Off Topic. Karl has often written about Plunder. And an article with that word in the title.
From Naked Capitalism a couple of days ago
"US Health Care Strip-Mined for Profit: Primary Care Physicians Becoming Scarce, Poorly Trained Nurse Practitioners Run Wild
Posted on November 13, 2023 by Yves Smith"
And then there is the vaccine mandate -- or there was the vaccine mandate -- which plundered the population and the military. This was just posted
"The Army is Begging Unvaccinated Soldiers to Return:
Army forced to reverse course, as people refuse to enlist" and they will even revise their records if they were kicked out for refusing the vaccine. Recruitment goals are 25% down and the Empire is getting ready for wars in 3 theaters.
Would you join the military when the country is in disarray and you could end up in a cauldron?
The dissolution of the Outlaw US Empire is proceeding as Hudson forecast in "Killing the Host"--Neoliberalism is destroying the ability of the nation not only to compete but ultimately to survive. I know well the healthcare issues. The military doesn't have a chance against either Russia, China or Iran or any combination of the three. Russia will soon have its SU-75 Checkmate fighter in full production at $25-30 million/ ea that will outperform the F-35 costing 10-20 times that. See Martyanov's post here for the videos, https://smoothiex12.blogspot.com/2023/11/let-military-porn-rule.html
Additionally, we have this recent Heritage Foundation paper that exhibits the main flaw within US policy:
"In an increasingly threatening global security environment—in which the People’s Republic of China, the Russian Federation, Iran, and North Korea are actively challenging U.S. interests—the NDAA gains even more importance."
First and foremost, in what ways are the above four nations "actively challenging US interests"? Which nation is actually doing the threatening and causing chaos in the "global security environment"? The utter failure to get outside the very steep-sided propaganda box leads to all the mistakes and wars since WW2 and today's failed policies.
Nov 17, 2023·edited Nov 17, 2023Liked by Karl Sanchez
Pepe Escobar in an interview said that negotiation was not possible. between Russia and USA and in the Gaza genocide.
I think that there are different cosmologies in play, different understandings of reality.
The West since The Enlightenment has made the dichotomy between Nature and Culture: one nature and many cultures. The one nature is known by science and rationality. The west is superior because we control nature and have science. We set the rules based on our superior knowledge of reality.
The statement above is my version drawn from the work of the polymath Bruno Latour
"Pepe Escobar: Russia CHANGES EVERYTHING as Putin Turns to Gaza in Israel's War"
Danny Haiphong 107,498 views Nov 13, 2023
"Geopolitical analyst and journalist Pepe Escobar discusses his take on Russia's strategic and diplomatic maneuvers related to the war taking place in Gaza and argues that Putin and the Kremlin is pivoting to Gaza's aid."
Latour's1991 book "We Have Never Been Modern" notes that we are superior because we are modern. They are the "other." The west can't seem to grasp that the Russians have a 1,000 year civilization and China civilization is much older than that. In other words, the RoW lives in a different world.
The move to a multi-polar world exposes the possibility that the west could become a remnant.
Nov 17, 2023·edited Nov 17, 2023Liked by Karl Sanchez
Latour can be a big mountain to climb. But there is one very short and readable book which is actually a pamphlet. It is very readable. Can be downloaded. Some quotes below. Published in 2002.
"War of the Worlds: What about Peace? Prickly Pear Press 116KB
Well Don, that's a head scratcher. My Philosophy Prof had the current Paradigm Change consisting of Modernism's demise to be replaced by its still unknown antithesis. My conception of Nature isn't at all what's described, but then how I view the world is unique, and that will get exposed for all to read about soon enough. Thanks for your contribution!
Nov 17, 2023·edited Nov 17, 2023Liked by Karl Sanchez
Karl, this warms my heart. I have been reading Latour for 20 years. My initial quest was to understand EXPERIENCE. Earlier I had read Michael Polanyi (brother of Karl) who talked about the experience of becoming a scientist through the community of other scientists.
My education is almost entirely in math but got into computer science in 1973 at Bucknell University because no jobs for math profs. Very small department and later became head. University not really doing interdisciplinary work and my students getting good jobs, so I left in 1978 to go to Bell Labs.
I got my project to hire the best person in the world in software engineering and we wrote a joint paper on using documentation as a design medium. I was infatuated with design and they gave me the job of transferring the design method throughout Bell Labs. The joint paper we wrote was the most republished paper in the history of Bell System Technical Journal. I transferred the method to 40 projects from small ones to very large ones. I then embarked to find out how the method worked. Users were MA and PhD often in physics who said that some model is needed.
So I interviewed practitioners. Then failure. Their experiences did not fit together. I realized that even though they used the same set of documents (I provided samples and reviewed the work of most of these projects) their stories did not fit together. In other words, I didn't know what happened. I took it as a personal failure that I couldn't generalize the group behavior centered around the common method. I was offered a job at NBS, now NIST, to be a manager of software engineering, but how could I take that job because I realized that I didn't know what I was doing.
I did realize that the practitioners were doing something more than the documentation framework. But what was the essence? Was there an essence?
Years later Latour helped me. The documentation project development effort was rhetoric. Rhetoric is an important discipline but neglected. When Latour spent 2 years at the Salk Institute working with a group that later got a Nobel Prize, he described what they did. The question was: how are facts created. He used literary theory to describe what he found.
Another learning was also from Latour. (I am making very short statements not an argument). Who is the biggest asshole in history? Who keep asking experts for more and more description of their practice and drove them into a corner babbling? Why it was the person who said that I know that I don't know. Socrates. I can no longer hate myself for failing to summarize design experience because Socrates failed as well. The epistemology, ontology and spirituality of embodied practice is one of the wonders of the universe.
Karl, from your comments on MOA and now in your posts of Russian work, I have to hold myself back from too much excitement. I see in this work solid intellectual work, morally grounded and practiced. The work you post is too good to be true. Except it does seem true. They are doing things that are impossible in the Westerns Modern World, in Latour's characterization of modernity.
Are the Chinese and the Russians are looking to the UN to be a transcendental legal framework within which dialogue on existential issues can be diplomatically engaged? In Latour's frame, the Modern Constitution (he uses that word) has to be dismantled to see the "other". Latour wears many hats including anthropology and sociology and especially in STS, Scientific Technology Society, an area in which he was a founder.
Thanks for sharing your history, Don. My background is so very different. When I returned to college in 1996, I eventually transferred to Northern Arizona University at Flagstaff and met a profoundly unique Humanities Prof, Dr. Guy Bensusan, who invented the Hexadigm System approach to learning, and who unfortunately passed away less than two years after my graduation in 2000 before he collated it all together. We worked very close together on distance learning issues since he was head of the University's nascent department in that area. I found older, non-traditional students like myself were better able to understand and utilize his system, whereas it befuddled younger students who had yet to become adept at taking in multiple viewpoints, analyzing them, then producing their own synthesis in response. I internalized that system and have used it ever since. I owe a lot to Dr. Guy.
When I was at Berkeley from 1965-1967 a big interest was systems. A prof had a mimeographed book on systems attempting to lay out linkages between various items. Later I spent several years with the work of C West Churchman who wrote extensively about systems. In the end this work was too mechanical even though advocates came from philosophy. There was very little politics in this work.
You are doing an amazing job in supplying this information. You are one of those pushing back the boundaries of the internet in the way which its foundrers dreamed of- as once there was a movement to free men of the belief that thet needed priestly intercession to commune with their God, so now there is a movement to free us of the superstition that agents of capitalism are required to facilitate our communicating with each other.
All of which is unrelated to the many topics the incomparable and irascible Maria dealt with. On which I have only to say that iI read recently an account of the history of the Caucasus which recorded the fact that it was in 1823 that the new Soviet Republics agreed that Nagorno Karabakh was a province of Azerbaijan. The Commissar for Nationalities helped broker the deal.
Once upon a time, there was the Town Crier who went about spreading the news of the day. Substack allows me to have my own soap box out here in the Oregon sticks that potentially reaches billions. No reader has tried to undermine my efforts or to really dispute what's written, and I've yet to need flea prevention. Thanks again for your support!
"How China's political model could prove to be a viable alternative to Western democracy
Westerners tend to divide the political world into "good" democracies and “bad” authoritarian regimes. But the Chinese political model does not fit neatly in either category. Over the past three decades, China has evolved a political system that can best be described as “political meritocracy.” The China Model seeks to understand the ideals and the reality of this unique political system. How do the ideals of political meritocracy set the standard for evaluating political progress (and regress) in China? How can China avoid the disadvantages of political meritocracy? And how can political meritocracy best be combined with democracy? Daniel Bell answers these questions and more.
Opening with a critique of “one person, one vote” as a way of choosing top leaders, Bell argues that Chinese-style political meritocracy can help to remedy the key flaws of electoral democracy. He discusses the advantages and pitfalls of political meritocracy, distinguishes between different ways of combining meritocracy and democracy, and argues that China has evolved a model of democratic meritocracy that is morally desirable and politically stable. Bell summarizes and evaluates the “China model”―meritocracy at the top, experimentation in the middle, and democracy at the bottom―and its implications for the rest of the world.
A timely and original book that will stir up interest and debate, The China Model looks at a political system that not only has had a long history in China, but could prove to be the most important political development of the twenty-first century."
The description given is similar to Zhang Weiwei's. We discussed the differences in efficiencies at MoA during Trump's turn and the consensus was China's system is superior.
"How a hybrid Confucian-engendered form of governance might solve today’s political problems
What might a viable political alternative to liberal democracy look like? In Against Political Equality, Tongdong Bai offers a possibility inspired by Confucian ideas.
Bai argues that domestic governance influenced by Confucianism can embrace the liberal aspects of democracy along with the democratic ideas of equal opportunities and governmental accountability to the people. But Confucianism would give more political decision-making power to those with the moral, practical, and intellectual capabilities of caring for the people. While most democratic thinkers still focus on strengthening equality to cure the ills of democracy, the proposed hybrid regime―made up of Confucian-inspired meritocratic characteristics combined with democratic elements and a quasi-liberal system of laws and rights―recognizes that egalitarian qualities sometimes conflict with good governance and the protection of liberties, and defends liberal aspects by restricting democratic ones. Bai applies his views to the international realm by supporting a hierarchical order based on how humane each state is toward its own and other peoples, and on the principle of international interventions whereby humane responsibilities override sovereignty.
Exploring the deficiencies posed by many liberal democracies, Against Political Equality presents a novel Confucian-engendered alternative for solving today’s political problems."
Off Topic. Karl has often written about Plunder. And an article with that word in the title.
From Naked Capitalism a couple of days ago
"US Health Care Strip-Mined for Profit: Primary Care Physicians Becoming Scarce, Poorly Trained Nurse Practitioners Run Wild
Posted on November 13, 2023 by Yves Smith"
And then there is the vaccine mandate -- or there was the vaccine mandate -- which plundered the population and the military. This was just posted
"The Army is Begging Unvaccinated Soldiers to Return:
Army forced to reverse course, as people refuse to enlist" and they will even revise their records if they were kicked out for refusing the vaccine. Recruitment goals are 25% down and the Empire is getting ready for wars in 3 theaters.
Would you join the military when the country is in disarray and you could end up in a cauldron?
The dissolution of the Outlaw US Empire is proceeding as Hudson forecast in "Killing the Host"--Neoliberalism is destroying the ability of the nation not only to compete but ultimately to survive. I know well the healthcare issues. The military doesn't have a chance against either Russia, China or Iran or any combination of the three. Russia will soon have its SU-75 Checkmate fighter in full production at $25-30 million/ ea that will outperform the F-35 costing 10-20 times that. See Martyanov's post here for the videos, https://smoothiex12.blogspot.com/2023/11/let-military-porn-rule.html
Additionally, we have this recent Heritage Foundation paper that exhibits the main flaw within US policy:
"In an increasingly threatening global security environment—in which the People’s Republic of China, the Russian Federation, Iran, and North Korea are actively challenging U.S. interests—the NDAA gains even more importance."
First and foremost, in what ways are the above four nations "actively challenging US interests"? Which nation is actually doing the threatening and causing chaos in the "global security environment"? The utter failure to get outside the very steep-sided propaganda box leads to all the mistakes and wars since WW2 and today's failed policies.
Pepe Escobar in an interview said that negotiation was not possible. between Russia and USA and in the Gaza genocide.
I think that there are different cosmologies in play, different understandings of reality.
The West since The Enlightenment has made the dichotomy between Nature and Culture: one nature and many cultures. The one nature is known by science and rationality. The west is superior because we control nature and have science. We set the rules based on our superior knowledge of reality.
The statement above is my version drawn from the work of the polymath Bruno Latour
"Pepe Escobar: Russia CHANGES EVERYTHING as Putin Turns to Gaza in Israel's War"
Danny Haiphong 107,498 views Nov 13, 2023
"Geopolitical analyst and journalist Pepe Escobar discusses his take on Russia's strategic and diplomatic maneuvers related to the war taking place in Gaza and argues that Putin and the Kremlin is pivoting to Gaza's aid."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJ7kbChOKU0
Latour's1991 book "We Have Never Been Modern" notes that we are superior because we are modern. They are the "other." The west can't seem to grasp that the Russians have a 1,000 year civilization and China civilization is much older than that. In other words, the RoW lives in a different world.
The move to a multi-polar world exposes the possibility that the west could become a remnant.
Thanks for reminding me to watch that interview. Many have recently referenced Latour's work. I'll try and find some time for it.
Latour can be a big mountain to climb. But there is one very short and readable book which is actually a pamphlet. It is very readable. Can be downloaded. Some quotes below. Published in 2002.
"War of the Worlds: What about Peace? Prickly Pear Press 116KB
http://www.bruno-latour.fr/sites/default/files/85-WAR-OF-WORLDS-GB.pdf
"The lesson does not seem to sink in. When did Paul
Valéry prophetically observe that, “We have now
learned that all civilizations are mortal?”
...
"Since September
2001, we go on dialing the same emergency number,
911, and rightly so, since we have entered a state of
emergency. We look around frantically to understand
why all that we feel is worth fighting for remains so
fragile"
...
"There was, however, a little hitch in this peaceful
modernist version of politics: nature was as meaning
less as it was disenchanted! Herein lies the whole
paradox of these strange times we call “modernity”—
which retrospectively appear no longer as the motor
of history, but increasingly as the partial representation of one historical episode now come to an end.
For if nature had the immediate advantage of
imparting unification, it also had the serious drawback, in the eyes of its very promoters, of being
fundamentally devoid of meaning. Objective facts in
their harsh reality could neither be smelled, nor
tasted, nor could they provide any truly human signification. The modernists themselves were fully aware
of this, and even acknowledged it with a sort of sadomasochistic joy. “The great scientific discoveries,”
they were glad to say with a shudder, “are incessantly
wrenching us from our little village and hurling us
into the frightening, infinite spaces of an icy cosmos
whose center we no longer occupy.” Ultimately,
though, this was not a matter of choice: modernization compelled one to mourn the passing of all one’s
colorful pretensions, one’s motley cosmologies, of all
the many ways of life with their rich rituals. “Let us
wipe away our tears,” the modernists liked to
declare, “let us become adults at last; humanity is
leaving behind its myth-imbued childhood and is
stepping into the harsh reality of Science,
Technology and the Market. It’s a pity but that’s the
way it is: you can either choose to cling to your
diverse cultures, and conflicts will not cease, or,
alternatively, you can accept unity and the sharing of
a common world, and then, naturally (in every sense
of the word), this world will be devoid of meaning.
Too bad, love it or leave it.” One may wonder
whether one of the many metaphysical origins of the
twentieth-century world wars did not consist of this
odd way with which the West sought to pacify all
conflicts by appealing to a single common world.
How long can one survive in peace when torn by this
impossible double bind with which modernizers have
trapped themselves together with those they have
modernized: nature known by reason unifies, but this
unification is devoid of meaning?"
Well Don, that's a head scratcher. My Philosophy Prof had the current Paradigm Change consisting of Modernism's demise to be replaced by its still unknown antithesis. My conception of Nature isn't at all what's described, but then how I view the world is unique, and that will get exposed for all to read about soon enough. Thanks for your contribution!
Karl, this warms my heart. I have been reading Latour for 20 years. My initial quest was to understand EXPERIENCE. Earlier I had read Michael Polanyi (brother of Karl) who talked about the experience of becoming a scientist through the community of other scientists.
My education is almost entirely in math but got into computer science in 1973 at Bucknell University because no jobs for math profs. Very small department and later became head. University not really doing interdisciplinary work and my students getting good jobs, so I left in 1978 to go to Bell Labs.
I got my project to hire the best person in the world in software engineering and we wrote a joint paper on using documentation as a design medium. I was infatuated with design and they gave me the job of transferring the design method throughout Bell Labs. The joint paper we wrote was the most republished paper in the history of Bell System Technical Journal. I transferred the method to 40 projects from small ones to very large ones. I then embarked to find out how the method worked. Users were MA and PhD often in physics who said that some model is needed.
So I interviewed practitioners. Then failure. Their experiences did not fit together. I realized that even though they used the same set of documents (I provided samples and reviewed the work of most of these projects) their stories did not fit together. In other words, I didn't know what happened. I took it as a personal failure that I couldn't generalize the group behavior centered around the common method. I was offered a job at NBS, now NIST, to be a manager of software engineering, but how could I take that job because I realized that I didn't know what I was doing.
I did realize that the practitioners were doing something more than the documentation framework. But what was the essence? Was there an essence?
Years later Latour helped me. The documentation project development effort was rhetoric. Rhetoric is an important discipline but neglected. When Latour spent 2 years at the Salk Institute working with a group that later got a Nobel Prize, he described what they did. The question was: how are facts created. He used literary theory to describe what he found.
Another learning was also from Latour. (I am making very short statements not an argument). Who is the biggest asshole in history? Who keep asking experts for more and more description of their practice and drove them into a corner babbling? Why it was the person who said that I know that I don't know. Socrates. I can no longer hate myself for failing to summarize design experience because Socrates failed as well. The epistemology, ontology and spirituality of embodied practice is one of the wonders of the universe.
Karl, from your comments on MOA and now in your posts of Russian work, I have to hold myself back from too much excitement. I see in this work solid intellectual work, morally grounded and practiced. The work you post is too good to be true. Except it does seem true. They are doing things that are impossible in the Westerns Modern World, in Latour's characterization of modernity.
Are the Chinese and the Russians are looking to the UN to be a transcendental legal framework within which dialogue on existential issues can be diplomatically engaged? In Latour's frame, the Modern Constitution (he uses that word) has to be dismantled to see the "other". Latour wears many hats including anthropology and sociology and especially in STS, Scientific Technology Society, an area in which he was a founder.
That's about all I know...
Thanks for sharing your history, Don. My background is so very different. When I returned to college in 1996, I eventually transferred to Northern Arizona University at Flagstaff and met a profoundly unique Humanities Prof, Dr. Guy Bensusan, who invented the Hexadigm System approach to learning, and who unfortunately passed away less than two years after my graduation in 2000 before he collated it all together. We worked very close together on distance learning issues since he was head of the University's nascent department in that area. I found older, non-traditional students like myself were better able to understand and utilize his system, whereas it befuddled younger students who had yet to become adept at taking in multiple viewpoints, analyzing them, then producing their own synthesis in response. I internalized that system and have used it ever since. I owe a lot to Dr. Guy.
When I was at Berkeley from 1965-1967 a big interest was systems. A prof had a mimeographed book on systems attempting to lay out linkages between various items. Later I spent several years with the work of C West Churchman who wrote extensively about systems. In the end this work was too mechanical even though advocates came from philosophy. There was very little politics in this work.
You are doing an amazing job in supplying this information. You are one of those pushing back the boundaries of the internet in the way which its foundrers dreamed of- as once there was a movement to free men of the belief that thet needed priestly intercession to commune with their God, so now there is a movement to free us of the superstition that agents of capitalism are required to facilitate our communicating with each other.
All of which is unrelated to the many topics the incomparable and irascible Maria dealt with. On which I have only to say that iI read recently an account of the history of the Caucasus which recorded the fact that it was in 1823 that the new Soviet Republics agreed that Nagorno Karabakh was a province of Azerbaijan. The Commissar for Nationalities helped broker the deal.
Once upon a time, there was the Town Crier who went about spreading the news of the day. Substack allows me to have my own soap box out here in the Oregon sticks that potentially reaches billions. No reader has tried to undermine my efforts or to really dispute what's written, and I've yet to need flea prevention. Thanks again for your support!
that they not that thet
1923 not 1823
Here's another one I just ran across:
The China Model: Political Meritocracy and the Limits of Democracy 🔍
PrincetonUP, 2015
Daniel A. Bell
https://annas-archive.org/md5/b1cb9220648fb3701bb41e9c736e07fe
Described as follows:
"How China's political model could prove to be a viable alternative to Western democracy
Westerners tend to divide the political world into "good" democracies and “bad” authoritarian regimes. But the Chinese political model does not fit neatly in either category. Over the past three decades, China has evolved a political system that can best be described as “political meritocracy.” The China Model seeks to understand the ideals and the reality of this unique political system. How do the ideals of political meritocracy set the standard for evaluating political progress (and regress) in China? How can China avoid the disadvantages of political meritocracy? And how can political meritocracy best be combined with democracy? Daniel Bell answers these questions and more.
Opening with a critique of “one person, one vote” as a way of choosing top leaders, Bell argues that Chinese-style political meritocracy can help to remedy the key flaws of electoral democracy. He discusses the advantages and pitfalls of political meritocracy, distinguishes between different ways of combining meritocracy and democracy, and argues that China has evolved a model of democratic meritocracy that is morally desirable and politically stable. Bell summarizes and evaluates the “China model”―meritocracy at the top, experimentation in the middle, and democracy at the bottom―and its implications for the rest of the world.
A timely and original book that will stir up interest and debate, The China Model looks at a political system that not only has had a long history in China, but could prove to be the most important political development of the twenty-first century."
The description given is similar to Zhang Weiwei's. We discussed the differences in efficiencies at MoA during Trump's turn and the consensus was China's system is superior.
Off topic: Nice picture of Maria.
I just ran across a book which might interest you given your appreciation of China as a model of governance.
Against Political Equality: The Confucian Case
https://annas-archive.org/md5/8ce221892b052947f973d7dd19266e23
Described on another download site as follows:
"How a hybrid Confucian-engendered form of governance might solve today’s political problems
What might a viable political alternative to liberal democracy look like? In Against Political Equality, Tongdong Bai offers a possibility inspired by Confucian ideas.
Bai argues that domestic governance influenced by Confucianism can embrace the liberal aspects of democracy along with the democratic ideas of equal opportunities and governmental accountability to the people. But Confucianism would give more political decision-making power to those with the moral, practical, and intellectual capabilities of caring for the people. While most democratic thinkers still focus on strengthening equality to cure the ills of democracy, the proposed hybrid regime―made up of Confucian-inspired meritocratic characteristics combined with democratic elements and a quasi-liberal system of laws and rights―recognizes that egalitarian qualities sometimes conflict with good governance and the protection of liberties, and defends liberal aspects by restricting democratic ones. Bai applies his views to the international realm by supporting a hierarchical order based on how humane each state is toward its own and other peoples, and on the principle of international interventions whereby humane responsibilities override sovereignty.
Exploring the deficiencies posed by many liberal democracies, Against Political Equality presents a novel Confucian-engendered alternative for solving today’s political problems."
I have a similar work, "Theorizing Confucian Virtue Politics" by Kim. that I've yet to dig into. Thanks for the link; I'll give it a look.