Pep Talk

Debate Culture

From my outbox (to a team listserv earlier today): 

I bring this up [debate culture] because where I put my focus is on debates, versus gunplay or smear attack propaganda. For some time, the policy in the State Department, during Nuland's tenure, was to cut off all communication with the Russian diplomatic community and to ban their television in the USA. This was consistent with the Ukraine policy of demonizing Russia and outlawing Russian as a means of official or even informal communication.

However, nowadays the prospect of televised debates between US and Russian journalists is far more likely, or even high school debate teams.

A US team, if debating something about current affairs, say whether Portland should indeed become a sister city with Mariupol, would want to train on a lot of materials, as is standard. The team will have to master and argue both sides at different events.

Does anyone else watch Rick Sanchez ever? He was in a booth on Red Square with Scott Ritter during the Alaska Accords summit (what some of us Ruscadians call it); I watched him co-star with Manila Chan on RT America for years.

I was always an RT America fan, which I came to, as I explain in my journals, via Air America, the FM radio network that I'd tune in on the car radio while waiting for that same daughter to get out of middle school. When Air America broke up, a lot of the talent moved to either MSNBC or RT America. The latter had Abby Martin, Chris Hedges... folks I follow to this day.

Now that NATO has lost its proxy war (the way I see it), I wouldn't be surprised to see a lot more US high schoolers, debaters especially, put on the spot to bone up on what's been happening, and that's not going to mean mindlessly reciting gospel / dogma emanating from Washington, DC and it's Great Decisions program (or maybe the Methodists still get programmed that way?), it's going to mean finding the right YouTubes and starting from scratch in a lotta ways.

Pythonica from the School of Tomorrow

School of Tomorrow: A Summer of Activism

An Active Inference Project

The Ant Stack: A Blueprint for AI

The ant: a masterclass in doing more with less.

Synergetics: A Geometry of Thinking

This vid is a curated snapshot of the state of the art in 2025, in terms of having an LLM grok Synergetics and come back with radio voice + slides. 

I call it "radio voice" because NotebookML, the Google tool in question, at first would come back with a dialog between a male-sounding and female-sounding voice, with no video component. The dialog was in the style of a radio broadcast, or a podcast, with cadance and intonations of people used to being on the radio.

 
Now, a few months later, we're getting some primitive video, and a single voice, male or female sounding.

This development is somewhat of a breakthrough for our ethnicity, as our subculture's memes tend to not get much time in social media. Confidant radio voice broadcasts of our material haven't happened much, in the forty years it might've. 

However, since I'm talking about a subculture, the implication is these memes were being shared somehow, among however few, and that's true. Museum exhibits. Documentaries. Lots of books. Collaborative communities. Institutes... the whole nine yards. 

Now we're finding AI is providing new levers, and so we use them.

I'm not giving the last word however. Check out my YouTubes, those of others, for more advance content, when it comes to Synergetics. Don't wait for AI to do your homeword for you.

College Prep Synergetics

 

If you're a long time reader of this blog, which features Philosophy Talk, then you'll likely be familiar with:

(a) hypertoons and
(b) 4D vs 4D vs 4D

The former has to do with computer animation, or actually any kind of moving picture, where the "playhead" is free to wander around amidst a network of scenarios, with seamless segues at keyframes.

The latter has to do with natural language, our awareness of "language games" within semantic space, either invented for investigatory purposes, or teased out of ordinary language itself. Wittgenstein. What language games involve "4D" as a meme?

These themes add together in our genre of science fiction, labeled Martian Math for marketing reasons, but not necessarily all that oriented towards Martian lore. ETs and science fiction more generally enter the picture, as we unfold our specific 4D mathematics.

Another Syllabus Video

David Graeber on Debt, Service, and the Origins of Capitalism 

Faculty Lounge Chatter

I'm assembling this posting from my contributions to one of the Telegram faculty lounge channels.

Cultagory Studies

Required viewing in my neck of the woods, if you're studying Cultagory Theory the way I do. We study the meaning of the word "spin doctor" (which is open to all genders by the way).

For example, we study "mad men" (Madison Avenue advertising gurus) in connection with The Hunger Project, the 1980s attempt to break through crufty programming. As I wrote in an email recently (earlier today):

What few understood about Erhard's Hunger Project, B. Fuller on the advisory board, was that it was all about using Mad Man brainwashing techniques (aka commercial advertising) to put on ads (like NFL ads, big TV) talking about how we had it within our means, physically and logistically, to end world hunger by the year 2000, and all that we lacked was the political will.

In other words, we were gonna hire the best and the brightest advertising firms to turn the brainwashing cannons in a different direction, to "pivot" if you will.

I thought that sounded bold and innovative and it appealed to my spin doctor side. "Yeah, that could work" I was thinking. This was around the early 1980s.

But lets not imagine all the pro advertiser pioneers were New York based. On the contrary, some argue that the real headquarters for this art (and science?) was (and is?) in Chicago.