Year: 2012

Gangsters and Banksters

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The Occupy movement has focused public attention on the vast and growing disparity of wealth and power in the US, and increasingly in other affluent nations. You’ve all seen the statistics — essentially all of the increase in real wealth and income over the last 40 years has accrued to less than 1% of citizens, and for the other 99% real wealth and income have declined, in some cases precipitously. As a result, nearly half of all Americans, and well more than half of American children, now live in poverty or near-poverty. There is essentially no social or economic mobility left in US society — if you’re born rich, you will surely grow richer, and if you’re born poor, you will surely grow poorer. The American Dream, and the American middle class, are dead.

To build community, an economy of gifts

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In former times, people depended for all of life’s necessities and pleasures on people they knew personally. If you alienated the local blacksmith, brewer, or doctor, there was no replacement. Your quality of life would be much lower. If you alienated your neighbors then you might not have help if you sprained your ankle during harvest season, or if your barn burnt down. Community was not an add-on to life, it was a way of life. Today, with only slight exaggeration, we could say we don’t need anyone….They are replaceable and, by the same token, so am I.

Occupy: rediscovering the general will in hard times

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“Democracy,” wrote John Dewey, “is more than a form of government.” The image we are given of democracy is often reduced to administration, the implementation and management of the necessary, but the legitimacy of the state in democracies is inseparable from some notion of the general will. Democracy, as Rousseau argued, requires some process for the formation of the “general will,” by reference to which decision-making can be measured.

Fight for the Internet – Jan 16

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– Sopa plans set to be shelved as Obama comes out against piracy legislation
– Wikipedia to shut for 24 hours to stop anti-piracy act
– Explainer: understanding Sopa
– How PIPA and SOPA Violate Free Speech and Innovation
– Momentum shift: SOPA, PIPA opponents now in driver’s seat
– Rupert Murdoch Goes on Twitter Rampage Targeting Obama, Google

Is deception no longer an adaptive human strategy?

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“A lie is as good as the truth if you can get somebody to believe it.” So goes the cynical maxim. Naturally, it contradicts the accepted public morality embodied in the saying: “Honesty is the best policy.” That saying is attributed to Miguel de Cervantes though it has been repeated by many others. I rather think that the ancient Roman satirist Juvenal had it right when he wrote: “Honesty is praised and starves.”

Will New Zealand be the first developed country to evolve a steady-state economy?

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New Zealand will inevitably make a transition to a steady-state economy. The onset of energy descent — having less and less energy to use with each passing decade — will push it to do so sooner rather than later. The critical question is whether the transition to a steady-state economy will be by design or disaster.

Man and the natural world

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Thomas describes changing attitudes to the natural world in early modern Britain, a time period that he sets at approximately 1500-1800. A great many things happened in the relationship between Britons and their natural environment during this period: enclosures of common land, increasing urbanization, the birth of scientific taxonomy, early attempts at conservation, and many others. I read a few pages, saw that Thomas was an engaging writer, and decided to take a first step towards dispelling my massive ignorance of the human past.