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RE: [ba-unrev-talk] Where is Kananaskis?


On Wed, 26 Jun 2002, John Maloney wrote:    (01)

> It is interesting/fun to examine different POVs in the context of the
> Unfinished "Revolution." IMO, levity and observation are the principal
> values...    (02)

Indeed.    (03)

> Humans are a tribal beast. We are hard-wired for proximate control and
> community. 99% of human physiological and evolutionary development has been
> in small groups and with close-in, local interaction and concern. It is the
> essential nature of the biology of the human brain. This fact will remain
> for some time to come....    (04)

You use this argument to say that world government, in any form, is
bad. I use this argument to say that the nation state is bad and your
conception of world government is bad. There is little that is
representative about large nations. My notion of a well implemented
world government is one that returns us to a _small_ (very small)
community orientation.      (05)

I don't expect it to ever happen because people with power like to
amass more power.     (06)

> Why is empire so seductive when its acolytes like you and the G8, EU, UN,
> etc., all know it will ultimately and painfully fail?    (07)

I'm a fan of neither empires nor G8, EU, UN etc.    (08)

I don't like artifical boundaries, I think that perhaps was the point
I was trying to make before.    (09)

> Some guys got it right a while back as follow:
> 
> "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor
> prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or
> to the people."    (010)

It's fine to quote the constitution, but the US states suffer from the
same lack of representation present in nations. All you are suggesting
here is that power centralized in the nation be centralized in the
state. Not much of an improvement if you ask me.    (011)

> Anyway, this is germane to unrev-ohs. The bureaucracies you love drive
> rigid, controlling information structures by nature and definition. That's
> bad. OHS architectures must focus on the individual, small groups and
> community, since for now, that's the way things work. That's good.    (012)

I don't love bureaucracies or their controlling information structures
in the slightest. To keep this on topic I'm in the habit of rejecting
formal knowledge representations as they limit. Formal symbolic
representations are resistant to the creation of new knowledge. They
are fine if your goal is proving theories false. That's a negative
goal and there must be more than that.    (013)

Earlier today I decided that knowledge access structures are far more
important than knowledge representation formalisms. Access helps to
generate new theory while avoiding repetition.    (014)

(Formal information representations is another cup of tea entirely.)    (015)

-- 
Chris Dent  <cdent@burningchrome.com>  http://www.burningchrome.com/~cdent/
"Mediocrities everywhere--now and to come--I absolve you all! Amen!"
 -Salieri, in Peter Shaffer's Amadeus    (016)