30 MAY 2015 by ideonexus
The South's Long History of Violence
Why has the South had such a long history of violence? The most sweeping answer is that the civilizing mission of government never penetrated the American South as deeply as it had the Northeast, to say nothing of Europe. The historian Pieter Spierenburg has provocatively suggested that “democracy came too early” to America.85 In Europe, first the state disarmed the people and claimed a monopoly on violence, then the people took over the apparatus of the state. In America, the people took...Folksonomies: violence vigilantism
Folksonomies: violence vigilantism
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notes01 JAN 2010 by ideonexus
Symbols: Shorthand For Ideas
Your 3-year-old has declared that he and the closet are going to Asia.
Asia, like America, is a concept that depends on our ability to think symbolically. America exists only because a group of people got together more than 200 years ago and decided that this great mass of land directly to the south of Canada should bear that name.
California wasn't America, and then it was. It became America because a group of people decided 1 notes
notesThis is something important to consider in developing artificial intelligence, how symbolic thought works. When we consider "China", the word evokes an understanding of an abstract concept: a geographic location, an ethnicity of people, language, fashion, culture, population, etc. All the details of what "China" is are really abstracted away, we accept an immense amount of ambiguity in our understanding of the concept.
