Showing posts with label information. Show all posts
Showing posts with label information. Show all posts

Saturday, February 27, 2016

Noam Chomsky - Political biography




Here is a man who challenges thought manipulation more than anyone else. Not for him the easy option of playing the 'the things THEY haven't told you. His ego is not that small. He broadens the spectrum of accepted debate going into areas others don't. His contribution to having a better-informed society is immeasurable.
Chomsky's political views have changed little since his childhood, and he adopted the emphasis on political activism that was ingrained in Jewish working-class tradition.  He is usually characterized as an anarcho-syndicalist and/or a socialist libertarian. He views these positions not as precise political theories but as ideas which he thinks best meet the needs of humans: freedom, liberty and community, and association under the conditions of freedom.  Unlike some other socialists, such as those who acceptMarxism, Chomsky believes that politics lies outside the remit of science.of
The key thrust of much of Chomsky's political world-view is the idea that the truth about political realities are systematically distorted or suppressed through the manipulation of corporate interests and elites while his work has focused on revealing these manipulations. He believes that "common sense" is all that is required to break through the web of falsehood and see the truth if it is employed using both critical thinking skills and an awareness of the role that self-interest and self-deception create on both oneself and on others.
Although he had joined protest marches and organized activist groups, he identifies his primarily political outlet as being that of education, offering free lessons and lectures to encourage wider political consciousness. He is a member of the Campaign for Peace and Democracy and the Industrial Workers of the World international union. Chomsky is also a member of the interim consultative committee of the International Organization for a Participatory Society, which he describes as having the potential to "carry us a long way towards unifying the many initiatives here and around the world and molding them into a powerful and effective 

Tuesday, June 24, 2014

SIFTERS


Speaking of why one writes, Beckett opines:


"James Joyce was a synthesizer trying to bring in as much as he could, I am an analyzer, trying to leave out as much as I can."

Neither of them lived long enough to experience our information-overload times:where synthesizing and analyzing are both almost impossible.

Bloggers, like all contemporary writers, are called to be Sifters of all this information overload! Onward with the Sifting so!!!



Sunday, October 16, 2011

Beauty of uncertainty



based on a study showing what happens when we discount the surprise value of unexpected events ~> [link]

Monday, March 28, 2011

anonymous


Anonymous (used as a mass noun) is an Internet meme originating 2003 on the imageboard 4chan, representing the concept of many online community users simultaneously existing as an anarchic, digitized global brain. It is also generally considered to be a blanket term for members of certain Internet subcultures, a way to refer to the actions of people in an environment where their actual identities are not known.

In its early form, the concept has been adopted by a decentralized on-line community acting anonymously in a coordinated manner, usually toward a loosely self-agreed goal, and primarily focused on entertainment. Beginning with 2008, the Anonymous collective has become increasingly associated with collaborative, international hacktivism, undertaking protests and other actions, often with the goal of promoting internet freedom and freedom of speech. Actions credited to "Anonymous" are undertaken by unidentified individuals who apply the Anonymous label to themselves as attribution.

Although not necessarily tied to a single on-line entity, many websites are strongly associated with Anonymous. This includes notable imageboards such as 4chan, Futaba, Ebaumsworld their associated wikis, Encyclopædia Dramatica, and a number of forums. After a series of controversial, widely-publicized protests and distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks by Anonymous in 2008, incidents linked to its cadre members have increased. In consideration of its capabilities, Anonymous has been posited by CNN to be one of the three major successors to WikiLeaks.
(read more)

Saturday, January 22, 2011

anarchy dot com

The Internet is like an anarchist state. No one is in charge and everyone can contribute. That’s how it should be. It puts everyone in charge of what comes and goes by a democratic process of selection. What is of interest to the most rises in visibility and what is of interest to the fewest decreases in visibility. It’s still available but mostly to the interested ‘niche’. What has no niche, or is offensive, fades into obscurity and may vanish altogether. That’s how it should be. Since there’s an open-door policy for entry, the ‘gateway’ needs to reside at the point-of-retrieval. This has been the protocol for nearly every database system I’ve installed ..the successful ones anyway. The gatekeeper to the Internet has been the role of portals such as AOL and Yahoo, or search-engines like Google. The most successful being the one that allows the most clear and manageable handle on chaos. That would be Google I believe. They have an equitable and consistent method for delivering Internet content. They call it ‘PageRank’ and it allows viewers to determine what comes to the foreground and what recedes to the background of our collective Internet experience. Rankings are based on factors such as the amount of attention a site receives or the aggregate number of links or ‘signposts’ directing traffic there. It is a most democratic point-of-retrieval system, provided they stay away from paid-ranking practices. Now they’re turning their attention to making Internet services available over the greatest number of devices and locations with their Android operating system. This has made the selection process even more democratic. In addition, it has put the Internet in our back pocket. Browser-based touch-screen phones have created a virtual ‘wallet’ ..containing a marketplace with virtual ‘catalogs’, ‘order-takers’, ‘currency’, ‘transaction-handlers’ and ‘record-keepers’. The number of services they can deliver to the palm of your hand is virtually endless. I don’t see the role of Google diminishing anytime soon.