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Thread: Haiti (Catch all)

  1. #181
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    Quote Originally Posted by marct View Post
    LOL - maybe that's why this type of discussion has practically disappeared from our grad student pub; the no smoking Gestapo !

    I remember a year I spent one day reading Husserl's Crisis - man, he really needed to smoke! He kept painting himself into corners that he couldn't get out of! Too bad, for Husserl, that fuzzy-set theory hadn't been developed at the time he was writing .
    Without condoning smoking (just say no kids!) I think you'reonto something there. I remember reading an Andrew Vaccss novel awhile ago where one of the characters actually defending his smoking with reference to the powers of fags (ciggies or cigaretes to non-Brits not the other kind!) in aiding concentration. When I was still at Uni, five or so years ago, they were bringing in the smoking ban in the student union and it really affected the marks (grades) I/we were given. OTOH, they brought that in to stem the smoking of Marijuana for which SOAS was famous and attracted students from all over London. I also recall the best discussion I had about Hegel (on the topic of Love) was in Yemen whilst smoking Yemen's indigenous Kamrans (foul but a snip at a 50 cents a packet) after which we switched to my shisha (and faroula/strawberry tobbacco followed by apple) after which the discussion really did get transcendental...

  2. #182
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    Quote Originally Posted by MikeF View Post
    I was only half-joking. The best working groups that I've participated in had an amalagram of experts combined with practisioners. The Core Lab at NPS is a good example. Many of the ideas developed after heated discussions were truly innovative.
    Actually, I agree and my experience has been similar as well. I have found, however, that inter & multi- disciplinary discussions work better in an informal atmosphere where people feel that they can say something like "Hunh?!? WTF does THAT mean?!?!" It's really useful to have a beer in your hands when you do that, and to be able to sit back, light up a smoke and think about it.
    Sic Bisquitus Disintegrat...
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  3. #183
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    Quote Originally Posted by Tukhachevskii View Post
    Without condoning smoking (just say no kids!) I think you'reonto something there. I remember reading an Andrew Vaccss novel awhile ago where one of the characters actually defending his smoking with reference to the powers of fags (ciggies or cigaretes to non-Brits not the other kind!) in aiding concentration.
    I remember reading something years ago about some of the effects of nicotine on brain neurology, and one of the effects discussed was increasing concentration. Works for me !

    Quote Originally Posted by Tukhachevskii View Post
    When I was still at Uni, five or so years ago, they were bringing in the smoking ban in the student union and it really affected the marks (grades) I/we were given.
    I remember hearing about some research that showed a correlation between lower marks and smoking bans in North American universities. Funnily enough, it appears to have been swept under the rug....

    Quote Originally Posted by Tukhachevskii View Post
    I also recall the best discussion I had about Hegel (on the topic of Love) was in Yemen whilst smoking Yemen's indigenous Kamrans (foul but a snip at a 50 cents a packet) after which we switched to my shisha (and faroula/strawberry tobbacco followed by apple) after which the discussion really did get transcendental...
    LOL - never tried most of the flavoured tobacco's, although I used to have a weakness for an apple / cherry pipe mixture that led to some very weird discussions! Then again, that was a long time ago in a previous life .
    Sic Bisquitus Disintegrat...
    Marc W.D. Tyrrell, Ph.D.
    Institute of Interdisciplinary Studies,
    Senior Research Fellow,
    The Canadian Centre for Intelligence and Security Studies, NPSIA
    Carleton University
    http://marctyrrell.com/

  4. #184
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    Exclamation Haiti replaced by the search for truth

    In the last day this thread has deviated to a non-Haitian issue and time for a new thread being created. Standby and after a PM I shall remain on standby!
    Last edited by davidbfpo; 02-11-2010 at 09:40 PM. Reason: Updated
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    Default Haiti - the rains are coming

    An update by the BBC:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/8511900.stm

    As others have said here a disaster added to a disaster and now the rains are due.
    davidbfpo

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    If it helps any, the cigarettes are Nat Sherman Classics (which, as long as you're going to smoke, are about as good as they get. I commend them to you) and the ashtray is a roughly 7" diameter, extraordinarily heavy and solid, octagonal lead crystal cigar ashtray, from Armani, that was made in Solvenia. Hey, it was on sale. And, as a matter of fact, I smoked Sobranies in Ranger School. (There wasn't a lot of luxury - as a matter of fact, sufficiency was rare - but at the time you could have tobacco there, so some of us indulged ourselves.)

    It's not true, you know, that all human linguistic usages are artificial, at least in the sense that we created them from nothingness. Consider the Arabic word for cat - "mau." We didn't come up with that one; the cats did - "meowwww." Otherwise, all right, they generally are.

    That admitted, there is a difference, a fairly vast difference, between a word concept that does a fairly good job of conveying the required meaning and one that is just a perversion of the meaning. (Though, be it noted, "Ignorance is Strength" is, at some level, true, even as "Sophistication is weakness" would also be, at some level, true.) The difference between the worms' artificiallity and the can's is that the can attempts to reasonably accurately portray the reality while the worms' objective is to obscure it.

    In the case of Haiti, the term "hopeless" is not a perversion of objective reality, but a reasonably and usefully accurate portrayal of objective reality. Nothing we can do for them, and nothing they can do for themselves that they actually _can_ do for themselves, has even a scintilla of realistic expectation of a better future. Hence, no hope. Hence, hopeless.

    Quote Originally Posted by marct View Post
    Hi Tom,



    As a note, I may end up moving this to another forum, but we'll see where it goes.....

    Okay, couple of points. First, yeah, the worms are artificial, as are all human concepts. If you notice the way I phrased my comment - "...that any human can know "truth"" (emphasis added) - it was aimed in a very particular manner based on, yes, artificial constructions . If I wanted to be really technical about it, I would have written "know and intelligeably communicate", but "know" is the short hand reference.

    Second, the examples you give are ones that are part and parcel of manipulating a communicative system - playing word games if you will. What they really underscore is two things: the map ain't the territory and the inherent paradoxical nature of abstraction. Basically, they highlight one of the quintessential problems with all human systems of communication, which is that we build these systems using fuzzy sets since it is actually impossible (or has been to date), to build an exact, non-fuzzy, symbol system that accurately reflects our experiences in reality and allows us to precisely communicate them to others. The closest that we have come to such systems are the various dialects of mathematics but, in order to actually get decent representations, we have had to invent dialects such as fuzzy set theory, chaos mechanics, quantum indeterminacy, catastrophe theory, etc.

    Okay, so back to this union of opposites type of manipulation: this is a very common manipulation of symbols based on the nature of the symbol systems. The "paradoxical nature of abstraction" really comes about as a result of us, as a species, taking some perception and abstracting it. Since our sensory perceptions are based on ratios and perceived oppositions, we tend to abstract along supposed scales or lines that we then proceed to "name".

    To add insult to injury, we then add in the pernicious influence of Plato, specifically his concept of Ideal Types. We take a "name" and abstract it (that's twice now!) from it's already abstracted and constructed line or scale, and treat it as if it were "real", a thing in and of itself. This process, reification, shows up all over the place for one simple reason: it makes communication, knowledge and action simpler. But remember, we are dealing with an abstraction of an abstraction as if it were a thing in and of itself, which "it" isn't (BTW, notice how it is really tricky to use English to talk about this; "it"? That implies existence...).



    If a man smokes by himself, is he really smoking?

    Silly paraphrases aside, you are taking one of the few positions that I can see that has any real worth - very Baconian of you . Notice how you built this phrase - "I am smoking a real cigarette". Okay, you're smoking a cigarette (so am I BTW). "Cigarette" is a class word, and while adding the modifier "real" to it let's me drop out such sillyness as herb cigarettes, it doesn't really tell me much more than you are smoking some type of an object that falls into the general parameters of the set "cigarette". I have to make certain additional assumption that may, or may not be warranted. For example, since you are American and living in the US, you are probably not smoking an Indian Beedi and I doubt you are smoking either Turkish cigarettes or Sobranies, so I will make an assumption that your cigarette is white (or a vaguely related colour). I have no idea if it has a filter, how long it may be (beyond a range guesstimate), or it is menthol or some other flavour of tobacco. I also have no idea of what additives may be in it.

    So, you may have empirically experiences a "truth", but by the time you come to communicate it, much of the quality of that experience is either lost or incommunicable. And that's for something as simple as smoking a cigarette!

    But, you know, cigarettes are really good examples to use. When we say that we "smoked a cigarette", we can communicate a representation of the truth of that experience in a satisficing manner; basically, it's good enough to work, even though the "truth" of the experience cannot be communicated in its fullness.

    GESNIPT

    Yup, and the very absence of data on your experience of smoking that cigarette may be relevant. For example, it might be part of your normal experience of smoking to burn your fingers towards the end of the cigarette, causing you exasperation and a flash of anger. If that is normal for you, it is a difference that makes no difference to you, but would to me since it isn't my "normal". Maybe you only smoke cigarettes when you are writing and, in your mind, part of the normal truth of smoking is conveying ideas in short, pithy sentences. Maybe you are one of those people who only smokes when you are drinking (hey, I've know a few).

    Feeling like I'm leading you down some academic, fuzzy headed semantic game? In some ways, I am, but there is a distinct purpose to it, which comes directly out of the last part of your comment - "And Haiti is hopeless". Basically, you are judging Haiti based on what you consider to be "normal", establishing you scale or line with, I would guess, the US (or an idealization of it) at one end and your perceptions of Haiti at the other. Nothing surprising about that; the process, if not the content, seems to be hardwired into our brains. We just need to be aware that it is not an absolute "Truth", merely a situated "truth" that may or may not be shared by someone in a different position.

    Remember that discussion of the problem of amoral familiarism and the state in the H&MP context in Carnifex? There are a couple of points I've raised that play directly into that. First, you have to work with what you have, not idealizations - I think you noted that that was one of Marx's faults (amongst many). So, constructing models, which is what H&MP is about, leads to the interesting problem of how can you incorporate situated truth into a system such that it supports the desired end goal (much in the same manner as allowing some degree of "free enterprise" [ not that we've ever had it! ] into a system uses our instinctual resource acquisitiveness - aka greed - to bolster a system).

    Second, you have to have a symbol system - an ideology, religion, mental discipline or whatever - that encourages a balance between certainty ("situated truth") and uncertainty (a quest for absolute Truth). This, BTW, is a crucial falure in most modern, Western cultures.

    Third, and finally, you (generic - I'm preaching right now ) have to be able to step into other people's "minds", regardless of their culture or social position at least to the extent of being able to establish some form of commonality of interpretation of experience so that you can actually communicate with them (technically, it's called verstehen or empathic understanding).

    One last point before I end this post. All to often inside academia, this third point is interpreted as you have to "feel their pain" and "stand with them against oppression". That is one possible result of attempting to establish verstehen, and some element of it is probably inevitable. That said, it is also a warm and fuzzy fantasy that too many of my colleagues have fallen in to since they fail to actually judge what they "understand"; the don't exercise "critical thinking" since they forget that the word "critical" comes from two Greek roots: "kriticos" (discerning judgement) and "kriterion" (standards). They apply what I consider to be a flawed judgement based on incorrect standards by assuming that understanding (verstehen) equates with agreement.

    That is a round about way of saying that sometimes the only way to effectively establish communication with someone is to eliminate them from the conversation; a point well known by many of those same PC colleagues - they just use exclusionary hiring practices rather than bullets.

  7. #187
    Council Member marct's Avatar
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    Hi Tom,

    Quote Originally Posted by Tom Kratman View Post
    If it helps any, the cigarettes are Nat Sherman Classics (which, as long as you're going to smoke, are about as good as they get. I commend them to you) and the ashtray is a roughly 7" diameter, extraordinarily heavy and solid, octagonal lead crystal cigar ashtray, from Armani, that was made in Solvenia. Hey, it was on sale. And, as a matter of fact, I smoked Sobranies in Ranger School. (There wasn't a lot of luxury - as a matter of fact, sufficiency was rare - but at the time you could have tobacco there, so some of us indulged ourselves.)
    Nat Sherman Classics? Haven't had one of those in quite a while - same with the Sobranies, although I did smoke the Black Russians for a couple of years.

    Quote Originally Posted by Tom Kratman View Post
    It's not true, you know, that all human linguistic usages are artificial, at least in the sense that we created them from nothingness. Consider the Arabic word for cat - "mau." We didn't come up with that one; the cats did - "meowwww." Otherwise, all right, they generally are.
    onomatopoeia. Yeah. It's actually quite fascinating when you start getting into the development of sign languages and creols. If I remember correctly, and it's been about 10-15 years since I was reading this stuff, there was a real move in the 1890 - 1920's or so to see if we could ground language development in onomatopoeia, but that ended up totally falling apart. The final part of that experiment was in the Vienna School of social science which tried to create an exact language - one sign -> one referent; it failed miserably .

    Again, and now I'm trying to remember a 15 year old conversation from about 3 in the morning after several bottles of Hungarian red, one of the reasons why the effort fell apart was because of cultural conventions on parsing reality; think about the interminable debates about whether turquoise is blue or green, then put that on steroids. We appear to be able to use onomatopoeia to point towards sensorily accessible processes that are common to humans as a species, but not towards most things in our environment.

    Quote Originally Posted by Tom Kratman View Post
    That admitted, there is a difference, a fairly vast difference, between a word concept that does a fairly good job of conveying the required meaning and one that is just a perversion of the meaning. (Though, be it noted, "Ignorance is Strength" is, at some level, true, even as "Sophistication is weakness" would also be, at some level, true.)
    Totally agree, and it's a great place to start applying the concepts of accuracy and precision (along with a few others that really PO the PC crowd). So, accuracy can be used as a measure of a sign or symbol to what is being referred to, while precision can be used as a measure of a sign or symbol in a message as to the closest (in Bayesian probabilistic terms) perception by an observer of what they are perceiving (BTW, this last is how we uncover biases, inferential systems, etc. during narrative analysis).

    The paradoxes you mention are one of a number of special cases that appear to use their own sets of logic, many of them based on the Syllogism of Barbara (men die, grass dies, therefore men are grass). What this seems to be modelling is an almost intuitive understanding that language systems are self-referential. In some cases, e.g. Zen Buddhist koans, these paradoxes are used to "break" the perceptual limits constructed and reinforced by a language system.

    Quote Originally Posted by Tom Kratman View Post
    The difference between the worms' artificiallity and the can's is that the can attempts to reasonably accurately portray the reality while the worms' objective is to obscure it.
    Hmmm, as a metaphor, I would accept that.

    Quote Originally Posted by Tom Kratman View Post
    In the case of Haiti, the term "hopeless" is not a perversion of objective reality, but a reasonably and usefully accurate portrayal of objective reality. Nothing we can do for them, and nothing they can do for themselves that they actually _can_ do for themselves, has even a scintilla of realistic expectation of a better future. Hence, no hope. Hence, hopeless.
    This is where I disagree with you, and it gets back to that relational thing I was mentioning earlier. "Hope" actually has little to do with objective reality except as the starting base for an emotional longing / attachment to a future state of objective reality that is currently perceived as being better than the current situation. Even calling the perceptions involved "objective reality" is somewhat misleading since it's all really about interpretation schemas that dominate perceptions.

    Hmmm, I get the feeling that I am digging a bigger holes here than I want to . Let's try it this way - if you haven't had any clean water to drink in a week, you can "hope" that you will have in the immediate future and, especially given all of the aid pouring in, you can have a reasonable expectation that you will get some. Some variant of Maslow's hierarchy of needs operates here, even if I have problems with it as a general model.

    Anyway, so "hope" can operate as a desire for a status ante quo situation, as well as for any other situation. And, like most emotions, it is only loosely connected with states of objective reality being based on a perception by an individual of what is and compared with a desired situation. Of course, once you get that desired situation, you start hoping for something else....

    There's also something that we might call "cultural learning" going on that, I think, is related to your use of the term "reasonable", and is particularly poignant in the case of Haiti. People living in a culture "learn" from experience and stories what is "possible" for them and their culture/society (this, BTW, was one of the key realizations Mao had). Anyway, those "possibilities" construct the "reasonableness" of what is hoped for within the culture.

    If we look at Haiti in particular, we can start to see some shifts in the experience and stories of what is "possible". The police actions in this last crisis are an example: sure, some of them buged out, but others didn't. This helps to reset the parameters of what the members of the culture view as "possible", opening up both new opportunities and new lines for a "reasonable hope". In effect, the perceivable "fact" that some of the police didn't bug out and that they stayed at their posts and performed their duties is a difference that makes a difference.

    Now, that "difference" isn't much of one from where I sit in the frozen, socialist North . Since my "normal" would be "Of course they will stay on duty !", I would automatically find the fact that some of them did bug out to be the difference that makes a difference, and would probably think that they were hopeless. But it's really not about how I emotionally react, nor about my personal reactive perceptions; it's about how the people living in Haiti react and perceive the actions of the police (amongst other things).

    So I try and apply a little verstehen and end up feeling like I am caught in one of those linguistic paradoxes - crappy policing (my perception) is good (their perception). At least, I can see how the (supposed) paradox arises, and why it isn't an actual paradox. For some reason, that makes me feel better....
    Sic Bisquitus Disintegrat...
    Marc W.D. Tyrrell, Ph.D.
    Institute of Interdisciplinary Studies,
    Senior Research Fellow,
    The Canadian Centre for Intelligence and Security Studies, NPSIA
    Carleton University
    http://marctyrrell.com/

  8. #188
    Council Member davidbfpo's Avatar
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    Default Optimistic view - if the diaspora helps

    An optimistic view on a "fix" for Haiti, if the diaspora instead of sending remittances return home to help:http://www.foreignpolicy.com/article...can_save_haiti


    I say optimistic from a faraway "armchair" and having visited two other Caribbean islands, each with more living abroad than at home.
    davidbfpo

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    Council Member marct's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by davidbfpo View Post
    An optimistic view on a "fix" for Haiti, if the diaspora instead of sending remittances return home to help:http://www.foreignpolicy.com/article...can_save_haiti


    I say optimistic from a faraway "armchair" and having visited two other Caribbean islands, each with more living abroad than at home.
    Interesting article, David. One thing caught my eye:

    Remittances sent from Haitians living overseas surpass the value of the country's exports and are estimated to account for one-quarter of its GDP. Many have stepped up their contributions of cash and goods to their homeland following the earthquake, but an urgent priority going forward must be creating a more structured and smartly financed way to mobilize and engage them in the rebuilding effort. (A good start would be simply passing a law to grant dual nationality.)
    One-quarter of the GDP? Scary....

    The "dual nationality" law strikes me as somewhat odd, since we (Canada) already have it in place and a lot of our citizens maintain dual citizenship, so I have to assume it is a reference to US law.

    Anyway, have to think about this one for a bit....
    Sic Bisquitus Disintegrat...
    Marc W.D. Tyrrell, Ph.D.
    Institute of Interdisciplinary Studies,
    Senior Research Fellow,
    The Canadian Centre for Intelligence and Security Studies, NPSIA
    Carleton University
    http://marctyrrell.com/

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    Hi Marc:

    I'm really not using the US or the frozen north as a measure. If I could see some way for Haiti to achieve, oh, I dunno, maybe a quarter or so of what the Dominican Republic has going for it, then I could see some hope. Haiti is probably stuck at the level where hope means, "Maybe things won't get worse so quickly that I can reasonably expect not to starve to death this year. Maybe." That, however, is a measure of "hope" stripped of any positive attributes, which is to say, no hope at all.

    True story: About 5-6 years ago I had lunch with the mayor of Delmas, a subdivision of Port au Prince. The mayor was a nice guy, a bright guy, well educated and caring. I had the impression - rarity of rarities - that he was the honest sort, too. He and this retired colonel who was working for a Haiti-oriented NGO had a scheme to take the charcoal tailings that dotted the country and turn them into briquets, selling them at cost. I listened to their little presentation and at the end had to ask, "What have you got when the tailings run out? Besides even more Haitians, who need more charcoal, and have no more trees than they had when you started mining the tailings? What's your end game? How does this temporary partial fix make anything better?"

    Of course, it didn't. There was no end game. There was no realistic plan of improving anything, however much they cared and however hard they tried. Everything, as so often, boiled down to saving people from starving this year so that even more of them could starve next year.

    The mayor asked me, "Do you see any hope, any way, for Haiti?" Me: "No, not really." Him, with sad sigh: "No."

    As for police actually doing what police are supposed to do...you can still color me skeptical. As you pointed out early on, anything but watching out for number one in a place that like is insane. Since none of the cops were reported as foaming at the mouth, I am inclined to think that, whatever they were doing, they had a purely self-interested, and probably short term self-interested, motive for. I would be terribly unsurprised to discover that some NGO, or consortium thereof, was paying them to act the part, because it is easier to collect money when one can show the suckers something that _looks_ like grounds for hope.

    Quote Originally Posted by marct View Post
    Hi Tom,



    Nat Sherman Classics? Haven't had one of those in quite a while - same with the Sobranies, although I did smoke the Black Russians for a couple of years.



    onomatopoeia. Yeah. It's actually quite fascinating when you start getting into the development of sign languages and creols. If I remember correctly, and it's been about 10-15 years since I was reading this stuff, there was a real move in the 1890 - 1920's or so to see if we could ground language development in onomatopoeia, but that ended up totally falling apart. The final part of that experiment was in the Vienna School of social science which tried to create an exact language - one sign -> one referent; it failed miserably .

    Again, and now I'm trying to remember a 15 year old conversation from about 3 in the morning after several bottles of Hungarian red, one of the reasons why the effort fell apart was because of cultural conventions on parsing reality; think about the interminable debates about whether turquoise is blue or green, then put that on steroids. We appear to be able to use onomatopoeia to point towards sensorily accessible processes that are common to humans as a species, but not towards most things in our environment.



    Totally agree, and it's a great place to start applying the concepts of accuracy and precision (along with a few others that really PO the PC crowd). So, accuracy can be used as a measure of a sign or symbol to what is being referred to, while precision can be used as a measure of a sign or symbol in a message as to the closest (in Bayesian probabilistic terms) perception by an observer of what they are perceiving (BTW, this last is how we uncover biases, inferential systems, etc. during narrative analysis).

    The paradoxes you mention are one of a number of special cases that appear to use their own sets of logic, many of them based on the Syllogism of Barbara (men die, grass dies, therefore men are grass). What this seems to be modelling is an almost intuitive understanding that language systems are self-referential. In some cases, e.g. Zen Buddhist koans, these paradoxes are used to "break" the perceptual limits constructed and reinforced by a language system.



    Hmmm, as a metaphor, I would accept that.



    This is where I disagree with you, and it gets back to that relational thing I was mentioning earlier. "Hope" actually has little to do with objective reality except as the starting base for an emotional longing / attachment to a future state of objective reality that is currently perceived as being better than the current situation. Even calling the perceptions involved "objective reality" is somewhat misleading since it's all really about interpretation schemas that dominate perceptions.

    Hmmm, I get the feeling that I am digging a bigger holes here than I want to . Let's try it this way - if you haven't had any clean water to drink in a week, you can "hope" that you will have in the immediate future and, especially given all of the aid pouring in, you can have a reasonable expectation that you will get some. Some variant of Maslow's hierarchy of needs operates here, even if I have problems with it as a general model.

    Anyway, so "hope" can operate as a desire for a status ante quo situation, as well as for any other situation. And, like most emotions, it is only loosely connected with states of objective reality being based on a perception by an individual of what is and compared with a desired situation. Of course, once you get that desired situation, you start hoping for something else....

    There's also something that we might call "cultural learning" going on that, I think, is related to your use of the term "reasonable", and is particularly poignant in the case of Haiti. People living in a culture "learn" from experience and stories what is "possible" for them and their culture/society (this, BTW, was one of the key realizations Mao had). Anyway, those "possibilities" construct the "reasonableness" of what is hoped for within the culture.

    If we look at Haiti in particular, we can start to see some shifts in the experience and stories of what is "possible". The police actions in this last crisis are an example: sure, some of them buged out, but others didn't. This helps to reset the parameters of what the members of the culture view as "possible", opening up both new opportunities and new lines for a "reasonable hope". In effect, the perceivable "fact" that some of the police didn't bug out and that they stayed at their posts and performed their duties is a difference that makes a difference.

    Now, that "difference" isn't much of one from where I sit in the frozen, socialist North . Since my "normal" would be "Of course they will stay on duty !", I would automatically find the fact that some of them did bug out to be the difference that makes a difference, and would probably think that they were hopeless. But it's really not about how I emotionally react, nor about my personal reactive perceptions; it's about how the people living in Haiti react and perceive the actions of the police (amongst other things).

    So I try and apply a little verstehen and end up feeling like I am caught in one of those linguistic paradoxes - crappy policing (my perception) is good (their perception). At least, I can see how the (supposed) paradox arises, and why it isn't an actual paradox. For some reason, that makes me feel better....
    Last edited by Tom Kratman; 02-12-2010 at 04:43 PM.

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    Quote Originally Posted by davidbfpo View Post
    An optimistic view on a "fix" for Haiti, if the diaspora instead of sending remittances return home to help:http://www.foreignpolicy.com/article...can_save_haiti


    I say optimistic from a faraway "armchair" and having visited two other Caribbean islands, each with more living abroad than at home.
    One can't help but wonder what would keep them there, making a few hundred dollars a year, and living like dogs, when they could just pack up again. Perhaps if that hadn't, as the article pointed out, already been tried and then failed, hope could sustain them for a while. Now though? They should give up their families' welfare here and in Canada so that someday strangers who speak the same language can live about a quarter as well as Domincans do?

    Just don't see it happening, really.

  12. #192
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    Hi Tom,

    Quote Originally Posted by Tom Kratman View Post
    I'm really not using the US or the frozen north as a measure. If I could see some way for Haiti to achieve, oh, I dunno, maybe a quarter or so of what the Dominican Republic has going for it, then I could see some hope. Haiti is probably stuck at the level where hope means, "Maybe things won't get worse so quickly that I can reasonably expect not to starve to death this year. Maybe." That, however, is a measure of "hope" stripped of any positive attributes, which is to say, no hope at all.
    I'd be ecstatic to see it at a quarter of the DR . May be, in about 20 years with a lot of work.

    Quote Originally Posted by Tom Kratman View Post
    True story: About 5-6 years ago I had lunch with the mayor of Delmas, a subdivision of Port au Prince. The mayor was a nice guy, a bright guy, well educated and caring. I had the impression - rarity of rarities - that he was the honest sort, too. He and this retired colonel who was working for a Haiti-oriented NGO had a scheme to take the charcoal tailings that dotted the country and turn them into briquets, seeling them at cost. I listened to their little presentation and at the end had to ask, "What have you got when the tailings run out? Besides even more Haitians, who need more charcoal, and have no more trees than they had when you started mining the tailings? What's your end game? How does this temporary partial fix make anything better?"
    You know, for most of our history as a species, we've relied on temporary, partial fixes. The trick is always trying to figure out before hand what problems those fixes will cause and whether the long term problems will be worth the short term gain (if any). The example i use up here is income tax which, in Canada, was brought in as a temporary tax to cover the debt from the first world war; I'm pretty sure that's been paid off, but.....

    Quote Originally Posted by Tom Kratman View Post
    Of course, it didn't. There was no end game. There was no realistic plan of improving anything, however much they cared and however hard they tried. Everything, as so often, boiled down to saving people from starving this year so that even more of them could starve next year.
    One of the things that can work, Botswana is a decent example, is using very limited temporary fixes and requiring that part of that "fix" include plans for identifying currently unidentified problems and having a cash reserve for dealing with them.

    Quote Originally Posted by Tom Kratman View Post
    As for police actually doing what police are supposed to do...you can still color me skeptical. As you pointed out early on, anything but watching out for number one in a place that like is insane. Since none of the cops were reported as foaming at the mouth, I am inclined to think that, whatever they were doing, they had a purely self-interested, and probably short term self-interested, motive for. I would be terriby unsurprised to discover that some NGO, or consortium thereof, was paying them to act the part, because it is easier to collect money when one can show the suckers something that _looks_ like grounds for hope.
    Possible, but there are some interesting implications of the way Haiti is currently organized 9or disorganized if you prefer). One of them is that if you rely on outside sources for support, like a pay check, you tend to not want to have that endangered. I'd be really interested to see which police units "worked" and which didn't and if there was any correlation between that and the training / funding coming from the RCMP, etc.

    BTW, I saw a really interesting example of this type of thinking at work in the DR amongst the beach vendors in Cabarete. Organizationally, they have elements of both the Patron system and a medieval guild; highly self and area policing in a very informal way, and quite open about their views on enlightened self interest (keep the tourists coming, keep them happy, establish personal relationships with them, etc.).
    Sic Bisquitus Disintegrat...
    Marc W.D. Tyrrell, Ph.D.
    Institute of Interdisciplinary Studies,
    Senior Research Fellow,
    The Canadian Centre for Intelligence and Security Studies, NPSIA
    Carleton University
    http://marctyrrell.com/

  13. #193
    Council Member marct's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Tom Kratman View Post
    One can't help but wonder what would keep them there, making a few hundred dollars a year, and living like dogs, when they could just pack up again. Perhaps if that hadn't, as the article pointed out, already been tried and then failed, hope could sustain them for a while. Now though? They should give up their families' welfare here and in Canada so that someday strangers who speak the same language can live about a quarter as well as Domincans do?

    Just don't see it happening, really.
    Or, even worse, adopting a "dual personality" depending on which country they were in . If they return, then that will diminish the countries hard currency, so that could be a problem.

    What does make an amount of sense is having "twinned" NGOs with an office in Haiti and, say, Montreal. However, really good aid / development work operates best at the small, local level with a lot of "local" input and control. I've seen some of that in the DR, and it can be quite effective even though the problem set in the DR is quite different.

    Tom, you were telling that story about the charcoal briquette idea and that got me to thinking about how it could be sustained. One possible way would be to use the tailings piles as the initial source while, at the same time, hitting up some of the environmentalist groups about tree planting. What I'm specifically thinking about is what's sometimes call "mixed" plantings of both long growth trees (aid in soil fixing and, later, selective, high value, harvesting) and very short growth trees that are pretty much "junk wood" (e.g. poplar). Use the latter for the raw material for charcoal after the tailings have been cleaned out. Obviously, needs work, but...
    Sic Bisquitus Disintegrat...
    Marc W.D. Tyrrell, Ph.D.
    Institute of Interdisciplinary Studies,
    Senior Research Fellow,
    The Canadian Centre for Intelligence and Security Studies, NPSIA
    Carleton University
    http://marctyrrell.com/

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    Yes, Botswana is something of a model. Yet it's a model that has no real bearing on Haiti. Botswana was fortunate to have been a British rather than a French posession, to have not been a slave colony, to have substantial natural resources, and to have had South Africa for a neighbor.

    And, yes, I know that life is by and large a temporary holding action. But Haiti is such a thorough mess that none of the temporary things work. Everything is so wrong, and has been for so long, that anything one might try for a temporary improvement will be undone by everything else before it can have any good effect.

    In a way, you're suggesting one thing that, in an ideal world, could work for Haiti, namely that we dispense with the notion of self government there, take it over, and run it ourselves for a century or two, and run it _ruthlessly_. Sadly, we don't live in that ideal world, which is to say that we lack the moral wherewithal to do what would be necessary to run it and fix it.

    Quote Originally Posted by marct View Post
    Hi Tom,



    I'd be ecstatic to see it at a quarter of the DR . May be, in about 20 years with a lot of work.



    You know, for most of our history as a species, we've relied on temporary, partial fixes. The trick is always trying to figure out before hand what problems those fixes will cause and whether the long term problems will be worth the short term gain (if any). The example i use up here is income tax which, in Canada, was brought in as a temporary tax to cover the debt from the first world war; I'm pretty sure that's been paid off, but.....



    One of the things that can work, Botswana is a decent example, is using very limited temporary fixes and requiring that part of that "fix" include plans for identifying currently unidentified problems and having a cash reserve for dealing with them.



    Possible, but there are some interesting implications of the way Haiti is currently organized 9or disorganized if you prefer). One of them is that if you rely on outside sources for support, like a pay check, you tend to not want to have that endangered. I'd be really interested to see which police units "worked" and which didn't and if there was any correlation between that and the training / funding coming from the RCMP, etc.

    BTW, I saw a really interesting example of this type of thinking at work in the DR amongst the beach vendors in Cabarete. Organizationally, they have elements of both the Patron system and a medieval guild; highly self and area policing in a very informal way, and quite open about their views on enlightened self interest (keep the tourists coming, keep them happy, establish personal relationships with them, etc.).

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    Quote Originally Posted by marct View Post
    Or, even worse, adopting a "dual personality" depending on which country they were in . If they return, then that will diminish the countries hard currency, so that could be a problem.

    What does make an amount of sense is having "twinned" NGOs with an office in Haiti and, say, Montreal. However, really good aid / development work operates best at the small, local level with a lot of "local" input and control. I've seen some of that in the DR, and it can be quite effective even though the problem set in the DR is quite different.

    Tom, you were telling that story about the charcoal briquette idea and that got me to thinking about how it could be sustained. One possible way would be to use the tailings piles as the initial source while, at the same time, hitting up some of the environmentalist groups about tree planting. What I'm specifically thinking about is what's sometimes call "mixed" plantings of both long growth trees (aid in soil fixing and, later, selective, high value, harvesting) and very short growth trees that are pretty much "junk wood" (e.g. poplar). Use the latter for the raw material for charcoal after the tailings have been cleaned out. Obviously, needs work, but...
    They'd never let the saplings last long enough to become trees. They couldn't; they must eat today.

    Which reminds me of something. In Korea, once upon a time, the Army had to hire Koreans to guard our supply dumps. Why? Because our troops wouldn't shoot starving civilians while the Koreans _would_. Now picture for just a minute trying to guard the trees. Our troops are going to shoot? Not on your life. Neither would the Brazilians, and they're considerably more rough and ready than we are about such things. So we hire locals to guard them. And we can even enter the realm of fantasy for a moment and imagine they do, rather than selling the wood themselves. How long does funding for that particular program last? Until the Five O'Clock news, maybe?
    Last edited by Tom Kratman; 02-12-2010 at 05:13 PM.

  16. #196
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    Quote Originally Posted by marct View Post

    Tom, you were telling that story about the charcoal briquette idea and that got me to thinking about how it could be sustained. One possible way would be to use the tailings piles as the initial source while, at the same time, hitting up some of the environmentalist groups about tree planting. What I'm specifically thinking about is what's sometimes call "mixed" plantings of both long growth trees (aid in soil fixing and, later, selective, high value, harvesting) and very short growth trees that are pretty much "junk wood" (e.g. poplar). Use the latter for the raw material for charcoal after the tailings have been cleaned out. Obviously, needs work, but...
    Hey Marc,
    The Ukrainians actually took that several steps farther and now solely import to Estonia for bagging, sorting and weighing before sending over 5 sea vans each month directly to Sweden. Even the sawdust is reused by pressing fireplace blocks, etc.

    I just don't see that much motivation coming from the Haitians though. Some here ponder over the Haitians being on the AID breast feeding plan way too long

    Regards, Stan
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  17. #197
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    Thumbs up Open source mapping helped

    A fascinating, short article on an open source mapping project that with lots of help produced maps to use:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/8517057.stm The project's website:http://www.openstreetmap.org/

    I'm sure Entropy will appreciate this, although I'm sure others here have a liking for mapping and maps.
    Last edited by davidbfpo; 02-25-2010 at 12:13 AM.
    davidbfpo

  18. #198
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    Default Low news profile, time to go

    Certainly not reported in the UK, although we do get the odd good news story. The US military commitment in Haiti is winding down:
    There are now about 11,000 troops, more than half of them on ships just off the coast, down from a peak of around 20,000 on Feb. 1. The total is expected to drop to about 8,000 in coming days as the withdrawal gathers steam.
    Link:http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100308/...iti_earthquake
    davidbfpo

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    NEW YORK (AP) -- The New York Police Department's commissioner is on a mission to Haiti to meet with leaders to discuss American support for rebuilding the earthquake-ravaged Caribbean nation's security forces.
    http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...TAM&SECTION=US
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    UNITED NATIONS (AP) -- The acting U.N. humanitarian chief in Haiti says the cholera outbreak is increasingly becoming a national security issue amid local protests.
    http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...TAM&SECTION=US
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