Friam

The Time for Rational Paranoia is NOW.

Classic

List

Threaded

5 messages Options

Nick Thompson

The Time for Rational Paranoia is NOW.

Dear Friammers and Kitcheners,

These websites caught my attention, and I think they ought to catch yours.

http://www.dsac.gov/Pages/index.aspx

http://www.justiceonline.org/commentary/fbi-files-ows.html

There is a danger that Obama, because he is a centrist, will cement in place institutions that would have been unthinkable only a few years ago. Where is Frank Church when we need him?

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

http://www.cusf.org

============================================================
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

Marcus G. Daniels

Re: The Time for Rational Paranoia is NOW.

On 1/2/13 10:55 AM, Nicholas Thompson wrote:

Dear Friammers and Kitcheners,

These websites caught my attention, and I think they ought to catch yours.

http://www.dsac.gov/Pages/index.aspx

http://www.justiceonline.org/commentary/fbi-files-ows.html

There is a danger that Obama, because he is a centrist, will cement in place institutions that would have been unthinkable only a few years ago. Where is Frank Church when we need him?

Conversely, I saw this on CNN last night..

http://www.mediaite.com/tv/grover-norquist-voting-for-senate-fiscal-cliff-compromise-technically-not-a-violation-of-the-tax-pledge/

"Cooper brought up military spending, to which Norquist agreed that the GOP needs to look at the Pentagon budget with a fine-toothed comb, quipping that we should still at least have a military strong enough to beat back a potential Canadian invasion."

I love it. Now this guy wants to compel the conservatives to be stingy about defense spending too!
Perhaps the Obama administration is getting too centrist because the Republicans can't figure out any kind of self-consistent identity.

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

Pamela McCorduck

Re: The Time for Rational Paranoia is NOW.

Norquist is a one-trick pony, though a well-funded one-trick pony--not by popular contributions, of course, but by the usual suspects, the Koch Brothers and their like. Talk about leverage…

I too worry about the institutions that are being cemented into place. We can hope for a pendulum swing, but that's a thin reed.

On Jan 2, 2013, at 12:04 PM, Marcus G. Daniels wrote:

On 1/2/13 10:55 AM, Nicholas Thompson wrote:

Dear Friammers and Kitcheners,

These websites caught my attention, and I think they ought to catch yours.

http://www.dsac.gov/Pages/index.aspx

http://www.justiceonline.org/commentary/fbi-files-ows.html

There is a danger that Obama, because he is a centrist, will cement in place institutions that would have been unthinkable only a few years ago. Where is Frank Church when we need him?

Conversely, I saw this on CNN last night..

http://www.mediaite.com/tv/grover-norquist-voting-for-senate-fiscal-cliff-compromise-technically-not-a-violation-of-the-tax-pledge/

"Cooper brought up military spending, to which Norquist agreed that the GOP needs to look at the Pentagon budget with a fine-toothed comb, quipping that we should still at least have a military strong enough to beat back a potential Canadian invasion."

I love it. Now this guy wants to compel the conservatives to be stingy about defense spending too!
Perhaps the Obama administration is getting too centrist because the Republicans can't figure out any kind of self-consistent identity.

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

"Bounded Rationality," by Pamela McCorduck, the second novel in the series, Santa Fe Stories, Sunstone Press, is now available both as ink-on-paper and as an e-book.

“The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.”
― Jane Austen

Russ Abbott

Re: The Time for Rational Paranoia is NOW.

There is a danger that Obama, because he is a centrist, will cement in place institutions that would have been unthinkable only a few years ago.

Agree. In fact, with his fiscal cliff deal he already has.

Steve Smith

Re: The Time for Rational Paranoia is NOW.

In reply to this post by Nick Thompson

Nick -

What I think you are describing, is a structural problem with our system. While I don't want to disagree with the likes of Winston Churchill ("Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the rest"), I think the form we have come to, which feels like a slow-motion tug-of war between two huge factions, each being sponsored by huge corporate interests, leaves us in this situation. The actual alignment of the tug-of-war rope shifts over time, but in any given moment there seems to be no room for innovation or compromise, just pull and tug.

When we don't have a "centrist" in office, "cementing in place institutions" ...   we have an extremist (well, only barely by some standards) tearing down the institutions of the last group in power and replacing them with new ones (to be torn down later).

I'm probably harping to the choir here, but our *mental* model of a single political axis (left/right) is as damaging to the possibility of anything else as the more mechanical institutions (election law) that help to put/keep us there.

Some of the alternative models of the "political spectrum" allow for 2, 3 and even more dimensions of alignment.

The early work (some of the sociologists/psychologists here can probably elaborate/correct me on this) of folks like Ferguson (American) and Eysenck (german living in Britain) seem to offer some pretty insightful thinking on this subject. Even they used factor analysis to reduce the dimensionality to 3 or 2 (respectively).   This is useful for analysis perhaps, but I think it is *always* risky to forget that the process is lossy and can be obfuscating of important properties...

I believe that the dimension reduction (to 1) contributes significantly both to the "stuck in the middle" artifact and the "wildly swinging pendulum" artifact. I'd be interested if anyone has more information/insight into this problem.

- Steve

Dear Friammers and Kitcheners,

These websites caught my attention, and I think they ought to catch yours.

http://www.dsac.gov/Pages/index.aspx

http://www.justiceonline.org/commentary/fbi-files-ows.html

There is a danger that Obama, because he is a centrist, will cement in place institutions that would have been unthinkable only a few years ago. Where is Frank Church when we need him?

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

http://www.cusf.org
============================================================
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