What we have here is an op-ed in The Chronicle of Higher Education by the author of a book about Charles Whitman.
Indeed, it is our mission in higher education to investigate and determine, as best we can, if there are "dots" to be connected. But during our inquiry we should not delude ourselves or ignore the obvious.
The Whitman case taught me that sometimes our zeal to champion causes important to us or to explain the unexplainable and be "enlightened" blinds us to the obvious.
... sensational questions from irresponsible reporters ...
As long as we value living in a free society, we will be vulnerable to those who do harm -- because they want to and know how to do it.
How quickly people forget the message of Tom Friedman, just because the context is domestic instead of foreign.
A collection from the archives, for your consideration:
There has always been a World of Disorder, but what makes it more dangerous today is that in a networked universe, with widely diffused technologies, open borders and a highly integrated global financial and Internet system, very small groups of people can amass huge amounts of power to disrupt the World of Order. Individuals can become super-empowered.
In the long run, the "swarming" that really counts is the wide-scale mobilization of the global public.
To win, we must all become super-empowered individuals. Get happy, get angry, whatever; just get going.
The bloggers with agendas are, in fact, copycats, just with a different weapon.
Individuals can increasingly act on the world stage directly, unmediated by a state.
So you have today not only a superpower, not only Supermarkets, but also what I call "super-empowered individuals." Some of these super-empowered individuals are quite angry, some of them quite wonderful -- but all of them are now able to act much more directly and much more powerfully on the world stage.
... we've got a problem, and probably an intractable one.
TIA is a solution to the "problem" of super-empowered individuals that leaves a bad taste in my mouth for much the same reason that I don't ... [ Read More (0.1k in body) ]
Online Video Watch » Blog Archive » Web 2.0 in Perspective
Topic: Society
9:31 pm EDT, Apr 12, 2007
For an quick overview of web 2.0, check out this video by Michael Wesch. It is the best explanation I have come across of the ways web 2.0 is changing communication. Thanks to Sean Bohan for the pointer. But now that we’re there, let’s take a step back. The nightly network news has a viewership of about 26 million people according to the Project for Excellence in Journalism. That number has declined steadily over the past 25 years as cable and the internet became more prevalent news sources.
This is a great collection of quotes assembled by noteworthy.
"A nation can be maintained only if, between the state and the individual, there is interposed a whole series of secondary groups near enough to the individuals to attract them strongly in their sphere of action and drag them, in this way, into the general torment of civil life."
"I like English history. I have volumes of it, but I never read anything but the first volume. Even at that, I only read the first three or four chapters. My purpose is to read Volume Zero, which has not been written."
What is the science behind trust? How does trust build, and how does it break down? While it is much easier to measure transactions than trust, Stephenson models the threshold size for networks which contain key nodal elements such as hubs, gatekeepers and pulse-takers. Through numerous examples and business case studies, these analyses begin to give a good grasp on models for healthy networks. Stephenson closes her talk by looking ahead to the challenges of heterachy, the networking of institutions, which now demands an even greater capacity for trust and understanding.
Maybe the reason why apparently empty messages like these resonate with my generation is that we don't have any icons of our own.
When someone recently asked me why people my age (I'm 21) listen to bands from our parents' generation, I had to explain that, with a few exceptions, we don't have any real musicians any more. Without massive advertising campaigns, a lot of the "music" you can buy today, like Beyonce, wouldn't exist.
We're a voiceless generation. We have nothing we can point to and say: "This is us, this is where we stand." We're lost and silent and we don't know what to do about it. We're sold a parody of culture that we buy because, well, what choice do we have?
This is a Gold Star article. There is some real insight in here. This is in line with how I feel about where we are right not culturally.
Francis Fukuyama has the cover story in the current issue of Prospect.
Modern liberal societies have weak collective identities. Postmodern elites, especially in Europe, feel that they have evolved beyond identities defined by religion and nation. But if our societies cannot assert positive liberal values, they may be challenged by migrants who are more sure of who they are
If you haven't read Fukuyama's book, Trust, you should.
Another boy dies copying Saddam Hussein's hanging - CNN.com
Topic: Society
3:44 pm EST, Jan 18, 2007
A Moroccan man returned home to find his 11-year-old son hanging dead from the ceiling, a newspaper said on Thursday, the latest victim of a macabre game in which children mimic the death of Saddam Hussein.
The boy decided to copy the former Iraq leader's execution while playing with his younger sister at their home in Khemisset, 80 kilometers (50 miles) east of the capital of Rabat, newspaper Al Ahdat al-Maghrebia reported.
It's the new hip thing. All the kids are doing it.
Since then, several stories have emerged of children dying or being injured after being captivated by the manner of Hussein's death or by family conversations about the execution.
One 12-year-old Saudi boy died after using a chair and a metal wire to hang himself from a door frame, while another in Algeria was found hanging from a tree, papers reported.
Two boys in different regions of Azerbaijan hanged themselves at the weekend and may have been influenced by Hussein's execution, a security source in the country said.
The death of a 15-year-old boy last week in the Moroccan coastal city of Casablanca was also suspected of being the result of another re-enactment.
I'd venture to guess that in all these cases, the father fo the house was ranting the previous night about how Saddam was a hero...
Perhaps not essential, but quite interesting, and not something you see daily in the papers.
What we know about the lives of individual Iraqis rarely goes beyond the fleeting opinion quote or the civilian casualty statistics. We have little impression of Iraqis as people trying to live lives that are larger and more complex than the war that engulfs them, and more often than not we end up viewing them merely as appendages of conflict.
As a recent editorial in The Washington Post observed, five years after September 11 the FBI still has a mere thirty-three experts who speak Arabic — and most of those are far from fluent. The CIA and the Pentagon are not much better off.
On the "hollowing out" that will make stabilization nearly impossible:
The Iraqi authorities have issued two million passports since August 2005. An estimated 40 percent of Iraq's professional classes have left the country. New elites are rising in their place, sometimes through the use of violence; needless to say, this is not the sort of civil society that the Americans were hoping to promote.
Terrorized by horrific acts of bloodshed and torture, and frequently forced to leave behind the businesses that once sustained them economically, they have only the mosques, and their associated political parties, to turn to.
You've seen this before, with Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon.
As I listened to these Iraqi voices, I could not entirely shake the feeling that we Americans are already becoming irrelevant to the future of their country. While people in Washington continue to debate the next change in course, and the Baker report raises the possibility of gradual withdrawal, Iraqis are sizing up the coming apocalypse, and making their arrangements accordingly.
What happens when the Decider can't make up his mind? We wait until our actions, whether carrots or sticks or both, are merely ambient noise amidst the discordant mix of sectarian signals. Then the debates over withdrawals, troop levels, milestones, methods, etc. are rendered moot. The Iraqis neither wave goodbye nor run us out of town. Ten years later, no one will quite remember exactly when the Americans left -- only that they were irrelevant long before they were absent.
