You Were RIGHT! Bill Gates and Tony Blair call for Digital TYRANNY!

I just saw the article Roger posted about the nuclear families – posted around midday.

One of the points raised was the origin of ‘the individual’, the article citing the Greeks and the Romans.

My immediate response was ‘The Greeks, certainly. The Romans probably less so.’ But then it struck me – we know the Greek idea of the individual as an individual found its greatest expression in their philosophy. The idea that the universe orbits around each individual as the centre of the universe. Multiple ‘centres’ at the same time so each sees something slightly (or even profoundly) different.

An astounding revelation.

But then I thought – this thinking would have been concentrated in a certain class – the elite class that read Plato and bummed boys. Did the average Greek see things this way?

Did the early Church read it and made it a core expression of an idea which explained religious teachings which they then pressed upon the whole of their flock? Telling even the lowliest among them such in a way that the ancient Greeks did not bother.

It would be a bit like the marble busts and statues. The European tradition of statuary made of pure marble or limestone or bronze or whatever – unpainted an unadorned – is a sort that we sense as the most honourable and revered. Our parks feature statues of past heroes in blind material. Daubing them with colours would look silly and tacky. Painting Captain Cooks coat and eye-colours would look ridiculous to us, Graffiti, in fact. But now we learn that the Romans and Greeks DID paint their statues. (And columns, and so on.) But the Europeans accidentally created something new. The sculptings of Michelangelo are far more poignant than anything a Roman (or even a Greek) could have created. You see those statues of Augustus Caesar posing as Father of the Country and see something splendid. The Romans wouldn’t have. They painted it. Painted the eyes, the eyelashes, and God knows what traits were not depicted in shape such as skin colour. The Europeans carved figures that would make the ancients’ work look rather flat.

I always come back to Michelangelo’s ‘David’. I see exactly what Kenneth Clark saw when he described it as, below the neck just an ordinary statue of the sort that any Roman or Greek sculptor might have made. But then you come to the head and see something new, perhaps something unique to Christian tradition – the ancient statues showed faces in anger, pride, placidness, majesty, even magnanimity. But the David shows a distinctive determination and a contempt for physical discomfort. Something not just absent from the statues but the literature.

It found a place in the art because they did not know about the paint.

And here is the kicker. While your average Greek might not have had much of an idea of the primacy of the individual (while they all would certainly had a clear idea of their own individuality “I am immobilised by my pain. I fear for my children and my family – they are most important to me) there was perhaps an accidental precursor to the non-Clan corporations in Greece in the Athenian reforms by some old guy that rearranged the Athenian political system into Trittys where instead of having organic tribes from the city, the plain and the coast (who would all have had their own city, plain, or coastal prejudices) they deliberately created new tribes which were each made up of people of the three regions who now had to work together in competition with other tribes so comprised – people from the city working with people of the plain against other people of the city from a different tribe.

Even now our electoral system tries to prevent geography like the urban areas riding roughshod over less populous areas like farmers. It is why we have the senate system we have, and the Americans their electoral college.

Tyrannous people in London, NY, LA, Sydney and Melbourne hate these systems precisely because they are harder to game.

Outsiders really cut loose on this issue. Well justified. It’s terrifying.

‘Insanity’: Coalition ‘finally’ standing up to Labor’s misinformation bill

Modern cars are shit. Really, really shit.

What I hate the most is the automatic lane guide that some cars have where it wants to wrestle you for the steering wheel if it doesn’t think you are doing it right.

Just drove a rented Opel in Europe and had to remember to disable the feature each time I started the car. It was really distressing when it kicked in while huge trucks were driving past in the opposite direction on very narrow roads.

Test.

BOM

Steps followed, no joy.

Modern cars are shit. Really, really shit.

The Mazda CX-5 has an electronic park brake. Kinda neat actually as it never needs to be adjusted. Electric motor winds a cable on a drum. I suspect they monitor the motor current and stop it when it stalls. Cable stretch/pad wear doesn’t matter
It took awhile to adjust as we leaped 19 years of automotive tech but the driver assist features are pretty unobtrusive. Love the radar cruise control and the synthetic top down camera view for parking.
You want low tech? Get a Cessna. Makes an FJ Holden look like a riot of modern technology.