zenpundit.com

[ by Charles Cameron — parallels, opppositions, analysis, games, coincidentia oppositorum ]

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My friend Cath Styles, who has been developing an iPad playable version of my HipBone Games under the name Sembl for the National Museum of Australia, made a point I’ve been trying to make for a while now, with sweet lucidity, in a recent blog post:

A general principle can be distilled from this. Perhaps: In the very moment we identify a similarity between two objects, we recognise their difference. In other words, the process of drawing two things together creates an equal opposite force that draws attention to their natural distance. So the act of seeking resemblance – consistency, or patterns – simultaneously renders visible the inconsistencies, the structures and textures of our social world. And the greater the conceptual distance between the two likened objects, the more interesting the likening – and the greater the understanding to be found.

That’s absolutely right, and it gets to the heart of my games and analytic practice — to see and acknowledge both parallelisms and differences, oppositions…

Oxford is the polar opposite of Cambridge as anyone at the annual boat race between them will tell you — yet they’re so similar that the term Oxbridge exists to distinguish them as a dyad from all else the wide world round…

Similarly, in the example illustrated above, Cath shows two items from the Museum collection that were juxtaposed by players of an early version of her game, and writes:

the Sembl players who linked the above branding iron to the breastplate – because both are tools for labeling bodies – cast new light on the colonial practice of giving metal breastplates to Aboriginal people.

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Since the essence of my own analytic style (and that of HipBone and Sembl games) is the recognition of parallelisms and oppositions, I was particularly interested to see one group of early Tea Party folk reaching out to the emerging Occupy movement. Here, then, are two posts in which we can see the beginnings of recognition that there may be a kinship between the two…

Occupy Wall Street: Another View:

You know what the “Occupy Wall Street” movement is?
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It is all the things that were in the original Tea Party, but were steadily ignored as the TP became a Republican booster club.

That comes from a post on FedUpUSA, a site with the Gadsden flag as its web-logo that was [as “Market
Ticker”], one of the founding orgs behind the TP. It’s from someone who identified as a Libertarian Party activist.

Here’s another post from FedUpUSA, not so identified:

An Open Letter From FedUpUSA To Occupy Wall Street Protestors All Over The Country:

This is a letter to OWS from FedUpUSA, one of the original Tea Parties:
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We support you in exercising your First Amendment Right. We are outraged that any peaceful demonstrator would be assaulted or abused by any authorities.
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If you are protesting because there are no jobs— We stand with you.
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We are for a free economy and recognize that what we have now is NOT a free economy; it is not capitalism what we have is a fascist state or crony-capitalism. There is nothing free about doing business with Countries that manipulate their currencies to attract cheap labor. We agree that these jobs need to come back to America.
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If you are protesting because no one has gone to jail— We stand with you.
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Regardless of what is being said from the white house and media, we know that there are many in the financial district and the banks that have committed fraud and outright theft and we too want to see them prosecuted. We support the stop looting and start prosecuting.
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If you are protesting because everything costs more— We stand with you.
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We see prices rise in our food, gas, clothes yet our wages have stayed the same or have decreased. The Federal Reserve has bailed everyone out but us and not only are we going to have to pay for that, those bailouts make the price of everything else go up because it devalues our currency. We support monetary reform.
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If you are protesting because you are tired of our bought and paid for government on both sides— We stand with you.
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We are also against the banks and big corporations buying our politicians and writing laws that favor their special interests. We understand that our economy is broken BECAUSE of this and that all of our other issues will never be addressed as long as the financial elite control OUR government.
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We understand that these issues cross party lines and ideologies and effect each and every one of us. We also understand that these issues will never get fixed as long as we continue to let the media, the elite, and members of the government separate us by our differing ideologies.
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Only Together, can we Implement Change
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It is time, We Americans, put our ideologies in our back pocket and not let them separate us so that we can work together for this ONE COMMON GOAL: to get the special interest money and elite out of OUR Government and return it to US — the people.
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As long as the banks, largest corporations, and wealthy elite control our government, we will never have a representative republic and laws will continue to be passed that only benefit the few 1% at the expense of us 99
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Demand that NOT ONE MORE LAW gets passed until they pass:
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Lobby reform:
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It is a Federal Offense punishable by a minimum 5 years in prison to:

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Lobby any member of the US Congress outside of the district you live, work, or own a business.
Lobby a member of congress while they are physically outside the district they represent.
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Campaign Reform:
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It is a Federal Offense punishable by a minimum 5 years in prison to:
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For any one person, corporation, enterprise, group, union or the like, to donate more than $2,000 to any one candidate during one campaign period.
For any member of the media to deny equal access to competing candidates.
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These two laws will cut the control the Financial elite have on our government by leveling the playing field. You will have just as big as a voice with your representative as the big box retailer that resides in your town. Simply, it will end the Crony-Capitalism that is strangling our economy.
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I encourage all my fellow Tea Partiers to join Occupy Wall Street protesters in their non-violent, peaceful protests and together demand that the Government be returned to the people. After all, this is precisely what the Tea Party was intended to be before it was taken over and marginalized by the establishment politicians.

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FedUpUSA.org

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And we’re deep into John Robb territory…

What do you think? Do the parallelisms strike you, or the oppositions — or, perhaps, both?

FWIW, Cath’s Sembl version of my game looks like it is going to be a beautiful steampunk affair…

From AFJ:

…This notion that there are specific knowable causes that are linked to corresponding effects dominates military thinking and manifests in our drive to gather as much information as possible before acting. This concept was captured by Air Force Col. John Boyd’s decision loop: observe, orient, decide and act. In this OODA Loop, an endless cycle in which each action restarts the observe phase, it is implied that collecting information would allow you to decide independent of acting. Also implied is the notion that you can determine measures of effectiveness against which to observe each action’s movement toward achievement of your goal so you can reorient. The result of this type of thinking is to spend a lot of time narrowing the focus of what we choose to observe in order to better orient and decide. This drives one to try and reduce the noise associated with understanding the problem. We do this by establishing priority information requests or other methods of focused questions aimed at better understanding the core problem so we can control it.

No.

The OODA Loop is not a linear process, orientation is the key and the OODA Loop does not by default “narrow your focus”. WTF?

Maybe the military or, more likely, some brigade commander, instituted a process like this in Iraq for their information-intel analysis, maybe not, but if they did it was not what Colonel John Boyd argued they ought to do. Nor is it an understanding of what the OODA Loop is or how it works.

Here’s an OODA Loop for Dummies level brief from Dr. Chet Richards intended for businessmen but there are more sophisticated explanations out there by Chet and others. Google is your friend. 🙂

Operating Inside Their OODA Loops

This post might help as well:

Chet on TEMPO….Rao on OODA

Nice catch by Bruce Kesler who goes en fuego on the weirdly discordant note Anne-Marie Slaughter strikes in her latest New York Times op-ed:

Majority Rule Over Minorities: Ironic R2P Hypocrisy

The extremism of R2P’s leading proponent is exhibited in Anne-Marie Slaughter’s op-ed in today’s New York Times. Slaughter likens the Wall Street protesters to those demonstrating against oppressive regimes in the Middle East and recommends removal of the US system of checks and balances that protect minority views and avoid poorly developed political stampedes. (Slaughter doesn’t mention or give credence to the more numerous, mature citizenry participating in or supporting the Tea Parties more peaceful protests for more limited government intrusions into Americans’ private lives and earnings.)

R2P’s leading proponent, Anne-Marie Slaughter of Harvard, believes that US foreign policies and military interventions should prioritize the Right To Protect severely repressed peoples through US obeisance to liberal internationalist elites’ sentiments in favor of some they like regardless of the US Constitution or laws or national or security interests.

In today’s New York Times, Slaughter takes her R2P home to the US, advocating that majorities rule regardless of the formal and informal checks and balances of our political system and overriding the rights of political minorities. Again, it is the majorities that liberals like who should be given more powers.

Without any sense of proportionality or of core differences between the US and Middle East satrapies, Slaughter says, “Indeed, the twin drivers of America’s nascent protest movement against the financial sector are injustice and invisibility, the very grievances that drove the Arab Spring.” Slaughter then concludes, “The only effective response is a political response, of a nature and magnitude that convinces protesters on the streets that they can in fact secure the change they seek within, rather than outside, the system.”

Slaughter’s system, however, would reduce the ability of permanent or transitory political minorities to protect their interests. They would, also, further factionalize the US and make compromises more difficult as the power of centrists is reduced….

Read the rest here.

Good grief. Anne Marie Slaughter opining on the need for greater democracy and accountability to the people is somewhat akin to Ayn Rand calling for more welfare programs.

My suspicion here, since this rhetoric runs counter to Slaughter’s most influential ideas, is that Slaughter is just carrying water as part of the current Democratic political strategy of trying to co-opt the Occupy Wall Street movement. Perhaps the Axelrods and Podestas see that open-source protest movement to potentially be “their tea party”. Whatever. I will take her op-ed more seriously when she is marching against the Hedge fundies and Wall Streeters who are top donors to her Party, her administration and her university.

You can put a three corned hat on a Princeton theorist of global governance by transnational “governmental networks” but even if you adjust the hat at a suitably jaunty angle for maximum populist effect, the agenda underneath is still neither democratic nor popular.

[ by Charles Cameron — childhood memories, computer history, creative thinking, analogy, bead game ]

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This menacing old pile, Horsley Towers — John Julius Norwich said of it in his Architecture of southern England, “The over-riding idiom seems to be vaguely Italianate Gothic, but in reality East Horsley is like nothing but itself, a grotesque Victorian Disneyland which has to be seen to be believed – and may not be even then” — was home to Ada, Countess of Lovelace, daughter of the poet Lord Byron.

Today is Ada Lovelace Day, and I have special reasons to honor her.

For one thing, I grew up inside these gate-towers, in the last little house before the Lovelace estate proper began, and certain features of the first fields on the way to the big pile were my childhood haunts, the old oak with its dark and mysterious hollow wound, the clovered grass and cow pats, the small mound for boyish climbing, the bramble bushes with their delicious blackberries…

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But it is as a devotee of Hermann Hesse‘s great Bead Game that I want to celebrate Ada Lovelace today —

for she illustrates to perfection the importance of cross-disciplinary analogies in creativity.

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Consider this diagram from Mark Turner‘s The artful mind: cognitive science and the riddle of human creativity, based on those in Arthur Koestler‘s The Act of Creation (eg those on pp 35 and 37):

Hesse proposes — in his Nobel-winning novel, the Glass Bead Game (aka Magister Ludi) the building of an architecture of ideas in which the great works of human culture are linked — bound together — by analogies between them.

Beginning players of his Game,  he writes, learn “how to establish parallels, by means of the Game’s symbols, between a piece of classical music and the formula for some law of nature.” As I wrote elsewhere, on a more complex level, Hesse speaks of scholars proposing materials for inclusion in the Game Archives, and specifically mentions someone who had been studying “the rhythmic structure of Julius Caesar’s Latin and discovered the most striking congruences with the results of well-known studies of the intervals in Byzantine hymns”…  Hesse couldn’t possibly have known about it when writing that particular sentence, of course, but there is actually a book by Jane-Marie Luecke, OSB, entitled Measuring Old English Rhythm: an Application of the Principles of Gregorian Chant Rhythm to the Meter of Beowulf, (Literary Monographs, vol 9, U. Wisconsin Press, 1978).

Hunh?  So?

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Consider what Ada, Countess of Lovelace hath wrought.

She perceived just such an analogy — comparing Charles Babbage‘s Analytical Engine with Jacquard‘s mechanical loom, and writing:

The Analytical Engine … weaves algebraic patterns, just as the Jacquard-loom weaves flowers and leaves.

That analogy between weaving and algebra was the great creative leap: from there to the adoption and adaptation of Jacquard’s punched card system in computation was the lesser step from insight to application.

And think about it: her mind moved unerringly between “art” and “science” — or more exactly, craft and mathematics — in 1843, to deliver a technological insight on which the mainframes of the 1970s still relied…

That, my friends, was a superb move in the spirit of the Glass Bead Game — and impossible without a well-furnished and agile mind.

[ by Charles Cameron — wars and seasons of wars ]

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Read the CJ Chivers piece first, for verbal and visual background, then read the New York Times article he mentions, Cease-Fire for Harvests Offers Respite in Afghanistan, which is now online — and quite a read it is, too.