Disqus - Latest Comments for kirbyurner

Re: Two Dissident Portland Academics Are Part of a New University Forming in Texas

kirbyurner — Mon, 15 Nov 2021 16:42:02 -0000

Shifting the blame to Putin, for Trump, was indeed weak-kneed and cowardly. DNC versus GRU is hardly a match. But then CrowdStrike, solicited by the FBI to do the real investigation, still has its Guccifer 2 story in the Mueller Report, on the basis of which it's ostensibly OK for DC to torture Assange (as it has been to date). I'm fine with the DNC digging its own grave in this way. I'll even lend them my shovel.

Re: Two Dissident Portland Academics Are Part of a New University Forming in Texas

kirbyurner — Mon, 15 Nov 2021 16:22:46 -0000

I grew up in Italy after leaving Portland and discovered that the Communists and Fascists were both political parties, open with their PR, even if both marginal. How civil. Such a relief after the juvenile paranoid craziness of Lower48ers who want to lecture the world on what "communism" really means. Or "socialism". There's nothing more socialist than a military base on Guam ("where America's day begins") full of economic refugees escaping life in an Amazon fulfillment center (which is worse I couldn't tell you). Cost-plus Pentagon contracts paid for with extorted money are hardly a "free market" phenomenon. DC seems quasi-fascist to me, not to mention neo-Roman. I'll not be learning my jargon from the likes of local yokels unless they earn my respect first.

Re: Why Innovation Is Key to Accelerating Battery Storage Growth

kirbyurner — Tue, 26 May 2020 11:56:14 -0000

Energy generation and storage is the business of polytechnic universities going forward. To stay competitive as a campus, you need to offer your students hands on experience keeping the campus in the green (black), energy-wise. That's one trend in science fiction (investment banking) in any case.

Re: Time to switch QuakerQuaker

kirbyurner — Thu, 27 Apr 2017 13:28:34 -0000

A mismatch of needs. Stable URLs I can embed in journal posts and have work through the years is all I care about. No worries. If Q2 is still around in 5 years with URLs not in flux, I might venture back in.

Re: Time to switch QuakerQuaker

kirbyurner — Wed, 26 Apr 2017 17:23:45 -0000

If the cost of switching is all the old URLs break, then that's a deal breaker for me. No more monthly payment, won't be back again.

Re: "The Big Lie": How Trump Uses Classic Authoritarian Propaganda Techniques

kirbyurner — Sat, 03 Sep 2016 20:23:44 -0000

I see Trump's posturing vs-a-vs NATO as somewhat random, and in recent speeches his stance softened in response to feedback. He often pulls in his horns.

That Europe experienced the Balkan war and was committed to participate in unpopular attacks on exo-European territories, while the US engaged in numerous disastrous hostilities in Asia -- since WWII -- is hardly strong proof we have any optimum or winning formula.

The need to evolve beyond NATO would seem a no-brainer, as necessary as our evolving beyond the USSR, or Apartheid in South Africa. Scotland might help lead the way?

I'd say NATO's track record is pretty dismal of late.

However I don't expect Trump to base his views on focused analysis so much as a read of the crowd's mood, which tends to be fickle -- especially on esoteric topics, such as TPP, NATO, and these days, Puerto Rico.

Re: Oregon Local News - Citizen's View: Measure will create stronger schools and a better future for all

kirbyurner — Fri, 22 Jul 2016 02:56:26 -0000

I've been suggesting the corporate taxpayers get together with the teachers to make sure it's well-spent. The article mentions "computer programming" but does that mean AP Java, a computer club after school, or some new kind of math offering? The devil is in the details.

Re: What can Quaker capitalism teach business today? It’s no good being ethical if you don’t make money

kirbyurner — Sat, 07 Nov 2015 16:12:15 -0000

Useful thinking here. As a practicing Quaker and IT Clerk for the regional body (NPYM.org), I have to say that our terminology (discourse) as a faith is still remarkably business oriented. It's not hard to imagine a time when this curious brand of self governance encompassed a bevy of late 1700s steel, railroad and ship-building firms, all fortes of a prominent Quaker families back then (this was after the earlier hundred years of significant persecution).

The ideal at the time, as many readers likely know, was the "company town" as a crucible for experimentation, presumably with workers' consent, as the goal was to provide a showcase or demonstration "utopia". Fair compensation, reasonable hours, education, daycare, healthcare... sounds like heaven even today, and the Quaker meetings were enthusiastic hotbeds for such radical capitalist thinking.

Many global trends undercut these experiments, not the least of which was slavery. In the US, where Pennsylvania was supposed to be the showcase (Philadelphia in particular), we got side-tracked into everlasting Indian Wars (still ongoing, having spread to fighting various defiant tribes holding out somewhere around the world).

Re: Quaker practice unbound from belief

kirbyurner — Sat, 10 May 2014 11:10:36 -0000

For me, the essence of Liberal Friends vs those with a Pastoral model is the set of delicately balanced committees whereon we learn how to extend our business, corporately / collaboratively, grounded in worship / meditation, to a wider arena more reminiscent of our daily lives.

As Quakers, we afford the wider community with opportunities to practice managing property, serving on a board (Oversight), controlling money, nominating others based on their intuitions and call to service. These are not beliefs so much as practices, which we cannot just take for granted as inherited and now frozen. On the contrary, the meeting where I most participate has innovated entirely new committees, such that our printed Faith & Practice, authored at the regional level, is at least a decade behind, which is bewildering to newcomers and, I have to say, a mark of laziness on the part of established Friends.

I pray for a the renewal in spirit and for the courage it will take to actually document our practices faithfully once again, as an "adhocracy" (where we just make it up as we go) is less "spirit-led" in my book than a surrender of the Liberal Friend model. When our practices become opaque and undocumented, the natural tendency is to imitate the churches and gravitate to a Pastoral model with the clerk or clerking team as the focal point (for example we now have a Clerk's Advisory Committee -- undocumented in our Faith & Practice).

We as Liberal Friends have no one to blame but ourselves for this trend. I think we lose one of our most valuable contributions to democracy in losing our coherence at the committee level. We offered a training ground, a sandbox in which to practice, such that strangers became Friends through shared business. Minus this apparatus, well-documented and transparent to all, we lose much of our Quaker heritage.

Re: "Language Game" as a Philosophical Term - Serious Philosophy - Ludwig

kirbyurner — Thu, 05 Dec 2013 10:39:04 -0000

Wittgenstein died before the term "spin doctor" came into vogue, but he did witness the rise of mass advertising through radio and magazines. Reading philosophy, one might get the idea language is all about drawing accurate pictures of things, rendering some reality. Wittgenstein himself uses this metaphor to introduce his Investigations as a kind of sketch pad -- many drafts thrown away -- showing us language games (e.g. the game of streets crossing). But language is also about (a) giving commands in battle and (b) getting people to buy more (or fewer) bacon sandwiches. Especially the latter takes spin doctoring, the ability to change meanings, affect the rules, without having to change anything factually (not even price). Back to the Tractatus: the world of facts is orthogonal to the ethical / aesthetic dimension (the realm of spin).

Re: "Language Game" as a Philosophical Term - Serious Philosophy - Ludwig

kirbyurner — Tue, 03 Dec 2013 14:59:44 -0000

To clarify: yes, he was, from the start of his later period at least, open to "the fuzzy side of meaning" and even willing for philosophy to accept fuzzy concepts into its core ("language game" one of these). Our view that the core must be "crystal" gets written off as superstition.

Yet in retrospect he did not come across as "wooly-minded" to a critical mass but kept his reputation for philosophical acumen through to the end of his trajectory. I take it as a mark of his genius that he didn't pay a higher price -- that was my point.

Aside from the question of what is gained, I consider your "THAT continuum" well chosen, akin to "spectrum" with its frequencies, "language" being some narrow band, like visible light's. In broadening "language events" to include "events more generally", we invite changes in perception ala Philosophical Investigations Part 2. As to the worth of these changes in an aesthetic dimension, I'd fall back on the Tractatus and suggest they have no worth as facts, as we're more just talking about context here. They may increase your coordination, i.e. ability to navigate / omni-triangulate i.e. "ways of seeing" are needed to interpret x-rays, the printed word, any language.

Re: On The Club's Meaning of "Analytic Philosophy" - Serious Philosophy - Ludwig

kirbyurner — Wed, 30 Oct 2013 22:47:40 -0000

In the article cited we find this proposition in the section on the later Wittgenstein:

"Instead, language systems, or language games, are unanalyzable wholes whose parts (utterances sanctioned by the rules of the language) have meaning in virtue of having a role to play—a use—within the total form of life of a linguistic community."

I would take issue with "unanalyzable wholes" as language games are indeed analyzable, as well as constructible (we get to invent them as a tool of investigation).

I'd say the later Wittgenstein forked or branched away from "analytic philosophy" and gave us "investigative philosophy" as an alternative.

Investigative philosophy is influenced by the emergence of anthropology as an academic discipline, but as much in reaction to its blatant ethnocentrism in the early days (cite LW's remarks on Frazer).

Wittgenstein had little patience for academic philosophy as championed by "the club" (e.g. Russell) and encouraged his proteges to escape that vortex. We should remember that, when looking to identify his so-called successors, if the goal is to establish a lineage. Don't start by looking within the club.

Re: What if the Arab Spring never reaches Palestinian refugee camps?

kirbyurner — Mon, 16 Jul 2012 23:17:52 -0000

Occupy successfully resisted being identified with any particular nation-state, as it swept the world after Arab Spring.

Refugee camps are testament to the corruption and unworkability of the nation state system. Millions of people have no nation to claim. The UN says all humans deserve a nation, but then of course the UN would think that as it seeks world domination for its favored way of governing.

People left without real nationhood are helping us grow beyond this obsolete way of doing planning and resource management. Of course we need governing bodies. They don't have to be jigsaw puzzle pieces though.

Corporations aren't nations and they manage resources. They could also be more democratic, even while not needing large contiguous land areas (many facilities around the world works well too).

Occupy sends the message that we no longer trust or recognize sovereign nations as a source of hope and progress for humankind. They're a phase we went through, and now it's time to move on. If they want to persist, they need to improve their operations or fade into bankruptcy.

In the meantime, we take nation states less and less seriously as mere puppets set out to amuse and distract us from what's really happening in the world.

Re: Occupy Together: Living Humanly

kirbyurner — Wed, 02 May 2012 12:29:01 -0000

Of course Christianity too is a "Fallen" institution carrying the seeds of its own death. No doubt many of the great world religions are still ahead of us (yet to be invented), some of which will likely draw upon Jesus, who's teachings needn't be considered the monopoly property of any one brand. Quakers aren't so tied to Christianity that some branches can't break free of it, and better themselves thereby. Here's an interesting movie about Occupy from Portland's B-Media Collective: http://worldgame.blogspot.c...

Re: Iran's vows to counter US or Israeli strike with 'iron fist' - CSMonitor.com

kirbyurner — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 06:17:16 -0000

IAEA is too wimpy to last in its present incarnation, in that surprise inspections / policing in North America has been left to other agencies. Weapons of Mass Suicide are criminal no matter where on Planet Earth they occur. Iran is rhetorically positioned to encourage the 'Countdown to Zero' campaign whereas Washington DC (WDC) wants to play a hypocritical game of "superpower" ("we have nukes, you must never"). WDC is not a credible city, when it comes to "foreign policy". Good thing we have other cities with more brains (and bravery).

Re: Iran's vows to counter US or Israeli strike with 'iron fist' - CSMonitor.com

kirbyurner — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 06:12:14 -0000

IAEA is extremely wimpy in not insisting on inspections in North America. Politicians won't criminalize nukes across the board but they're clearly pathological anti-human weapons of mass suicide. The "sanity committee" is already well down the road of making it close to impossible to develop said WMSs. The Iranian is actually not the most dangerous. Mostly it's the target of hypocritical projections.