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laodan

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laodan is a guy from Milford, Pennsylvania, USA

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THE WAY THINGS ARE: The meaning of life is to be found in thinking about what is reality and the beauty of reality is to be found in our DNA's memorization of all forms that have been successfully retained along the four billion years of evolution of the principle of life on Gaia our earth. In the end what I mean to say is that beauty is something objective and what we call ugliness is then simply our unconscientious feel of something evolution did not retain.
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  • The Long Now Blog & Blog Archive & We are programmed...

    Rated Feb 20 2009 • 2 reviews • culture, web • longnow.org

    We are programmed to be interrupted.
    in the Long Now Foundation blog by Austin Brown

    Wired has a great interview with an author named Maggie Jackson who has written a book about the neurobiological basis of attention and how it is affected by all the "lovely distractions" modern society provides. Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age describes three types of attention - orientation, a general sense of awareness, and executive. Her concern is that our modern technological culture is constantly distracting us - and that we like it. Scientific American just ran an article about a study with similar findings: Results suggested that thinking fast made participants feel more elated, creative and, to a lesser degree, energetic and powerful.

    We are programmed to be interrupted.
    Digital Overload Is Frying Our Brains
    Distracted by Maggie Jackson
    Rapid Thinking Makes People Happy in The Scientific American
    List of cognitive biases in Wikipedia
    Neo-Amish Drop Outs

    Under digital overload we zap from one place to another and soon come to the point where we are only reading titles... We seem to lose our faculty to concentrate on the subject described in an article or a post always wishing to discover something else.

    It seems some people react to this aberration by jumping ship or drop out of the web. I'm often tempted to follow them but I observe myself always coming back... albeit with less frequency but much more focused on the substance of what I'm interested in.

    How do you fare?




    81 views
    The Long Now Blog & Blog Archive & We are programmed to be interrupted.

  • FT.com / Columnists / Philip Stephens - Crisis marks out...

    Rated Oct 09 2008 • 1 review • culture, change, economics, hegemony, finance • ft.com

    Crisis marks out a new geopolitical order
    in The Financial Times by Philip Stephens

    The wreckage of the financial system holds up a mirror to the changing geopolitical balance. It offers advice, and a warning, as to what the west should make of the emerging global order.
    ...
    Owning up to the geopolitical implications will be as painful for the rich nations as paying the domestic price for the profligacy. The erosion of the westu2019s moral authority that began with the Iraq war has been greatly accelerated. The westu2019s debtors cannot any longer expect their creditors to listen to their lectures. Here lies the broader lesson. The shift eastwards in global economic power has become a commonplace of political discourse. Almost everyone in the west now speaks with awe of the pace of Chinau2019s rise, of Indiau2019s emergence as a geopolitical player, of the growing roles in international relations of Brazil and South Africa.
    ...
    ... the big lesson is that the west can no longer assume the global order will be remade in its own image. For more than two centuries, the US and Europe have exercised an effortless economic, political and cultural hegemony. That era is ending.

    Crisis marks out a new geopolitical order



    Right on the mark. The Western economic, political and cultural hegemony is abruptly faltering. We Westerners will have to learn listening to the ways of the Bric countries but most particularly to the Chinese ways... and even more than listening and learning we'll have to adapt the ways of the new hegemons.




    138 views
    FT.com / Columnists / Philip Stephens - Crisis marks out a new geopolitical order

  • Pioneering research shows Google Generation is a myth

    Rated Jan 18 2008 • 4 reviews • culture, internet, visualization • bl.uk

    "Google Generation" is a myth
    via KurzweilAI.net, in The British Library Online

    A new study overturns the common assumption that the "oogle Generation' " youngsters born or brought up in the Internet age is the most web-literate. The first ever virtual longitudinal study carried out by the CIBER research team at University College London claims that, although young people demonstrate an apparent ease and familiarity with computers, they rely heavily on search engines, view rather than read and do not possess the critical and analytical skills to assess the information that they find on the web.

    The report Information Behaviour of the Researcher of the Future (PDF format; 1.67MB) also shows that research-behaviour traits that are commonly associated with younger users' impatience in search and navigation, and zero tolerance for any delay in satisfying their information needs are now becoming the norm for all age-groups, from younger pupils and undergraduates through to professors.

    "Google Generation" is a myth
    Information Behaviour of the Researcher of the Future FREE 35 pages study report

    - Sheer size of the mountain of information available.
    - We all zap and surf wildly losing track, it seems, of "the prize".
    - And from an incredibly rich tool at distributing information the web transforms into something more akin to a spider-web that immobilizes our capacity to understand and unleashes our frantically looking always further as if further contained the finality of our clicking.

    SU is highly symptomatic of such an attitude. But where does this "always further" bring us? Impressionism?




    2,734 views
    Pioneering research shows Google Generation is a myth

  • Dissent Magazine

    Rated Dec 23 2007 • 1 review • culture, politics, china • dissentmagazine.org

    China: meritocracy versus democracy
    in Dissent Magazine by Daniel A. Bell

    There may be the worry that the strong meritocratic system becomes entrenched - fossilized, like the American constitutional system - and hard to change once it's in place. But what if it works well?
    ...
    In the sobering documentary An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore notes that he has been hammering away about the dangers of global warming for decades, and he expresses frustration at the lack of interest among democratically-elected decision makers in the United States.
    ...
    The question is, who is more likely to enact laws that limit greenhouse gases in China: political leaders chosen by poor farmers who understandably worry first and foremost about their short-term economic interests or deputies in the meritocratically chosen legislature?

    And what if the large majority of Chinese seem satisfied with strong meritocracy? Should we complain just because the system doesn't satisfy our ideas about democratic rule or should we allow for the possibility that there are morally legitimate, if not superior, alternatives to Western-style liberal democracy?

    From Marx to Confucius: Changing Discourses on China's Political Future

    Democracy is the outcome of a process characterized by fight and negotiation between the clergy, the aristocracy and the merchants, that took place in Western Europe, along the centuries between the late Middle-Ages and the 20th century.

    No other country on earth has this kind of societal landscape. It is thus difficult to imagine how the historical process that led to the emergence of democracy could ever be repeated. And the exercise to impose democracy in Iraq has definitely bankrupted the idea that democracy could ever be imposed from the outside. Impossible as an inside process of maturation and impossible through outside imposition democracy appears more and more as what it is - a Western European exception that also rooted in its geographic extensions.

    How could we then reject the idea of other countries (90% of the world population) trying to find their own ways in managing the public institutions of their industrializing societies? I don't think that we Westerners are in any moral high ground to give lessons to others (our history and our present actions!). Nor do we necessarily have the most efficacious institutional model to propose.

    China has over 2000 years of practice in managing a huge state bureaucracy. Their model was based on:
    - the teaching of the Confucian classics that instilled the values of righteousness
    - exams for the scholars concluding for the successful ones in their access to the decision making process.

    In light of all this it is not surprising to witness a Chinese revival of a system that after all has served them quite well along their history.

    Who are we to even dare questioning their experimentations?




    600 views
    Dissent Magazine

  • A lesson in humility for the smug West - Times Online

    Rated Nov 24 2007 • 3 reviews • culture, modernity, worldviews • timesonline.co.uk

    A lesson in humility for the smug West
    via CQD, in Times Online by William Dalrymple

    About 100 miles south of Delhi, where I live, lie the ruins of the Mughal capital, Fateh-pur Sikri. This was built by the Emperor Akbar at the end of the 16th century. Here Akbar would listen carefully as philosophers, mystics and holy men of different faiths debated the merits of their different beliefs in what is the earliest known experiment in formal inter-religious dialogue.

    Representatives of Muslims (Sunni and Shi\u2019ite as well as Sufi), Hindus (followers of Shiva and Vishnu as well as Hindu atheists), Christians, Jains, Jews, Buddhists and Zoroastrians came together to discuss where they differed and how they could live together.

    Muslim rulers are not usually thought of in the West as standard-bearers of freedom of thought; but Akbar was obsessed with exploring the issues of religious truth, and with as open a mind as possible, declaring: \u201cNo man should be interfered with on account of religion, and anyone is to be allowed to go over to any religion that pleases him.\u201d He also argued for what he called \u201cthe pursuit of reason\u201d rather than \u201creliance on the marshy land of tradition\u201d.

    All this took place when in London, Jesuits were being hung, drawn and quartered outside Tyburn, in Spain and Portu-gal the Inquisition was torturing anyone who defied the dogmas of the Catholic church, and in Rome Giordano Bruno was being burnt at the stake in Campo de\u2019Fiori.

    A lesson in humility for the smug West

    Memory, ah memory. It seems indeed that the West has even no concern for the memory of its own historic doing. So how could its memory be better at remembering the historic doing of other people?

    The comments on Dalrimple's article are most hilarious and denote a trend in Western thinking: in short the West is superior, for, individuals are free to think, to vote and so on.

    But what about the side-effects of modernity that the West has unleashed upon the whole world that are now appearing to threaten the survival of civilization itself? The West has to realize that societal reproduction is more important than individual rights? When our societies collapse under the weight of the side-effects of modernity nobody shall ever give a damn again about human rights. Our daily-life stories shall indeed entirely be devoted to subsistence. That's when nature shall take its revenge on culture, mostly on Western culture.




    37 views
    A lesson in humility for the smug West - Times Online

  • Robert Garfias - Ethnomusicology

    Rated Nov 18 2007 • 0 reviews • culture, music • uci.edu

    1,147 views
    Robert Garfias - Ethnomusicology

  • American kids, dumber than dirt / Warning: The next...

    Rated Nov 01 2007 • 28 reviews • culture, education, society • sfgate.com

    American kids, dumber than dirt.
    Warning: The next generation might just be the biggest pile of idiots in U.S. history.


    via beautifulcorpse's SU pages, in SFGate.com by Mark Morford

    it might be no stretch at all to say the biggest threat facing America is perhaps not global warming, not perpetual warmongering, not garbage food or low-level radiation or way too much Lindsay Lohan, but a populace far too ignorant to know how to properly manage any of it, much less change it all for the better.

    What, too fatalistic? Don't worry. Soon enough, no one will know what the word even means.

    American kids, dumber than dirt

    I don't know how to take this article. It's difficult not to think that the image drawn here is extreme but from what I observe on SU 95% of the blogs are collections of images stolen from here and there and most often not even mentioning the origin of their clippings. Pages of quality, I mean pages where people lay out their thinking, are very rare indeed. Is that a sign of the dumbing this article describes? Have any comments?




    1,560 views
    American kids, dumber than dirt / Warning: The next generation might just be the biggest pile of idiots in U.S. history

  • http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/07/20/news/entracte.php?...

    Rated Jul 20 2007 • 1 review • culture, arts, art • iht.com

    What has happened to culture's challenge?
    in The Int'l Herald Tribune, by Alan Riding

    " For the past three years, this column has sought to make the case that art and life or, more broadly, culture and society are natural interlocutors: just as art can express life's emotions in a coherent form, culture can provide society with a spiritual dimension and an ethical framework.
    ...
    What might be called Western "classical" culture has lost enormous ground to popular culture and its accompanying celebrity fever. Even that fixture of the Paris Left Bank, the public intellectual, has almost disappeared. Harold Pinter still rages against the United States, Gu00fcnter Grass still beats his drum, but few writers under the age of 60 seem to feel it their duty to lead public debate. As for contemporary art, well, the marketplace rules.
    ...
    Perhaps I should rebuild my case around another premise: society is too important to be left to politicians (or journalists, priests and businessmen). There is ample room for artists, writers and thinkers to elevate the debate with some idealism. True, by now, they may need encouragement to join in. But why not? It has happened before.">

    What has happened to culture's challenge?

    Yep. We are in times of transition not knowing what tomorrow will be made of. It is not as if we have no idea of what could happen, it's simply that there are so many possibilities that we are at a loss.

    The market has also succeeded to imprison most of us in the role of modern slaves who have to toil every day in order to pay the bank at the end of the month. Slaves have no time to devote to thought.

    But FREE people who are still AWAKE should rejoice for "... what we do today depends on our image of the future, rather than the future depending on what we do today. We build our equations by our actions. These equations, and the future they represent, are not written in nature. In other words, time becomes construction. Of course, we have some conditions that determine limits of the future but within these limits are many, many possibilities.
    Therefore, since no deterministic prediction is likely to be valid, visions of the future--utopian visions--play a very important role in present conduct. I am more afraid of the lack of utopias. "     (Illya Prygogyne In NPQ)




    312 views
    http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/07/20/news/entracte.php?page=1

  • http://www.lessig.org/blog/archives/003800.shtml

    Rated Jun 19 2007 • 0 reviews • culture, internet, open source, society • lessig.org

    61 views
    http://www.lessig.org/blog/archives/003800.shtml

  • New Left Review - Henry Zhao: Contesting Confucius

    Rated May 13 2007 • 1 review • culture, china, civilization • newleftreview.org

    CONTESTING CONFUCIUS
    via Abiezer / Metafilter, in the New Left Review by Henry Zhao

    Contesting Confucius [Single-link book review tour de force] In which a returned exile Chinese scholar uses a literary spat between two Francophone sinologists as a springboard for an exploration of the politics of New Confucianism and the role of the Chinese 'other' in Western philosophical discourse. Isn't globalisation something?

    CONTESTING CONFUCIUS


    Interesting read. But I should venture that China can't be summarized through Confucianism. Billeter is right that Confucianism has been the ideological driver of the Chinese empire in its successive dynasty sauces and Francois Julien does not imply something different.

    For Zhao it seems as if China's traditional philosophy were limited to Confucianism. This is simply not true. The Confucian classics are expanding on the long intellectual evolutionary tree that precedes them. One of Confucius main works is his "Commentaries on the I-Ching". Nobody knows how nor when the I-Ching originated but what is starting to be better known is that the Bagua on which the I-Ching is based appears thousands of years earlier. And the Bagua is also the root of Chinese thinking about everything: from strategy, to painting to medicine to politics to morality and so on. (the bagua is the 8 trigram derivation from the yin-yang polarities)

    In my view there is one essential difference between China and the West.

    - China's civilization gradually built over its animist background without destroying it. There is a continuity in China's intellectual construct and its animistic origins remain foundational to the later construct.
    - The Middle-East and Europe followed another path. Religious foundational stories violently superseded animism. The force of military power erased all visual signs of animism and imposed the signs of the foundational story of the religion as replacement.

    It is not difficult to understand that this drastic differentiation in the rooting of the two civilizations leads to radically different interpretations of reality. And it is also not difficult to understand that these radically different interpretations of reality engender radically different attitudes in the shaping of decisions in the present.

    One example.
    - In the West the treatment of sickness is done by elimination of the symptoms through one or another form of suppression: the knife in surgery, chemicals in chemotherapy or rays in energy therapy. In other words Western doctors cut the symptom.
    - In China the cure of sickness is done through the treatment of the underlying causes that provoke the sickness. In other words Chinese Traditional Medicine considers that an initial chemical or energetic imbalance in the body is what causes sickness and so they act to re-establish the chemical and energetic balance of the body.





    623 views
    New Left Review - Henry Zhao: Contesting Confucius