Don’t know how long it will take to digest your thoughts

thanks

hope that my lack of preciseness will not obfuscate the meaning

I’ll need a beer or two,

cheers!

Party of the Democratic Republicans divided against itself

to fight against a mighty enemy (and money IS mighty) always instills both anger and angst, so you always have at least two fractions

then add to that the Divide-et-Impera-rule pursued by the “mighty enemy” (really easy for money which owns the media, isn’t it?) and i fear, it is not hard to understand - you know, the “history-thingi”

but my personal feeling is that angst is a no longer affordable luxury - so i tend to be against the candidate of the angst (Hillary “Patty Hearst” Clinton)

Paul Krugman … has placed his faith in the hands of a machine willing to disenfranchise its most loyal base.

would be sad, really, really, sad…

Steve once told something like that…

i’m not a Krugman regular, but some of his articles impressed me much - and i understand, that you can’t be unconditionally for one candidate or the other and that it is a hard decision which one you will support - but that doesn’t mean to “place faith”, more like “place a bet”

so maybe Krugman is a demonstration of the power of behavioral patterns? Because he once was a rational man - now he is a “believer”??

Chuck

in depth understanding of what he said

also - thank you

despite the fact, that “beware of behavioral patterns” might be a little too “condensed” to describe his work

Thanks for the reminder about Santayana. I haven’t read him in 35 years, and then it was a more cursory reading than an in depth understanding of what he said. I’ve ordered his book “Life of Reason, Reason in Common Sense” so I can perhaps get a bit of both reason & common sense before I’m gone.

Back to Steve’s concerns about the framing of Obama as McGovern, I’d say it is a ploy by the Clintons and DLC a la Rove, and this is what infuriates me the most. Obama’s campaign has grown beyond the bounds of this election, and should be “handled” as such. It is much more akin to MLK’s in that it is not just about electoral rights or the anti-war movement. It has been premised upon the discontent with the trend in governing based on the corporate model, with Bush as corrupt and incompetent CEO, rewriting policy to enable as much embezzlement of “profit” while simutaneously dis-empowering not only the workers, but the shareholders as well.
It is a hard sell to remind the electorate that we the people ARE the government that has been so villified, from Reagan on down. Government is not the problem, as the Reaganites had many believing, rather inept and corrupt governance, of, by and for the “haves and have mores”, ie BushCo’s “base”. It is a hard sell, because the framing accepted by so many makes the problem of taking the governance back into the hands of those not out for personal profit seem insurmountable.
It saddens me to see the Party of the Democratic Republicans divided against itself, and one player in particular has laid me low. Paul Krugman was someone I would avidly read for advice about economics and social justice, but I can no longer read him wide-eyed and wonder-filled. He has placed his faith in the hands of a machine willing to disenfranchise its most loyal base. Remember Yertle the Turtle? We are all turtles now, and it is time to get out from under the weight of oppression whether it be named King or Queen.
Obama is not McGovern, nor Bobby Kennedy, nor MLK. He’s just this guy, see (thanks Douglas Adams), at the front of a movement to re-engage the People in governance. With or without the White House, the movement is here and now. The turtles are restless, and on the move.

So with this — perhaps excessively long — introduction out of the way,

these shoes are made for me? At least, they fit, so i wear them…

i guess, the laywer is speaking? Laywers usually have to work a posteriori, have to judge problems, but Santayana’s words are about a priori tasks, about foreseeing problems. So please, try to see it as programmer! Programmers always have to analyze things today to create tools working for tomorrow

that they are likely to bring about the same results under radically different circumstances today

first - iiiiiit depends on what “same results” mean, because identity of states is a science in itself……

and second - the circumstances are never “radically different circumstances”, they are always three-leveled (generic, typical, individual). E.g. we are all human beings, remember? (Btw. we have a quite “narrow” DNA-spectrum - the relatively low level of genetic variation with humans - that also narrows the variation of differences humans are able to stand)

Santayana doesn’t talk about exact repetitions, not about a.detail == b.detail, he talks about high similarities, about processes, not datas, about rules, not (specific) results, about systems, not surfaces

or, to say it with the words of Terry Pratchett: he talks about stories, not actors

“because stories are important. People think, that stories are shaped by people. In fact, it’s the other way around.”

ok, Pratchett is an author, so he tends to exaggerate, but sometimes you have to do so to be understandable…

e.g. each baby is a “repetition” of history in the way, Santayana (or Marx) had meant

each child has a program to follow - programmed in DNA (generic + typical elements), programmed in the first 10 years of life (typical + individual elements) - nothing “perfectly individual”, actually, mostly passive information processing

simply because the active part of information processing is dependent on individual experience - so it always takes time (and space) to gather experience and babies need some “seed money”

that’s how information processing systems work - radically different circumstances simply would not allow life

History’s relevance to contemporary events — and it has great relevance — is as metaphor, not prophecy.

it is much more than just a metaphor - sorry to say that, but our whole life depends on “History’s relevance to contemporary events” - without that, no decision would make sense, no learning would be useful. Each and every of our decisions IS a prophecy - or better, a bet on how we think the future will look like - and that depends on history (or better, on our knowledge about history, that’s not the same)…

With all due respect to George Santayana, those who cannot learn from history are not doomed to repeat it

with all due respect to you - if someone is not willing to accept behavioral patterns demonstrated by history, (s)he is doomed to obey them - subconsciously, because only your conscious ego/brain is able to control the subconscious programming

that’s what Santayana wanted to tell us - beware of behavioral patterns, control them, otherwise they control you. And to control patterns, you have to know them - and here enters history

(btw, and, my bet, that’s why no democracy has survived despite the fact, that each and every advanced civilization was born before their aristocracies, because in former times, they didn’t know their predecessor’s fate)

but, alas, to detect patterns you have to use details - that is the general problem of active information processing: to detect and to count, to compare and to verify. Comparing and verifying depends on memory, detecting and counting creates memories

that’s how information works - repeatable, identifiable processes, recognizable by their repeated states/details, so there is one thing about details able to characterize patterns/informational structures: occurency

single events are simply not informational and cannot be used - remember “one is a fluke, two is a coincidence, and three is a pattern”?

Jesus, could there be two more dissimilar eras than the early ‘70s and the late ‘00s? In the early ‘70s, … but…. is in any meaningful way comparable to the honorable, but doomed, campaign George McGovern

that’s the verifying part - you ask your memory about the occurencies of the details, Mr. Judis claims to be significant for a pattern

you disprove Mr. Judis, but not Mr. Santanaya

PS: even America is a “repetition” - look at the Indus Valley Culture and compare the “construction” of both cultures (especially look at the cities and the “typical american regularity”). If you look at details like time and space (2000 BC vs. 2000 AD or the continents), there is really a difference, but if you look at the “construction pattern” (recreation from scratch) there is equality - and even if you look at the culture, there is equality (or high similarity): both were democracies of engineers with sophisticated knowledge and industries…