Is the Individual Obsolete? Wish I could Read the Article! By James Reed

     Ah! Journalism with no money! How to do it with less money than the average high school student, those I used to teach? The Washington Post has an article “Is the Individual Obsolete?’ by George Wills, which looks like something we should response to, but it is behind a paywall. How can we guess what it says, having no money to access any material? Well, think like a post-apocalyptic survivor. What can be salvaged from the wreck of the internet, which by the way, a large chunk of the Google part went offline a few days ago, like space junk, for some reason that I have not yet found:
  https://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/08/17/google_outage/

“You can all relax now. The near-unprecedented outage that seemingly affected all of Google's services for a brief time on Friday is over. The event began at approximately 4:37pm Pacific Time and lasted between one and five minutes, according to the Google Apps Dashboard. All of the Google Apps services reported being back online by 4:48pm. The incident apparently blacked out every service Mountain View has to offer simultaneously, from Google Search to Gmail, YouTube, Google Drive, and beyond. Big deal, right? Everyone has technical difficulties every once in a while. It goes with the territory. But then, not everyone is Google. According to web analytics firm GoSquared, worldwide internet traffic dipped by a stunning 40 per centduring the brief minutes that the Chocolate Factory's services were offline.”

     Like our resident neo-Luddite Brian, I can’t wait until the entire internet goes dark, forever, ending all of this madness. Anyway, here is the link about individuals becoming obsolete:
  https://www.washingtonpost.com/graph...=.715ea41a9432
  https://www.westhawaiitoday.com/2019/05/31/opinion/national-views/will-column-is-the-individual-obsolete/

“Warren and Obama asserted something unremarkable — that the individual depends on cooperative behavior by others. But they obscured this point: It is conservatism, not progressivism, that takes society seriously. Conservatism understands society not as a manifestation of government but as the spontaneous order of cooperating individuals in consensual, contractual market relations. Progressivism preaches confident social engineering by the regulatory state. Conservatism urges government humility in the face of society’s extraordinary — and creative — complexity. American society, understood as hundreds of millions of people making billions of decisions daily, is a marvel of spontaneous cooperation. Sensible government facilitates this cooperative order by providing roads, schools, police, etc., and by getting out of the way of spontaneous creativity.”

     George Wills Expands on this in his book to be released on June 4, The Conservative Sensibility, which basically only tells us, as I guess it, what Major Douglas already told us, that individuals in social networks, cooperate in associations to get jobs done, and that no person is an island. Ok, no big sweat, and no need to cut out essential items from my meagre food budget to get the book after all. It will pass away like all the published books, as new ones roll of the press, get put on coffee tables, then get thrown out into recycle bins, where doubt such books are incinerated adding to the carbon footprint, which is good.
  https://www.amazon.com/Conservative-Sensibility-George-F-Will/dp/0316480932/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=george+wills&qid=1559519583&s=gateway&sr=8-1

 

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Friday, 29 March 2024

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