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NON-SERIOUS POST DEDICATED TO PHILOSOPHICAL VILLAINS EVERYWHERE

So…this is that YouTube nonsense that entertains the internet masses….

ECONOMIC MAN VS. PRIMARY LOYALTIES

I’ve posted this over at Chicago Boyz.

Lex has strong objections to “secularization” as an explanation for tempering historical tribalism in the West. I’ll comment more as soon as I can.

Exceptionally busy day – I’ll try to get some quality blogging in late tonight. No rest for the wicked.

VISUALIZING INFORMATION

First, I’d like to give a big tip o’ the Zenpundit hat to Dave Davison of Thoughts Illustrated for bringing the following links to my attention. Ever since Critt Jarvis connected the two of us last Spring, Dave has steadily enriched my thinking by introducing me to new ideas and thought leaders, something I much appreciate.

Visualizing information is becoming an increasingly important tool in business, government and education for allowing people to understand, comprehend and manipulate large amounts of data quickly and effectively. Both the Intelligence Community concerned with analyzing threats to our national security and private sector tech companies interested in building Web2.0 applications are diving deepinto visualization techniques. If you use power point presentations for business on an extensive basis may be familiar with the work of Edward Tufte, a leading expert in the field of visualizing information.

In teaching children or adults, I frequently make use of diagrams or have students create their own visual formats in order to get them to integrate concepts and make connections that previously might have gone unnoticed. Some very important aspects of history and some areas of the sciences ( say, modern physics) are counterintuitive – they run against our natural logic of how the situation “should” play out. Practicing visualization of information can bring these non-obvious elements to light, make them more concrete and stimulate students to ask questions.

Combining symbolic visual formats and text also engages multiple regions of the viewer’s brain when they “read” it, possibly making the information more meaningful to a larger group of students with different learning styles.

Below is a table “ A Periodic Table of Visualization Methods” created by Visual Literacy.org that gives a comprehensive range of techniques for displaying information that students may find useful for projects in the coming years. While I have loaded the table into slideshare, I encourage you to go to their page because the table there (unlike my version) is fully interactive with examples and descriptions, as well as more easily read ( and can be downloaded as a PDF file).

RECOMMENDED READING

Sunday…Sunday…Sunday….where action is the attraction…

Bruce Kesler -” Interagency Coordination Requires Dems & Reps To Come Together“

Top billing. The issue, while seemingly a dry one of inside-the-beltway bureaucratic wrangling among deputy assistant secretaries really could not be more important for increasing the resiliency of U.S. foreign policy. Why can’t the United States respond effectively to nimble 4GW groups ? Look to the lack of “operational jointness“, ” unified action” and ” System Administration” and the plethora of turf battles and bureaucratic empire building. More on this topic in the near future.

James McCormick -“Iklé — Annihilation From Within“

A deep and probing review at Chicago Boyz of an important book (I’m reading it now).

Gabriel Kolko at DNI -” The Age of Perpetual Conflict“

Kolko is the well known Marxist historian and one of the more credible scholars (i.e. he’s a real historian, not a Noam Comsky type polemicist) with an unrelentingly critical view of the United States. I’m holding this one up as a negative example; as a vigorous argument for isolationism and for a weakness of reasoning that assumes as static benefits of global interventionism ( bad actions deterred by the potential of intervention are ignored but are assumed to continue after a shift to isolationism) as a given while counting only the costs.

Catholicgauze -“Turkish Payback to Ralph Peters and Signs of Things to Come? “

I agree this is disturbing. I am no expert on Turkish politics but there seems to be an emerging strand of crypto-Islamist rejectionism of the West in Turkey that is larger than issues over Iraq. To hazard a guess, anti-Americanism is partly a safe “euphemistic” discourse to hide opposition to secularist Kemalism ( which if you oppose openly in Turkey -or even not so openly -that gets your party banned and perhaps you a jail sentence). Anti-Americanism or anti-Westernism can be presented as Turkish nationalism, even when it masks an ideology that is decidely transnationalist.

Marc Schulman – “Who Is George Soros? “

Speaking of disturbing. George Soros appears to be becoming unhinged. Does he realize that he – a major Democratic Party and liberal organization contributor – is openly suggesting introducing Kangaroo Courts to try Republicans and conservatives or is he so isolated in a bubble that he does not realize how that statement sounds to folks who are not on the MoveOn.org email list ?

How would Soros like somebody saying ” We should de-naturalize and deport politically active, authoritarian, crackpot, billionaires who violate the Logan Act ?”

Gunnar Peterson – “Protect the transaction“

System security expert Gunnar Peterson opines on Col. David Kilcullen’s post Two Schools of Classical Counterinsurgency from his professional perspective.

That’s it.

THE LOST WORLD OF THE ANGLO-SAXONS

Lexington Green has an interesting post “Do we really owe it all to the geography of the Norwegian fjords?” at Chicago Boyz that traces the culture of Anglo-American notions of political liberty to the nuclear families of the Norwegian fjords:

“Here is a whole corpus of writing about which I knew nothing. I have in the meantime obtained a copy of the translation of the Demolins book, Anglo-Saxon Superiority, To What is it Due? (1907). The beginning of it is a summary of the writing of M. de Tourville, which discusses how the Saxons came to dominate all the other invaders, Angles, Danes, Normans, because of their cultural practices, particularly nuclear families, which Tourville calls “particularist” social structure. The Saxons generated a unique type of state apparatus as a result, operating large states on a federal-type basis. For example, note this passage:

We know how, under Egbert, the Heptarchy fell under the domination of the Saxons. But the latter did not give the Angles a Saxon government, nor did they foist Saxon officials on them, for the good reason that their political development was most limited, their strength lying more in private than in public life. They never dreamt of administering conquered peoples in the fashion adopted by the Romans, and later by the Spaniards and the French. Their idea was rather — and has remained — a Federation. Thus were started by the Saxons that former United States of England. So little did they aim at constituting the model of a large empire, that their king continued to call himself simply ‘King of the Saxons of the West’. Yet he was sovereign over the whole island.

Remarkable if true. We see the Saxons at the earliest possible date showing the genius for distributed power and federal arrangements that we in the Anglosphere still have today. Unfortunately, the Demolins book, which I am halfway through, is more focused on reform in France a century ago, with the English case only as a background.”

Very intriguing. At the time the Demolins book was published, the troubled Third Republic was deeply split politically, socially and culturally. There was, to an extent, in France, a sense of anxiety over the might of the “Anglo-Saxon powers”, rising America and reigning Great Britain and paranoia about the aforementioned power’s distant Teutonic cousins in Wilhelmine Germany. On the other hand, admiration for British political institutions was not unusual among French intellectuals prior to the 20th century – Montesquieu and Voltaire being the most famous examples of that tradition.