Simply having interests, or the courage of your convictions is immune evasion, if I understand. The problem with news, social media and many kinds of communication is that they risk decreasing social entropy. People become too similar. People stop trying because they feel pressured to conform or feel superseded and redundant. Antidepressants to the rescue..
From: Friam <friam-boun...@redfish.com> On Behalf Of steve smith Sent: Tuesday, August 27, 2024 9:53 AM To: friam@redfish.com Subject: Re: [FRIAM] on government 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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