nation-building – mil's page

I’ve been note-taking again; yesterday on the tunnelbana (Stockholm’s metro) and today in one particular Joe & the Juice I love because of the jazz playlist you often get in the mornings. The one near Hötorget.

I’ve taken a liberty, too. It may not be the right thing to do: but if it’s not, we can amend and choose something else. What follows I have headed as “Astrid’s Garden”, in its English translation. Because, just as Alan Turing was a man of good genius, and yet had to fight for his right to be himself, so Astrid Lindgren, in a different time, place and culture, chose to fight what she believed in. And like Turing, it was for and behalf of a society which one day might become of the good.

Here is the stream of thought I’ve had over last night through to just after this midday …

mission:

fight fire with water wherever possible; only fight it with fire when utterly unavoidable

1. all the participating organisations achieve representation in terms of the potential and promise of individuals who belong to each.

to achieve this:

we create a bespoke evaluation process which allows us to identify this individual potential and promise in ways no one dreamed of.

the basis of the project is neuro-diverse complex problems-solutioning tech architectures: hardware, wearables and software all.

• https://www.sverige2.earth/unified

stepped in stages from the first privacy-sensitive structures through privacy-positive and secrecy-sensitive to the final goal: secrecy-positive.

• https://www.sverige2.earth/complexify-roadmap

we should spend as much money on people and their brains as we ever will on tech.

why does this feel uncomfortable? when did we ever feel spending massive amounts of money on tech was wrong? isn’t that the purpose of tech — to have money spent on it? ok. well. lots of virtues in that, for sure. but why not feel comfortable with doing the opposite? spending money on people: on our strengths and our capabilities.

• https://www.secrecy.plus/hmagi | hmagi.com

why not?

what could it mean?

spending directly, with salaries that allow for correct, humane, and moral conditions and sustenance; and then supportively, re technologies that upskill, expand and enhance the capacity for — ultimately — a wholly secrecy-positive “pure thought” that each person chosen will be chosen for because they already bring it – in more or less raw state — to the table at the start.

the projects and workstreams will then be enabled to first drive with efficiency (that is, leading to hyper-nonconformist hyper-performing person-focussed inside-out tech always) but along the way also creating regularly and inclusively (that is, what i have already conceptualised as hyperteam-delivering tech) as the programme progresses.

• https://thephilosopher.space

2. the goal is, however, also unremitting. completely so. as completely as the uk’s bletchley park during the second world war.

the targets as twofold:

a) bad actors; and b) preferred outcomes

a) the first target will focus on russia and china, and others who have, equally, allowed the criminality of the aforementioned to embed itself longitudinally throughout these years: from the russian wealth and war-focussed revenue streams in the uk alongside the collaboration at, and of, all levels of the conservative party to the chinese “police stations” spreading across supposedly sovereign britain and europe, with huawei and others as pure extensions of the chinese government’s aims to install surveillance within our internet backbones, never mind on phones, devices multiple, and so forth … all these are all examples of what i have called neocrime:

• https://crimehunch.com/neocrime

things we don’t see or even imagine until usually their creators have moved on to something else, at which point they lose interest in ongoing concealment. because whilst concealment exists, it happens for one reason: those committing such criminality are clever enough not to need to show anyone, ever, exactly how clever they are.

so we simply remain unaware, thinking “random” or “life” or … whatever.

3. astrids trädgård must therefore exist to anticipate, scope, identify, protect, and serve the interests of a real, good western democracy.

there is more we need to focus on …

b) in the best traditions of the united nations, we don’t only focus on detail, which is often passing. we focus also on the overarching and inalienable: the universal; the unchanging … literally and figuratively.

this is why i would add to the word “unremitting” already introduced one other word:

4. when we are able to fight fire with water, the word already mentioned. but when fire is our only alternative, then perhaps from a related org not open to astrids trädgård personnel themselves (for everyone’s mental wellbeing and sense of proportion and focus) we must fight this awful longitudinal fire that led to ukraine in the first place, and is sustained by the joint authoritarianism of russia and the chinese since much longer than we care to realise, with an equally merciless fire of our own.

so … proportionality always:

proportionate always, i repeat: but more than what “unremitting” tells us. and you may disagree, too; we may need to refine; we might have to finesse.

but in all cases, peter levine, the american civic thinker, and one of the most humane humans who ever lived, was right: good democracy demands we be inclusive, yes, but equally … we must be efficient.

• https://peterlevine.ws/?p=6359

so if covert spending exists to fund the fire with fire side, then it must have another name and mission quite different from astrids trädgård.

5 however, one thing must remain sharply clear: the final goal of both organisations will thankfully be shared.

it must be thus:

the objectives of both fire with water and fire with fire are to preserve, expand, deliver, share, and educate everyone globally — facilitating, also, that everyone become completely versed re these arts of learner and teacher — in the virtues of what i have seen in sweden these months:

a community spirit built on the absolute sovereignty of what we all hope are ultimately the nation’s most thinking citizens. and with this i mean … everyone in their absolute diversity and dignity to be enabled to express themselves of this diversity.

we MUST, similarly, trust that human beings will prefer their innate humanity over what we see in ukraine, in london’s richest money-laundering centres, in china, in places of similar authoritarianism across the globe — just so many, too many, far too many.

but in order for a human being to prefer humanity over inhumanity when the choice presents itself, we also MUST give the humanity we want to flower the tools to make it possible for all people to FEEL that it’s SAFE TO BE GOOD.

which is why i say: nation-building and citizen-building have to be accompanied by fighting crime and ensuring global security in the ways i will never stop advocating. ways which, to date, we have absolutely never pursued.

i hope this is ok. i hope for many reasons.

and i am always open to debate, to new ideas, to restructuring it all, if the evidence says it must be so.

but i also hold true to the reality that no one believed anything i said for twenty, and maybe more, years … but twenty at least.

and so i cry now not for me, but for the hundreds of thousands, maybe millions too, of other human beings who still aren’t believed in just the same way because we knowingly, negligently, make it possible for criminals (and all similar — including those who advantage themselves of loopholes and zemiological processes multiple) to be far more creative and nonconformist in their criminality than we have dared — ever CARED! — to be in our battle against the same.

one final thought:

just reconsider this.

just one more time.

why are criminals the strongest link in their criminality whilst the security industry consistently sustains the rest of us humans must be the weakest link in security?

• https://www.secrecy.plus/fire

it wouldn’t have anything to do with the fact that it’s easier to monetise a widely imposed, machine-based counterforce to criminality than it is to integrate machines closely and sympathetically with the actual needs of the most competent, existent crimefighters we already have.

finding themselves, it’s true, not only having to fight the rampant criminality that leads directly to authoritarian russia and ukraine but also the #it- and #ai-#tech which their manufacturers utterly refuse, even today, especially today, to make supportive of humans as we actually are.

would it?

a couple of days ago i was in a human-friendly cafe in a department store here in #stockholm which i love so much.

not the one in the video above, i hasten to add — but the feelings i regularly extract joyously from it are exactly similar …

🙂

it’s a cafe which is human-friendly for several reasons: firstly, the working-conditions which the staff may work to their best in; secondly, the overall atmosphere and decor which are both, without being shouty about it, firmly diversity-welcoming; and then thirdly, the food itself … the salads it sells are magnificent paeons to well-priced and healthy existences.

ok. so.

this post is actually not about the above. not really. it’s more about the #swedish character: the right to allow someone to learn by making mistakes.

and sometimes the “someone” in question doesn’t; and especially if they are not steeped in this deep #swedish tradition of profound reflection: a tradition some — especially from the us, uk, and similar — confuse foolishly with an inability to take decisions in a timely fashion.

in the uk, we usually say no decision is worse than a decision taken poorly. but what we in the uk forget to remind ourselves (oh, and i say “we” so i sound less combative, didn’t you know?) is that to resist even the poor decision because one’s finely attuned #intuition knows that the gold of the matter — any matter! — is still out there waiting to complete a full picture is, in itself, surely, to sometimes involve taking the best decisions history will be able to witness.

so in countries like the uk and the us, when we have ENOUGH data is WHEN we decide.

which is why so often — in respect of nation-building at least (what provoked this post in part), but perhaps civil engineering as just one example, as well as other complex processes in a multitude of sectors, too — enough actually is clearly not enough in historical hindsight.

it may also be a thing of a certain kind of social sensibility. and whilst this is for another post, i do think yes it could very well be. the good right is often patient out of calculation, despite all intentions. the good left perhaps, more resiliently (for my universe), acts out of true compassion.

either way, to know when enough is NOT enough is what the #swedish people, alongside a wider #sweden of institutions and organisations and ways of doing things so particularly, really does manage to deliver on quite superlatively when acting out of its very best instincts.

and so — finally! — to the anecdote: the human-friendly cafe. i saw a mother or carer, a toddler in high chair, and a joyful young girl of perhaps about five or six at a large round table near where i was sat. on the large tables in this restaurant they put red hearts on a sign which gently requests that only parties the size of the table sit there. the community instinct, i think they say (my #swedish still isn’t where it should be), so everyone can sit down who wants to. a jaundiced british eye would say: “footfall, above all …” (but then again, maybe the jaundiced one is me …)

anyways.

one of the hearts on another big round table next to this party of three was in the shape of an ace of spades: the sign had been placed upside down.

i watched from a distance: the young #swedish girl clocked the difference, checked back at her own table, and realised (i sense) what had happened. but then she did something which for me was initially strange — but which, in retrospect, was UTTERLY #swedish: she said nothing to her mother/carer; neither did she choose to change the ace of spades back to a heart; but instead, manifestly, kept the information for herself.

and maybe on another occasion, too, she’d mention it to someone. but at that moment, she chose to reflect further, as the individual she was and saw herself to be.

and this is what the rest of us forget about #sweden when our right trots out its tropes over and over as it does: the #swedish sense of community — even today — is built profoundly on the individual, NOT on a culture of smothering: the individual, that is, as the inviolable building-block of their sense of society.

and sometime this sense is more or less militaristic. but always it is founded on the deepest of respect for the right of each person to go so far as to make a fool of themselves — and then, fabulously, be fully supported into learning how not to in some better future.

above all this: support for the integrity and reality of the inviolable shape of the individual.

this for me is #sweden. and this is how i would like other countries and cultures to see the best of what #sweden still gifts to the world. why? because i would like the rest of us to learn that there is a way forwards; a profoundly good one for us all. not exactly the same way: but as music, reinterpreting itself continuously.

it doesn’t necessarily involve dominating the enemy either, whomsoever our history at any time demands we must thus define it.

no.

not this.

but it does mean that the “enemy” must learn, finally for themselves, as the little girl who clearly is no one’s enemy is now doing every beautiful learning moment of her life, that nothing is irrational; that there is a reason for everything; and that if we think long enough, we will uncover the truth — NEVER post-modern nor relativistic, any more, for sure … — to absolutely all the pain and joy and intelligence and art and science and education and law and medicine and passion and poetry and good faith we just have to yearn for in our both shared and assertively collective future-presents … based, always, as i now demand myself they be, firmly and forever i mean, on the rights and integrities of the individuals we all are: OUR building-blocks.

just this.

ourselves …

Tag: nation-building

“astrids trädgård”: the swedish-located bletchley park