurance, and a couple of election cycles, before they switched from the lysogenic to the lytic phase. Without trump as a slow variable, would the flutterers have continued to flutter a while longer? Can one say anything about that that has any scientific worth, and isn’t just firing off buzzwords?<br class=""><br class="">Eric<br class=""><br class=""><br class=""><blockquote type="cite" class="">On Aug 20, 2021, at 7:53 AM, Marcus Daniels <marcus@snoutfarm.com <mailto:marcus@snoutfarm.com>> wrote:<br class=""><br class="">Eric writes:<br class=""> <br class="">“I have wondered whether trump in the presidency was like an adjuvant in a vaccine. Just having the antigen leaves room for highly variable responses, because if you don’t manage the inflammatory response that initiates the immune response, you have only a weak control system. Trump was so awful in so many dimensions that he triggers inflammation in those who would have remained asleep under Clinton.”<br class=""> <br class="">The mask protests like this one..<br class=""> <br class="">https://www.cnn.com/videos/health/2021/08/19/mask-wars-unrest-flores-pkg-dlt-vpx.cnn <https://www.cnn.com/videos/health/2021/08/19/mask-wars-unrest-flores-pkg-dlt-vpx.cnn><br class=""> <br class="">..strike me as something that M. Night Shyamalan could not even invent. Say the guy at 1:40.<br class="">I should be thinking of these folks as my fellow citizens? Really?<br class=""> <br class="">Is it just me or is maybe the “inflammation” getting a little out of control? For example,<br class="">the other day I was driving down a narrow part of the road in my residential area and pulled off to the side to let a car pass that was coming the other way. He (white middle-aged man) was not signaling, but as soon as I spent five seconds off the side to let him pass he started screaming at me and waving his fist out the car window. Apparently I had dared to block his driveway. Is it really that hard for some people to get through their day?<br class=""> <br class="">It increasingly seems to me that maybe there is just all this crazy just below the surface, and all that can be done is to keep the inflammation down.<br class=""> <br class="">Marcus<br class=""></blockquote></blockquote></blockquote></blockquote></blockquote><br class="">-- <br class="">☤>$ uǝlƃ<br class=""><br class="">- .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. .<br class="">FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv<br class="">Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6 bit.ly/virtualfriam<br class="">un/subscribe https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=http%3a%2f%2fredfish.com%2fmailman%2flistinfo%2ffriam_redfish.com&c=E,1,VFGFMwhMoXtWaEnw8J-8SGyUnvXOmdkWZqyKy4a3EV87ev45mMHnsA1SWHQHmXrYvjJVlQBJ4go2L39FMrwX2J2wla74SWGb8F_Io0xzKIz3Lw,,&typo=1<br class="">FRIAM-COMIC https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=http%3a%2f%2ffriam-comic.blogspot.com%2f&c=E,1,Vj-NKCduO-a_egE4RnXhFKwPd4343JSMmW59_WySSUuJyvTmOMs6gE3QGS_hDrlC4UtxYUZ5jTtJr8Tb2OMcL3HquHqr-cdoT4wf48OeJPRTgw,,&typo=1<br class="">archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/<br class=""></div></div></blockquote></div><br class=""></div></body></html>