Ron Wheeler wrote:
On 30/05/2012 10:10 AM, Rich
Cooper wrote:
If
we limit the Self Interest Ontology to just the players Chomsky mentions
(directly or indirectly), the set of agents could be organized thusly:
-government
-legislators
-judiciary
-cabinet level executives
-employees
regulators?
Aren’t
regulators cabinet level executives, perhaps assisted in developing regulations
by employees of the government and lobbyists representing corporate interests
or else NGO employees?
Please
feel free to add those kinds of thoughts.
public services?
Public
services wouldn’t be agents, though that might fit into the Activity
subtree. Some public services (police, paramedics, …) might be
represented there, but there are so MANY instances of public service types that
I’m not sure what representation would be most effective. I’ll
think about it for a while, but if you have some good ideas about it, that
would be appreciated.
DHS, military?
Good
idea; wouldn’t DHS be cabinet level? Wouldn’t military break into
the various forces Army, Navy, Air Force, Coast Guard, TSA, Marines, etcetera?
All DHS subtypes should have something to do with applying force. So
would federal police (FBI) local and state police, CDC (contagious disease
quarantine) and US Marshalls
(judiciary force). How should these be organized, and how would they likely
be referenced by phrases in Chomsky’s writings or in news stories?
-NGOs
-corporate
-stockholders
-directors
-executive management
-lobbyists
-employees
customers?
marketing partners (reps, distributors, franchisees)?
I
considered customers, suppliers, and service providers but I’m not sure
how to organize those kinds of subclasses into the individuals
class. Suggestions appreciated. Also, would these classes by
mentioned in Chomsky articles or news articles? That could get to be a
complex mapping if not carefully treated.
financial institutions (banks, bondholders, other credit institutions)?
Yes,
good choice, though I’m not sure how to handle them just yet. I
would prefer to delay discussion groups (e.g. banks, institutions) until after
we get a good rendering of individual agents and activities. Groups might
be best represented by a collage of logic, since groups don’t actually
perform activities; the executives and employees (etc) do that. Yet
groups are mentioned in source materials (short for Chomsky and news articles)
and have to be handled somehow before the ontology has been completed.
financial analysts, stockbrokers, rating firms?
media?
Again, those terms could describe groups
or they could describe individuals in those groups, so its not clear to me yet
how to best render them.
-individuals
-taxpayers
-adults
-minors
dependants
might be a better classification than minors?
Yes,
that might be preferable since a dependant can be either an adult or a minor or
an incarcerated individual, or a disabled individual.
-beneficiaries
-adults
-minors
This gives one view for the Ontology which
identifies the agents that participate in the Chomskyesque materials.
Does anyone want to suggest additions, deletions, or changes to the list above?
Activities of the Self Interest Ontology
might include:
shouldn't
these all be actions rather than results or things (monopolies, capital)?
I was thinking in IDEF0 terms so that an
activity is a class while actions are instances of the activity class, perhaps
also activity classes or perhaps singular actions. Keeping the
distinction between activity and action seems useful to me for mapping textual
source materials into the representation.
Similarly, the objects ( inputs, outputs,
controls, mechanisms ) can be represented as derivative types of ICOMAs.
That leaves a consistent interface for defining activities and related
ICOMAs.
-Great suggestions! Thanks,
-Rich
Sincerely,
Rich
Cooper
EnglishLogicKernel.com
Rich AT
EnglishLogicKernel DOT com
9 4 9 \ 5 2 5 - 5 7 1 2
-government
-taxation
-regulation
-legislation
-enforcement
-judgments
-corporate
-markets
-monopolies
-competitors
-persuasion
-operations
-finance
-capital
-revenues
-costs
-lobbying
-employment
-taxation
-Individuals
One way to develop materials for filling
in the lower levels of the ontology might be to process NLP from
Chomsky’s books and articles, and news stories, including daily news
articles from individual reporters, articles from corporate news sources (e.g.,
WSJ, NYT, LA
Times, etc). By identifying the named entities that correspond to the
agent classes above, it should be possible to organize news stories to deepen
the Self Interest Ontology to include lower level subclasses. This is a
very limited first step in identifying the actors and activities that play
identifiable roles a la Chomsky’s viewpoint. It should also
identify the news sources which are biased in each direction for each class of
agents.
Has anything serious been left out of the
top level for the Self Interest Ontology? Again, suggestions are
appreciated,
-Rich
Sincerely,
Rich
Cooper
EnglishLogicKernel.com
Rich AT
EnglishLogicKernel DOT com
9 4 9 \ 5 2 5 - 5 7 1 2
Chomsky’s theories of the
corporate-state partnership, and how it concentrates power in the hands of
large corporations, are well known, especially:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TieGj2Yi5r8
But neither Rand nor Hayek subscribed to
corporate-state partnership. In both cases, they value the individual,
not the corporation and not the state and certainly not the combination of the
two. So I don’t think that is the reason why he is unhappy with
both Rand and Hayek.
From the above video “elections are
always bought”, “President Obama’s election was funded by
corporate interests”, and numerous other examples indicate his deep
displeasure with the state-corporate binding.
I would like to see quotes from Chomsky
that specifically describe his displeasure with both Rand and Hayek rather than trying to predict
his rationale. Chomsky is always very deep in his rationale, so I
don’t think that we can simply say the corporate-state binding is why he
is against either Rand or Hayek.
Mike Pool quoted this short paragraph from
the article, which is somewhat enlightening:
"Hayek was the kind of
'libertarian' who was quite tolerant of such free societies as Pinochet's
Chile, one of the most grotesque of the National Security States instituted
with US backing or direct initiative during the hideous plague of terror and
violence that spread over the hemisphere from the 60s through the 80s. He even
sank to the level of arranging a meeting of his Mont Pelerin society there
during the most vicious days of the dictatorship. "
But that critique is not directed at
Hayek’s ideas about economics in general, only about his interpretation
of Hayek’s poor showing in the political area, specifically in supporting
Pinochet and the US
methods of supporting property owners at the expense of the average
citizen.
His description of how democratic groups in
Haiti
were overturned by the US
government and a dictator was reinstalled under US actions, is typical Chomsky,
and very clearly in line with his past work. But in broad brush strokes
in the article, he paints both Rand and Hayek (neither of whom are known for
their political wisdom) as evil without considering the kudos they gave to the
individuals.
-Rich
Sincerely,
Rich
Cooper
EnglishLogicKernel.com
Rich AT
EnglishLogicKernel DOT com
9 4 9 \ 5 2 5 - 5 7 1 2
On Mon, May 28, 2012 at 2:09 PM, Rich Cooper <rich@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
Thanks – a very interesting article. I’m
surprised at how vehemently Chomsky shrugs her off as evil. He
doesn’t give any explanation in the article; do you have any information
about WHY he thinks Rand
is evil?
It's obvious if you read Chomsky's (vast) work on
political theory and American social and political history, especially his
writings on social security, taxation, corporate welfare, the massive
redistribution of wealth from the middle class to the top income brackets
engineered by conservative tax policy over the last dozen years, etc, all of
which are in vehement opposition to the social darwinism that lies at the heart
of Randian economic theories (and current GOP economic politicies).
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