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January 24, 2008

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Jeff Trexler

I second that recommendation of Seeing Like a State. Read it when it first came out, and man, does it resonate with both history and experience.

Jeff Trexler

I second that recommendation of Seeing Like a State. Read it when it first came out, and man, does it resonate with both history and experience.

Jeff Trexler

See, now that's how you second. Twice.

Howdy, churlish Nebuchadnezzar!

"Perhaps it is time we retreated to a more organic understanding, based on metaphors drawn not from modern bureaucracies, whether those of business, military, or government, but from the garden that God entrusted to our first parents to tend.?"

Hmmm. Our first parents were scavengers, not gardeners.

Metrics must have arisen at the same time as gardening (if you recognize "gardening" as an aestheticization of agriculture, and metrics as a way of marking inventory in the markets that arose concurrently with agriculture's practice).

Perhaps it's wise to mistrust understandings that present themselves as organic.

phil

Well, if I do mistrust Pindar, Jesus, and Edmund Spenser, I don't know whom to trust. Consider the difference between considering the human as something engineered as opposed to grown, or consider the difference between a seed and a tabula rasa or empty bucket. To consider another as a seed of an unknown but exotic variety, rather than a slate to be written upon, is all the difference in the world to a teacher. The gardener removes hindrances and advances the energies inside the seeds. The engineer would prefer machines milled to close tolerances, and performing like clocks from a single conveyor belt, all keeping the same time. "No child left behind."

phil

Interestingly, Jeff. Your own mind reminds me of Scott's in being eclectic in reading (inputs), but coherent in outputs (insights).

phil

Mr. Churlish, When all the de-idealization is done, what motivates us to move forward and in what direction? The puncturing of wisdom is easy. The replacement or renovation of it is hard. Cynicism has not lived up to the potential it showed in Diogenes. The goal then was not just to reframe, or demoralize, but to awaken. (Why else carry a lamp in daylight?)

NOTchillindude

Oh SNAP! THAT SHIT IS OFF THE FUCKING HOOK! Can you please put it back on the hook please? It may lose its battery power, and I charged it for hours. Thank you.

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