<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
</head>
<body>
<p>No News == Good News</p>
<p>I'm inclined to agree with this. In my analogical/metaphorical
style I think of "News" as being something like "Inflammation" in
an organism or tissue. Inflammation has a role... to warn the
organism (or coupled systems) that something is out of "healthy
operating range". <br>
</p>
<p>I was just listening to congress grilling the Project 2025
architect and it felt *very much* like inflammation (as does most
every deliberation of every committee?). Is P2025 not in fact the
'publicans (or more apropos, MAGA) attempt to establish or move to
their idealized form of "governance"? <br>
</p>
<p><off on a RANT> <br>
</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Glen has referred to collective humanity as being more like a
slime mold than any other "superorganism" (correct me here
because I'm sure I am wrong) but I think we (collective
humanity) are on the verge of (years, decades?) new level of
organization which reflects the global scale of our reach and
coupling along with some sense that we have "tried a lot of
forms of self-organizing" through alternatively government
(nation-states), religion (with global reach), multi-national
corporations (starting with Dutch East India and Hudson Bay?
...) and the philosophical underpinnings which inform (sorry
Nick) and shape all of the former.</p>
<p>I see why many whose personal and in-group identity is aligned
with a specific religion/politic/branding/etc are
offended/threatened by anything "global" scale... to them it can
only feel like being over-run by "other" when in fact, they are
the "other" who has been doing lots of "over-running".
Renormalization and subsumption and merging (emergently) is very
scary and threatening stuff and maybe is indistinguishable from
being invaded by hostile powers?</p>
<p>Evolution is notoriously "inefficient" and even "brutal" by
many measures. I don't know (EricS might, others might?) know
what experiments in multi-cellular life and the emergent
specialization of the individual (cell) into tissue/organ types
must have looked like, but I"m guessing there were a lot more
failed than successful experiments? The flailing humanity has
been doing in this regard (for 5-15k years) seems like it has
gone on forever and has tried "damn near everything" but my
suspicion is that before information processing technology
emerged
(Cuneiform/Gutenberg/Enlightment/Babbage/Telegraph/Enigma/Cybernetics/Iliac-Eniac-Maniac/IBM/Internet/Cray/TMI/Clusters/Mobiles/Clusters/IoTs/BlockChains/LLMs/Autonomous
Vehicles/?? we had hardly scratched the surface (or barely
begun to tangle our webs?).</p>
<p>We will either become a functional super-organism which is
copacetic with the existing biosphere/Gaia which is the
substrate from which our open-ended, wild-ass, radical-nonsense
has emerged or we will crash ourselves on top of it or perhaps
crash it, bringing our own selves down.</p>
<p>30-40 years ago I thought Climate Change and even Species
Collapse and Sweeping Environmental Disruption was a "Liberal
Hoax" or at least an indicator of our collective hubris...
thinking we puny little humans could crash a multi-billion year
old planetary-scale evolved complex system in (dynamic)
homeostasis with nothing more than a few thousand coal fired
power plants and a few billion internal combustion engines,
etc. Now I'm pretty sure we've already tipped a lot of systems
with an inertial vector sure to take us past some if not all of
Rockstrom's Planetary boundaries... and meanwhile most of us
fiddle away, re-arranging the seats of congress (or parliament)
or maybe try to sneak some extra supplies into a lifeboat
(survivalist hoarders).</p>
<p>So do we die of an inflammatory/allergic/anaphalactic reaction
to our own bad behaviour or are we recapitulating what we call
"Cancer" in an organism but in the global
noosphere/politicsphere/technosphere/even-biosphere?</p>
<p>So much of our civilizational/political/economic/religious
development seems parallel to Cancer:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>oncogenesis: socio-political-economic-religioius
"experiments"</p>
<p>tumor-development: urban/industrial sprawl</p>
<p>metastasis: colonialism/missionary-work</p>
<p>angiogenesis: infrastructure development</p>
<p>genomic instability: techno-political-economic innovation</p>
<p>immune evasion: organized crime, cartels, terrorist networks</p>
<p>clonal evolution/epigenetic alterations: left to the reader</p>
<p>apoptosis evasion: Life extension tech/medicine/lifestyle</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I started consuming news really for the first time maybe 8-10
years ago and I now live on a diet of Junk News (when I'm not
ranting here) and it keeps all my systems inflamed in the same
way a diet of Doritos, Mountain Dew, Alcohol, Tobacco,
Methamphetamies and Candy Bars might. Even the best the
news-stream has to offer feels like eating every meal from a
fast-food drive through... Maybe Tom J (and others) can help
me think/feel better about this... maybe prescribe a Paleo/Keto
diet for the mind and soul? I know people who claim to *only*
consume long-form journalism, seems wise. I at least don't let
any social media in directly (only the back-scatter off the
mainstream Junk News?)... <br>
</p>
<p>I worry (suspect) sometimes that my posts are little more than
an an indiscrimanatory release (expression according to Nick?)
of cytokines. ...buh...<br>
</p>
</blockquote>
<p></endRANTforNow><br>
</p>
<br>
<p></p>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 8/27/24 8:10 AM, glen wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:6c42b03e-2bc1-45d2-a0dd-26fb5f39f72e@gmail.com">How
Telegram's Founder Pavel Durov Became a Culture War Martyr
<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.404media.co/how-telegrams-founder-pavel-durov-became-a-culture-war-martyr/">https://www.404media.co/how-telegrams-founder-pavel-durov-became-a-culture-war-martyr/</a>
<br>
<br>
Mark Zuckerberg says White House ‘pressured’ Facebook to censor
Covid-19 content
<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/article/2024/aug/27/mark-zuckerberg-says-white-house-pressured-facebook-to-censor-covid-19-content">https://www.theguardian.com/technology/article/2024/aug/27/mark-zuckerberg-says-white-house-pressured-facebook-to-censor-covid-19-content</a>
<br>
<br>
What does it mean to "govern"? I frequently hear things like
"Democrats actually govern" in contrast to culture warring,
grifting, personal branding, etc. I mean, I welcomed Biden's very
boring tenure. I'm hoping Kamala is elected and that she'll be as
boring as Biden. If I don't hear from someone, it prolly means
they're working ... doing their job. No news is good news. But
even if Durov's arrest is solely about his complicity by
association with the app and his lack of governance of that as a
platform, I still kindasorta think the French prosecutor
(prosecutors?) is doing a good job of governing in assigning him
that agency, his share of the blame.
<br>
<br>
Sure, JD Vance is in Thiel's pocket. But most of our neoliberal
Democrats are also in the pockets of large corporations or rich
vampires. Can it be any other way? Can an American politician
*actually* govern? Or is it all smoke and mirrors?
<br>
<br>
</blockquote>
</body>
</html>