We just finished watching “Black Earth Rising” on Netflix, by Hugo Blick. The English have a long tradition of intelligent parsing of their Empire and colonialism in their fiction; Graham Greene and his ilk. We in the US are more immature about ours. All our discussions, and our art, are still reduced to black and white, polemical. Lots of shouting, still. I wonder if the French have a grown-up point of view in their literature.
I’m reading Dennett on AI, and he talks of the goal of creating “a free-wheeling, open-ended imaginative human mind”. Maybe the problem is that such a thing is as hard to find in Natural intelligence as it is in Artificial intelligence; look at all the research that’s been coming out on behavioral economics, post-modern philosophy, …. We humans aren’t really there yet, either, although we can imagine such a thing.
When Hillary Clinton ran for office, she made the future of the coal mines in Appalachia part of her campaign. The solutions she was offering for the miners, however, were the same tired retraining schemes. I couldn’t see how retraining 50 year old miners to be web site designers was going to work. Instead, I proposed just paying these guys a decent pension for life, thank you for your service but we have to move on.
I see that I’m not the only one thinking this way. There’s a movement called Just Transitions that sounds much more reasonable. Spain recently agreed on such a process with their miners: http://www.industriall-union.org/spanish-coal-unions-win-landmark-just-transition-deal
Its going to cost more, but it’ll work, and it’s much more fair. Much easier to get support from the miners. All the “controversy” over coal v jobs goes away.
Lessig writes on Pelosi’s first act of the new Congress, a bill to address many of the anti-democratic flaws that have become consequential in the last few years. Fix the process first, then we can fix the issues.
Source: Democratic House will address most important civil rights issue in half century
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/99ac/092d014aac16728912563975282e20039e19.pdf
Imagining music as a sequence of articulations (we used to say “gestures”), then realizing these as sequences of text representations with rules for morphing based on textual differences.
The Next Big Thing in Music Theory. How to measure music now: intervals, beats or money? The introduction of “externalities” into music theory.
Ranked-choice voting: Maine proved the concept in 2018 midterms.
Proportional representation is starting to gain adherents.
One of the most clear-sighted and honest discussions I’ve heard about this; not mired in emotion nor suffused with moral outrage. Well done.
AMERICAN PSYCHOSIS on Vimeo on Vimeo
Chris Hedges.