A non-universal normativism
David Haekwon Kim: In doing philosophy, I often approach normative issues with concerns about lived experience, cultural difference, political subordination, and social movements changing conditions of agency.
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David Haekwon Kim: In doing philosophy, I often approach normative issues with concerns about lived experience, cultural difference, political subordination, and social movements changing conditions of agency.
Young people spoke to me enthusiastically about the good things that flow from a life lived by the rule of three, which you can follow not only during meals but all the time. First of all,
1. There is the magic of the always available elsewhere. You can put your attention wherever you want it to be.
2. You can always be heard.
3. You never have to be bored.
When you sense that a lull in the conversation is coming, you can shift your attention from the people in the room to the world you can find on your phone. But the students also described a sense of loss.
-- Sherry Turkle
I've studied schools, universities and workplaces. When college students explain to me how dividing their attention plays out in the dining hall, some refer to a "rule of three." In a conversation among five or six people at dinner, you have to check that three people are paying attention -- heads up -- before you give yourself permission to look down at your phone. So conversation proceeds, but with different people having their heads up at different times.
The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die. Economically, they are negative assets. Morally, they are indefensible. Forget all your cheap theatrical Bruce Springsteen crap. Forget your sanctimony about struggling Rust Belt factory towns and your conspiracy theories about the wily Orientals stealing our jobs. Forget your goddamned gypsum, and, if he has a problem with that, forget Ed Burke, too. The white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles.
Donald Trump's speeches make them feel good. So does OxyContin. What they need isn't analgesics, literal or political. They need real opportunity, which means that they need real change, which means that they need U-Haul. If you want to live, get out of Garbutt. -- Kevin D. Williamson is roving correspondent for National Review. This article originally appeared in the March 28, 2016, issue of National Review.
-- Kevin D. Williamson
When Ms. Rometty became chief executive in January 2012, she told her executive team that she wanted to improve -- "to rethink and reimagine" -- the experience of IBM's customers. This was motivated partly by a shift in how businesses were buying technology.
As more purchased software as a service over the Internet, buying decisions were often being made by workers in functional departments -- human relations, sales, marketing and data analytics -- rather than by a central corporate information technology office. In this new market, software that was tailored to workers' needs and could be used without technical help from IT employees would win the day.
Software developers are just as important as customers to IBM, since both groups create markets. "We wanted to redefine IBM for developers," said Damion Heredia, an IBM vice president who leads the Bluemix operation.