Monthly Archives: May 2008

HITCHED TO A GODDESS

oldmarriedcouple

Married Susan Friday in a short and sweet civil ceremony in Shaker Heights, Ohio. After 15 years of being lovingly partnered, it’s okay to ask what changes now? Change happens, yet, what’s wonderful for me is that our fundamental deep friendship evoked the changes, whatever they are and turn out to be, and I couldn’t be more enthusiastic about growing old with my incredibly kind and spirited best friend.

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Filed under personal

THE ANTIGONE COMPLEX

I don’t have a harsh judgment to levy against Hillary Clinton in the aftermath of her answering the question about, implicitly, her tenacity in the face of long odds and about party unity at the end of the process. There’s a reason for my being circumspect.

It’s that the incident takes a specific psychological form and consequently its reasons are psychological.

If someone answers a question you’ve posed to them in a way that promotes your thinking to yourself, “I can’t believe he had the thought, let alone spoke it, and in doing so spiked his own self interest!” it is likely that this answer is affect-laden and its dominant is subjective. In suggesting this, such an answer is against other possible answers, including rational, well-rehearsed answers. (The question Hillary was asked about when she thought the nomination would be decided was not in any way a question from left field.)

More remarkable was when she wrapped up with this:

“Um you know I just I don’t understand it.”

Again, this kind of answer fits into a usual form: one understands why people share the page they’re on together, and, for those that don’t, the question begged is: ‘how do I understand their position?’ In this second aspect, there is an implicit Theory of Mind conundrum; how are other perspectives in other minds to be understood? There’s nothing about those who disagree with Hillary–about her remaining in the race–that is hard to understand, so she gives away something at work in her depths in pretending she doesn’t understand.

A question is: How could she have answered and met the twin objectives, one, to justify her remaining in the race against diminishing odds, and, two, to support confidence in party unity irrespective of who should become the nominee?

The psychological question then is: what are the types of internal psychic (or cognitive factors,) that will tend to diminish a person’s ability to firstly stand outside the mystique of their subjective perspective and secondly respond with enough objectivity to meet objective-type goals?

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Filed under analytic(al) psychology

PRECAUTIONS MUST BE TAKEN TO CONCEAL THESE ACTIVITIES

Dr. Aubrey Blumsohn has done yeoman work in highlighting the sordid and criminal story of the CIA’s use of psychedelic drugs in experiments done for dark purposes. Whatever the specific purpose was, it was an ill purpose. And, it resonates today because it is mostly unknown to what extent drugs are currently deployed by the CIA for the purpose of interrogation, torture, and, possibly, mind control. In Part V Blumsohn tells the story of the same criminal activities happening in the UK.
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Filed under cultural contradictions, Kenneth Warren

WHINING TAKES TIME

Dr. Brian C. Melton, Assistant Professor of History at Liberty University, writing at the web site Intellectual Conservative, Human Origins and a Side of Fries: Refuting a Popular Neo-Darwinian Position.

[A] A prime example of this appeared in Expelled, when Dawkins expressed a willingness to accept evidence of cellular intelligent design if it came from aliens, but not if it implied that God existed. While there is manifestly less proof to support the idea of extra-terrestrial life than a supernatural God, the general concept at least fits in with Dawkins’s naturalistic biases, and so he finds it acceptable. Evidence has nothing to do with it.

Brian, the word evidence meaningfully appears in your sentence [A] in two instances: (1) accept evidence if it came; and (2) not [accept] if it implied.

Evidence does have something to do with the difference between its coming from or coming about, and, its pointing toward some implication. But how to research the mechanics of the designer’s biological agency?

The ID crowd argues furiously in favor of this latter implication, that a designer is implied by inferences drawn from the current evidence. Yet, they understand that their understanding as much is impossible to demonstrate within any naturalistic verification methodology, (eg. science,) given the requisite supernatural causation and its mechanics or miraculous (pre?) mechanics.

So, marching off in the direction of “creation science” and post-science, why is it the proponents of creationism get so exercised by science when ID’s verification can’t even exist within the scientific framework?

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TWO SEASONS

click image to enlarge

March 13 to May 4. Spring has sprung. The apple tree is especially glorious even if the rot has literally mostly hollowed out its trunk. I’m a seasonal tweener, enjoying May and September above all other months, and, with my fair scotsman’s skin, liking least the heat. 55-70 degrees is ideal. Click for large version.

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Filed under visual experiments, my art

PROCESS OF CIVIC LOVE

The Heights Observer, like the Lakewood paper, is written by citizens, who use AGS’s web-based program to upload stories and photographs onto a server. Volunteer editors read the content, post stories to the paper’s web site and design newspaper pages, all via the Internet.

The volunteers and low overhead will allow the Heights Observer to keep costs low, said Deanna Bremer Fisher, executive director of FutureHeights, a nonprofit dedicated to improving life in Cleveland Heights. (May 5th, Crain’s Cleveland Business, Citizen-produced Observer catching on With three new editions on tap, company’s publisher envisions an edition “in every town’ Chuck Soder)

The Lakewood Observer is vigorously seeding its model. Leveraging creative and executive intelligence along with Lakewood’s innovative publishing software, other communities are taking up the task of building civic chops* via the model of volunteer journalism and voluntary engagement.

  • civic chops::creative, cognitive, artistic, emotional, disciplinary, abilities and capacities–focused upon the development of community self-knowledge, self-awareness, and knowledge creation.

I rode with the Lakewood Visionary Alignment for its, as I see it, second chapter. From my anthropological-adult learning perspective the interesting aspect I’ll continue to track is how–overall– journalistic reports will tend to either accentuate or mitigate knowledge creation, and, how does reportage deeply ramify civic engagement.

All sorts of challenges crop up on the path toward realizing civic self-knowledge. The central cross purpose comes up in the flux between the wish to elevate the positive “brand,” and the more veracious wish to uncover whatever knowledge might find its way into the, so-called, Civic Open Source.

  • Civic Brand::attractive community identity; in terms we developed, thus the brand is the civic persona presented as the face of the civic imago–the imago then is the source of manifest collective identity and identity in-potentia.
  • Civic Open Source is a coinage::knowledge is radically democratized, made accessible, is shared, and is freely subject to re-configuration and re-use.

I noted in 2005 that well intentioned civic-promotion (in Lakewood,) would surely clash with the inspirational desire to achieve civic self-knowledge and community awareness. This follows simply from recognition of those aspects of civic life that form the undercurrent of the civic shadow; manifested as the Other, constituting alterity at the scale of community.

The point of inspiration was predicated on unleashing community researchers into both the lit up and darkened corners of the community, and then allowing any findings to stream through the uncensored process. Much of this thrust followed from having a core group turned on by the idea of a city coming to know its self better than any other. And, I knew going into it, that cross purposed desires would be compelled to negotiate and self-organize accomodation along the way.

How it sorts itself out has everything to do with the implicit group relations that contextualize the psychological negotiation of points of emphasis. In this sense, the community newspaper is, every time its published, the fruit of such negotiation. This is a fascinating underlay because in this group arise learning processes. At the end of the day to sustain civic chops is to nurture capacity in the context of the group and via the group’s various and variable intentions, desires, and labors of love. Praxis.

Along with this comes the prospect of securing better civic engagement and cohesion by virtue of, in effect, self-selected journalists and researchers, working, acting ‘on the city.’ Given my prejudices, this could effect re-personalization; a term of Paolo Freire having to do with a socially unified critique of the givenness of the social environment causing transformations of awareness stood against de-personalization. With respective to this, collective action is aimed to liberate, and so the negotiation between boosting of and boasting about the given, and, critically conscious confrontation with the received functions and facilities of the extant given communitas deeply explicate the variance in hope and hazard between sustenance of this given, and, disruptive transformative learning.

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Filed under adult learning

TIME TO REFLECT

Silly Judge

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Filed under experiential learning