🗨 Status Report II: What's Up With You?

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@alberto, this is a good summary of why Robert Harris, formerly a political journalist, is such an interesting read.

Perhaps I could write a novel about politics that was universal, that would mean as much to someone living in Germany, or Italy, or England or America or anywhere in the world, because there are certain laws of politics that are universal and the Romans established much of our language and much of what we think about politics.

I’m not sure that Imperium actually achieves any such universality, but the ambition is there. This particular trilogy of course sets out to detail the events that led to the fall of the republic, at the hand of populists non the less. It pits Cicero as a figure that is pulled between his own hunger for power and his knowledge in that much of the damage that is being done to the republic through the political battles he is participates in can never be undone. It’s a sort of picture of a political system at the end of its life, just as the Empire is about to take its place.

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Today is the 50th anniversary of the bus caravan that went on the start The Farm. I started with one of the buses at age 19 and stayed with the group until I was 32. This is a picture of the caravan leaving on the trip, Oct 12, 1970. The scene is the Great Highway that runs along the western beach in San Francisco. We had been meeting as a group in former roller skating rink converted into a rock and roll / meeting hall that was run by the legendary Family Dog who also ran the Avalon Ballroom. These were seminal locations if you’re into a certain music history. But we had our meetings there every Monday Night for about a year. We had been on Haight Street before that. About 2000 people attended the meetings, and this night about 200 hopped in their buses and headed north, only to be busted by the police at the Oregon border. And so it began…

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I confess that my little group and I had to go back to our bus and finish fixing it before we could leave. Soon enough we did leave. But that night we watched them drive off. A sight that likely won’t ever be repeated. Oh my what idealists we were.

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Wow, recently this whole thread reads like an experimental apocalyptic sci-fi story told in form of Blogposts.

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We are still idealists, John. Just… old ones, you and I at least.

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Hanging in there, thank you, but it’s been an unexpected shock to the core. We are safe in Yerevan, for now at least, and so let’s be thankful for that. Despite exploding cases of COVID and family members on the front line (most of them are back now, but wanting to go back apparently). It’s been a rough year, but there is worse around me…

Helpless, a little dazed, are perhaps the most accurate adjectives to frame me right now. At the start of the war I tried to study, journal a tiny bit, wanting to make sense of things, but after a few days I realised it was taking quite a toll on me, physically. And so, we just hang in there, not knowing what to do but to look after the basics really. Time has stopped, I guess it’s normal in wars? And again, we are not the ones fleeing from shelling, or looking at incoming UAVs, so… :man_shrugging:

In case you wonder how the above can explain the interest in world-building calls, I think escapism might be the unflattering answer.

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Received yesterday:

Dear Alberto,

my name is XXXX and I am a theologian. As head of strategic innovation I am in charge of several innovation and transformation processes within my diocese.

[…] While I browsed through the web to search for a connection of benedictine spirituality and innovation I stumpled accross your blog post about the rule of St. Benedict. And I honestly was amazed, inspired and really grateful. You share really cool ideas over there. Thank you for sharing these insights.

Since the lines are a few years old, I am curious if your view on the rule has changed. I fit was confirmed, strengthend, deepened.

Would you like to get connected and share your experience?

Many greetings and best wishes from Northern Germany,

This made my day. Ok, Edgeryders may be small and unimportant, but I bet this stuff does not happen at McKinsey. :slight_smile:

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Alessandro: that is extremely awful.
Alberto: that is extremely cool.

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Also notice that her diocese has a “head of strategic innovation”. I had no idea.

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An interview with Kevin Kelly that gives some glimpses into his fertile mind…

"What’s exciting me is what we’re doing right now: teleconferencing. This new media of videoconferencing has been around for 20 years, maybe more, but it feels like the early ’80s of the internet, when we had bulletin boards. Where people were logging on. The tech then was terrible, crude, and user-unfriendly, but you had a sense of its power and potential.

All the great things that we’ve done as a species so far have been done shoulder to shoulder, living within walking distance of each other. These new telecommunication tools allow us to do things together, but not necessarily in real time. Look at Wikipedia: It’s a tremendous achievement of mankind but achieved asynchronously. It’s bit by bit, here and there. These new tools are going to allow us to collaborate at vast scale in real time.
When you give people total freedom for their schedule, you find it’s not a binary thing of either they work at home or they work in the office. Generally, you find people spend two or three days together and then two or three days alone. And those two, three days together are very important.

They allow for serendipitous, chance meetings. New things happen in the hallway. And those are very, very crucial for long-term growth. I’m a huge believer in waste, in slack, in taking time off, in buffers, in inefficiency.

Because if you want efficiency, then you need a machine. Productivity is for robots. It’s not for humans. Humans excel at all the things that are inefficient. For example, science by definition is hugely inefficient. If you’re discovering the same thing, a hundred percent perfectly, you’re not learning anything. If you’re not making mistakes and having failures, you’re not going forward."

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Ok, it’s totally unprofessional, but I could not resist using the trailer templates in iMovie to make a small fan video for the Sci-Fi Economics Lab. It’s quite fun!

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Zoom for reasons I don’t understand is starting to censor/disallow certain public meetings on Zoom. New York University has scheduled a zoom event about censorship of all things featuring a Palestinian and Zoom wouldn’t allow it. I’m not clear on all the details yet but WTF are they doing that for?

Here is the statement about it from NYU: http://web.nyu-aaup.org/2020/10/statement-from-nyu-aaup-executive.html

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Meanwhile, thanks (?) to @markomanka, I have fallen into the rabbithole of the funny and disturbing Epistemological Diarrhea sparkled with obstacles. I could recommend it to @amelia and @katejsim and @Leonie and @Jirka_Kocian and @Wolha, but I am not sure. I am really not sure. At your own risk, guys.

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wow feeling personally attacked by the inclusion of k-pop in that list :rofl:

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I really found this statement by our lovely @iriedawta spot on… and a sincere window into the trauma faced by all sides of a war:

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The mood over here right now:

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I am afraid these discussions about all sides, now, can be a little irritating for me. I am aware to be a potential victim of an info war, but still, I think the amount of crimes committed in the last month by the aggressors should get more attention, and possibly some bloody intervention. The time to break bread together is far away right now, unfortunately. Necessary, yes, but the space for dialogue is super tight, with things being as they are on the front line.

Yes, there is trauma on all sides, and it will linger around for a very long time. Which is one of the nasty side effect of any war: conflicts stick to people, and linger around for generations.

This is especially true if you have an autocratic dictator (like Aliyev for example, his family is running the country since 1993, from father to son) who actively blows on the trauma fire, poisoning generations before you even get to combat, which is the one thing they are allowed to march on the streets for in Azerbaijan it seems… but about such restrictions of expression, let’s not take my word for it.

So yes, I would love to be here talking about a healing process, but the one that was tried till now never really properly functioned, because the reality is that in the last 30 years the war was always there, always flaring up in nasty ways. Now that the world is busy not caring about anything but COVID, the US elections, and what not, the Azeris have decided to escalate, to avoid a regime implosion perhaps? Who knows… Turkey’s in dire straits too, also needed to protect its own regime? :thinking:

In any event, what we - more likely - do actually know on the Artsakh/Karabakh war is thanks to the one side were journalists are allowed to do their job of reporting (Press Freedom Index in Azerbaijan? 168/200. Foreign journalists are not allowed near the action in Azerbaijan. I wonder why…

So now, putting history and territorial claims aside for a moment, here are some of the actual things that have been happening in the last month to the army, but especially to the civilian population, that have been attacked (forgive me, if the list is not comprehensive, nor ordered) :

Where is the international community’s response? Pretty much absent. Some concerned statements, but no action. And there had been stuff like the above, imagine if it was just soldiers killing each other. But you know, the oil and gas from Azerbaijan will be needed to keep us warm in Europe this winter… so… :shushing_face: I would not be so surprised if there will be a strong backlash to UN and EU as institutions here in Armenia, having been lecturing about human rights and all that jazz, and now… nothing of any substance. Unless they will eventually wake up. There is a lot of anger and disappointment all around. Including within the actual peacemakers, like @iriedawta that have tried their best to build bridges. But right now, they are all burning.

So, please, really please, show me now, because I can’t see where should the space for dialogue be, right now?!

So. Much. Waste.
Shameful.
Stepanakert reminds me of Sarajevo, for the little that I can remember.

It’s so so disappointing to see the clock turning back like this, we should have better things to do to keep ourselves occupied, and instead we are looking for the nearest bomb shelter, in freaking 2020, at the edges of Europe… and at least we are the lucky ones who are safe. For now at that is…

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As long as Trump and his gangs remain in power, Erdogan will always be favored. The Trump real estate business wants too much from them.

Speaking of the US election, it is Tuesday and the consequences of it will reverberate everywhere.

This sentence, from a news email I receive pretty well describes how far the White House and GOP have fallen, “Never before in our history has a candidate openly planned to win an election by gaming the system, but here we are.”

Already any semblance of moral leadership from the US, long in decline and always containing its opposite, sits now in a self-dug grave. Trump’s reelection would put the dirt over it and lay the tombstone.

I personally do not think it will happen because the opposition is so strong, but I must refer again to the gaming of the system. There is a clear path to victory for them that way and their “packing” of the courts over the past several years increases that possibility exponentially.

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As long as we don’t break the current economy, we have no hope.

By the way, I forgot to add to the list that the mercenaries are paid $100 per head of Armenian they cut off.

Incidents were already being reported by a long time, now they captured a mercenary and he confirmed.

Oh, and this is happening as well, in France. If it reminds you of Nazi Germany, it is because it does. If you are wondering who are these “Grey Wolves”, here they are…

I know, nobody cares… but I kinda need to put it out there. I guess you should know what’s happening…

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It is not looking good. No idea how one copes with something like this, or how any of us can help?

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