Archive for November 4, 2009

Author’s Subtext. . . . . APN #1

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November 4, 2009
by in APN

Pandemic Preemption – ‘Author’s Subtext’ [see footnote in ‘Introduction’]

Contributors; Ted Lumley

In writing this first newsletter (APN #1, Pandemic Pre-emption)  on the ‘H1N1 swine flu pandemic’, I wanted to try to deepen the view of ‘what is actually going on’, to capture how the sense of ‘being a participant in evolution’ (a ‘strand in the web of life’) does important things for us and for the way we engage with/in the world, that are absent when we opt for the sense of ‘being in control’, as associates with dealing in ‘representations’ and the ‘causal model’.

The remarks on community ‘seen’ as the ‘wild desert flower’ that spontaneously self-organises, rather than the community ‘seen’ as something ‘deliberately constructed’ as it may appear in ‘representations’, tries to infuse the sense that the relationship between ‘habitat’ and ‘inhabitant’ can be ‘seen’ in two ways; in an ‘aboriginal/medieval’ way and an Enlightenment – representation way.

The approach attempted has been to infuse, by way of a ‘background awareness’, the sense that there is indeed a conjugate relationship between ‘inhabitants’ and ‘habitat’ (‘terrain’).   In the viewfield of a notional long-term observer (the ‘eyes of the continuing evolutionary process’), the flow of people in and out of the oasis is relentless and so the occupants of the dwellings around the oasis are ceaselessly being replaced, not only by the immigration-emigration flow but by the birth-death flow, so that the dwellings (that we can capture as photographic representations) can be understood as a kind of ‘scale’ that develops along the periphery of the flow, in the manner that a silt-loaded river in the delta dumps out the material to build its own banks.  (more…)

Pandemic Pre-emption APN#1

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November 4, 2009
by in APN

Perhaps nothing pre-empts minority views as effectively as the threat of a global catastrophe that appears to be avertable, if and only if everyone ‘gets on board’ the effort to ‘cut it off at the pass’.  For example, if one believes that getting vaccinated will attenuate the spread of H1N1 to the point that it never reaches ‘critical mass’, then it becomes a ‘moral imperative’ for everyone to get vaccinated and, figuratively speaking, lower the lead rods into the about-to-go-supercritical nuclear core of global society.

Managing a pandemic counter-defensive requires a concerted effort by the media to mobilize the masses, and there is no time, under these circumstances, to open the media channels to hear out the ‘minority views’ which question a runaway logic that may be more effective in provoking pandemonium than countering pandemic.  (more…)

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