Found a wonderfully inspiring site yesterday (but regrettably am still too busy to find the time to read much or write about it): Sanjana Hattotuwa’s ICT4Peace (http://ict4peace.wordpress.com) …

“ICT for Peacebuilding (hereafter referred to as ICT4Peace) is essentially, the creation of hope using technology to support a peace process. Hope is not a result of the technology itself, but by what technology facilitates between and within the hearts and minds of stakeholders in a peace process. IC4Peace is an important area of practice and research because it can augment the efforts of peacebuilders by enhancing channels, avenues and possibilities for communication, information and knowledge sharing, collaboration, empowerment and discussion in virtual spaces, even when physical, real world meetings are impossible on account of geographical distance or political sensitivities.”

Go read through it yourself. The one thing I want to note here is that the author’s technology thinking with regard to ICT4Peace are uncannily similar to my own with respect to where I want to go with ICT4D:

• Mapping culture and emotions that inform decisive decisions (or lack thereof) in a peace process must be an on-going prerogative of ICT4Peace systems.
• Artificial Intelligence (AI) based decision support modelling, based on complex multi-faceted databases that allow for the storage and analysis of culture, emotion, hagiography, myth, legend, aspirations, needs, interests, resources, diaspora and international community actions, spoiler dynamics, donor interests and civil society initiatives, amongst others, need to be built to allow future scenario development, a cornerstone of the development of any sustainable peace agreement.
• Complex adaptive systems instead of pre-packaged solutions. Peace processes aren’t linear and are an ill-fit to systems designed with pre-conceived notions of conflict. ICT4Peace is iterative, adapting to complexity through systems that learn from failures.

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Remembering, and looking through old notebooks for, a quote from Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle that I’d scribbled down in probably my late teens, I came serendipitously upon another, wholly unrelated, quote from Alfred Radcliffe-Brown’s The Andaman Islanders (1922) that, in my neatest rounded script, I’d copied into my notebook with what I (irrelevantly, but as a matter of curiosity) remember to be my old Parker fountain pen:

A society depends for its existence on the presence in the minds of its members of a certain system of sentiments by which the conduct of the individual is regulated in conformity with the needs of the society … The sentiments in question are not innate but are developed in the individual by the action of the society upon him … The ceremonial (i.e., collective) expression of any sentiment serves both to maintain it at the requisite degree of intensity in the mind of the individual and to transmit it from one generation to another.

This was the period in my life, eighteen to twenty years old, when I was reading and thinking about the sorts of things that would preoccupy my mind ever after, that exciting space of time during which I was reading inter alia Durkheim and de Saussure, Radcliffe-Brown and Roheim, Lévi-Strauss and Lacan.  And that quote from Kurt Vonnegut?

Beware the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before.  He is full of murderous resentment of people who are ignorant without have come by their ignorance the hard way.

Nearly thirty-five years on, I think I now know what that means.

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Have you ever noticed how Have you ever noticed how is ever more commonly used in contexts in which its rhetorical function is quite different from what might be suggested by the literal meaning of Have you ever noticed how? No longer is it a genuine, hence innocent, enquiry as to whether you have noticed how … (… and insert whatever you like here); increasingly it is becoming a clichéd prelude to a political jibe, and a Google search indicates that it will almost exclusively be a jibe against ‘liberals’, ‘progressives’, ‘left-wingers’, hence emanating from the political ‘right’. Some examples:

“Have you ever noticed how liberals and leftists just can’t accept reality when reality conflicts with their own warped worldview?” (section-31.blogspot.com)

“Have you ever noticed how liberals are constantly making wild over the top predictions of doom that never come true?” (napablogger.com)

“Have you ever noticed how liberals fight against every established moral truth?” (honestconservative.blogspot.com)

“Have you ever noticed how liberals do not like balanced and fair Fox News?” (nodakoutdoors.com)

“Have you ever noticed how Liberals are always such naysayers?” (lkmp.blogspot.com)

“Have you ever noticed how liberals in general are always telling people what they really think, rather than listening to what those people actually say?” (thestudyofrevenge.blogspot.com)

“Have you ever noticed how Liberals create a world of corruption, and then assume and behave like everyone is corrupt like they are?” (rathergate.com)

“Have you ever noticed how liberals love to refer to themselves as ‘progressives’ but refer to you as ‘right wing’? ” (illinoisreview.typepad.com)

“Have you ever noticed how liberals love to toss numbers around and think everyone will believe them without question?” (shadydowns.blogspot.com)

“Have you ever noticed how liberals are not concerned nowadays about whether something is true or not but are only concerned with whether it is insensitive.” (pat2k.com)

“Have you ever noticed how liberals love to talk about the Holocaust and visit Holocaust memorials, but will do nothing to prevent the need for future ones to be built?” (littlegreenfootballs.com)

“Have you ever noticed how liberals want to keep throwing extra money into failing schools, yet they don’t want to screen the teachers to make sure they are competent teachers?” (us.geocities.com/stephen1siegel/)

“Have you ever noticed how liberals don’t respond to arguments against their position?” (uspoliticsonline.com/forums/)

The purpose—exemplifying the logical fallacy of the ‘loaded question’—is clear: in a question of the form “Have you ever noticed how P”, the truth of proposition P is presupposed; consequently, an affirmative or negative answer only confirms whether the hearer has noticed that P, while P itself is not offered up for scrutiny, discussion, or refutation.

My intuition (though I’ve found no evidence to support this) is that its rhetorical use in this manner originates in the advertising industry, as a device for highlighting the virtues of some product against its competitors. “Have you ever noticed how ordinary washing powders …?” “Have you ever noticed how some deodorants …?” The casual ‘by-the-way’ character of the question form invests the embedded proposition with the taken-for-granted-ness of common everyday knowledge, possibly amusing in advertising but insidious in politics.
Just thought I’d share that with you …

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