In Harmonium

Posted By Marc on July 13, 2010

In the previous part of this series, I really concentrated on the environment of role expectations and especially, on the boundaries of these.  As I was reading the CBC.ca news this morning, I found a story that just illustrated many of the points I made in the last post, especially the points about communications and flexibility around the interpretation of a behaviour.  In this post, I want to finish up the remaining two environments in which components of ethical systems (patterns of behaviour and perception) are susceptible to selection pressure.

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Category: Ethics, Working Ideas | No Comments »
Tags: Ethics, Professional Knowledge

Posted By Marc on July 11, 2010

In the part 1, I tried to establish certain guidelines for how I am looking at ethics, morality and, to a much lessor degree, group dynamics surrounding these issues.  The overarching model I use for this is taken fairly directly from Wm. Calvin’s work on Darwinian bootstrapping (op.cit.) which I have found to be both extremely useful and quite robust.

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Category: Ethics, Uncategorized, Working Ideas | 2 Comments »
Tags: Ethics

Posted By Marc on July 10, 2010

This set of posts is a first cut at integrating some ideas I have been working on in one form or another for several years now.  While I am really interested in the general case of the evolution of moral and ethical systems within groups, for this specific set of posts, I will only be considering one system: Anthropological ethics regarding operations in war and near-war (i.e. COIN) conditions.  My hope is to produce a rough model of a highly complex situation that, with more work, will be increasingly generalizable.

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Category: Ethics, Working Ideas | 9 Comments »
Tags: Ethics

Posted By Marc on June 29, 2010

Apologies for not posting much in the past while.  I have been prepping a new course that started last week and, what with my singing commitments, I just haven’t had the time or energy to do much posting.  I am hoping to get a series of new posts out over the next week or so.  Until then…..

Category: Uncategorized | 2 Comments »
Tags:

Posted By Marc on June 1, 2010

In my last post, I talked about critical thinking and noted that one of the problems I have been seeing recently lies in the communicative nature of thinking / research.  I wanted to expand on this idea a bit, and look at some of the issues surround what, for want of a better term, we might call “social thought”.

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Category: Communications Theory, Epistemology, Uncategorized | 4 Comments »
Tags: Critical Social Thought, Critical Thinking

Posted By Marc on May 28, 2010

I just finished attending the IAFIE conference here in Ottawa, and a lot of the discussion was on the subject of “critical thinking”.  Based solely on the presentations there, it became rapidly apparent that the problems many of the presenters were having with critical thinking were the exact opposite of the problems my students have been having with it.

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Category: Communications Theory, Epistemology, Teaching | 12 Comments »
Tags: Critical Thinking, Epistemology, IAFIE, Rhetoric

Posted By Marc on May 21, 2010

At ~ 3:30 am (May 18th), the RBC branch at Bank and First in Ottawa was firebombed and, later that day, a group calling itself FFFC Ottawa posted a video of the attack and claimed responsibility.  The chief of Ottawa Police Services, Vern White, told CBC that he is “extremely confident” that they will shortly be making arrests in the case.  He is treating it as a case of domestic terrorism.

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Category: Social Theatre | No Comments »
Tags: Domestic Terrirism, Ottawa, RBC

Posted By Marc on April 22, 2010

According to a recent press release, the Canadian Minister for Public Safety will be re-introducing the Justice for Victims of Terrorism Act that died when the government was prorogued last December.  According to the minister,

“This government is responding to calls from victims who seek justice, and demonstrating leadership in the global fight against terrorism,” said Minister Toews. “Perpetrators and supporters of terrorism must be held accountable for their actions.”

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Category: Politics, Social Theatre | 1 Comment »
Tags: Justice for Victims of Terrorism Act

Posted By Marc on April 16, 2010

On March 24-25, 2010, the Small Wars Foundation brought together a group of current and former military, academics, think tank members and policy people for a two-day focused workshop on what is being called the Tribal Engagement Strategy in Afghanistan.  The workshop was co-sponsored by the U.S. Joint Forces Command Joint Irregular Warfare Center, the U.S. Marine Corps Center for Irregular Warfare, the U.S. Army / U.S. Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Center, and Noetic Group.  The summary report of the event, along with background information and some of the commentary from participants, has now been published.

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Category: COIN, Epistemology | 2 Comments »
Tags: Afghanistan, TEW 2010

Posted By Marc on April 14, 2010

Well, once again one of the primary characteristics of fanatical fundamentalists, in the pejorative sense, has shown up.  CBC announced that several of the radical Islamist groups in Somalia have banned music from being played on the radio stations there on the grounds that it is “un-Islamic”.  As the story noted:

Hosts at Mogadishu’s 14 radio stations said they had to comply, because those who didn’t were threatened with punishment.

“Today we see an official crackdown on the independent media.… The local radio stations stopped playing any kind of music or songs after the deadline given by the Islamists came to an end,” said Mohamed Ibrahim, an official of the National Union of Somali Journalists.

That characteristic, by the way, is a simple one whereby one group denies another group the ability to do something on pain of force.  What these fanatics don’t realize is that a lack of listening to music (or watching television in the case of Afghans under the Taliban), only produces a false sense of agreement along with a lot of distaste and anger.  This is conversion by terror, not by choice.

Category: Music | No Comments »
Tags: Music, Somalia