ETC.: A Review of General Semantics articles from January 2006

ETC.: A Review of General Semantics archives from January 2006

A. E. van Vogt and the World of Null-A.(Critical essay)
January 1, 2006... "He felt a keen excitement attracting vibrant minds and turning them to the pursuit of a higher human purpose." IF A.E. VAN VOGT had written a story of his own life, he would perhaps have started with this line. In a sense, it...

Machines don't have issues--only people do.
January 1, 2006... "WE HAVE AN ISSUE with a leaking fuel tank, and the team is stuck. We need our help right away." An issue about leaking gasoline? That sounded more like a problem to me! I arrived at the client site at 10:00 p.m. that same night, tired and...

Read House dedication: a new home for general semantics.
January 1, 2006... WHILE thousands of coastal residents fled to the Fort Worth-Dallas area seeking temporary shelter from Hurricane Rita, a few dozen members of the Institute came to Fort Worth to dedicate a more permanent home. Read House dedication...

Happiness formulae: an update and critique.
January 1, 2006... GENERAL SEMANTICS THINKERS have developed several formulae for happiness. A recent issue of ETC discussed and reprinted original writings about such formulae by Alfred Korzybski and his followers, including Wendell Johnson, Harry Weinberg,...

Introcosm.(Poem)
January 1, 2006... Ask who am I and what am I and why, And I will tell you gladly, without guile. Sit down beside me on the grass awhile. Now stare up at the surging of the sky. Who calls that cloud a camel? Who but I? See? There's a crab. And there a...

General semantics and Holocaust denial.
January 1, 2006... Introduction CERTAIN GROUPS claim the Holocaust never happened. Almost from the beginning of the discovery of this widespread destruction of European Jewry before and during World War II, Nazi apologists, anti-Semites, and self-styled...

Some "new" extensional devices 2006.
January 1, 2006... ALFRED KORZYBSKI, in Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics (1933), argued that our language would be more effective if we used certain techniques from scientific methodology. To this end, he...

Crazy Talk, Stupid Talk--redux.(Critical essay)
January 1, 2006... IN THE 1970s, I worked as a junior high school counselor in New York City. The students at my school didn't want to be in the building, the teachers felt burnt out, and the administrators seemed bewildered about how to improve the situation....

Bookmarking our perceptions.
January 1, 2006... AS I GUIDE my classes down through Korzybski's Structural Differential, from the parabola (event level of reality), to the circle (object of perception), I remind students that many objects and events, for which we have no words, ideas, or even...

Absent presence.(METAPHORS IN ACTION)
January 1, 2006... I HAVE BECOME interested in how oxymorons help us think about media experiences. An oxymoron is a phrase containing contradictory terms. I think that when we experience all media, but particularly electric media, we have slightly contradictory...

Must war be inevitable? A general semantics essay.(CALLING OUT THE SYMBOL RULERS)(Essay)
January 1, 2006... SINCE THE KOREAN WAR, the United States has been involved in a number of conflicts and undeclared wars, and other countries have had wars and internal struggles. Humans have been making war for eons. Perhaps the title of this essay should ask:...

"Response Side Semantics".(CALLING OUT THE SYMBOL RULERS)
January 1, 2006... FROM THE July 1, 2005, National Public Radio broadcast of the Diane Rehm Show: Diane: Here is an interesting email from Steve, who's the Executive Director for the Institute of General Semantics. He says: "These kinds of...

Death with dignity or criminal act?(CALLING OUT THE SYMBOL RULERS)
January 1, 2006... THE TITLE of this article appeared as a headline over an article on ABCNews.com (1) during the first week in October. That week, the Supreme Court, under the guidance of newly appointed Chief Justice John Roberts, heard arguments in the matter...

Katrina taught us all lessons.(CALLING OUT THE SYMBOL RULERS)
January 1, 2006... HINDSIGHT ALWAYS SEEMS to have 20-20 vision. Hurricane Katrina showed us just how inadequate planning had been for such a disaster. Fingers started pointing in all directions within hours of the storm passing. Criticism--some of its...

Refugee, evacuee, or something else?(CALLING OUT THE SYMBOL RULERS)
January 1, 2006... AS IN OTHER news media outlets, the "refugee vs. evacuee vs. something else" debate has come up at the Missouri School of Journalism, and specifically at the Columbia Missourian. While we don't have a formal policy on "refugee," the...

Catch-22: if he gets smarter, execute him?(ILLUSTRATING GENERAL SEMANTICS)
January 1, 2006... THE SUPREME COURT decided in 2002 that it's unconstitutional to execute a murderer who is retarded. The ruling was in the case of Daryl Atkins of Virginia, who scored 59 on an IQ test in 1998. That state put the cutoff for retardation at 70....

The Fractal Murders.(Book review)
January 1, 2006... Mark Cohen. The Fractal Murders. New York: Mysterious Press, 2004. Pepper Keane, a private investigator who collects old-time rock and roll and likes to read philosophy, is hired by Jane Smyers, a University of Colorado math professor, to...

Dark Hero of the Information Age: In Search of Norbert Wiener the Father of Cybernetics.(Book Review)
January 1, 2006... Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman. Dark Hero of the Information Age: In Search of Norbert Wiener the Father of Cybernetics. New York: Basic Books, 2005. I was introduced to Norbert Wiener through Neil Postman's Media Ecology seminars. A...

Status Anxiety.(Excerpt)
January 1, 2006... Alain de Botton. Status Anxiety. New York: Pantheon, 2004. Alain de Botton defines "status anxiety" as "A worry so pernicious as to be capable of ruining extended stretches of our lives, that we are in danger of failing to conform to the...

The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse.(Book Review)
January 1, 2006... Gregg Easterbrook. The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse. New York: Random House, 2004. Gregg Easterbrook believes that practically everything is getting better. For example, he states that national crime rates...

Fifty years ago in ETC.(RETROSPECT)
January 1, 2006... We are adrift in a strange and frightening world. The same breath that promises new delights sighs at the ever present shadow of atomic destruction. We witness chaos at international and local levels. Even supposedly "friendly" nations seem to...

Mark your calendar--2006.(Calendar)
January 1, 2006... Check online for the latest details: www.time-binding.org/news.htm. Jan 31-Feb 21 -- Fort Worth, TX. Evening seminar, 4 weekly sessions at Read House, Institute of General Semantics. Mar 24-26 -- Fort Worth, TX. Weekend seminar, Read...