[FRIAM] on government

[steve smith]

No News == Good News

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".

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"?

<off on a RANT>

    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.

    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?

    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?).

    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.

    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).

    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?

    So much of our civilizational/political/economic/religious
    development seems parallel to Cancer:

        oncogenesis: socio-political-economic-religioius "experiments"

        tumor-development: urban/industrial sprawl

        metastasis: colonialism/missionary-work

        angiogenesis: infrastructure development

        genomic instability: techno-political-economic innovation

        immune evasion: organized crime, cartels, terrorist networks

        clonal evolution/epigenetic alterations: left to the reader

        apoptosis evasion:  Life extension tech/medicine/lifestyle

    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?)...

    I worry (suspect) sometimes that my posts are little more than an an
    indiscrimanatory release (expression according to Nick?) of
    cytokines.   ...buh...

</endRANTforNow>


On 8/27/24 8:10 AM, glen wrote:
> How Telegram's Founder Pavel Durov Became a Culture War Martyr
> https://www.404media.co/how-telegrams-founder-pavel-durov-became-a-culture-war-martyr/ 
>
>
> 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 
>
>
> 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.
>
> 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?
>
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