New perspectives, new facts, new communication

There is an abundance of new opinion everywhere and worth a passing glance, but fact-based new perspectives are the most important to getting a clearer view of the world.

This South Korean article on the supply chains behind smart phone manufacture in China based on IMF data has much wider importance if you apply the anthropological/historical eye. Begin here with this screenshot:

[article dated 16 May 2019, same link as above]

The world has travelled a vast distance since the beginning of reforms in China forty years ago. Such a network of involvement between peoples, people who should be involved together constructively but such involvement come out where before a cold war of opposition to communication at all. While languages in binary and languages of Arabic origin in money are involved, all the communications languages are and have history of power relationships. When we sit in a whitish country blessed or cursed with English language dominance/hubris, we have to shove off a bit to see how complicated it is, how a new world of communication arises with this kind of phone-building, also also belt and road building. As in "excuse me sir, there's something big happening over there and I'm sure it's big" and standard reply "piss off Edric, we're busy" — core of much of Robert Harris's writing and modern Korean and Japanese films about tsunamis etc. [Link][Link]

Consider the history of Korean language. Note the rise of the Hangul script around the time of the arrival of the printing press in Europe and the rise of English with Shakespeare and rise of Italian especially at Ferrara and Ludo Ariosto's great melange of European memes in Orlando Furioso, under the gaze of the wondrous Lucrezia Borgia daughter of Pope Alex 6. Those people over there in East Asia are building ways of communicating that will either profoundly alter English or lead to 'other'. We have only a tiny appreciation of the scale and direction of change this big communication revolution, the biggest since the printing press. 

To add to the melange of freshperspectivism do visit http://americanempireproject.com/ at which I arrived via the American John Feffer's wonderful Foreign Policy in Focus which as I speak headlines the wondrous John Bolton with an appropriate nod to Alexander Haig.

This is just a start. We have to look to ragged edges and the unfinished (the blog is the opposite of the tweet, the tweet being a single final statement and a blog entry a meandering step into can't-define, idea-push). 

Stay wary of people who have the answers. I said this as first principle in a speech in 2004 about the Iraq war:

FIRST: we should be very wary of people of whatever hue who say they have the absolute truth. Not because there is no truth available, but because truth is individual. I hold passionately to my beliefs, you hold passionately to your beliefs. But this is a crowded world now, even here on the [southeast coast of Australia], and if we do not put first an ethic of dealing as community with each other at grass roots level, we will never be able to deal sensibly with international issues. Fundamentalisms, fanaticisms, uncompromising pursuit of whatever absolute belief is what will kill us all. 

I rest my bones, for a moment.