There’s a sort of “pop jazz” song named “Compared to What?” and that’s the tune I have sort of stuck in my head as I am having these thoughts… — which thoughts?
When we talk about community, it usually creates an intellectual divide between “Us and Them”, ingroups and outgroups. Yet these groups are not so much themselves factually real as much as they are subjectively chosen. We interpret the world with our own minds, and the groups that result form because of the way our own mind chooses to organize things. I think a couple decades ago Cory Doctorow wrote a neato little article about that and called it “metacrap”.
Here in Germany, the word “Kommune” is also a common way to refer to a local community, yet here the term is usually used to refer to the local government, rather than the local group of people mulling around in the same local area. As the 20th Century gradually transitions into the 21st Century, the lagging technological development of mobility brought about mainly by the automobile industry is slowly softening up localisation as a geographical concept. It’s not so much that people are becoming more footloose (which the double-whammy of the Corona-virus and the price shock of rapidly rising fossil fuel prices have more or less stopped on a dime), it’s that geography seems to matter much less now that globalisation is finally arriving in even the remotest locations across the globe.
Over time, I expect many will at some point come to experience a rude awakening that there is nothing virtual about transportation costs.
Okay, marry you up was the town outside of Kyiv according to the BBC, oh is Fredericksburg. Okay, I’m going to I’m gonna give you some numbers here. So Mary, you pull is by Dre if you wanted to drive there to from Kyiv it’s 461 miles to Dallas. San Diego is just outside of San Francisco according to this Sky. A couple of other little items here. Dallas to Fredericksburg is 196 miles if you drive, so you’re buying our final right outside of Dallas I am I’m basically in a suburb of Dallas, it’s only five hours to drive. And so it’s actually closer to Lubalin. Poland than it is to Mariupol. It’s, it’s about the same distance to Warsaw, as it is to Mariupol. And so I can go on and on. So why are they lying to us? Why are they lying to us that Mariupol is just outside of Kyiv when it’s nowhere near Kyiv, Sacramento is closer to San Francisco than this is just about the distance to Reno. I mean, how is this just outside of cave? The question is why do they say this? Why are they blatantly lying? Do you have an answer and it’s vetted? Because NPR played it full cloth. Well, I don’t know why the I don’t know why they’re lying. But this is a blatant lie. Tactic false.
NoAgendaShow Transcript: https://www.noagendashow.net/index.php/listen/1443?transcript=2:09:36
In other news, John @ NoAgendaShow (aka Jahnsi) observed that it has now been reported that Mariupol is a town just outside of Kiev. And the other day I was also reminded of my affinity for an English-language blog written by Meg … who is “based” in Praha (Prague) — see (for yourself) her very well-written “How Can I Help You? Why We Need to Voice Our Fears and Needs” [ https://itsgonnabemeg.wordpress.com/2022/04/22/how-can-i-help-you-why-we-need-to-voice-our-fears-and-needs ].
In my preferred intellectual world, localisation is all about topics. The community I intend to communicate with indicates the stuff we care about using linguistic expressions. We reach agreements in topical terms. We localise ourselves on the same page (see also “Introduction to Rational Media: Content vs. Container” [ https://contextual.news.blog/2020/04/22/introduction-to-rational-media-content-vs-container ] ). Rather than needing to be footloose, we choose to interact loosely with our minds over matters (e.g. think of the phrase “small pieces, loosely joined” [ https://www.smallpieces.com ] ).
Even if the world of information and communications technology is managed with machines, it would be naive to think that this world operates without natural language. The technology of writing systems, however, now undeniably favor languages based on the latin alphabet — the outlook for all other writing systems seems rather bleak (at best). And nonetheless: lest we lose ourselves in such finer details, we should always remind ourselves of the big picture … the grandest scheme of artificial intelligence, the paramount view of all automation itself, is the overarching image of pattern recognition … and pattern recognition would not exist at all without being built on the shoulders of human cognition … in the first place … and that being built upon (or in symbiotic evolution with) human communities using so-called natural languages in a somewhat prehistoric premonition of a first place.
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