Finalist-PhilBlogAwards 2010

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Wednesday, November 25, 2015

WEST MARKETS SHRINK, ASIANS’ RISE AND OVERTAKE WEST SOON



WEST MARKETS SHRINK, ASIANS’ RISE AND OVERTAKE WEST SOON

Erle Frayne D. Argonza

Good evening from the Pearl of the Orient!

The International Monetary Fund or IMF has been quite bullish lately about Asian growth. It had forecast East Asia’s average growth at past 7% for this year, and shares an equally positive growth trend for RP at 5.5%-6%. Just what could be the implications of the growth trends on the global economy and the West?

As Asia expands, the West (Europe, USA, Canada, Japan) contracts. The trend will not change much over the next five (5) years, so let’s see where the East and West are headed for in the foreseeable future.

In early 2008 yet, the economists and financial analysts of the West (or North) were of the opinion that the technological cutting edge of the West was already breached by Asia by the end of 2007 yet. Remember that 2007 was the beginning of a new cycle of recession for the West which began in the USA with the implosion of the realty bubble.

Given that the Western economies are flat on their back growth-wise, and their toxic bubble economies have given them only virtual economy results (read: inflated values not based on real production but on speculation), there is ample reason to forecast that they will be mired in problems of saving their ailing banks, financial-monetary systems, and providing sovereign guarantees to their capitalists at the expense of taxpayers and infusing investments in the physical economy. This is now matter of fact, as we can clearly see.

Western economies have suffered from the ill effects of continuous de-industrialization for decades, of being remiss in their own infrastructures (USA seems to be the worst in infrastructure decay), and deteriorating investments in science & technology. From being a producer economy, Western economy generally has become a parasitical ‘eater economy’ that stands on no clear foundation other than financial quicksand.

In contrast, the Eastern economies have steadily built their strategic industries across the decades, reinforced their infrastructure expenditures and projects, and invested in science & technology. The Eastern economy generally has therefore been role-playing as ‘producer economy’ worth the emulation of other developing economies worldwide.

Result: by 2007, at the downspin year of a recessionary West, the East overtook the West in terms of cutting-edge technologies. To qualify, the technologies we refer to are those life-inducing technologies, not those death & destruction technologies that the West has clear edge till these days.

I still remember what my nationalist colleagues in the Sunday Kapihan that we then held every Sunday at the Sulo Hotel in Manila: the West knows nothing but perfect its Armaments.  Dr. Emmanuel Yap, an economist who finished his PhD at Harvard University, was the most vocal about that emphasis on the death & destruction focus of Western innovations.

To continue, the added forecast that I’d share at this moment is this: from the years 2007 through 2015, Western markets will contract by at least 30%. That means their own consuming public will spend less and less across a 9-year stretch, until the consumption pattern will settle down by 2016 or so. Real GDP (gross domestic product) will radically decline during the period, shrinking by as much as 30%-40% contrasted to their 2006 levels (the last of the best years of the West).

In contrast, the Eastern markets will expand by at least 100% during the period. The giants China and India will go farther than that, with China expanding by as much as 200% during the same period. That means the middle income earners in the East will continue to rise by the year and consume more products by the year, even travel more overseas year by year.

Result: China will clearly overtake the shrunken economies of EU and USA by end of 2015. India may follow suit, at around the years 2020-2025. The last would be ASEAN, which will overtake the West by 2025-2030 period.

Once a region overtakes others technology-wise, it will just be a matter of time before the same innovator region will overtake the rest wealth-wise. Technologies—physical technologies, biotechnologies, social technologies, medical technologies—are precisely the cutting edge practices that will enable one region to overtake others across the globe.

The bad news for the West is this: if their own states and markets will fail to solve their ailing problems in infrastructures and reverse de-industrialization, they will pathetically go down as 3rd world or ‘developing economies’ past 2020. No less than their own economists warned of this possibility in the early 1990s yet, and sadly no one paid attention to them in their own backyards. City after city in the USA and EU will immerse in urban decay, becoming 3rd world cities in the process.

My mother just retired from New York where she migrated since the 80s yet. She decided to come home back to the Philippines, and visited the Libis & Cubao areas of Quezon City/Manila suburb pronto upon her arrival. She was so deeply enchanted by the esthetic beauty of the architectures and planning in those mixed land use zones, while she complained of the dilapidated buildings and nauseating smells of cinema theatres in downtown Manhattan.

Those observations are signs of the times indeed. In just a year from now, the Pagcor City will rise in Manila, housing the world’s tallest tower. Burj Dubai, Petronas Twin Towers, and Taipei 101 are already similar hallmarks in other Asian cities, signifying the power shift from East to West.

The message is hereby brought to the West’s peoples: shift back from virtual reality to physical reality, from the virtual economy to the real economy. We Asians will help you along the way, as we’ve already been doing through our colossal treasuries investments, direct foreign investments, and quality Asian expatriates in your backyards that have been saving your collapsing economies from rapid decay.


[Philippines, 13 July 2012]

Monday, November 16, 2015

LARGE CLASS, MAD DISCOURSE: SAME ROOTS



LARGE CLASS, MAD DISCOURSE: SAME ROOTS

Erle Frayne D. Argonza

Magandang hapon! Good afternoon!

Classes have resumed here in Manila/Philippines, and our campuses are again swarming with pupils, students, teachers. Focused on their tasks, the same stakeholders are barely aware of what’s going on in the world around them, a world that is changing fast at confusing rate.

While the rugs under our feet our changing, the old context of large classes (class sizes of 100-250) are still in vogue in many universities worldwide. Some other universities that may have abolished them in the past, are re-instituting the large class platform.

As I’ve said in a previous article, the large class platform belongs to the past ages of medievalism and industrialism. To implement it now, at this time, is a regressive decision.

The large class, which unconsciously glues students to the ‘Herd instinct’, is anathema to the overall evolutionary movement of the human psyche towards greater individuation. University education is supposedly an opportunity field for the flourishing of that individuation.

The ‘mad discourse’ is finding expression in many venues today. The large class platform feeds inputs to the mad discourse, and is subtly rooted in it in fact. Its rationale hides under the rubric of technocratese language, but any sharp observer will easily unveil the illusion and show the large class platform’s connection to the ‘mad discourse’.

Imagine if all students are subjected to the same large classes, where they cannot air feedbacks or questions at all as they are consigned to passive receivers of inputs from a lecture professor. Imagine exposing freshmen students to this platform for 4-5 years, and assess the degeneration of the same students into the hovels of passivity.

Such a regimentation is just but one step short of what the Phase III cybernetics is up to these days: chipping humans. Phase III cybernetics had worked out to erase the dividing line between human behavior and machine behavior, with practical uses aimed at chipping all humans in the future.

The same chipped humans can then be put under the control of mega-computer systems, their behavior eventually reprogrammable to make them more in tune with what the System demands. They can be sent to war fronts as armies and technicians, and will experience no fear as fear will be deleted or subjugated by mega-control commands from their own psyche.

Wars and police states of the near future will be easily justified with every technocratese language conceivable, rendering them as typical ‘mad discourse’ in the argot of Michel Foucault. Mad, in that the erasure of the boundary between reason and the irrational has been effectively erased or deleted.

If there is anything that university policy makers must do now, it is to abolish all large classes while there is still time. Globally, we concerned citizens are doing what we can to deter moves by elites to install nazi-type regimes in the West, leading to a global state later that will be in need of compliant citizens.

Let us all do our tasks now to take down school platforms that will be the launching pads for compliant humans who can be chipped in couples of years’ time. The VeriChip by Verizon Corp is now out, and before 2015 a more perfected prototype will be out, ready to be implanted to humans via syringe (by trained doctors/medics).

We still have the time to act, to note. Any decision that infringes on human liberties is dangerously fascistic, such as re-instituting or maintaining large classes.

Failing to act in time, we shall watch in horror as new ‘das boots’ kids will be churned out from our youth, commanded via chips to participate in building a Draconian deux ex machina of the near future. And they’re products of our universities, products of large classes.

By then, I will be having the last laugh. With resonating guffaws will I declare “I told you so.”


[Philippines, 27 June 2012]

[See: IKONOKLAST: http://erleargonza.blogspot.com,

  



Saturday, November 07, 2015

LARGE CLASS IN UNIVERSITIES: OUTDATED, AUTHORITARIAN!



LARGE CLASS IN UNIVERSITIES: OUTDATED, AUTHORITARIAN!

Erle Frayne D. Argonza

It’s late afternoon as I write this piece, and it’s the longest day in the northern hemisphere too (summer solstice). I will devote this piece to the matter of large university classes that are the mode of instruction in many academic institutions across the globe.

Large classes are a thing of the past. The large class modality was referred to as ‘Great Man pedagogy’ in Europe, and was critically challenged by the youth and professors during the stormy youth heydays of the 1960s and ‘70s.

The human psyche is rapidly evolving towards greater individuation. As we humans become more individuated, the educational instruction fit for us is one that should account for and enable our individuality, even up to the point of providing ample space for eccentricity in each one.

In the olden days, when the Herd Mind or folk mind was the characteristic psyche of the people, the modality of instructions was one that would fit them well. Large classes evoked the ‘Herd instinct’ (Nietszchean label for the same), and unconsciously provided a semblance of community for peoples of those ancient times who were cut off from family & village to study in the university.

The coming of the Industrial Age, right after the conclusion of the 30 Years War (1618-48), ushered the ‘assembly line’ of mass production of articles of manufactures. The ‘assembly line’ method found its concomitant equivalent in the Great Man pedagogy which churned out collegiate graduates like commodities for sale in a rapidly expanding labor market.

Up until the late 19th century, during the Victorian Era that is the nadir of the modern age, Great Man pedagogy was a largely unquestioned modality of instruction. As the crisis of the early 20th century set in, the same pedagogy found perfect compatibility with the nascent totalitarian ideologies and systems of that era (fascism, Nazism, communism).

Indubitably, the success of ‘assembly line’ classes was effective only insofar as the psyche remained as more folk-mind or herd-oriented. As the psyche mutates to more individuated type, it will militate against anything that brings it back to the Herd: subject to manipulation and shaping by authoritarian if not sociopathic interest groups and persons.

Sure enough, as the youth rebellion of the 60s set in, the students of the Sorbonne in Paris burst out in revolt against the Great Man pedagogy circa 1968. Other universities quickly caught up the fiery flames of the revolt and followed suit in a tempo of upheavals that were largely unplanned and spontaneous.

Accustomed to bureaucratism and pork barrel largesse that went with mainstream political power, the French Communist Party was caught flat-footed by that revolt. Tailing behind the event that indicated its being mired in intellectual bankruptcy and betrayed its archaic mindset, the communists lose relevance almost overnight.

Had the communists grasped that event quickly and seized the opportunity by siding with the anti-large class youth, the sociopolitical landscape of France and Europe could have changed forever. A social revolution of a new kind, bred by a fusion of working class militancy and youth revulsion against archaic pedagogy and culture, could have been registered in the annals of history as worth our positive valuation.

It is shocking to find out that the large class modality is still around with us today. It is anathema to the goal of human liberation, even as it could be a launching ground to breed new ‘boot camp’ babies for certain interest groups of a fascistic/authoritarian nature.

The Industrial Age had now passed away, and the Post-Industrial/Postmodern Age has brought along with it an erasure (sous rapture) of the dividing line between Reason and Madness. Fascism is resurgent worldwide, and before we’d notice it a global state would be in the offing that is orchestrated by an ideological force of global Bonaparte.

If the large class modality is re-introduced in any university whatsoever, it should only be on an interim phase. It is a regressive  move, and running counter to the gamut of psychical individuation, it will erode in time and be abolished across the globe.

Should there be a youth revolt against this antiquated pedagogy in my own home country, I will be glad to make my presence in the barricades to be set up.