Category: Politics

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Tom Atlee: Collective Thinking About Public Affairs

Crowd-Sourcing, Culture, Economics/True Cost, Innovation, Knowledge, P2P / Panarchy, Politics
Tom Atlee

Collective thinking about public affairs

(NOTE: In this essay I intentionally subsume the thinking processes of official decision-makers into the thinking processes of the citizenry as a whole. I realize that official decision-makers can and do make decisions independently of the will of the people, unless that public will is united and organized. But elite decisions made independently of the public do not qualify as “public thinking” – at least in any democratic sense – and in this essay I am attempting to explore the nature of public thinking so that it can be upgraded and empowered to impact public policy. So here we will look at the thinking processes of the entire population and mini-publics thereof as they go about living a relatively democratic life.)

How can we think clearly about the collective thinking processes of a whole population in a democracy? How do populations reflect on public issues and come to conclusions about collective action and public policy? What follows is one framework for sorting out the different dimensions of public thinking and the quality of that thinking process.

Click on Image to Enlarge

The most basic form of public thinking is, of course, what goes on in the minds of individual citizens as they think about public affairs. We see manifestations of this – commonly called “public opinion” – in polls, in voting, in online “citizen input” sites, and in various other visible forms of citizenship that reflect the opinions of individual citizens in the population as a whole.

Public opinion evolves in a message-rich environment that includes – at the next higher level of public thinking – news media and commentaries from pundits and partisans, on talk shows and blogs, and in online forums, letters to the editor, and public hearings. This public thinking often takes the form of mediated or witnessed conversations: Diverse (often polarized) voices express their views to each other while being directly or indirectly witnessed by the public. Our society depends heavily on this kind of media-driven interaction to collectively reflect on its public issues and shape the views of its citizens and decision-makers.

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Michel Bauwens: When Growth Outpaces Happiness (Corrupt Mis-Appropriation of the Benefits of Growth)

03 Economy, 11 Society, Culture, Knowledge, P2P / Panarchy, Politics
Michel Bauwens

When Growth Outpaces Happiness

CHINA’s new leaders, who will be anointed next month at the Communist Party’s 18th National Congress in Beijing, might want to rethink the Faustian bargain their predecessors embraced some 20 years ago: namely, that social stability could be bought by rapid economic growth.

As the recent riots at a Foxconn factory in northern China demonstrate, growth alone, even at sustained, spectacular rates, has not produced the kind of life satisfaction crucial to a stable society — an experience that shows how critically important good jobs and a strong social safety net are to people’s happiness.

Starting in 1990, as China moved to a free-market economy, real per-capita consumption and gross domestic product doubled, then doubled again. Most households now have at least one color TV. Refrigerators and washing machines — rare before 1990 — are common in cities.

Yet there is no evidence that the Chinese people are, on average, any happier, according to an analysis of survey data that colleagues and I conducted. If anything, they are less satisfied than in 1990, and the burden of decreasing satisfaction has fallen hardest on the bottom third of the population in wealth. Satisfaction among Chinese in even the upper third has risen only moderately.

Read full article.

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DefDog: IAEA Veteran’s Letter “No Iran Bomb” Being Ignored

05 Iran, 08 Proliferation, 08 Wild Cards, Corruption, Government, IO Deeds of War, Knowledge, Peace Intelligence, Politics
DefDog

I know nothing about the science, but this seems credible–certainly worth considering.

World Renown Nuke Expert Nails Bibi to the Wall on Iran Bomb Threat

Jim W. Dean

EXTRACT (Letter Only, Editorial Hyperbole Detracts)

Dear Prime Minister Netanyahu:

Iran may be in your red zone, but can not score.

Sure, Iran could divert a few tons of 3.5% or a ton of 20% enriched uranium hexaflouride gas for enrichment to 90+%. But what then?

No one has ever made a nuclear weapon from gas. It must be converted to metal and fabricated into components which are then assembled with high explosives.

Iran lacks experience with and facilities for these processes which are very dangerous because of potential for a criticality accident or nuclear explosion. Iran would not jeopardize its important, fully safeguarded nuclear programs by an attempt to have a deliverable, one kiloton yield nuclear weapon ten to fifteen years later.

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Tom Atlee: Bitterness Dances with Hope – Focusing On the Essence

Politics
Tom Atlee

Bitterness dances with Hope

Dear friends,

I like this article by Rebecca Solnit (who's writing I'm coming to love more and more) not because it comes from “the left” but because it calls for sanity and decency.  It acknowledges the overriding fact that our quasi-democratic system is itself deeply flawed in its design and corrupted in its practice.  It invites us to step out of our polarized, preachy bitterness – regardless of what “side” we are on and what evils and solutions we obsess about – and address the public issues we share with intelligence and compassion.

I can easily imagine someone on “the right” writing a similar essay, and if any of you know of such an article, please send it to me to share.

In the meantime, we each have the challenge of being true to our own perspectives and open to everyone else's as we try to make a better society out of this very strange one we've got.

Coheartedly,
Tom

Rain on Our Parade: A Letter to the Dismal Left

by Rebecca Solnit

Common Dreams, 27 September 2012

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I found myself saying “Yes!” to the following sentences in her closing paragraphs: “To be hopeful means to be uncertain about the future, to be tender toward possibilities, to be dedicated to change all the way down to the bottom of your heart…. Every minute of every hour of every day you are making the world, just as you are making yourself, and you might as do it with generosity and kindness and style.”

I was dismayed that almost all of the comments attacked her.  So I added my own comment:

“I think Rebecca is spot on – with one exception. I think most of the conversation needs to be about how to change the political and economic systems that generate all the harms we end up protesting. The problem with electoral politics is less about whether we vote and who should be voted for and more about what we are doing between elections. To the extent we campaign and vote and go home or focus our activism on symptoms (the suffering and destruction fed by the systems), we will be faced with the same corrupted choices the next election.  To the extent we spend most of our energy transforming the electoral and political systems into something sane, we will then be routinely given political choices that not only reflect our values but, thanks to the sanity of the system, actually make a difference. I'm doing my bit with
http://empoweringpublicwisdom.us/, which is less about elections than accessing and empowering the potential wisdom of the diverse People as a whole.”

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Gold Transformer: Spain Falls to Pieces, As Predicted

Economics/True Cost, Politics
Gold Transformer

Spain Falls to Pieces, as Predicted

The Daily Bell, Thursday, September 27, 2012

Be Very Careful, Beloved Spain … Two weeks ago I was interviewed by the Catalan newspaper El Punt Avui. I said it would be unthinkable for the Spanish state to stop Catalan secession by military force. Such action would violate EU Treaties and lead to Spain's suspension from the European Union. You do not do such things in the early 21st Century. “No pots ser membre de la UE si utilitzes la força” was the headline. I may have underestimated the vigour of the Spanish officer corps. First we have the robust comments of Colonel Francisco Alaman comparing the crisis to 1936 and vowing to crush Catalan nationalists, described as “vultures”. “Independence for Catalonia? Over my dead body. Spain is not Yugoslavia or Belgium. Even if the lion is sleeping, don't provoke the lion, because he will show the ferocity proven over centuries,” he said. – UK Telegraph

Dominant Social Theme: The riots have begun again. What a surprise.

Free-Market Analysis: Ambrose Evans-Pritchard reports on Spain and what he provides us with is a look at the underbelly of Spanish despair that you won't read about in other similar mainstream reporting.

What Evans-Pritchard provides us with, in fact, is the bloody sociopathic grin that lurks under the current, escalating social tension. The grin is that of one collectively plastered across the faces of the armed forces. It is the same in Britain and soon will be, no doubt, in France and Germany.

As the “planned” – there is no other word for it except perhaps “directed” – demolition of Europe continues to bulldoze its way across the south of this great continent, the lurking violence of the organized military reveals itself once more.

There is increased talk about the “honor” of armed forces in Western mainstream media and this is probably no accident. Here, from the Associated Press:

Prince Harry, third in line to the British throne, began a four-month combat tour Friday in Afghanistan as a gunner on an Apache attack helicopter …”Prince Harry, like any soldier, considers it a great honor to represent his country in her majesty's armed forces wherever it chooses to deploy him,” St James's Palace said in a statement.

You see? This is a deliberate statement. The Afghan war has been subject to contentious debate in Britain, with former Prime Minister Tony Blair coming under attack as a war criminal by some for his role in involving Britain in that quagmire in the first place. But there is no context here: Harry is merely honored.

We used to read a lot about the “sacred honor of the German Reich,” etc. in the history books and would wonder how people could use such rhetoric. Now we know.

The world is being whipped up by the hard military men waiting in the proverbial wings. Soon they will surge to the fore and the reality of modern capitalism will be revealed for what it really is, a thin veneer. Here's some more from Evans-Pritchard's article:

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DefDog: Living Under Drones – Outcomes in Pakistan

07 Other Atrocities, Corruption, Economics/True Cost, Government, Ineptitude, Knowledge, Military, Peace Intelligence, Politics
DefDog

Living Under Drones: Death, Injury and Trauma to Civilians from US Drone Practices in Pakistan

This report is the result of nine months of research by the International Human Rights and Conflict Resolution Clinic of Stanford Law School (Stanford Clinic) and the Global Justice Clinic at New York University School of Law (NYU Clinic). Professor James Cavallaro and Clinical Lecturer Stephan Sonnenberg led the Stanford Clinic team; Professor Sarah Knuckey led the NYU Clinic team. Adelina Acuña, Mohammad M. Ali, Anjali Deshmukh, Jennifer Gibson, Jennifer Ingram, Dimitri Phillips, Wendy Salkin, and Omar Shakir were the student research team at Stanford; Christopher Holland was the student researcher from NYU. Supervisors Cavallaro, Sonnenberg, and Knuckey, as well as student researchers Acuña, Ali, Deshmukh, Gibson, Salkin, and Shakir participated in the fact-finding investigations to Pakistan.

EXTRACT (One Sentence from Each Summary Paragraph):

First, while civilian casualties are rarely acknowledged by the US government, there is significant evidence that US drone strikes have injured and killed civilians

Second, US drone strike policies cause considerable and under-accounted-for harm to the daily lives of ordinary civilians, beyond death and physical injury.

Third, publicly available evidence that the strikes have made the US safer overall is ambiguous at best.

Fourth, current US targeted killings and drone strike practices undermine respect for the rule of law and international legal protections and may set dangerous precedents.

Summary Recommendations:

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