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Thanks very much for this series, which will help clarify our agenda.


You can't be me, I'm taken
by Sven Triloqvist on Sat Oct 2nd, 2010 at 06:11:30 AM EST
Thank you for the encouragement.

May I take this opportunity to spell out that, obviously, the series does not belong to me and that I would quite welcome if someone else were to write an entry.
I'd just like two things in that case:
-That we could have them all linked from a series heading. Not sure how to do that -we used to have occasional series but they seem to have gone.
-That the writer would contact me by email to let me know he's preparing that subject so I don't do it.

Earth provides enough to satisfy every man's need, but not every man's greed. Gandhi

by Cyrille (cyrillev domain yahoo.fr) on Sat Oct 2nd, 2010 at 06:55:42 AM EST
[ Parent ]
great series, watching group identity form, like a flower out of the mud, or a mushroom lifting many times its weight of cement, indeed cracking through it.

i find what you are articulating to be reminiscent of a 70's movement called 'voluntary simplicity' centred round stewart brand and kevin kelly's 'co-evolution quarterly', periodical offshoot of the epic 'whole earth catalog'. there were many articles by bateson, shumacher pointing forward to what we are discussing here and now.

i totally share your conviction, cyrille, that there is enough for everyone, it is a distribution problem, more than one of pure resource limits, and some would have one believe for their own agendas.

the other memory this evokes is that of zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance, pirsig's 'metaphysics of quality', maybe chris will chime in and flesh this out a bit.

the bete noir is 'consumerism', per se. as long as we keep trying to float whole economies on the dubious seas of 'consumer confidence', 'xmas retail surges' and the like we are doomed to repeat the same arch=follies we have become so emaoured of and addicted to. and worse, we are modeling this unsustainable, obsolete paradigm to thousands of millions of 'new consumers' (barf).

the worst enemies to progress, apart from the financial hijinx we all belabour here so thoroughly, are the concepts of 'planned obsolescence', slave labour, and the calvinist worship of work for work's sake.

work may and should be as ennobling as love or art, but to deify it above all other gods is as foolish as deifying its chief symbol, money.

yes this must be communicated as both a pragmatic as well as a -merely- :)) moral issue. only then will people whose faculties have not acquired such luxuriously rigorous levels of self-examination can see that even the most myopic, self-centred agendas depend upon such givens as drinkable water, fit air, and balanced lives.

seeing as peeps only see what they are paid to take on board, the answer probably consists in creating new ways to grab their atomised attention span, and ride a message in on the back of something they already let through their filters.

discussing goals is creative use of time and candlepower, uniting around themes and messages and spinning them in a good way, since spin is inevitably part of messaging.

studying the moral hinges creaking in the series 'madmen' is illuminating, i find, as we are all still swimming in the gluey amber of those attitudes, they are our roots, and heavily infested ones they are too!

reverse engineering society's moral codices is not for the faint of heart, we can use all the help we can get.  

tibetan philosophy holds that the way up is the same one we came down, another reason that people won't listen to some new idea unless they're being entertained at the same time...

like who listens to the air hostess explaining how the safety equipment works before take-off?

portugese peasants... that's the endgame, but networked this time around.

'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty

by melo (melometa4(at)gmail.com) on Sat Oct 2nd, 2010 at 09:59:48 AM EST
[ Parent ]
Brand and his projects were a considerable influence upon me. Viewed from an English provincial town, 50s/60s California seemed the smartest place on Earth. The energy there was going into innovation, whereas in England it was going into overturning the Establishment - the strangled innovation bit came later (white heat of technology).

Working in CA for the first time in '68, it seemed to me that that flowering - if it ever existed - was over. Because my wonderful picture of California had been so selective. What I thought was a revolution was only an infinitesimal part of the State culture.

If I had to choose a place today (using the same selectivity), I would choose Uudenmaa - the southern state of Finland. If quasi-Rawlsian ethics and Qualitativism are 2 things we stand for, then they stand for Uudenmaa too.

Disclaimer: the state is a sometime client of mine.

You can't be me, I'm taken

by Sven Triloqvist on Sat Oct 2nd, 2010 at 12:11:36 PM EST
[ Parent ]
i didn't get to Ca till 75, and it was still jumping with alternativity, though the bloom was definitely off the haight st rose, and 'wasted' stopped being a euphemism and became a description.

still the can-do thing was jamming, there was an immensely freer, more playful energy in the air than  ever seen in england. europe seemed mired in narcissistic cerebrality, endless smoky discussion about zombie ideologies and murky loyalties...

the whole earth catalogue crystallised everything admirable about america then.

the west coast has always had an intense counterculture, to match the equally intense military industrial complex entrenched there.

'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty

by melo (melometa4(at)gmail.com) on Sat Oct 2nd, 2010 at 03:01:32 PM EST
[ Parent ]
... its just not the score of the game.

Its like watching the tachometer to tell what speed you are going, without knowing what gear you are in. Its just a measure of total spending on newly produced stuff. Its not a measure of economic productivity, its not a measure of net new real wealth, ...

... someone using GDP to assess standard of living is like a nurse trying to measure my Blood Pressure with a thermometer. Its inability to do that is no failing of the thermometer ~ but of the nurse using the wrong tool for the job.

I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.

by BruceMcF (agila61 at netscape dot net) on Sun Oct 3rd, 2010 at 01:38:50 AM EST
[ Parent ]
Or you could read what JakeS says right down there, as I obviously had not yet done.

I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.
by BruceMcF (agila61 at netscape dot net) on Sun Oct 3rd, 2010 at 01:41:46 AM EST
[ Parent ]

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