The Clash of Civilizations is a thesis that people's cultural and religious identities will be the primary source of conflict in the post-Cold War world. The American political scientist Samuel Huntington argued that future wars would be fought not between countries, but between cultures. It was proposed in a 1992 lecture at the American Enterprise Institute, which was then developed in a 1993 Foreign Affairs article titled "The Clash of Civilizations?",[1] in response to his former student Francis Fukuyama's 1992 book, The End of History and the Last Man. Huntington later expanded his thesis in a 1996 book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clash_of_Civilizations aka Culture War?

Samuel Huntington on "the Hispanic Challenge". The persistent inflow of Hispanic immigrants threatens to divide the United States into two peoples, two cultures, and two languages. Unlike past immigrant groups, Mexicans and other Latinos have not assimilated into mainstream U.S. culture, forming instead their own political and linguistic enclaves - from Los Angeles to Miami - and rejecting the Anglo-Protestant values that built the American dream. The United States ignores this challenge at its peril.

Information integration theory was proposed by Norman H. Anderson to describe and model how a person integrates information from a number of sources in order to make an overall judgment (cognitive science). The theory proposes three functions. The valuation function is an empirically derived mapping of stimuli to an interval scale. It is unique up to an interval exchange transformation. The integration function is an algebraic function combining the subjective values of the information. "Cognitive algebra" refers to the class of functions that are used to model the integration process. They may be adding, averaging, weighted averaging, multiplying, etc. The response production function is the process by which the internal impression is translated into an overt response. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_integration_theory

Jack Park deck on federated Knowledge Gardening. (cf Digital Garden). Nice example of two people's unrelated posts about a shared subject ("Free Radicals") get connected (by a human) by both referring to that Tag (WikiWordAsTag, Shared Vocabulary). (more)

Rusty Guinn: The Mountain and the Molehill. (more)

Ben Hunt: Hollow Men, Hollow Markets, Hollow World. I don’t think it’s possible to organize mass society (BigWorld) in a non-hollow fashion without doing something about the “mass” part. (more)

Ben Hunt: Many People Say. (more)

Ben Hunt: Oh No, Here It Comes Again, That Funny Feeling. Three weeks ago, I didn’t see a narrative path for Donald Trump to win a turnout-based election hinging on four or five swing states. Today I do. (more)

Ben Hunt: The Clash of Civilizations. Lots of quotes this week, particularly from my two favorite war criminals – Samuel Huntington and Henry Kissinger. Everyone has heard of Kissinger, fewer of Huntington, who may have been even more of a hawk and law-and-order fetishist than Kissinger but never sufficiently escaped the ivory towers of Harvard to make a difference in Washington. (more)

Anne-Laure LeCunff Interview: on Collective intelligence with SciHub's Alexandra Elbakyan. Sci-Hub, a website that provides free access to millions of research papers and books/ (more)

Rusty Guinn: We are all MMTers (Still). We thought it would be fascinating to see which Fiat News expression of “what the (coronavirus) stimulus is really about” was the most connected and which was the least. (more)

Ben Hunt: Scapegoating the Zeitgeist. Shale Companies Had Lousy Returns. Their CEOs Got Paid Anyway. (Wall Street Journal) (more)

Starseed: the neuro era. A brand new Robert Anton Wilson book is now available... takes you straight back, 45 years, to the barbarous incarceration of Dr Tim Leary. The Starseed Signals. (more)

Tiago Forte: Knowledge Building Blocks: The New Meaning of Notes. Now that our notes are digital, they can become durable. They can last for the long term, supporting our long-term goals and ambitions without relying on our fragile memory. (more)

JotSpot (then Google) employee - 2020 moved to Figma (more)

A unitary state is a state governed as a single entity in which the central government is ultimately supreme. Unitary states stand in contrast with federations, also known as federal states. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unitary_state. The ultimate BigGov/Monoculture, contra States' Rights, individual autonomy, Cultural Pluralism (more)

cf Agency, sovereignty (more)

Venkatesh Rao compares Francis Fukuyama’s The Origins of Political Order, Pankaj Ghemawat’s World 3.0 and David Graeber’s Debt: the first 5000 years. It’s interesting to note that Fukuyama was born in 1952, Ghemawat in 1959 and Graeber in 1961. Personality-wise — and perhaps this is a function of age — they come across as gentle, impatient and angry, respectively. Along another dimension, Fukuyama is mostly descriptive (though his politician-fans often mangle his ideas into prescriptions), Ghemawat is weakly prescriptive in a tentative and technocratish way, and Graeber is strongly normative. And along a third dimension, Fukuyama is mildly reactionary (taking on classical man-in-the-state-of-nature models, but reconstructing rather than destroying them), Ghemawat is moderately reactionary (simultaneously taking aim at what he labels “globaloney” arguments on the anti-globalization side and Thomas Friedman on the pro-globalization side) and Graeber is almost entirely reactionary (devoting the entire book to attacking the foundations of mainstream economics rather than constructing an alternative framework). After intro stuff about all 3, this first post focuses on Fukuyama. He dealt with the harder foundational questions to his own satisfaction (and to the satisfaction of about half the people who think about this sort of stuff) back in 1993. This book can be understood as a reading of history, assuming the conceptual framework of The End of History as a starting point... His former mentor, Samuel Huntington, and later Huntington’s student, Fareed Zakaria, fought back with counterarguments in books like The Clash of Civilizations and Illiberal Democracy. These reactions (in my opinion) conspired to miss the point: attempting to counter a purely conceptual argument intended to illuminate philosophical questions. (more)

esp the Federal Budget (though Local Government matters also)

Nathan Lewis gives his Economic Stimulus recommendation (no, not QE2). Banking system meltdown and other "systemic" factors are a real risk. The proper banking solution would be a debt restructuring with government oversight, probably combined with what amounts to a Super Glass Steagall, to once again separate regular banking from investment banking, securities trading, derivatives dealing, and everything else that is not simple commercial lending. I say Super Glass Steagall because I think that we should also separate securities brokerage (executing customer orders) and prime brokerage (securities custodianship) from the market-making, derivatives dealing, HFT and proprietary trading, and investment banking of today's broker-dealers. A three-way split... Second, we could help along the natural process of economic self-healing with a big tax reform, something like the 13% Flat Tax that Russia passed in the depths of economic collapse in 2000. (more)