[FRIAM] RedState/BlueState OneState/TwoState

[Marcus Daniels]

Glen writes:

< But it's just so wrong. What I think is right is that we are an indivisible *goo*. There is no boundary between me and the homeless kid I just drove by on my way to the glass drop-off. If that homeless kid isn't prepared, then *I'm* not prepared. >

Looking at metagenomic data is kind of fun.  Oh look, in this sample we have SARS-Cov2, Green Monkey, and Chlamydia abortus.   Who is to say which organism is more interesting?  It's probably how alien visitors would evaluate humans going to the glass drop-off or a homeless kid under a bridge.  Suddenly that nothing little virus got a whole lot more interesting to the arrogant humans!   The homeless kid has a whole nervous system.

[cid:b7046bb1-b600-4a95-9aa6-cb40a55c911c]

Marcus
________________________________
From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> on behalf of uǝlƃ ☣ <gepropella at gmail.com>
Sent: Wednesday, April 8, 2020 2:42 PM
To: FriAM <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] RedState/BlueState OneState/TwoState

While I sympathize with the *idea* of diversity as a way to maintain a kind of "bottom floor" agility, sacrificing some higher optimal, but probably fragile, narrower solution set, the question devolves (again) to what the normals will do. I know you're not an ivory tower type. But I think your cognitive facility may lead you into some of the same rat holes. Diversity ... *true* diversity will come from *below* the conscious/thought radar ... from our bones, from the bugs that live in side and surround us, etc. And, in practice, that means preserving the lives of the frail and avoiding right wing tropes like "self-made man" and "survival of the fittest".

My point percolates within what you say below. But I can tell a more personal, similar, story so that it looks less like an "attack" on you (even though I know you're tough enough to handle whatever wimpy attack I might launch 8^). Renee' was/is a part of the CERT (Community Emergency Response Team) back in OR. And the first thing they tell you is to FIRST, take care of yourself, THEN and only then, once you're in a good position, consider helping others. The rhetoric is that if you can't take care of yourself, then you're only causing problems for other people and the best way to help is to not cause problems for others. (cf billionaire philanthropy [ptouie])

I've tried to point out how completely, fantastically, wrong that sentiment is. It's rooted in the same bias to individual ontogeny that's led to our current state of malignant capitalism. I'm not immune to the bias, of course. For my entire lifetime, I've relied on both my physical and mental agility to win the day out of all sorts of bad situations. And I often used to think that if others were more like me (stay prepared, exercise, eat right, readreadreadreadread, stash some money, learn to cook/brew/weld, etc.) then we wouldn't be in the mess we're in. But it's just so wrong. What I think is right is that we are an indivisible *goo*. There is no boundary between me and the homeless kid I just drove by on my way to the glass drop-off. If that homeless kid isn't prepared, then *I'm* not prepared.

From that perspective, the diversity you impute looks like a fiction ... a delusional idealism. I still argue for diversity. But it's obtuse, occult, and deeply ensconced within things we are unlikely to tease out, analyze into, divide up, ratio-nally. And if we pretend that we are (or will soon be able to) do that, then we're akin to people like Sam Harris, Jonathan Haidt, or Steven Pinker, whose superficially *benign* rhetoric facilitates gamers like Trump in their quest to feed their own egos.

And from that perspective, the centralized Chinese style clamp-down may well preserve diversity way better than our (probably fictional) federated system will.

On 4/8/20 12:03 PM, Steven A Smith wrote:
> Simultaneously I'm looking at my 1.49 acre homestead and (mildly)
> preparing it for "the coming Apocalypse" by being more thoughtful about
> what/when/how I plant, adding chickens, building up some off-grid
> PV/storage so I can maintian comms and water even if my (end of a long
> line) power fails due to (minor) social/infrastructure breakdown.   This
> leads to thinking at many scales from the microorganisms in the guts of
> the worms in my vermicompost to the vegetable scraps I give them to the
> size of the seeds Iplant in the pots, raised beds, and furrows, to the
> bushes, saplings and mature trees.   The amount of power my cell-phone
> wants to stay connected to the amount my laptop wants to play videos,
> the amount my solar heat needs to circulate hot air from collector to
> rock-bed, to what my well requires to deliver garden-scale water, to
> what my Chevy Volt wants to take me on a round trip to the nearest town.
>   These are all orders-of-magnitude apart , while their utility is
> roughly inversely scaled for some purposes.


--
☣ uǝlƃ

..-. . . -.. / - .... . / -- --- .-. .-.. --- -.-. -.- ... / . .-.. --- ..
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6  bit.ly/virtualfriam
unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/attachments/20200408/d74d9297/attachment-0001.html>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: image.png
Type: image/png
Size: 163409 bytes
Desc: image.png
URL: <http://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/attachments/20200408/d74d9297/attachment-0001.png>