To begin Apple users, of which I have been happily one for the last four years having been released from corporate Windows, do not rever Bill Gates but see him rather as a destructive monopolist who has done much to ruin the pleasure of computing and destroy much creativity in the computer and internet space. We are only too happy to see him give his money away which he has mostly stolen but regret that this gives him so much power and control over charities, charitable work, intellectual forums within the circles of power and the "mindless" many of whom praise his multi-generational theft on this board. On the plus side, he does do it with a smile!
Yes, we have our baronial titans of industry pillaging and buying up smaller creative companies as they go, in much greater numbers than Europe but hold on, there's always China and their guys and assorted gals seem ready to do some big time plundering of their own.
As for philanthropy in general most working class people would rather earn their due - not 1/1000 of the CEOs take - than have to take food stamps or Gates foundation computer outreach programs.
As for creativity, as one interested in philosophy - especially as imo we are all going to die and have not been put here to consume as many i-pods or LPGs as possible - the French have contributed dozens of major philosophers to Western civilization just in the post-war years, including philosophical movements which have furthered our understanding of society, language psychology etc. compared to exactly none for the Americans. I am talking about things like Existentialism, Structuralism, deconstructionism, semiotics, post structuralism and people like Sartre, Derrida, Deleuze, Foucault, Lacan (psychology), Bardaud (history), Baudrillard (sociology), Althuser, Levi-Strauss, etc.
So you guys continue to rever the economic exploits of wal mart, amazon, windows, Mac Donalds, YUM Brands (Kentucky Fried Chicken - now expanding in China), I will tell you that Carrefour has biger and better stores with fresher produce, ikea classier and less expensive furniture; Sony and Philipps do as well as Microsoft and in the case of gaming and blue ray technology Sony makes a much better product but in making this comparison both you and I would be missing the point
The point is to live and learn from others not to be so blinded by ones jingoism and prejudices to miss most of what is out there and especially when it concerns ones unfortunate neighbor like the American blacks, all that this oppressed people has contributed, in terms of joy, music dance, theater literature and now leadership as to render onself absent from modern society by one's close mindedness. Imagine what American society would be without the great contribution of the African polity, a smaller narrower place ready to consume itself with hatred. One may say the same of Asian Americans and Hispanics and even all the white groups but one must begin by seeing "the other" as the French Philosophers say.
Bonds And Money
1 year ago
19 comments:
Please Note: This post was prepared and originally aired on another blog so none of the comments are meant personally to anyone here.
My point was to refute those claiming that the U.S., or U.S. system if you will, was better than Europe as the discussion seemed unbalanced, found nothing good in Europe, or Asia for that matter, and that this close-mindedness was counter -productive, if not directly harmful.
Best.
SS
SS said "so none of the comments are meant personally to anyone here." Thanks, that addendum does help. I was obviously still a little defensive from your attacking puritans.
re: "those claiming that the U.S., or U.S. system if you will, was better..."
I couldn't agree more with you and this point.
In fact, this is really the same complexity science argument I have been making all long- indeed the one I am still angry at god over ;-), only it is being made from still yet a different point of view.
I still remember the first time I really began to understand this issue. I was treating a young boy who was brought in by ambulance from a car crash and was paralyzed at initial presentation. I diagnosed a C4 cervical spine fracture.
After stabilizing him, I started asking myself why mother nature would ever have been so stupid as to evolve humans with spinal cords when the risks to our survival were obviously so great.
This simple thought experiment led me down the rabbit hole you are now in.
re: "The point is to live and learn from others not to be so blinded by ones jingoism and prejudices to miss most of what is out there"
Remember, within a defined manifold, there are always an infinite number of ways to create an information structure. Fractals just describing that infinite diversity within that manifold.
The problem of course with diversity is that is can be really really scary when people do not understand it (and vice versa) and this lack of understanding has significant implications for the manifold of kin boundaries and kin networks.
For as I hope my spinal cord analogy illuminates, admiring diversity's beauty within a bounded system must also be tempered with knowledge that there are always risks. Particularly, within a given manifold, there can always arise fundamental incompatibilities between certain types of information structures- at least incompatible in the sense that if both are to continue to exist, not all other possible designs are allowed.
@ Thai,
I never meant to attack Puritans, I attacked the sexual repression and thinking of sex as dirty which rightly or wrongly has been one of their seeming legacies in American culture.
Nothing wrong with restriant, however, nothing wrong or at least many positives to a "Puritan work ethic." Frugality, honesty? I'm for it. There are even "puritan socialists" - Lenin's personal discipline was called "puritan" - Southern Italians, which is my heritage, participated in the Albigensian heresy which had many Puritan aspects.
SS
Thanks and again I apologize (if you dealt with the almost daily comments I have to read from the likes of Yoyomo and Marcus, I think you would see why I have become a little touchy- but clearly pathologically so).
I guess it is just the price of blogging
Be well my friend
Oh and please remember, I realize I am not actually a puritan. I simply sympathize strongly with their view of the world ;-)
Thai, I don't think that you are a Puritan at all, basically.
But I DO think that American society has an extremely Puritan heritage that is not really either known or acknowledged by many people at this time.
My all favorite view of Puritanism and its ravages can be seen in Bergman's autobiographic film, "Fanny and Alexander" which is mysteriously unavailable at this time...
For France, well, France, for mysterious reasons, is a complex combination of Latin Meditteranean culture, with some Northern European tendencies thrown in.
You have to remember the beacon that Italy, another Latin Meditteranean culture, exerced on Northern Europe for centuries, draining artists, musicians, poets, to it.
Latin culture is, in some respects more easy going than Northern European culture.
Like : I HAVE THIS THEORY...
The climate is very temperate and it gets warm in the summer. People take off their clothes. More skin exposed means more opportunity for sensual experience (how's that for scientific for you Dink, I bet you thought I was incapable of it ?)
And where it's HOT HOT HOT, it's hard to get all excited about work and sweating it out all day.
In Spain, the school day starts early in the morning, then when the afternoon heat kicks in, the kids stop.
That makes sense doesn't it ?
It's MORE ECONOMICAL in some ways, and better for the planet to NOT install that air conditioning and neon lighting that will enable (LOL) people to work like rats until they drop during the day when it's hot.
What happened to the Algerian then? They are even further south
Deb,
You didn't address my love of France. Ready to throw yourself into Philosophy, smoke "Gitanes" at the Cafe Magot, cross-over with Gertrude Stein, drink pastis at 10:00 (a.m.), and amble along the Seine (topless?).
Or is it wal mart, amazon, i-pods, google, good shopping, free enterprise, the sky's the limit attitude, grand canyon, DAR.
All America is awaiting the ex-patriate choice.
SS
@ Thai,
Algeria doesn't count. This is what Derrida called a mega-discourse, the way that a country or culture explains itself to itself. With mega-discourses inconsistencies and contradictions don't matter. America' love for freedom would be another meta-discourse; discussed rabidly by the largest prison population per capita in the world.
SS
Can you direct me to a link on this? I have never heard of it before.
Thanks
fewer clear explanations than I thought:
http://books.google.com/books?id=W7eLlRE-5OwC&pg=PA325&lpg=PA325&dq=Derrida+meta+discourse&source=bl&ots=OCF3OP5ApX&sig=3tBquunFUnXVLK7JLVxEmxYi5Do&hl=en&ei=rf9tSsuwM8nKlAfDuOy1Ag&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1
but be forewarned, Chomsky says it may all be pretentious, obfuscation unless he didn't understand it, which he says is unlikely.
SS
SS, looking for something even more basic, as you will have to remember I never studies philosophy formally before
Do you agree with these:
link 1
Derrida... known as the founder of deconstruction.
Deconstruction involves the close reading of texts in order to demonstrate that, rather than being a unified whole, any given text has irreconcilably contradictory meanings
... Hey, am I what you guys call a structuralist??? And is a post structuralist a structuralist who sees the conservation of energy in a closed systems?
... Deja Vu?
And is this what you mean by a Metadiscourse?
If so, what a gloriously fractal idea!
For if I am reading this definition correctly, it is nothing other than a philosopher's equivalent of an emergent property created from a fractal complex system: e.g. information structure building blocks iteratively combined to form yet a new information structures with their own unique properties, etc...
Agree, except for maybe, the "closed" system I don't think that is necessary but the fractal repetition might work. As for metadiscourse, I saw the wikepedia definition and don't think they've actually finished it. Try my link again now that you're already steeped in this stuff. It was the best I could find but not to worry you're already way up on Chomsky who you have left in the dust re.: understanding.
SS
I'll let you stay away from the conservation of energy if you want... You might get as mad a god as I did when you start to see it. For right at the moment I began to see the common ground of science and religion that many others see, it hit me like a stone: it does make a difference :-(
The more I look at it the more I think fractal fits well here, closed system, not so much although you could hold out like Chomsky and claim they missed an important part of the system. Best.
I think you are probably correct on this one as well... I think I need to be a little more precise about what I mean here.
@ Thai
I'm not really sure but that's ok. Hey how about my Haiku? Check it out on Dink's last post. Looks like we've lost Deb it is way into the night in France, we'll have to wait to have a decision on France v USA.
For your benefit in assessing the comparison: Gitanes are a very strong, unpolished cigarette; Cafe Magot (magots) a place where Sartre hung out; Gertrude Stien a lesbian (hence the notion of cross-over) American writer who lived in Paris as an expatriate
pastis a bitter but not too strong alcohol; Seine, Paris' major river; and topless I guess you know. I tried to be fair to both and find it a tough choice based on the sampling.
Yes, I see. Very tough... ;-)
LOL, SS, there's lots of ways to be French, and you don't have to take it back to the St Germain and OH SO PARISIAN view of Frenchiness to be French, do you ?
I never drink Pastis.
Gitanes are foul. I used to smoke Camel no filters for one year when I was trying to develop addictions but I never managed. My only addiction is "amour courtois"... And I'm a little old for that now, even..
Carrefous (my neologism for Carrefour) is little better than Wal Mart.
Why should I congratulate the French for doing well what the Americans have always done better ? (There is a saying here that every American fad hits France twenty years after, and believe you me, there is definitely some truth in this saying, and it is EXASPERATING. The French manage to copy American culture while throwing in their little French twist, which most of the time does not HUMANIZE the culture, but gives it a nihilist touch that could make you want to go out and hang yourself on the spot...)
Deconstructionist thought is an abomination in my book, and I prefer to remember Derrida as a French intellectual who was passionately devoted AGAINST the death penalty...
No, French intellectual thought has a foundation of despair that I cannot defend.
Deconstructionist thought, SOUS LA LOUPE, as I call it, putting things under the microscope has DEFINITE DANGERS that we have forgotten. Reducing, and analyzing are like substraction : they bring you closer and closer to... ZERO, or to NOTHING, if you prefer.
Dangerous stuff, that...
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