[FRIAM] Motives - Was Abduction
Steven A Smith
sasmyth at swcp.com
Thu Jan 10 11:28:04 EST 2019
Dave -
This contribution (Adam's "Win Bigly") and Roger's offering of the John
Boehner (apparent?) endorsement of the American Cannabis Summit helps to
remind me of the underlying struggle I am having with some of the
conversation here, and most of what passes for public conversation at
large (in and out of the media).
Donald is pretty clear, for example, that even when he is claiming moral
high-ground, that his primary (singular?) goal is to WIN. While I've
only read summaries and reviews of Adam's "Bigly", I sense that his
topic is truly (and singularly?) about being persuasive (aka Winning?),
up to and including hypnotism (or NLP techniques?).
The American Cannabis Summit video Roger linked suggests that there is
"wealth" to be had by jumping on the Cannabis bandwagon, comparing it to
Tobacco, among other things. The message seems to equate "wealth" with
"leverage over others"... without much more than a passing nod to the
actual enrichment of lives (individually and collectively). Without
debating whether the widespread legalization and commercialization of
Cannabis implies/supports some "greater good"
I happen to be reading Rebecca Solnit's "A Paradise Built in Hell" which
is a deep dive into the theme of how people (sometimes) show their best
while suffering great disasters. Particularly in the area of community
spirit and synergistic cooperation. She anecdotally and analytically
reviews disasters from the 1906 San Francisco earthquake to Katrina,
focusing *mostly* on the positive examples of people stepping up
individually and collectively to show demonstrate/discover their "best
selves". In this, she speaks of the tension between "Seeking a better
life" and "Seeking a better world". It is suggested that in the face
of disaster, the latter is evidently the most efficient route to the
former, and on the whole, the behaviour of individuals in those contexts
suggests that such is self-evident. She acknowledges that there are
plenty of opportunists who *do not* apprehend that their "best
interests" are supported by cooperation, but instead notice that the
fragility of their context allows them to "exploit" that fragility, and
in fact seem convinced that it is not only an opportunity but an
unction. In their zero (or negative) sum model, the only way to get
what they need is to take it (or hoard it) from someone else, and
*sharing* is deeply suspect at best and
ON the topic of "persuasion" vs "ethics", one of Adam's reviewers
reflected: "But, when I was in school, we always discussed ethical
responsibility of the persuader and Adams does not. As long as Trump was
persuasive he was going to win and that’s what matters." I suppose
this is the tension I often experience... between that which is
"efficacioius" in a (deliberately?) limited context, and that which has
a larger context and is nominally discussed in terms of ethical and
moral frameworks.
I was raised in various cultures of "rugged individualism" which biases
me toward what I perceive to be a *natural/instinctual* state of "me
first". I would claim that *fortunately*, I grew (over many decades
now) into an awareness that while that might be the default position to
retreat to when all available strategies for a larger collective
(family, neighborhood, tribe, etc.) seem hopeless or negative, that
those collectives are a deeply adaptive aspect of life's evolution.
Many organisms are capable of living in relative isolation from members
of their own group, but do seem to thrive in groups of their own type
but also enhanced by modest diversity (forests, savannahs, blooms, pods,
hives, tribes, schools, flocks, etc.).
I'm rambling/rattling on (as usual) here, but I'd like to hear your
(DaveW) perspective on this topic, since you have spoken fairly directly
to the ideals of individualism.
What is the case (from your perspective) to the complement to rabid
individualism? Does the individualists bogeymen of collectivism or in
the (relative) extreme Globalism have *any* redeeming qualities, or is
the very idea of participating in larger and larger collectives
(hierarchical or heterarchical) completely antithetical to the survival
and enrichment of the individual?
- SteveS
On 1/10/19 6:40 AM, Prof David West wrote:
> Trump is coming up frequently in this "abduction" thread, especially
> with regard communication and rhetoric.A very good, quite
> enlightening, book about this is Scott Adams' (yes, the Dilbert
> cartoonist) /_Win Bigly_/.
>
> davew
>
>
> On Wed, Jan 9, 2019, at 9:03 PM, Nick Thompson wrote:
>>
>> Steve Smith wrote:
>>
>>
>> I sense frustration in many of us when we try to talk about our
>> various topics of specialty (as amatuers or professionals) with our
>> significantly educated (but in other (sub)disciplines)
>> lay-colleagues. It seems that in the attempt to be more precise or
>> to make evident our own lexicons for a particular subject that we end
>> up tangling our webs in this tower of Complexity Babel (Babble?) we
>> roam, colliding occasionally here and there.
>>
>> Right, Steve.
>>
>>
>> I wouldn’t have it any other way. It is one of the few places on
>> earth where, fwiw, people are struggling with the problem. Fighting
>> the good fight against semantic hegemony.
>>
>>
>> Nick
>>
>>
>> Nicholas S. Thompson
>>
>> Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
>>
>> Clark University
>>
>> http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
>>
>>
>> *From:*Friam [mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com] *On Behalf Of *Steven
>> A Smith
>> *Sent:* Wednesday, January 09, 2019 12:20 PM
>> *To:* friam at redfish.com
>> *Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] Motives - Was Abduction
>>
>>
>>
>> Nick writes:
>>
>>
>> < Ok, Marcus, I am standing my ground as a realist here: ():-[)>
>>
>>
>> There you go trying to claim semantics for terms in a public
>> dictionary again. (That’s an example of taking ground, like in
>> my Go example.) Doing so constrains what can even be *said*.
>> It puts the skeptic in the position of having to deconstruct
>> every single term, and thus be a called terms like smartass
>> <https://www.foxnews.com/politics/kellyanne-conway-embarrasses-cnns-jim-acosta-during-heated-exchange>when
>> they force the terms to be used in other contexts where the
>> definition doesn’t work. A culture itself is laden with
>> thousands of de-facto definitions that steer meaning back to
>> conventional (e.g. racist and sexist) expectations. To even to
>> begin to question these expectations requires having some power
>> base, or safe space, to work from.
>>
>> I think this is the "genius" of Trump's campaign and tenure... he
>> operates from his own (and often ad-hoc) Lexicon and that reported
>> 39% stable base of his seems happy to just rewrite their own
>> dictionary to match his. That seems to be roughly Kellyanne's and
>> Sarah's only role (and skill?), helping those who want to keep their
>> dictionaries up to date with his shifting use of terms and concepts
>> up to date.
>>
>> It has been noted that Trump's presidency has been most significant
>> for helping us understand how much of our government operates on
>> norms and a shared vocabulary. He de(re?)constructs those with
>> virtually every tweet. While I find it quite disturbing on many
>> levels, I also find it fascinating. I've never been one to take the
>> media or politicians very seriously, but he has demonstrated quite
>> thoroughly why one not only shouldn't but ultimately *can't*.
>>
>> In this case, you assert that some discussants are software
>> engineers and that distinguishes them from your category. A
>> discussant of that (accused / implied) type says he is not a
>> member of that set and that it is not even a credible set.
>> Another discussant says the activity of such a group is a skill
>> and if someone lacks it, they could just as well gain it while
>> having other co-equal skills too. So there is already reason to
>> doubt the categorization you are suggesting.
>>
>> I took Nick's point to be that the Metaphors that those among us who
>> spend a significant amount of time writing (or desiging) computer
>> systems is alien to him, and that despite making an attempt when he
>> first came here to develop the skills (and therefore the culture), he
>> feels he has failed and the lingua franca of computer (types, geeks,
>> ???) is foreign to him. Here on FriAM, I feel we speak a very rough
>> Pidgen (not quite developed enough to be a proper Creole?) admixture
>> of computer-geek, physics, sociology, psychology, linguistics,
>> philosophy, mathematics, hard-science-other-than physics, etc.
>>
>> I sense frustration in many of us when we try to talk about our
>> various topics of specialty (as amatuers or professionals) with our
>> significantly educated (but in other (sub)disciplines)
>> lay-colleagues. It seems that in the attempt to be more precise or
>> to make evident our own lexicons for a particular subject that we end
>> up tangling our webs in this tower of Complexity Babel (Babble?) we
>> roam, colliding occasionally here and there.
>>
>> - Sieve
>>
>>
>>
>> ============================================================
>>
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>>
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>>
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>>
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>>
>> ============================================================
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>> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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>
>
> ============================================================
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> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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