Thursday, September 25, 2014

International Art English

Here's a description of the genesis and present usage of International Art English, a language used primarily as a set of tribal recognition symbols while only tangentially conveying specific meaning. (Their corpus is available online here.)

Think about that. Now think "dog whistles" - identification of class membership signals in language is a fundamental aim of whatever it is I'm doing here.

The Vampire's Castle

Here's a thought-provoking post by somebody I don't know, riffing on  current events I mostly have no idea of, in a country whose politics I essentially have no idea about. As a result, the motivating lead-up is largely incomprehensible to me except in general terms - but then the author gets down to brass tacks, exposing the seamy underside of political correctness as practiced by the upper-class liberal.  (Actually, that description itself isn't very accurate... Read the post. Then read it again. I know I need to.)

I got it linked from Avedon Carol, so you know it's going to be good. But I have to admit I had to read it more than once to start really grokking what's the big idea, and I'm still not to the point of being able to articulate that.

What this kind of thing really keeps boiling down to, in my mind, is the need for a principled way of defining a worldview (a Weltanschauung) and describing the memetic systems that prop it up. Upper-class academic liberalism, with all the points listed in the article, can be described - but ultimately that description has to be dispassionate, documentary. I'm not entirely sure that doing that in natural language is even possible - the mechanisms we've evolved to describe systems carefully are mathematical in nature partly because of the precision mathematical language affords us. We need to have that same precision available when describing concepts and systems.

This description of the Vampire's Castle is a move in the right direction - identification and description of memetic systems when they're not immediately obvious (after all, language is also used to obfuscate, to avoid too-close examination of axioms) - but the lack of this systematic approach makes it impossible to go further.

Korzybski's goal was actually to correct this. I still don't know whether he succeeded, but I rather think he didn't, as his discipline mostly died with him. But I do know I need to take a closer look. Just as soon as I get time. (HAHAHAHAhahahaha, I kill me.)

Monday, September 22, 2014

Conspiracy theories on Facebook

Here's a neat study tracing how people consume conspiracy theories on Facebook. And speaking of chemtrails (what?), here's a Poe's-Law kind of site. "Why cats are immune to chemtrails: 5 possible answers from science." I swear, the world just keeps getting weirder.

The four deformations of the Apocalypse

David Stockman says the GOP, from Reagan on, destroyed the American economy.

Well, duh. But it's no use. This was written in 2010 and nothing has come of it - certainly no changes to GOP policy!

Corporate monopoly capitalism in 2014

A brief overview for people who have never realized that the American economy is increasingly oligarchic.

Friday, September 12, 2014

Gross Republican immorality results from abandoning conservatism

I've always thought so.

Hobby Lobby money supports questionable people

I guess that's not surprising. What's surprising is the sheer volume of money that does go to support these people. Like buying them an entire administrative complex.

What happens when you try to publish on confirming the non-existence of time travel?

An interesting conundrum - science confirming a null hypothesis for the existence of time travelers can't be published. (Or can be published only with great difficulty.) And it was interesting work, too, from an NLP perspective.