Writing on the Wall

Keith Kahn-Harris points out that denial, the slasher flick baddie of Global warming debates, is related to the mind protecting itself from things it can’t cope with. So why not take the taboos, the worse case scenarios, and explore the positives in them? Surely that is a way to open up things a bit.

So yes, maybe it is a good thing if, over the next few hundred years, the vast majority of life on earth goes extinct. Just think, if humanity survives this crisis, and goes on to colonize other planets, what a problem that would be for those other planets,and those that live on them.

We don’t have a great track record, what with colonialism and environmental destruction, so maybe we will have saved the universe at large from a terrible fate. Besides, if you take a giant step back you can see it is all futile anyway: Lives will come and go, planets will live and die, and eventually stars, including our own, will burn out. The rest is just not worth getting too upset about, or is it?

Read the rest of this entry »

There is a very interesting article on Open Democracy, where bean counters have looked at various forms of assymetric warfare (between state and non-state actors, with radicaly different levels of power and resources) and, from the way they have gathered and treated their data set (caveat emptor), they have found that non-violent revolution is more effective:

Madrid11.net | Does terrorism work?

This is pleasing to me, considering the bashing I took for making a stand against violent methods as the best way for the Palestinians to respond to Isreali occupation and ethnic cleansing.

Read the rest of this entry »

E-participation seems to be taking various forms. Apart from the recent emerging role of YouTUbe in the US Primaries (see the videos here) there is also the issue of epetitions.

Waste of time? I almost thought so, but..
I signed an epetition a while back and then forgot about it. Then I got this email back:

Read the rest of this entry »

Second Life is becoming a destination for increasingly many. But what is a parallel reality useful for?

Well one answer is that it gives an interaction space where people can meet and learn. Sloodle is one such project. They are taking the very good open source distance learning platform Moodle, and making it work within the 3D visual space that is second life. In other words they are using second life to add extra dimensions to an allready successful e-learning platform. And Moodle is successful, it has just been adopted as standard by the biggest distance learning institution in the world, the Open University, and they are also showing an interest in Sloodle. The head of e-learning at the OU can be found on the Sloodle list.

Read the rest of this entry »

The two people who mind the garden in our house, between them they earn 2000 rupees a month. That’s about £25-30. Funny thing is that the housekeeper, who makes 1000 rupees a month (for half-time work, that’s a relatively good deal for the market she is operating in) questioned why they struggled to get by on that money.

The answer came back that so many people come and eat at their house. In other words, on that kind of money, they are acting as a form of local social welfare, and it would be seen as strange if they didn’t do so. Upshot of it is that the wife of our care-taking couple has arthritis and needs 30 rupees (50 pence) to get on a bus to the local state hospital. I suspect that this is true, but actually don’t care if it is not. It is almost harder to deal with their honesty than with being ripped off.

Funnily enough I just read a piece by John Gray in the New Statesman about human agency, and the wierd take poltical philosophers tend to take on it. It was incidentally about Nazi Germany.

http://www.newstatesman.com/200703120045

Gray, as ever, was taking a pop at our weird image of enlightenment man being able to transform the world at will. OK John got the message. He also had a plug to his latest book , something characteristically morose and pessimistic. His point being that people often don’t have control over their lives.

Read the rest of this entry »

There is a heated debate on postmodernism on the World Socialist website:
An exchange with a reader on postmodernism

Here was my comment:

The debate on PM can actually be resolved somewhat by referring to early Marx, and by taking into account more contemporary interpretations of theories of practice.
Marx’s work on alienation actually dealt with the philosphical issues debated here rather well, but in a nascent form. He pointed out the human need for a relationship with the material, as formed by our actions, a way of recognising ourselves in the world. He also pointed out how mechanisms of exchange tended to generalise the fruits of people’s labour, thus obscuring the possibility of people recognizing themselves in the world.

If you carry the analogy from the material to the representational, then you can see that the project of Marxism is to humanise representation as well as production. From this standpoint it is clear that there is a need to pay attention to how people create their realities, and how this is related to their other acts of creation.

An objectivist epistimology is the ultimately alienated product: The whole universe is cast as a system of generalised exchange , where some set of principles of sameness, or evaluation, serve as a universal basis for relating things in a mechanical manner.

If such principles (or formalised truth relations) are not asserted, then you have an “external” reality with its own integrity, but without any basis for one coherant and structured representation of it. Thus the “real” without the “objective.”

Marx was urging us to celebrate human creativity, and human fellowship, founded in mutual recognition rather than alienation. Practice theories, where knowledge and representations are seen as created within specific historical relations and sets of material practices, stand far closer to that original ethic.

This does not imply rejecting forms, or rather practices, of generalisation, but these should be seen as historically situated with their own specific dynamics and standards. That way we are able to see the primacy of the human over the cold world of ideas.

I went to see Tom Stoppard’s play ‘Rock and Roll’ last night. It was interesting precisely because it was so predictable. I was suprised by how well it fitted with ideas I had been rolling around in my head for a while.

What was predictable in Tom Stoppard’s script was the celebration of ‘not caring’ and ‘doing your own thing.’ In many ways it was an honest social document of idealism caving in to the relativistic individualism of the 80’s, with the fall of communism and the rise of ‘liberated’ consumption.

However the calculated irresponsibility of Stoppard’s play is not just a piece of social history, but also something very contemporary. It is part of a huge denial of reponsibility by the rich and powerful, a denial that has eaten its way in to almost every area of contemporary thought.

Read the rest of this entry »