[FRIAM] Motives - Was Abduction

[Eric Smith]

An article on this that found enjoyable was the following:

https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/why-the-russian-influence-campaign-remains-so-hard-to-understand

There are a key set of areas, where I often think the bulk of the commentariat go off on tangents and distractions, and Masha sees clearly the point and can cut to it without difficulty.

The importance of noise qua noise in the predatory behavior patterns of opportunistic con-men seems to me an important observation.  It’s not changing a language; it’s not even a coordinated effort to “destroy” a language, quite.  It is just throwing up clouds of chaff so they can dart about and steal stuff under cover.

She did another interview with Gary Kasparov that I also liked:

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-new-yorker-interview/garry-kasparov-says-we-are-living-in-chaos-but-remains-an-incorrigible-optimist

he being another who says things I haven’t heard before and endlessly repeated.  He comments that dictators are all in key respects opportunists.  I also love his characterization of the core message of Putin:  We are shit. You are shit. It’s all bullshit.  What democracy?”  That observation works well together with the former observation about the role of noise.

Eric



> On Jan 10, 2019, at 4:49 AM, Marcus Daniels <marcus at snoutfarm.com> wrote:
> 
> Steve writes:
> < 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.  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. >
> Deconstructing a complex predicate involves taking out sub-predicates and sub-sub predicates and examining all of the facts that cause each predicate to hold or not.    Trump’s `leadership’ involves ripping out the top level predicates and simply defining sub-predicates to hold or not depending on his impulses at that minute of the day.   Yes, it is his correct recognition that humans, especially the deplorables, aren’t very good with depth first search.   He’s got a depth cutoff of about 1, as do they.
> Marcus
> ============================================================
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
> archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
> FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove