04 OCT 2024 by ideonexus
Undecided Voters are Uninformed and Disengaged
Many commentators have suggested that undecided voters’ opinions are better understood not as deeply held, thought-through beliefs, but as a sort of verbal Muzak. You say, of a candidate who has given many policy specifics already (and whose opponent speaks in word salad), “I need more policy specifics,” because it sounds better than “I don’t know what policies I want.” You say “The candidates just attack each other” because it sounds better than “I don’t actually know wha...So why do we put so much emphasis on their political opinions?
26 AUG 2024 by ideonexus
Hiroshima's Remarkable Recovery
Other examples of remarkable societal resilience are more recent. We can consider, for example, the atomic bombing of the Japanese city of Hiroshima in 1945. The bomb the United States dropped was 1,500 times more powerful than any previously used.32 The fireball at the hypocenter of the blast reached several thousand degrees Celsius within one-ten thousandth of a second before igniting all flammable material within one and a half miles.33 Ninety percent of the city’s buildings were at leas...Folksonomies: civilization disaster recovery
Folksonomies: civilization disaster recovery
28 APR 2024 by ideonexus
The Demise of Legality
In an essay called "The Twilight of Legality," John Gardner theorises the demise of legality in the modern age. He describes the increasing invasion of legislative regulations in every aspect of life. Think, the complicated and mistake-prone process of filling out your taxes, requirements to link government IDs to your bank account, or intellectual property rights and their muddy disputes. Gardner sees this barrage of legal paraphernalia as antithetical to democratic justice and freedom. He c...Folksonomies: legality critical theory
Folksonomies: legality critical theory
28 APR 2024 by ideonexus
Juridification is the Enemy of Legality
Modern governments, their hands increasingly tied by the robber-barons of global finance, often try to assert their power with their feet: by kicking out at another high-profile social problem, real or imagined, with another big policy initiative. Usually they come up with an accompanying raft of new laws. Legislative incontinence prevails. Not only is much of the legislation futile and even counterproductive from the start, we are also left with ever more relics of now-forgotten reforms. Bet...1. The sheer breadth of laws renders ‘the law’ in its entirety, unknowable.
2. This vastness means that the law cannot be enforced evenly.
22 OCT 2023 by ideonexus
How Realities are Created
It was always my hope, in writing novels and stories which asked the question “What is reality?â€, to someday get an answer. This was the hope of most of my readers, too. Years passed. I wrote over thirty novels and over a hundred stories, and still I could not figure out what was real. One day a girl college student in Canada asked me to define reality for her, for a paper she was writing for her philosophy class. She wanted a one-sentence answer. I thought about it and finally sa...Folksonomies: reality
Folksonomies: reality
06 AUG 2022 by ideonexus
1979 Dystopian Vision That Came True
I HAVE THIS recurring nightmare. Jonas Salk has just announced his cure for polio. A bill is introduced in Congress to require mandatory inoculation of school children under HEW direction. Opposition then appears. Ronald Reagan urges "free choice by parents rather than compulsion by government." Mobil runs advertisements with the headline, "From gas tanks to bloodstreams. Where will government go next?" An associate professor of economics does a study for the American Enterprise Institute dem...16 DEC 2021 by ideonexus
Principles of Technorealism
1. Technologies are not neutral. A great misconception of our time is the idea that technologies are completely free of bias -- that because they are inanimate artifacts, they don't promote certain kinds of behaviors over others. In truth, technologies come loaded with both intended and unintended social, political, and economic leanings. Every tool provides its users with a particular manner of seeing the world and specific ways of interacting with others. It is important for each of us to c...16 DEC 2021 by ideonexus
Subjected Under the Guise of Freedom
Any disciplinary power that expends effort to force human beings into a straitjacket of commandments and prohibitions proves inefficient. It is significantly more efficient to ensure that people subordinate themselves to domination on their own. The efficacy defining the system today stems from the fact that, instead of operating through prohibition and privation, it aims to please and fulfill. Instead of making people compliant, it endeavors to make them dependent. This logic of neoliberal...People freely subject themselves to oppression in return for satisfying their addictions. Because the oppression is not overt, like in a police state, people blame themselves and not the system for their dissatisfactions.