Ethan Zuckerman blogs about the future of advocacy. He demonstrates a shift from programmatic "representation" to the "pointing and contextualizing" of the blog world. This amplifies an important lesson regarding "tolerance." Just as it is embarassingly presumptuous to emphasize "tolerance" as a value (who am I to presume to tolerate you!?), so also is the tendency idealistically to adopt-a-cause and represent the less fortunate who come along with the ideal.
Ethan quotes Martin Kimani,
[A benefit show's organizers] will lay claim to the very last thing so many Africans own: our problems. And it will be terrible and evil beyond imagining for owning your problem is at the heart of what it is to be human. It is when we wrestle and suffer and triumph over our problems that we are most human, but this alas is not to be if the soul stealers on show succeed. I do not want anyone to suffer needlessly. I would prefer everyone to live in a democratic, prosperous community that knows no war or want. But these are conditions that must be battled and struggled for; they have never arrived as a gift from a stranger.
It's a far cry from representing others to representing ourselves, and the smug sanctimonious bullshit that can accompany our charitable impulses often dehumanizes, depersonalizes and neutralizes the best intentions. How much better it is to support another's representation of herself by pointing to it and providing context.
(cross posted at NetSquared)
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Clairvoyance?
We know nothing of this subject.
Clairvoyant trompe l'oeil how bout that?
The passively arrogant reliance on perceptual mechanics that follows along like a trusting pet with us as we follow along at the side of whatever it is that leads us forward.
We get fooled.
And attain a new way of seeing that pierces that veil - and get fooled again - and get a new prescription, and...
My experience of clairvoyance is it's not that different than visual reception. You're still there soloing with more info than
you can process while the floodwaters rise to the top of the porch steps.
Tradition offers the same comfort and urgency it offers the traditional norm - alignment, compromise, toadyisms, dogma,
scrambled nomenclatures, books that purport to be all you need to win big, armies of pseudo-illuminati protecting
second-level pseudo-illuminati who function as cut-outs for still deeper camouflaged versions of what may or may not be
heirs of the big hairy eyeball.
Increasingly well-calibrated instrumentation can decrease paranoia - up to a point.
This is the main noise of Dennett and his erstwhile David-and-Goliath opponents.
We know this, therefore that makes a good conjecture.
Seeing everything all at once would put you in the position of having to have an opinion about all of that at once wouldn't it? Kind of the ultimate clairvoyant experience know what I mean?
But the message was and continues to be that that passive receptivity is itself a kind of active complicity - the anthropologists
creating rituals with the jungle men as they film them dancing around the fire, standing around the fire and the dancing with their cameras.
And out of the cloud of that temporal cyclonic the Very Large Radio Personality intones his opinions - thanx to L.Frank Baum for the image.
Elections from one four-year get to the next are to the millenarianists' expectations as paragraph to novel. Without the little there can be no great.
This dimension is hell for some, near-heaven for others.
It would be heaven entire but for the presence of those sufferers; though there are they who take great comfort in the knowledge of others fallen below them, for many of us it is a sad thing.
The Franciscan bodhisattva analog.
Movement through seems to have been the idea. And there's a kind of transfer of intent, flow from the spirit side through the unlocked membrane opened by the protein-mask of reality-TV cynicism.
Just like with the video game rhesus-teens transitioning into cockpits and tank command, and CCTV snitch-baskets.
Secondary divinities getting what they want seem more divine than the frustrated almost not. Like rich kids relaxing by the pool versus rich kids on camping trips that have gone unexpectedly sour. Thrown back into the mix and upheaval of scrambling biological imperative and exigency.
Each dimension exists surrounded by the next, in this linear context. In order for clairvoyance, or electro-magnetic radiation, or son et lumiere, or anything, to be what you work with, you have to be able to fit it inside your head.
That may be the real problem of this world.
Or it may be that the next step is to trust something outside the self. So that cognition alone isn't it.
Types of clairvoyance:
Crowleyan satanic manipulative gratification.
Mossad strategic.
SRI DoD R&D weapons-grade.
Vatican penumbral extension.
Grass-skirt indigenous.
Gaelic elfin.
Nahuatl mushroom Aztec panavision.
Trailer-trash psychedelic.
Red-shield economic.
Haight-Ashbury free-lance.
Clairvoyance being the input to cognition's process, and in that no different than sight or hearing except in degree and volume and category, we're still left with being the soloists of our own knowledge. With goals projected according to our ethic.
Surrounded by exploding viral imperatives that don't share our humble curiosity, or even gravity.
Pressured by inexorable time and the immediate demands of carnality.
So it's really about applied knowledge isn't it?
It always was about that, wasn't it?
Work, for the night is coming.