being neither a logician or an academic will not deter me from thinking:
1.) humans are tribal and territorial by nature.
2.) that being tribal imparts a sense of security and “belonging.
3.) that belonging is not universal…it is exclusionary…it is a pharmakon and, eventually, it poisons…there is always “the other”.
4.) that any treaty promulgated by the united nations banning nuclear weapons is irrelevant to those who possess nuclear weapons.
5.) because of an evolutionary predisposition to tribalism the hegemons who control their various socio-political system will not surrender what they see as an ultimate defense of “us” against “them”.
We have a multitude of ways of disposing of ourselves as a species that we actively engage in on a daily basis because it is structured into the institutions we were born into…whether it is me recklessly using resources and emitting carbon dioxide ( despite the carbon offsets of the coniferous trees and deeply rooted perennials in my yard ) or kim jong un and his increasingly unstable counterpart unleashing a nuclear exchange and a general war ( and don’t doubt there are those here who would favor a “first strike”…the military mind is the uber-tribal mind )…are we doomed? may be…perhaps not…humans are adaptable too…we may find a way to live with our destructive ways ( we have always been deleterious to the environment ) but I wouldn’t expect idealism to trump weaponry…if you have it the impetus is to use it…add in the ascendancy ( or, perhaps, their assumed ascendancy ) of life-hating christian nihilists and you have a dangerous and lamentable combination of human hubris mixed with flat stupidity…trump and kim may dispose of themselves as they see fit…I care for neither…they should leave the rest of us out of their puerile posturing.
"hello,
just a question someone can answer if they can find the time...are the photos you publish in in your newspaper ( as opposed to on line ) derived from digital or analog cameras?
thanks for your time and attention."__________that is an email i sent off to my friends ( as long as i am a subscriber anyway ) at the n y times asking about the photos they use in their print edition ( obviously the photos in the on line edition are all digital )...i have been reading a lot of philosophy recently and there is a lot of verbiage in that discipline devoted to discussing how we know what we know and why we believe what we believe and i was wondering about the sources of what i was looking at in the media...a couple of days later this arrived in my mailbox..."Good Morning Fred,
Thank you for contacting the New York Times. The Photographer has the choice of digital vs. analog. But I would say that 99% of the time they end up being digital.
Have a great day today!
Chuck Arnold III"__________this was not comforting news...i have something of a distaste for the digital ( i know...i know...this is digital...everything i do here is digital..my cameras [except the vivtar] are digital..i know...i know )...partly because i was born near the middle of the last century i suppose...however there is reason to be a bit concerned...with analog photography there was a mechanical transference of light to chemically treated film that created the negative for the image...things like a flaw in the chemical coating could occur or double exposures, however whatever image was transferred to the film had to be there...it had to be physically present...true photos could be "retouched"..flaws smoothed or removed...stalin had a passion for that and it is part of what inspired orwell's "memory hole" and his conceptualization of the mutability of history ( and his stint at the bbc in the second world war sensitized him to propaganda as news )..some efforts were exceptionally crude ( see photos ) and even yezhov's becoming an unperson was not perfect...you could discern the changes..it was clear things were not as they seemed...digital images and photoshop have rendered the "memory hole" obsolete...images can be seamlessly altered by editing the digital code that is the basis of the photos...you can remove or insert anything and there is no real way to tell...distortions of perception can be had easily and, given the fact that media outlets are, in the end, corporate entities, i don't doubt that some manipulation in the interests of the editorial board ( read advertisers ) or the politically motivated ( all politics are an extension of economics...why do you suppose the "dismal science" began its life being called "political economy"? )...so..what media do i trust? none i am thinking...i can no longer be sure if what i am seeing is real ( if you can manipulate digital photographs one supposes digital video is not immune )...so? so i continue reading the times..and philosophy...and orwell...and i compare what i read and hear with what i see and hear in my own locality ( trust me, the news about the economy is pretty much fiction )...and i make my own judgements.
