Tags: Canada, freedom

These are my links for December 6th from 00:18 to 00:18:

• The Harper Index – A Stephen Harper Timeline – A chronological look at Harper’s career reveals a willingness to dump old friends for new ones.

Related articles by Zemanta

• PM and Tories hang on
• Hard-right Tory ideology has put the PM in a bind
• Canada PM sees opposition revolt

Tags: Breadcrumbs, Canada, freedom, politics

Image via Wikipedia

Stafford Beer 1926 – 2002

If, as will become the dominant theme of this blog, the Purpose of a System is What it Does ( POSIWID) what does it mean to mankind that so many of our systems appear broken to even unseasoned observers?

Stafford Beer of course had a lot to say on this subject in his many works but one example that often haunts me comes from his work of prose Chronicles of Wizard Prang.

Tags: cybernetics, design, freedom, POSIWID, software, systems

These are my links for November 15th from 14:47 to 14:47:

• Lee Smolin on science and democracy | Video on TED.com – Physicist Lee Smolin talks about how the scientific community works: as he puts it, “we fight and argue as hard as we can,” but everyone accepts that the next generation of scientists will decide who’s right. And, he says, that’s how democracy works, too.

The video:

Tags: freedom, science, TED

“Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.” — Isaac Asimov

Tags: freedom, ignorance, knowledge, politics

Designing Freedom by Stafford Beer

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars
I finally got my own copy of this book (which I’ve been looking for it since about 1990)…

I’d forgotten just how great it is.

I’ve been angered lately about the number of absolute falsehoods spread by ALL sides in both current election campaigns (USA and Canada) – sometimes on purpose, often because they simply “don’t get it.” This book covers some of the reason this is endemic in our societies and at least gives me some hope that someday the leaders of our systems of governance will discover the route to stabilizing our systems. But for now I shake my head in fear and anguish.

Tags: CBC, cybernetics, design, freedom, Massey Lectures, Stafford Beer

40+ years ago the cyberneticist Stafford Beer forecast that computerization would be a disaster if this “new” prescription of Shirky’s was not followed [Clay Shirky (shirky.com) It's Not Information Overload. It's Filter Failure delivered at the Web 2.0 Expo last week].

In a later radio broadcast summarizing some of his concepts (CBC Radio 1973; later published as “Designing Freedom” Anansi) Beer summarized the need this way:

Tags: CBC, Clay Shirky, cybernetics, design, filters, freedom, ignorance, Stafford Beer, systems

from the cover:  “…. Naomi Wolf compels us to face the way our free America is under assault.  She warns us — with the straight-to-fellow-citizens urgency of one of Thomas Paine’s revolutionary pamphlets — that we have little time to lose if our children are to live in real freedom.Wolf shows that there are ten classic steps dictators or would-be dictators always take when they wish to close down an open society.  Each of those ten steps is now underway in the United States Today.”

Tags: freedom

From the cover: “Since September 11, 2001, the Bush administration has relentlessly invoked the word “freedom.”  Al-Qaeda attacted us because “they hate our freedoms.” The United States can strike preemptively because “freedom is on the march.”  Social Security should be privatized in order to protect individual freedoms.In Whose Freedom?, Lakoff surveys the political landscape and offers an essential map of the Republican battle that seeks to capture the hearts and minds of Americans — and shows how progressives can fight to reinvigorate this most beloved of American political ideas.”

Tags: freedom, politics