Remember this the next time you find yourselves mesmerized by the antics of the 2016 presidential candidates or drawn into a politicized debate over the machinations of Congress, the president or the judiciary: it’s all intended to distract you from the fact that you have no authority and no rights in the face of the shadow governments.
Source: Deep State: Inside Washington’s Shadowy Power Elite | Zero Hedge
Something died. I feel a sense of loss that I just can’t shake. The Sharing Economy has become an icon and an emblem for a business model…
Source: The sharing economy — a social movement dying to become an economic one — Medium
By Crom! is an autobiographical comic by Rachel Kahn, featuring life advice from her favourite fictional Barbarian.
Source: Weald Comics
Since time immemorial humans have complained that life is becoming more complex, but it is only now that we have a hope to analyze formally and verify this lament. This article analyzes the human social environment using the “complexity profile,” a mathematical tool for characterizing the collective behavior of a system. The analysis is used to justify the qualitative observation that complexity of existence has increased and is increasing. The increase in complexity is directly related to sweeping changes in the structure and dynamics of human civilization—the increasing interdependence of the global economic and social system and the instabilities of dictatorships, communism and corporate hierarchies. Our complex social environment is consistent with identifying global human civilization as an organism capable of complex behavior that protects its components (us) and which should be capable of responding effectively to complex environmental demands.
Source: Complexity Rising: From Human Beings to Human Civilization, a Complexity Profile | NECSI
We have been dreaming of robots since Homer. In Book 18 of the Iliad, Achilles’ mother, the nymph Thetis, wants to order a new suit of armor for her son, and so she pays a visit to the Olympian atelier of the blacksmith-god Hephaestus, whom she finds hard at work on a series of automata.
Source: The Robots Are Winning! by Daniel Mendelsohn | The New York Review of Books
This gallery contains 3 photos.
Originally posted on The Dark Fantastic: Literature, Philosophy, and Digital Arts:
Philosophy, in its longing to rationalize, formalize, define, delimit, to terminate enigma and uncertainty, to co-operate wholeheartedly with the police, is nihilistic in the ultimate sense that it strives…
He who says organization, says oligarchy.
So wrote German sociologist Robert Michels during the formation of Europe’s big tent ‘people’s parties’ a century ago. According to Michels—a committed realist, as we shall see—even the most radical and progressive of these new parties would eventually succumb to what he termed ‘the iron law of oligarchy’.
Source: How We Can Overcome Oligarchy Disguised as Democracy | Alternet
NOTE 24(b): Why Marx’s argument on value causes such controversy
A reader of this blog made this excellent statement regarding my last post:
“Yes indeed, after having to offer so many caveats about value, bourgeois economists and most ordinary people start to wonder what good the concept is in the first place. Especially if it is not directly visible, if nobody really knows the value of any commodity, and if it doesn’t directly determine prices, fretting over it starts to sound to people like a bunch of obsessive woo-woo pseudoscience, like worrying about ghosts and such.”
If the value of a commodity cannot be detected or measured by any known means, why do I spend so much time talking about it? The answer is simple: qualitatively, value, exchange value and prices are all the same thing: they are each some definite quantity of socially necessary labor time. Unless you can…
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Source: Trance Formation of America
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