tdaxp podcast

Dan Abbot from tdaxp is the first guest on Phil Jones' new podcast .

+ Good to hear Dan's voice. I was looking forward to that. Phil's accent, much as I try to resist such determinations, is really nice.

+ Dan says watching Tom's brief 'changed the direction of his life': started him weblogging and changed his career path from Computer Science PhD to international relations, politics, and psychology.

+ Ooh, man, Phil! That was a nice connection between computer science/network/systems view of the world.

+ Dan says Libertarians and Conservatives have a common distrust of the motives of people - individuals and groups. Tradition tells us what hasn't led to the destruction of our society.

+ Whoa. Then Dan calls out a 'bad' culture, Lakota Sioux,  where their values led them to ruin. That's pretty cheeky!

+ Dan goes on to say that [paraphrase alert!] superior cultures beat inferior cultures via Darwin-like natural selection based largely on internal coherence. Seems like you're trying to have it both ways here, Dan: 'Beauty. Culture. God.' from your old masthead. Call it 'values'. And Darwinian superiority of certain cultures.

+ Dan says Lakota and Dakota culture were both predicated on plenty of space to walk around in. So was Western Culture. But we were the one with the 'guns, germs, and steel' to take the space.

+ Phil does a nice job of teasing out the ideas and asking questions like 'Would you want to put it that way?'.

+ Dan advocates Jesuit syncretism in China v. Benedictine purity. Theologically, I disagree.

+ Ooh! Good question, Phil, about hierarchy in the Catholic Church v. Federalism. Dan says the Catholic Church is more successful than the Protestant Church by any measure. But which one is more like the Federalism you extol, Dan? Not to mind, what counts as 'Christian' on a scale from minimal to devoted? Lapsed Catholics and Jews still self-identify by religious 'culture'. Lapsed Protestants self-identify as 'Jedi' ;-)