Alert level yellow is for Daily Kos.

Alert level Orange is probably the editorial opinion over here.

This diary needs a poll: what level are you?

"It's the statue, man, The Statue."

anyone fancy a sweepstake?

Interviewer: What do you believe is behind this recent increase in terrorist bombings? Helpmann: Bad sportsmanship

your new narrative is perfect, what a lovely one to wake up to.

progressive is the new kewl...

humour is a weapon of mass instruction...

and that pic tickled my funnybone!

There are no blank spots on the map any more, anywhere on earth. You want a blank spot on the map, you gotta leave the map behind. Jon Krakauer

Co-operation is built-in to humans.  

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¹  Apologies for the technical jargon.  ;-)

Have epistemological model of Complex Information environments. Will Travel.

It would make a change from trying to work out which of us is the CIA plant. :)

I think authoritarians don't just have different opinions. Their cognitive disabilities seem to be much more serious than that.

In my experience authoritarians - of the left and right - have difficulty dealing with uncertainty.  They require a nice warm 'All' to wrap up in.  It is this that sparks their well known tendency to ignore or suppress information which does not fit their opinions.  

Have epistemological model of Complex Information environments. Will Travel.

About Politics & Science (August 2003)

The State of Science Under the Bush Administration

The American people depend upon federal agencies to promote scientific research and to develop science-based policies that protect the nation's health and welfare. Historically, these agencies -- such as the National Institutes of Health, the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Environmental Protection Agency -- have had global reputations for scientific excellence.

However, leading scientific journals have questioned whether scientific integrity at federal agencies has been sacrificed to further a political and ideological agenda. As the editor of Science wrote in early 2003, there is growing evidence that the Bush Administration "invades areas once immune to this kind of manipulation."

Over Halloween weekend 2004 I went to a mathematical physics conference near Toronto. There was one person there who was going to vote republican and everyone else that I talked to was at least at paranoia level blue. But, then again, this was a conference of dissidents so they had other reasons to have their eyes open. So it's not all hopeless, but maybe mainstream scientists are.

"It's the statue, man, The Statue."

There is one maths prof, Fields medal laureate, Laurent LAFFORGUE, who endlessly denounces entrenched experts at the "Education Nationale". His view is that - I simplify a lot - the school system itself (not the teachers) creates a sub-standard education, which undermines the noble aim of a school of the Republic. So he had to resign from the "Haut Conseil de l'Education".

This guy certainly projected himself at the core of today's problems.

2. Remember how many people on this very site were convinced that the republicans would not hand over control of congress to the democrats after the 06 election. They did without issue. Without recounts. Without much controversy at all. A police state would be radically less profitable for wall street due to the the financial costs and the potential for disruptive unrest, and for that reason, we will have no dictator in 08. As geezer pointed out the elites already have a passive population doing their bidding, removing the minimal level of democracy we have would cause absolute chaos. No way the elites risk waking up the public to the man behind the curtain when they already have what they want.

3. That said, a new terror attack would result in what you say, but again it won't result in a dictator for the reasons I just gave. I think most first world countries will resemble something like China after such event(s) occur (a measure of economic freedom and political freedom that is symbolic only). The forces leading us down this path have nothing to do with American politics though - it is the result of three things:

• Advancing technology functions to lower both the material and labor costs of causing a specific level of destruction.

• Advancing technology has also allows increasing complexity, and we have used that complexity on our economic structures and physical infrastructure to maximize profitability and utility at the expense of robustness, leaving both increasingly vulnerable to attack.

• The efficiency of bureaucratic structures have decayed due in part to their incredible size which was possible to begin with because of the cheap energy bonanza of the past century. They can't change in a qualitative fashion due to their own inertia, so to counter the threats present in my first two items they continue down the path of their "local minimum" doing the only thing they know how to do - increase levels of public harassment.

The big unknown is peak oil (and its twin peak food) - a qualitative change of such magnitude that all bets are complete conjecture as far as I'm concerned. Do the elites try to hold their complex, energy intensive global networks together through the means of a police state or do they cut and run and allow the world to fragment without resistance? What fills that void if they do? I can think of hundreds of questions along these lines that I have no answer to.

you are the media you consume.

b: the teched up world of global interconnectedness will survive and just like the partisans sabotaged and helped undo the nazi evil in ww2, there would be a huge support from outside the us to help relatives  and friends who were trapped in the maw of the matrix.

in my worst paranoia days i suspect europe is in on it too, and the same day as the us goes, all of a sudden the city streets here will be being patrolled by blackwater mercenaries who don't speak any euro language.

Then add the EU data rentention directive and they can roll up the logs to find who wrote what at what page, who phoned whom, and who meet whom where (at least if they were carrying cell phones) and so on. Should make for an easy passage of unwanted elements to the nearest holding facility.

it would politicise the mass of people who are fence-sitting right now, tear families into shreds as much or more than Vietnam did, set off a multiple firestorm of ammy-caching waco-type nutjobs/survivalists that would suck up a lot of pain before going out in flames.

Too late.  The number of major media outlets of all types in existence (as corporate structures) that have the potential to influence public opinion is about a fiftieth of the Viet Nam days, and their corporate ownership is solidly republican and corporate-oligarchic in character. There would be an effect, but an integral part of any sociological model of collective behavior is communication, and the growth of a generalized belief as to the problem and as to the  location of responsibility. That's over now. Except for us blog weirdos, and the blog world does not yet even approach the functionality needed as a communication channel for collective behavior.

travel to and from the states would be obviously altered beyond recognition; since the us is a country of immigrants, this would provoke a huge swell of resentment worldwide, and leave america isolated like never before.

Again, too late. Travel to and from the US is already a process from hell, often- Canadians must have passports, get photographs and fingerprints on all ten. Canadians? Melo, the swell has already come, and washed away our reputation, --and we did not really notice. And isolation is not an option, because we buy their crap, and we have the nukes. They GOTTA deal with us.

the logistics of running a police state are a nightmare, and the levels of brutality needed to keep the public in a state of sheepish acquiescence would be impossible to explain away or dress up with words....all pretence of democracy, a fair society where all are equal, etc, would become so cognitively dissonant to teach in such a visible contradiction...america would have to unhook from every other country fumbling for a sane world, and remain in its dystopia  until some counter-wave would occur.

Leftymathprof's point about the sleepwalkers is that none of that was necessary to put us in an utterly aquiescent state. What did it, without a shot fired or a bit of barbed wire was a vast amount of stuff demanding our attention and labor, eating up our lifetimes, media that focuses on Britney Spear's ass pimples and the cherry-picking of reality to soothe us, and education in parroting instead of thinking.
I did my battle with the sleepwalkers during Viet Nam, and it was touch and go even then-- you have no idea how many people at Ohio State University could not have cared less about a half million dead Cambodians, as long as the OSU-Michigan game went off on schedule.

the odds are low, imo, because a. they already have so many peeps in jail already, building enough camps to fit everyone who doesn't want to  roll up their sleeves and get with the program would make the land of the free the laughing stock of the rest of the world...through tears.

b: the teched up world of global interconnectedness will survive and just like the partisans sabotaged and helped undo the nazi evil in ww2, there would be a huge support from outside the us to help relatives  and friends who were trapped in the maw of the matrix.

There are many types of prison. The sleepwalkers are already in a prison assembled from injection moulded plastic crap, and cell phones and ipods that they cannot live without. Ever tried to walk through a crowd of shoppers with 20% of them on their cell phones? That crowd has been effectively rendered harmless. Without a trial or a sentence, they got life. And they don't even know it. And Europe can't help, because they are doing their own battle with an economic/social construct that lives or dies on it's ability to make stuff, and get people to devote their lives to stuff. It eats their lives too. Tragically, our most powerful effect on Europe has been to export to them our golden arches, our stuff addiction, and all the machinery that must be populated to support it.

in my worst paranoia days i suspect europe is in on it too, and the same day as the us goes, all of a sudden the city streets here will be being patrolled by blackwater mercenaries who don't speak any euro language.

See above.
The real art is to achieve the desired end state without any of the grisly drama, to fabricate a narrative, a story that is convincing and compelling, ---and that we can live in, and not meddle with the affairs of our betters.

Done, dude.

And MUCH cheaper than prisons and Blackwater goons. But there will be/are weirdoes-- and a prudent move would be to provide for them.

 

Useful talking follows experience, the more experience the better. Talking that precedes experience is known as bullshit.