Arquivo para November, 2017
Empowerment, Autonomy and State
16
Nov
Several United Nations studies and development questions point to a new
paradigm of” good practices “or” good management “of the state.
Magdalena Sepúlveda Carmona (2013) clearly points out the relationship between empowerment and poverty “lack of power is a universal and basic characteristic of poverty. Poverty is not solely a lack of income, but rather is characterized by a vicious cycle of powerlessness, stigmatization, discrimination, exclusion and material deprivation, which all mutually reinforce each other.”
Empowerment is something of a development “fuzzword” (Cornwall, 2007), a broad concept that allows multiple interpretations and definitions, often reflecting the theoretical or ideological predisposition of their exponents. Ibrahim and Alkire (2007) have listed 32 different, but overlapping definitions of the word.2 This paper will use a definition based on Eyben (2011):
“Empowerment happens when individuals and organized groups are able to imagine their world differently and to realize that vision by changing the relations of power that have kept them in poverty, restricted their voice and deprived them of their autonomy.”
An empowering approach is both an end in itself, and a means to eradicating poverty and exclusion in their broader (multidimensional) sense.
Effective experiences of empowerment tend to involve a “magic triangle”: active civil society environment, committed public officials or political leaders, and enforcement mechanisms that guarantee that initiatives “have teeth”. That means that civil society organization is an asset, and its weakness or absence a problem. Governments need to nurture independent, active civil society organizations and protect the space in which they can operate.
The good news is that history appears to be firmly on the side of empowerment, as the global broadening and deepening of human rights since the creation of the United Nations system unambiguously demonstrates.
paradigm of” good practices “or” good management “of the state.Magdalena Sepúlveda Carmona (2013) clearly points out the relationship between empowerment and poverty “lack of power is a universal and basic characteristic of poverty. Poverty is not solely a lack of income, but rather is characterized by a vicious cycle of powerlessness, stigmatization, discrimination, exclusion and material deprivation, which all mutually reinforce each other.”
Empowerment is something of a development “fuzzword” (Cornwall, 2007), a broad concept that allows multiple interpretations and definitions, often reflecting the theoretical or ideological predisposition of their exponents. Ibrahim and Alkire (2007) have listed 32 different, but overlapping definitions of the word.2 This paper will use a definition based on Eyben (2011):
“Empowerment happens when individuals and organized groups are able to imagine their world differently and to realize that vision by changing the relations of power that have kept them in poverty, restricted their voice and deprived them of their autonomy.”
An empowering approach is both an end in itself, and a means to eradicating poverty and exclusion in their broader (multidimensional) sense.
Effective experiences of empowerment tend to involve a “magic triangle”: active civil society environment, committed public officials or political leaders, and enforcement mechanisms that guarantee that initiatives “have teeth”. That means that civil society organization is an asset, and its weakness or absence a problem. Governments need to nurture independent, active civil society organizations and protect the space in which they can operate.
The good news is that history appears to be firmly on the side of empowerment, as the global broadening and deepening of human rights since the creation of the United Nations system unambiguously demonstrates.
CARMONA, M. S. 2013. Report to the UN Human Rights Council of the Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights. United Nations General Assembly.
CORNWALL, A. 2007. Buzzwords and Fuzzwords: Deconstructing Development Discourse. Development in Practice, 17, 471-484.
EYBEN, R. 2011. Supporting Pathways of Women’s Empowerment: A Brief Guide for International Development Organisations. Pathways Policy Paper. Brighton: Pathways of Women’s Empowerment RPC.
IBRAHIM, S. & ALKIRE, S. 2007. Agency and Empowerment: A proposal for internationally comparable indicators. OPHI Working Paper Series.
CORNWALL, A. 2007. Buzzwords and Fuzzwords: Deconstructing Development Discourse. Development in Practice, 17, 471-484.
EYBEN, R. 2011. Supporting Pathways of Women’s Empowerment: A Brief Guide for International Development Organisations. Pathways Policy Paper. Brighton: Pathways of Women’s Empowerment RPC.
IBRAHIM, S. & ALKIRE, S. 2007. Agency and Empowerment: A proposal for internationally comparable indicators. OPHI Working Paper Series.
Empowerment and the State
15
Nov
Today is the day of the Republic in Brazil, what perspectives can we have 
in terms of a modern state?
One of the rare authors to deal with the empowerment of society is David John Framer who thinks of the distribution of government power in favor of citizenship, it is not a concession of the ruler or a blessing that is given to society, it is the force to recognize the incapacity from the state to society to promote solutions in environments of high complexity, which is characteristic of modern society.
The opening to the democratization of the administrative functions is not an absolute novelty of the Brazilian law, the most notorious experience of gave from the Constitution of 88 with Councils in several administrative systems related to the development of social services, but I draw the attention to the Constitution of Iceland made by crowdsourcing and promoted a cleanup in the country, in the fall of 2008.
In order to identify the theoretical matrix that these governance initiatives have begun to emerge, it is fundamental to rectify the vices identified in the almost 30 years of this constitution, either by the blockages that have been made within these new models, such as “block the agenda” and prevent advances when the particular party is in power, or by incomprehension of the society of the proposed model.
These are initiatives that must start from society, not only the participation consent or a certain ideological nuance, but the whole of society must feel the governance, the deference to what is the understanding of democracy, which Bobbio (2000) , 386) in what he calls “power in public,” society must be the promoter of a collective mode of decision, which could be called an opening within the democratic openness or democratic maturation of Brazilian society.
It is not a minimal state, with less power, incapable of changing administrative and judicial processes that take society to a more fair and transparent point
FRAMER, D. J. The languagem of public administration, Bureaucracy, modernity and posmodernity. USA: The Universidade of Alabama Press, 1995.
BOBBIO, Norberto. Teoria geral da politica. A filosofia politica e as lições dos clássicos. Trad. Daniela Beccaccia Versiana, 9ª. Imp. RJ: Elsevier, 2000.
Administrative problems in Brazil
14
Nov
The already-stated incompetence of the State to fulfill its duties in
the field of guaranteeing fundamental rights, with alternations of model proposals for good administration in situations of fair legal regimes, seems to be a new idea, but it is not.
The problem of our new millennium is the speed of rescuing solutions, which are not allowed to the ideas of the benefits gained over time, both for the correct application of ideas and for the fair evaluation of what was done.
The state does not admit a manual of “good practices” because it changes with time and according to the social context, and in this aspect can not deny the influence of new media that drive social networks for good and evil, for this reason the Electoral Tribunal and also the systems of governance must admit new “practices”.
The Era Vargas, for example, proposed to consolidate a new configuration of the State apparatus, to create new institutions as the manifestation of the bases of the formation of the Brazilian society, is Lustosa da Costa (2008, page 843)
It is García de Enterría’s (1998) indication of the importance of the post-Revolution period of 1930, in order to consolidate a new configuration to the State apparatus, by creating new institutions as a manifestation of the foundations of modern society formation, where legal regulation would be a instrument of containment of power and the establishment of an active, strong and universal governmental power capable of carrying out the project of restructuring society.
Indeed, the drive to industrial capitalism, coupled with the prestige of rationalism, resulted in an environment that demanded of the new bureaucracy “… an essential economic function: the coordination of large enterprises producing goods and services, whether state or private. “As Bresser Pereira (2001) affirms, but that would only materialize with the American support in the period of” allied “war effort with the Companhia Siderurgia Nacional, created in support of the Americans in World War II.
Developmentalism, however, would come at the beginning of the administration of Juscelino Kubitschek finds the proposal of administrative reform, still originating from the Vargas period, which later created in this government the Committee of Studies and Administrative Projects (CEPA), which was “parallel.”
The name “parallel” was given by Lima Junior (1998) for the project “50 years in 5”, where the municipalities, society of mixed economies and other structures in conflict with Congress.
The administrative actions of his Juscelino “50-year-in-5” project, make in 5 years that is need 50 (in Brail in 60´s years).
GARCÍA DE ENTERRÍA, Eduardo. Revolución Francesa Y administración contemporânea. 4ª ed., Madrid: Civitas, 1998.
LIMA JUNIOR, Olavo Brasil de. As reformas administrativas no Brasil: modelos, sucessos, fracassos. in Revista do Serviço Público, Ano 49, Número 2, abr-jun 1998, p. 5-32.
LUSTOSA DA COSTA, Frederico. Brasil: 200 anos de Estado; 200 anos de administração pública; 200 anos de reformas. Revista de Administração Pública, Rio de Janeiro 42(5):829-74, set/out. 2008,Disp em: < http://www.scielo.br/pdf/rap/v42n5/a03v42n5.pdf> Acesso: nov 2017
Paradise Papers” and Global Corruption
13
Nov
After SwissLeaks (see our post) and Panama papers (another post),
new tax havens are now emerging in islets around the world, denounced as “Paradise papers”. The complaint, which involves the network of investigative journalists from more than 80 countries, denounces tax fraud based on the leakage of 13.5 million financial documents from an international law firm based in the Bermuda Islands, Appleby, which were first obtained by the German newspaper Suddeutsche Zeitung. Among the world’s personalities are the British Crown, the singer Maddona and the world champion of formula 1 Louis Hamilton, but they appear the minister Henrique Meirelles of the Farm and the minister Blairo Maggi of the agriculture, besides the businessman Paulo Leman. Owner of Ambev, the Heinz brand and the Burger King chain of restaurants. According to the report people linked to Trump as trade secretary Wilbur Ross, and linked to Russia’s Putin as his son-in-law, plus more than 100 multinational corporations, such as Apple, Nike and Uber, run away from taxes by skilful accounting maneuvers. Having money in paradises does not mean acts of corruption, but finding tax havens with low taxation, and using offshore companies (to the letter off the back, that is to say without much oversight) may be a sign of currency evasion and also corruption. The information details financial transactions of more than 120,000 people since 1950 and 2016, according to the BBC London is not a leak, but a flood. To paraphrase a journalist, “the world must be clean”, a new planetary citizenship should emerge that no longer supports this, and according to Big Data’s analysis in Brazil, the word corruption was the most cited this year here, perhaps it is the ” year of corruption. “
Truth and Worship
10
Nov
The parable of the prudent virgins speaks of the attention that we must 
have the truth and we must watch over it, and the zeal is the eternal vigilance, in the case of hermeneutics is not distance from the reformulation and interpretation of our preconceptions, which does not mean abandoning the principles.
The kingdom of heaven is like the story of the ten young women who took their oil lamps and went out to meet the bridegroom. Five of them were unseemly, and the other five were foreknowledge of the Kingdom of God, also it is Kingdom of Truth.
Heaven is like the story of the ten young women who took their oil lamps and went out to meet the bridegroom, five of whom were unprepared, and the other five were thoughtful and they did not know when the bridegroom was about to arrive, so when he comes, they want to borrow from the wise.
The Hermeneutic Circle is a good tip for prudence, dialogue (in the circle the Text) for understanding part of a pre-figuration (or preconceptions), must by a positive distance (if you do not listen and open- if it is negative) to suspend judgments and the explanation of the Other (the speaker or author of the Text) to promote new insights and new possibilities of relationship, and then the appropriation of text and discourse in a new configuration.
The possibility of a great transformation in the relationship between the Same and the Other promotes a new transformation leading to a new understanding.
Wisdom is not the fruit of an inflated ego, bubbles of “wisdom” or pills of wisdom, is the fruit of real human relations and only lead to LIFE, GOOD CULTURE and GOOD POLITICS, in short the new society.
Understanding and Hermeneutics
09
Nov
Certainly wisdom is the opposite of ignorance, but wisdom is possible that
springs from tradition and wise living, but even these should have present interlocutors who have plunged into the thoughts and reflections of others, and who have read the tradition and the problems somewhere of humanity.
The idea that only a book exists in all wisdom is even refuted by the Christian philosopher Thomas Aquinas with his famous maxim; “Distrust the man of a single book,” Marx also read the “capitalist” economy of Adam Smith and Richard to write his famous “Capital,” but it must be said that few read the Bible, Capital, or any other book of basic reference to the thought of “tradition” that they claim to have.
Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Hans-Geog Gadamer, Emmanuel Lévinas, Paul Ricoeur, Edgar Morin and many others attest that there is a crisis in thought, at least in Western thought, as there is little reading and deepening in the thinking of the Arab and Eastern world , the African is almost incognito.
Another idea is to reduce culture to ideologies, and their exercise is in most cases to subject cultures to their scheme of thought, Paul Ricoeur wrote “ideology is this contempt that makes us take the image for the real, the reflex by the original “(Ricoeur, 2013, page 84) and this is perhaps the greatest Confucianism of our time.
Wisdom involves understanding, and hermeneutics is the science of understanding because it involves interpretation, overcoming preconceptions, understanding and dialogue, and revising concepts, the so-called hermeneutic circle, whose elucidation is made by Gadamer.
Although Gadamer sees him as stuck in romantic historicism, Dilthey has identified three classes of understanding: the first that he calls “larger judgments and formations of thought,” related to science that includes both natural and human sciences, are examples a textbook of biology or mathematics, but can also include concepts such as gravity and others present in common sense; the second is the lived experience and these are the ones who take the actions but should pass through the former, calls this a vital nexus.
It expresses the second as “elucidating how a situation, a purpose, a milieu and a vital nexus intersect in an action, it allows no inclusive determination of the external life from which it arose.”
The third and most essential are the expressions of lived experience, as Dilthey puts it: “An expression of lived experience may contain more nexus of psychic life than any introspection can perceive,” thus partly because of the aspect of understanding that has not yet if it is perceived, to penetrate it leads to a hermeneutic circle returning to greater judgments and formations, although Dilthey did not formulate thus, would be the hermeneutic circle.
DILTHEY, W. Obras escolhidas – vol. 3 A fundação do mundo histórico nas ciências humanas, 2002.
RICOEUR, P. Hermenêutica and Ideologias, 3ª. Edition, São Paulo: Vozes, 2013.
Information and Knowledge
08
Nov
When information is in our mind it becomes knowledge, but this does not always mean
understanding, repeating maxims (sayings, beautiful sentences, etc.) does not mean that we have knowledge, because information has not passed through the stage of understanding.
This is not a modern pathology, or simply that the TV, the Internet or some virus has invaded our minds and harmed our ability to know, although some people may have difficulties, someone with Alzeihmer or a dispersive child, but I have the impression that the so-called “attention deficit” has gone too far, and it is a social factor that makes it difficult to understand, in Germany and in France, there is always a social worker on duty, not a doctor or pharmacist to give medicines to children.
One of the serious problems of our time, says Edgar Morin, is that we are accustomed to believe that thought and practice are separate compartments of life, or more seriously to already structured thinking, the world of theory and practice.
So for ideologues means that whoever thinks the world does not make the world and vice versa.
But if we look throughout history there was a time when sages, eventually called scientists or artists, circulated through various fields of culture. Mathematics, physics, architecture, painting, sculpture were the raw material of thought and action, Morin also recalled in a lecture in 2015 in Brazil, in the Millennium Program.
The industrial revolution overturned the idea of Renaissance knowledge, and since the 19th century, specialization has been gaining strength and we have forgotten to reconnect knowledge, a call from Morin for education.
Asked how to teach and what is knowledge, Edgar Morin replied: “I propose, in teaching, the introduction of fundamental themes that do not yet exist. That is, I propose to introduce the subject of knowledge, for we give knowledge without ever knowing what knowledge is. But since all knowledge is a translation followed by a reconstruction, there is always the risk of error, the risk of hallucinations, always. ”
How many in the areas of science, technology and what is most lamentable in the area of pathologies, has never seen so many pathologies, classifying people according to pathologies is only the most serious pathological form, you see only the gray world, there is no light and nor hope.
Asked about the tools that have emerged in recent decades, including the digital world, Morin replied: “First of all, it is true that information is not knowledge. Knowledge is the organization of information.”
So we are immersed in information and how they succeed each other day by day, in a way, we can not be aware of it. On the other hand, knowledge, as I said, is scattered. You have to unite them, but you lack that complex thinking. ”
Simplicity is the most disorganized form of information.
Inform before knowing and knowing
07
Nov
In times of cultural crisis, information is abundant and not always true, knowledge
is limited and wisdom is scarce.
Although it is common sense that for knowledge it is necessary to inform, little is known about what is information, and little knowledge time little chance to become wisdom, then overflows the “maxims” (sentences made out of context), self-help (name unfit for self-knowledge) and fundamentalism, misery of philosophy.
There are many possibilities for information, but if we consider it as a present in the life of beings, then a definition refers to the origin of the word in Latin stem (information-) of the nominative (informatio): (delineate or conceive idea) is understood as giving shape or molding in the mind, where it is in-form, being is ontological informationn (see example in Picture).
However, this format is in language, idioms or some form of signs this information already exists, and this relation has a semiotic root given by Beyno-Davies where the multifaceted concept of information is explained in terms of signs and systems of signs- signals.
For him, there are four interdependent levels, or layers of semiotics: programmatic, semantic, syntax, and empirical (or experimental, which I prefer because it is not empiricism).
While Pragmatics is concerned with the purpose of communication, Semantics is concerned with the meaning of a message conveyed in a communicative act (which generates an ontology) and Syntax is concerned with the formalism used to represent a message.
The publication of Shannon-Weaver information in 1948, entitled The Mathematical Theory of Communication is one of the foundations of information theory where information not only has a technical but also a measure of meaning and can be called a signal only.
It was Michael Reddy who observed that ” signs ” of mathematical theory are ‘patterns that can be changed’, in this sense are codes, where the message contained in the sign must express the ability to ‘choose from a set of possible messages’, not having meaning, since it must be “decoded” among the possibilities that exist.
It must have a certain amount of signals to be able to overcome the uncertainty of the transmitted signal, it will be known if the ratio between signal and noise (present in the encoding and transmission of the signal) is relevant and the degree of entropy has not destroyed the transmitted signal.
The theory of communication analyzes the numerical measure of the uncertainty of a result, so it tends to use the concept of information entropy, generally attributed to Claude Shannon.
Knowledge is one where information has already been realized ontologically.
Brazilians explain dust from the Black Hole
06
Nov
When we photograph infrared telescopes, instead of finding a torus 
(a kind of form the circular donut), the researchers SF Hönig, M. Kishimoto, MA Prieto, P. Gandhi, D. Asmus, R. Antonucci, L. Burtscher, WJ Duschl and G. Weigelt, found a dust that was pushed away from the black hole in the form of a wind, indicating a new and unknown phenomenon by physics, the publication was made in the Astrophysical Journal in 2013.
The Brazilian astrophysics Thaisa Storchi Bergmann of UFRGS, many cited in numerous articles, which had already found the supermassive black hole in the galaxy NGC 1097 source of countless subsequent works, already warned that the Black Hole Theory could have misunderstandings, since there was evidence of the presence of a flat, ring-shaped cloud composed of plasma (protons and electrons) and hydrogen spinning at 10,000 km per second (km / s).
The Brazilian received numerous awards and honors for her work.
Brazilian astronomers João Steiner and Daniel May, both of the USP’s Institute of Astronomy, Geophysics and Atmospheric Sciences (IAG), concluded by contradicting the common sense that black holes expel much of the gas that lies at the center of galaxies rather than engulf it, and more accurately locate how it is made, its published in magazine Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
Astronomers have shown that the Wind is formed in two stages. In the first stage, the strong electromagnetic radiation coming from the disk in the vicinity of the black hole (primary wind) impacting the dust torus located three light years from the black hole, which evaporates the torus expelling the gas contained in it.
The second stage is more violent, occurs when the primary wind and a powerful particle jet, collimated by a strong central magnetic field, reaches a large cloud of molecular gas (composed mainly of molecules of two hydrogen atoms) located at 100 years- light away from the black hole, still in the center of the galaxy (which has a diameter of 100,000 light-years).
Gradually the black hole, unknown by science, becomes more “clear”.
Complexity, simplicity and purity
03
Nov
They seem contradictory in times of crisis, but it is not really reductionism is
the attempt to reduce the human, the natural and all the complexity of life into dogmatic truths and therefore nothing simple and nothing purê, because simplicity ou nor simplificity.
The Complex is precisely to understand that each person, the whole of society, each being of nature and the whole of the universe interact, interact in a complex whole and that all this is simple if you are open to the Other, the Natural and the All Universe that surrounds.
We find in simpler people the complexity of life and the wisdom that penetrates the deeper revelations of Nature and the Universe,
Mahatma Gandhi claimed that if all Western literature were lost and only the Sermon on the Mount remained, nothing would have been lost, and he was not a Christian.
Einstein argued that it was easier to break an atom than a prejudice, for it is in the complexity of human formation and thought that we encounter many problems, greater in times when modernity wants to assert itself in the face of already decaying values: its morality, its model of state, social harmony and worldview are all in check.
Among all the blessings that are narrated in the biblical text of Matthew, all beatitudes are important, but two are directly in the center of the revelation: Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see the face and God and Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God, for they both set us before God: from his face and as his sonship.
In a time of such malice, of ever greater confidence that generates divisions and confrontations, purity (which is not reductionist naivete) is an essential value, Adorno claimed in Minima Moralia, “what world is this in which even a child distrusts a present, “and we would say of the world that not even the justice we should have respect for does not seem to deserve it.
What kind of peace do we want, what kind of meekness do we want (Happy the meek because they will inherit the earth), that is the question that is challenged by the dark times we live.
Several images can be reminiscent of the beatitude of the bible: the Samaritan (who rescues someone who has been outraged), Zacchaeus (who was a usurper and repented), blind people, vipers and so many other characters, but perhaps the greatest blessedness of Madalena, the ex-prostitute who changes radically of life and was one of the most faithful in the following of Jesus.
