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”They say time heals all wounds, but we never live long enough to test that theory.”
Jose Saramago
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June 9, 2020
quotes
June 9, 2020
I just had cause to look up Arnold Toynbee
“To many world historians today, Arnold J. Toynbee is regarded like an embarrassing uncle at a house party. He gets a requisite introduction by virtue of his place on the family tree, but he is quickly passed over for other friends and relatives.”
Michael Lang, Globalization and Global History in Toynbee.
That said - maybe his time is come back;
“In general, historians pointed to his preference of myths, allegories, and religion over factual data.”
Wikipedia
PS : His grandaughter is Polly Toynbee
📚 💬 around.the.world
June 9, 2020
The Tesseract
I wrote a newsletter (kind of) about it …
Think of it this way
a single point has zero dimenions
two points joined together make a line in one dimension
four lines joined together make a square in two dimensions
six squares joined together make a cube in three dimensions
eight cubes joined together make a tesseract in four dimensions
Mind Blown
🗂 💡 🔍 observations
June 5, 2020
Why You Can’t Seperate Business and Politics
Responding To A Post I Read From a friend on LinkedIN
💯- with one additional thought. We don’t live in neat orderly buckets of space with our work, our three hobbies, 2.4 children etc etc it all merges together in one big giant soup of LIFE. Anyone who believes LinkedIN is not a place for politics doesn’t understand business AND doesn’t understand politics. Partisan elephant versus donkey fluff aside … I mean real politics.
I commend you to read Venkatesh’s Ribbon farm - specifically an article that is now nearly 10 years old : A brief histor of the corporation
The article includes his personal mental model of the human world, which “like physics, can be reduced to four fundamental forces: culture, politics, war and business.”
Needless to say, I have a different take on the visualization of the mental model, but the core of what Venkatesh writes is spot on … IMHO. It’s so good that it takes up a whole chapter in a yet to be published book.
Post Script
In case you are wondering, the book is not the one that is about to come out - it is another one. I know. I know.
↩️ 🔗 microblog
June 5, 2020
Why You Can’t Seperate Business and Politics
Responding To A Post I Read From a friend on LinkedIN
💯- with one additional thought. We don’t live in neat orderly buckets of space with our work, our three hobbies, 2.4 children etc etc it all merges together in one big giant soup of LIFE. Anyone who believes LinkedIN is not a place for politics doesn’t understand business AND doesn’t understand politics. Partisan elephant versus donkey fluff aside … I mean real politics.
I commend you to read Venkatesh’s Ribbon farm - specifically an article that is now nearly 10 years old : A brief histor of the corporation
The article includes his personal mental model of the human world, which “like physics, can be reduced to four fundamental forces: culture, politics, war and business.”
Needless to say, I have a different take on the visualization of the mental model, but the core of what Venkatesh writes is spot on … IMHO. It’s so good that it takes up a whole chapter in a yet to be published book.
Post Script
In case you are wondering, the book is not the one that is about to come out - it is another one. I know. I know.
↩️ 🔗 business.just.business
June 3, 2020
The Things We Say
https-bucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com-public-images-f7dd6381-7992-4137-9f46-e5f088b9e086_1100x739.png
Salvador Dali
The Persistence of Memory - 1931
Sometimes we get so caught up in working out how to communicate across national boundaries, we forget that we can barely communicate within them. That’s why language is one of the eight tenets of People First.
Newsletter archive.pf.businessOur language slowly became invested with mechanical metaphors: We needed to grease the wheels, crank up the business, dig deeper, or turn a company into a well-oiled machine. Even everyday phrases, such as “fueling up” for eating lunch or “he has a screw loose” for thinking illogically, conveyed the acceptance of humans as mechanical devices.
Douglas Rushkoff
June 1, 2020
A Set Of Links
I Have Collected These Over The Past Two Weeks
There’s more, but publishing now to add to this living list.
I am going to reference them in two or more short pieces.
Hong Kong
1] South China Morning Post
2] China Post
Pompeo told Congress Hong Kong is no longer autonomous from China. Here’s what that means. - Vox
3] The Strategy Bridge
Don’t Bring a Knife to a Gunfight with China
4] YouTube Posts
China’s Geography Problem
American PhD Student in China - A Discussion about China
China The Motherland
USA
1] XXX
2] Trevor Noah
3] Killer Mike
4] Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
“Yes, protests often are used as an excuse for some to take advantage, just as when fans celebrating a hometown sports team championship burn cars and destroy storefronts. I don’t want to see stores looted or even buildings burn. But African Americans have been living in a burning building for many years, choking on the smoke as the flames burn closer and closer. Racism in America is like dust in the air. It seems invisible — even if you’re choking on it — until you let the sun in. Then you see it’s everywhere. As long as we keep shining that light, we have a chance of cleaning it wherever it lands. But we have to stay vigilant, because it’s always still in the air.”
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
5] Dave Winer
“We, and the world don’t understand something really important. The United States is nothing like the country it was a few years ago. There’s been so much change – it’s not reversible. There was still a little hope if nothing changed too much before the November election that we might possibly start to recover in January next year, but a couple of things happened that make that impossible now: 1. Barr. 2. Covid-19. We’re way down Martin Niemöller’s list. It’s not just people of color that are under attack. The other day the president tweeted that the only good Democrat is a dead Democrat. Life is very cheap now. 100K people died of a preventable pandemic in the last few months and more that number will die before the election. People who are alive right now. Some who are perfectly healthy, privileged, white. When he talks about dead Democrats, listen. Yes, most of the dead are poor people and people of color. But also enough whites and people of priviledge for us all to feel it now. That’s a very profound change, it must not be overlooked. But we cling to the same news system. We value the opinions of people who are heavily invested in the pre-Trump-Covid world. People who naturally tell the story of how we will return to what we were. I just got a heavy dose of that watching just a few minutes of the Sunday news on CNN and MSNBC. But we will not be going back to anything like what we were. We need to get in the moment, and get into save my life mode for all of us. The protests of the last few days are an impossible dream, you can see that in the police reaction. If we’re going not be completely devastated, we need new thinking.”
Dave Winer
6] The Guardian
The governor says Minneapolis is ‘under assault’. Who is behind the protests?
7] The New Yorker
Amid the Pandemic, Is Hong Kong Facing a Different Kind of Death
8] Cornell West
“I think we are witnessing America as a failed social experiment. What I mean by that is that the history of black people for over 200 and some years in America has been looking at America’s failure, its capitalist economy could not generate and deliver in such a way people can live lives of decency. The nation-state, its criminal justice system, it’s legal system could not generate protection of rights and liberties.
And now our culture so market-driven, everybody for sale, everything for sale, you can’t deliver the kind of really real nourishment for soul, for meaning, for purpose. So when you get this perfect storm of all these multiple failures at these different levels of the American empire, and Martin King already told us about that…
The system cannot reform itself. We’ve tried black faces in high places. Too often our black politicians, professional class, middle class become too accommodated to the capitalist economy, too accommodated to a militarized nation-state, too accommodated to the market-driven culture of celebrities, status, power, fame, all that superficial stuff that means so much to so many fellow citizens.
And what happens is we have a neo-fascist gangster in the White House who doesn’t care for the most part. You’ve got a neoliberal wing of the Democratic party that is now in the driver’s seat with the collapse of brother Bernie and they really don’t know what to do because all they want to do is show more black faces – show more black faces. But often times those black faces are losing legitimacy too because the Black Lives Matter movement emerged under a black president, a black attorney general, and a black Homeland Security [Secretary] and they couldn’t deliver. So when you talk about the masses of black people, the precious poor and working-class black people, brown, red, yellow, whatever colour, they’re the ones left out and they feel so thoroughly powerless, helpless, hopeless, then you get rebellion.
We’ve reached a point now a choice between nonviolent revolution – and by revolution what I mean is the democratic sharing of power, resources, wealth and respect. If we don’t get that kind of sharing, you’re going to get more violent explosions. Now the sad thing is in the neo-fascist movement in the White House, you have some neo-fascist brothers and sisters out there who are already armed. They show up at U.S. capitol and they don’t get arrested, they don’t get put down. The president praises them. See what I mean?
White supremacy is going to be around for a long, long, long time, don’t be surprised when this happens again. Try again, fail again, fail better. That’s the blues line of our Irish brothers. But the question is we must fight. Even in the moment where we have a failed social experiment, we must fight. We must have an antifascist coalition against the White House-Republican party. We have to tell the truth about the milquetoast cowardly activity too often we see too often in the neo-liberal wing of the Democratic party.”
West’s powerful statement has already been viewed more than 3 million times, with many praising his passionate and uncompromising comments.
💡 🔗 🎥 🥇 💬 🗒 around.the.world
June 1, 2020
One Of Those Important Pieces Of Clarity That I Like To Read
“To raise … means to lift or move something or someone upward. It also means to increase.”
whereas
To rise … means to move upward or to increase.
The definition of ‘raise’ includes the words ‘something’ and ‘someone’. i.e. something or someone is causing the upward movement of something else, whereas with ‘rise’, the cause is not stated.
🗂 observations
June 1, 2020
What Is Normal
Responding To A Post I Just Read
I wrote the following to something written by @cleverdevil over on MicroBlog.
I have no disagreement with the threads of the article, more the title and even then the title makes sense in the context of Jonathan’s article - which focussed on ‘white privilege’.
But. BUT …
To me … ‘normal’ is not so much a ‘privilege’ as a process that allows the majority to ignore the dark underbelly of society because it doesn’t affect them. That works in the racist world - even if you’re white and not racist, burying the problem is the problem. But, what of the non-racist ‘normal’. What of Wall Street over Main Street ‘normal’. What of incarceration in the United States not only at unprecedented levels for the country, but also orders of magnitude higher than any other countries ‘normal’. What of LGBTQ bias ‘normal’. What of sexual harrasment ‘normal’. The list is endless.
Those are just some of the ‘normals’ I question as we call for ‘getting back to normal’.
It’s clear. Then again, it was clear before George Floyd. It was clear before COVID. It’s always been clear - if you cared to look. But - unlike in all those horror movies, we generally don’t go investigate the crash in the bathroom, the lights in the cornfield, the haunted house at midnight.
Instead, most of us wrap ourselves up in our bed clothes tighter, try to get to sleep and hope that come the morning, it will be light, all the problems will have gone - and we can carry on as if nothing happened.
That’s what my friend Daniel Szuc in Hong King calls ‘sleepwalking’. It’s what most people do. They sleepwalk through life. Accepting, without questioning. Because it suits them. Doesn’t affect them. (Except it does - but that’s another story)
It’s what I was talking about in the newsletter What’s Next a few weeks ago. We are at a red pill / blue pill moment.
AGAIN.
Lets get it right this time.
↩️ 🥇 🔗 🖋 humanity