Why OccupyWallStreet?

While individual memory builds up to collective memory, collective memory frames/limits/facilitates individual memory. The "big picture" is sometimes hard to see, but it can be seen. This is a pretty clear look at the present in the frame of the recent past.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How can an atheist be moral?

 posted originally on Apr 21, 2017, 2:27 PM       A student quotes his textbook: "morality is a bad fit within the contemporary atheistic world view because there is no good reason to think that creatures who evolved intelligence through purely naturalistic mechanisms would have evolved the ability to correctly discern the content of necessarily true, general moral principles" I replied: To the contrary, secular humanism, an atheist philosophy, is intensely moral. Its morality comes from two sources: 1) a rational argument that cooperation is not only more beneficial to individuals than conflict or competition, but also that it is structurally necessary in order that it be possible for individuals to live together; 2) a scientific understanding that the source of psychological individuality is group membership, interaction with family in infancy and early childhood and interaction with peers and other community members in later life.
Read more

The market should peak within three weeks

" If the duration of the current rally were to take the same portion of its ruling cycle that the 1929-1930 rally did, when would it end? The 1929-1930 rally lasted 155 days out of 968 in the cycle (1932 was a leap year), for a ratio of 0.1601. The 16.6-16.9-year span ends between February 19 and June 9, 2016. Applying the 0.1601 ratio to this period of 2541-2652 days from the March 6, 2009 low would give rally durations of 406.81-424.59 days, suggesting a peak in the current rally between April 16 and May 5. Using intraday turning dates projects exactly the same range. As Beautiful Pictures shows, time targeting usually works out to within 3 days. With April 14 already behind us and May 8 a Saturday, we can project a top on this basis between April 15 and may 7, 2010. April 16, by the way, marks the anniversary of the 1930 rally peak. These dates pertain only if the current rally matches its predecessor in percent-of-cycle terms, which is conjecture, but given all the other evid...
Read more

Profit-&-Cost vs. Values (Comment to a student in my Sociology of Popular Culture course)

Mature capitalist industrialism has become so intensely commercial, so driven by the profit motive, that its influence intrudes into every corner of our lives. And it's difficult even for us to question whether this is a good thing. (For many of us, at least.) It's "just accepted." To some extent, they bribe us into accepting it, but to some extent, they don't even have to bribe us, we're so inured to the practice. We're deluded --not just by advertising, but by a whole complex of factors-- into thinking that "cost" and "profit" are the most important principles of decision-making. (Not just business decision-making, but political, public-policy, even personal decision-making.) We get distracted from what we really want and what we really need, like health and kindness and creativity and clean air. Money is too easy to count, so its more and more widespread use degrades our ability to reason in a more complex fashion than money allows. ...
Read more