We are made to be powerless in the face of evil
by Mike Meyer ~ Honolulu ~ September 3, 2021
The American apocalypse is not sudden and catastrophic but slow and exhausting. Our litany of death is the idiotic acts of people consumed by evil that could be prevented but isn’t.
We can’t believe that people could do these things, but they do, and we have to watch it happen. The weapons used by the political criminals who have taken over the Republican Party are crude and poorly aimed, but, as in nightmares, the majority seems frozen in place, unable to even move out of the way.
The ugly attack on…
What we think is paradigmatic change may be collapse
by Mike Meyer ~ Honolulu ~ August 11, 2021
We thought we understood paradigmatic change from Thomas Kuhn’s 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions after watching the transformations resulting from e-commerce and social media. But it didn’t work out as we imagined.
The popular assumptions about paradigmatic change were already far removed from the focus of Kuhn’s work on the intellectual shifts required for and by the scientific revolution of the 17th century. Still, they helped explain the profound shock of internet-driven change. …
As the war escalates, we need symbols of our battles
by Mike Meyer ~ Honolulu ~ September 22, 2021
Things are definitely confused for people who expected traditional outcomes in 2021. Despite general discussion of the new normal by the end of 2020, most people held onto the idea of a return to the past.
This was supported by a decline in COVID cases in the early part of the year after establishing a sane, if not original, administration in Washington following Trump’s Kafkaesque coup attempt in January. …
With great respect for Ethan Siegel and this article, the problem is not error but complexity. Ffor most people, most of the time, following the scientific consensus in any specific area is the safest bet.
Once upon a time this was a far better bet than now.
We are overwhelemd by pardigmatic change (See Kuhn referenced below) that creates scientific arguments and crisis. Human knowledge is metaphorical or based on models. We are in an era, the anthropocene, that is a product of numan effect on our planet based on errors in our past models. …
How to adapt to Remote Work and Remote Education
by Mike Meyer ~ Honolulu ~ September 16, 2021
Paradigmatic change is confusing from any perspective but especially from the inside. Nevertheless, these are changes to long-held assumptions about how things work that allow us to not worry about basic operations in human society.
This is the way the world works except when it stops working that way. Functional paradigms or model conflicts have initially been a problem when you meet someone from a different culture. There has been a slow-growing awareness that change has been creating a constant sequence of these kinds of events for the last one hundred…
These are signs of an exponential crisis overwhelming us
by Mike Meyer ~ Honolulu ~ September 11, 2021
The disasters are beginning to cascade on us. And that is its own kind of disaster. When disasters become a continuous deluge, we tend to curl up into our shells and selectively edit our reality or, in the worst case, shut out everything around us. That is not what we should be doing.
People in 21st-century avoidance mode tend to focus on what they do every day and ignore the weird shit that they can’t face or understand. Unfortunately, we can’t avoid things completely in our digital world with multiple firehoses…
This is well structured and perceptive within the current world perspective. The comparison to the old Cold War is excellent as this will be very different. Unfortunately, this is too closely tied to the collapsing Modern order.
As is common, the focus is on narrow categories of information; here, international economics is predicated on 20th-century attitudes using antiquated criteria.
China has led the planet intellectually and in wealth more times than any other civilization. Their historical database is larger, giving them a lot to work with. That should not be given too much weight, but it is a fact. …
And not confusing it with stupidity
by Mike Meyer ~ Honolulu ~ September 6, 2021
We have a lot to worry about. But, unfortunately, misunderstanding the nature of what we are facing causes bad prioritization. That is potentially fatal.
If you have doubts about this, consider the consequences of misdiagnosis in clinical medicine. For example, my dermatologist once mentioned a fellow dermatologist's tragic loss of his wife to melanoma. Unfortunately, he ignored what appeared to be hemorrhoid but was a cancerous tumor that killed her.
There are a couple of important issues with this embarrassing and tragic anecdote. The first is not paying attention to areas…
Having destroyed much of our planet's viability for a wide range of life forms, we need to admit defeat in our efforts to plunder our planet for the benefit of a few. This surrender must be the return to 'commoning' or the active restoration of the commons [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commons and https://www.commonsnetwork.org/news/what-is-commoning-and-why-is-it-so-important/].
Capitalism is not sustainable, and while market economics is valuable, it is must be managed as a minor tool within the planetary commons administered by locally structured direct democracy subject to planetary ecological and universal standards of wellbeing.
The key to this transition is eliminating the nation-state that is not needed in our evolving metaverse as it repeatedly collapses into systems of authoritarian oppression and exploitation.
The faster we surrender, the better
by Mike Meyer ~ Honolulu ~ August 23, 2021
Our civilization is disintegrating around us, and we are adrift. There is nothing to hold onto except pieces of jetsam near enough for us to grab. So we try to grab the things that we recognize from our cultural and communal memories, whether of future value or not.
What we see and what we grab is a product of the communities we were a part of. For many people in low information communities, there is little value for the current and future planetary crisis. But like a drowning person, we hold…
