georgebaily @georgebaily@mastodon.social

"Institutions have increasingly moved to reactive forms of strategy where the key goal is to sense and respond as quickly as possible to what is happening at the moment. This approach fosters incrementalism and tends to spread the resources of the institution across a growing number of initiatives, so that nothing receives a critical mass of attention or resources. It’s actually very inefficient." https://edgeperspectives.typepad.com/edge_perspectives/2019/08/learning-and-strategy.html

Big tobacco lobbying that vaping is harmful to health is just so.... Can't even.

"At 1,000ppm, human cognitive ability drops by 21%... Carbon dioxide clouds the mind: it directly degrades our ability to think clearly, and we are walling it into our places of education and pumping it into the atmosphere. The crisis of global waming is a crisis of the mind, a crisis of thought, a crisis in our ability to think another way to be. Soon, we shall not be able to think at all." - James Bridle in "New Dark Age"

Sept 20th US Youth #Climate Strike Coalition Demands https://strikewithus.org/#demands

"If Hong Kong’s heroic refusal to go gentle into Beijing’s dark night is accelerating this disenchantment, the summer of dissent has been this decade’s grandest and most important development." https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/hong-kongs-heroic-dissent-might-be-the-decades-most-important-development/2019/09/11/151af57e-d406-11e9-9343-40db57cf6abd_story.html

Unlike Mao, Deng was neither particularly introspective nor possessed by an overweening narcissistic urge to write himself grandly into Chinese history.

His [Deng's] writings and speeches largely ignored the subject of traditional culture and Confucian ideology. The epochal struggle to transform Chinese culture and revolutionze people's consciousness seems in Deng's mind to have been a distraction from the real work that needed to be done: namely, improving material conditions and making China a global powerhouse.

Deng and Mao's dissimilar attitudes towards family reflected their differing orientations toward traditional Chinese culture as a whole. If the self-absorbed Mao was a riot of self-contradiction - an ostentatious aficionado of Chinese classics while militantly demanding that his people liberate themselves from old thinking and feudal values - Deng suffered no such contradictions.

Later, in the Deng chapter:
[Deng] did not come to define himself through struggle against parental authority... described his boyhood under the care of his mother and father as being "very free and very full". Growing up without the kind of familial strife that had marked Mao's youth, Deng was throughout his life a far steadier person...

Later, in the Deng chapter:
[Deng] did not come to define himself through struggle against parental authority... described his boyhood under the care of his mother and father as being "very free and very full". Growing up without the kind of familial strife that had marked Mao's youth, Deng was throughout his life a far steadier person...

While his Tiananmen appearance in October 1949 was a triumphant milestone in the Chinese people's century-long struggle against disunity, inept government, imperialist exploitation, chronic backwardness, and unbearable humiliation, it was not an end marker. In Mao's ideological universe of ceaseless contradictions, protracted struggles, and "permanent revolution", there were never real finish lines, only brief intermissions between periods of struggle.

From Orville Schell's #China modern-history-through-thinkers "Wealth and Power: the "ying/yang aspects of [Tiananmen] square's modern identity - as embodiment of both state power and the people's resistance to it - were also dueling aspects of Mao Zedong's own personality. He was in love with spontaneity and upheaval, mass demonstrations and peasant earthiness, but no less fixated on control, discipline, orthodoxy, majesty, and the formal trappings of high office.

Another simple realisation: governments apparently have fuck all method for absorbing dissent or even pretending to listen let alone create dialogue. If you try to speak up, it's walls and tear gas.

I just had a simple realisation: globally we are in our first tests of something approaching democracy. The reaction points to the newly spiking power of the people.

Baby shark is stealth Confucian brainwashing.