roachboy

this is as interesting, informed and provocative an overview of the fundamental lunacies of contemporary america that i've seen in a while. and it's interesting that it comes from the creator of the hbo series "the wire"---and that the series is built around these premises and so is a vehicle in a sense for this vision.

have a look:

Bill Moyers Talks Drugs, Crime, Journalism and Democracy with Creator of 'The Wire' | DrugReporter | AlterNet

i'm personally interested in the argument that simon makes that the wire is dissent:

there's alot to talk about from this interview i think.
what do you make of the basic outlines of it: the contemporary capitalism has produced what amounts to entire classes of "superfluous people"--that the drug war is an enormous sham aimed at regulated this population---that there is a complicity between the superficiality of benchmarking in education, this structural feature of contemporary capitalism, and the drug war---that statistics have become an entirely superficial mode of generating psuedo-information that generates reassuring but ultimately meaningless ideological images back to the institutions that are invested in creating and acting on these images.

most importantly, the arguments about the destruction of feedback loops, which you can see through his discussion of the state of the american press.

this is not the happy-face world of the right. this is quite far from the non-image of american reality that lay behind the obama administration's actions up to this point--which one can see are locked in reactive mode to the Situation it was handed--but if this guy is anything like correct, the social reality of the united states is much further out of phase with the happy-face neoliberal image of it that unless some very significant changes are made at the level of information gathering and processing that informs policy, it could turn out that we are well and truly fucked.

but what do you make of this?
what strikes you as interesting about the interview?
what strikes you as off the mark?

many themes get touched on, and multiple forms of interconnectedness are discussed--it's a real advantage of working from the particular to the general--here is a knot of realities on the ground in baltimore---here's how they feed into each other--here's how the fit into larger problems--here's what i think it means....

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

sapiens

I enjoyed the interview. Thanks for posting it. It was compelling. It was also very depressing. What is to be done about the decline of journalism? What is to be done about corruption in state and local legislatures? What is to be done about the drug war? What is to be done about "juking the stats" in crime and education? I don't know. It seems hopeless.

I appreciated how he connected the war on drugs, to politics, to education, to the perpetuation of an economically superfluous underclass. I don't have much to say at that level of analysis.

I do agree with Simon's general point that education in the US is seriously fucked up. I'm not a big fan of No Child Left Behind and Annual Yearly Progress (AYP) standards. They neglect the student in the seat in the classroom. I have concerns about "teaching to the test" "juking the stats" within schools, and disincentives to teaching low performing and high performing students. I also have concerns about a complete lack of measurement and standards in the classroom. Newer testing models, especially the growth models coming out of Colorado, focus more on student level progress. Hopefully, those new models will reduce some of the testing problems that NCLB has created. I do think that some form of testing is necessary.

I work for a non-profit organization that, among other things, researches the regulatory bodies that oversee schools. I don't know as much about education policy as many of the people I work with, but I do no a reasonable amount about research methods and statistics. I have often run into situations where my reaction was "you can't say that. we don't know that." It might be corruption or "juking of the stats", but it's also very intelligent, well-meaning people that don't understand statistics or research methods.

I don't know what the answer is. I'm inclined to think that a complete overhaul of schools of education and massive pay raises for teachers might help.

Willravel

Why is this such a hard concept for the general population to grasp?

roachboy

well, i think one response to the basic register of simon's interview--which (again) i think is really interesting--is that there's a serious systemic problem that *can* be addressed but which isn't being addressed *at all* in part because confronting it would require a basic change in the way we all understand what american capitalism is, what it does and has done--and more importantly that what has happened is a function of policy choices based on ways in which information has been framed---the result would be that very different kinds of policies have to be put into place along with a different relation to information...

in other words, i think that there's a pretty strong argument here against the continuation of the existing relation between education, the class system it reproduces and the various institutional mechanisms that have been put into place to not really deal with the effects of the first two.

1. it would appear that the relation simon talks about between economic marginalization, an educational system that is a direct mirror of this and the reproduction of marginalization follows directly from the fact that educational funding is tied to local property taxes.

2. there has to be a different kind of information generated that is realistic in its results, and which does not simply feed back onto the institutions that gather that information the bureaucratic image of the world intertwined with indices that enable movement or "progress" to be fed back into that image. if what simon describes in generally accurate, then it looks like these institutions are geared entirely around preserving their funding, so generate pictures of the world symmetrical with their program design and "benchmarks" that indicates motion in order to be able to demonstrate to funding sources that motion is happening.

so the basic problem is that we, collectively, have allowed the development of largely self-referential types and streams of information. this is a systemic problem. it is a really really serious systemic problem.

how on earth is it possible to develop coherent plans--coherent programs--if there's no interest in generating systematic images of the social situations these plans are supposed to effect?

if you ever read stuff about how stalin's various economic plans were implemented and the ways in which information was rigged to provide an illusion of implementation, you may find that it's not that different from what's being talked about here. the stalinist system was wholly incoherent and held itself together primarily through violence. what holds the american one together?

so there's at the least an information collection/co-ordination problem.
more basically, there's a fundamental political problem that has to do with the ways in which bureaucracy has been instituted in BOTH state and non-state contexts compounded by an apparent lack of awareness of system-characteristics of bureaucracies---how they tend to parse their environments for example--because there ARE general tendencies (the imperative to reduce complexity, say)...
within that, it seems to me that there has to be a serious rethink of how information about the socio-economic realities in america are produced, what the status of this information is, how it is used, etc.

because the situation simon outlines is entirely insane.

of course, you or i may or may not see evidence of this depending on whe
re we live geographically--which corresponds to class position.

3. i can imagine any number of initiatives--say micro-credit, say larger-scale initiatives, that could be undertaken in order to grow various types of economic activity in these marginalized areas that may or may not be geared around any "integration" into the larger=scale capitalist status quo--but this would have to be understood as a desirable political end--and the problem would have to be amenable to being outlined.

frankly, conservatives--and this includes republicans and democrats--are perfectly content to let an entire segment of the american population rot, so long as they don't have to look at the consequences of that rotting in their insulated everyday lives.
because that, folks, is what simon describes for you.

welcome to america.
and this is just one place.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite