Remember the counter culture extremes of the ’60′s? Life without limits, restraints, controls or consequences. Free sex, free love, free drugs, and rock and roll with general disregard for the future. It may well have been a predictable reaction to both the 1950s with its McCarthyism as well as the technological and cultural determinism that lead to the travesty of the VietNam war. In the end, however, it was not very effective. It was a bad idea that promoted immature self-indulgence, greed and the I.Me over the We. It did not and could not work as envisioned. Perhaps because it was basically an unbalanced view of “reality”.

Now, some 40 years latter, we have the business cultural extremes of the first decade of the 21st century — last seen from 1890 – 1929. Free market capitalism without limits, restraints or controls and with the same general disregard for inconvenient consequences. It too is a bad idea that promotes immature self-indulgence, greed and the I.Me over the We. It is not working. It is showing us every day what a bad idea it is. Enron being but one example. It too is basically an unbalanced view of “reality”.

Democracy, from the Greek, demokratia, “rule of the common people”. Oligarchy, from the Greek, oligarkhia, “government by the few”.

With low voter turnout, gerrymandered voting districts, the large role of money in politics, efforts to disenfranchise opponents and drive down turnout, and the growing doubt in the veracity of vote counting, it may be useful to question what sort of government we really have, and what our roles have been in bringing about the government we have.

Going back to the Greek, I am reminded of Diogenes. Diogenes was known for carrying a lantern in broad daylight in search of an honest man. Perhaps, he was the precursor to modern get out the vote efforts. After all, so much of politics today seems to be focused on finding those voters that are most likely to vote and who support a specific candidate.

Today, we have much greater tools that Diogenes’ lantern, but perhaps the process is essentially the same. Diogenes is perhaps the best know of an ancient Greek school of philosophy known as the Cynics. Greek cynicism was an ascetic sect railing against the selfishness of people.

The cynics were founded by Antisthenes, a disciple of Socrates. Another disciple of Socrates, Plato, provides us with the Socratic dialogs as a chance to understand Socrates’ thinking and method. Many of us may have read the Protagoras in school to learn about the Socratic method, but how many of us remember the topic of the discussion? One of the key points is whether or not virtue can be taught. Another Greek, Plutarch, returned to this discussion years later.

On this site, is an image saying, ‘Stop Gawking! Cynicism breeds paralyzing apathy’. Perhaps some of that cynicism comes from its Greek roots and the focus on identifying voters today. Perhaps we need to return to the issue of whether virtue can be taught, and if so, how.

Today, I will attend the Games for Change Annual Conference. Games listed on the site seek to raise awareness of important issues, Darfur is Dying, Four Years in Haiti, Pax Warrior and PeaceMaker. How effective are these tools in teaching conflict resolution and skills in spreading message? Do these tools teach virtue? How important are these games in helping our country become more democratic?

Yes, we need to identify and turn out voters, but we also need to find new ways to move beyond the cynicism that is paralyzing American politics. Perhaps Games for Change is a good starting place.

I have a few thoughts on the June 26th article in NY Times reported by Ken Belson: What if They Built an Urban Wireless Network and Hardly Anyone Used It?

The missing conversation on the policy side of the municipal wireless issue is whether or not it is important to preserve the hub and spoke organizational model for our communications paradigm in order to preserve “billing” by “providers”. Of course this also reinforces the regrettable notion that we the people are merely unequal consumers locked into an asymmetrical relationship.

Or should we look at another policy option, namely that wireless communications should be seamless, always on Big Broadband publicly operated as an element of the commons in order improve public life, promote innovation and the efficient use of end user capital? In this case, billing is a mute point, just as billing for street lights, snow plowing, police services, fire services etc are not billable events. In this case, we are allowed to view we the people as all of citizens, producers, distributors, and consumers.

It is wise to remember that the very successful PC revolution was largely funded by end-user capital when we upgrade our PCs every few years for $3,000 an upgrade.

As I wrote earlier this month:

Something is happening in English politics we should know about. Ode Magazine has published a very interesting essay by Jay Walljasper in their issue 34:

Right Turn on Green

Excerpt:

The rise of a political paradox brings hope for the world

Modern politics is notorious for the way it creates strange new meanings for familiar words. “National security,” for instance, now means attacking distant countries. “Choice,” in American electoral debates, is a secret code for abortion, and “family” signifies fierce opposition to gay rights. “Us,” in the minds of some European political candidates, refers exclusively to white people.

But the word that has undergone the most dramatic transformation at the hands of politicians is “conservative.” It once clearly described a political philosophy devoted to preserving tradition. But powerful leaders around the world now use the term to justify a complete reordering of society according to the wishes of global corporations and radical free-market economists. The merit of these policies is open to discussion, but it seems obvious that this kind of political agenda is anything but conservative.

“It’s no accident that ‘conservative’ and ‘conservation’ are almost the same word,” notes American environmentalist philosopher Bill McKibben. “But what we call conservative today has been captured by something else—the idea that we need economic growth at all costs. That can be ruinous to our environment and our communities.”
That’s the great irony of politics today: The very idea of conservation—conserving the environment, natural resources, energy, a sense of community or anything else—is considered unnecessary, or even a dangerous obstacle to economic progress, by most so-called Conservatives. U.S. Vice-President Dick Cheney summed up the prevailing right-wing view when he said, “Conservation may be a sign of personal virtue, but it is not a sufficient basis… for a sound, comprehensive energy policy.”

This is what makes the recent turn of events in British politics so fascinating. The Conservative Party, which earned the undying wrath of environmentalists when Margaret Thatcher was prime minister, is now trumpeting green issues in an effort to unseat the ruling Labour Party. The new Conservative leader, David Cameron, who assumed power last fall, quotes Gandhi in urging people “to become the change we want to see in the world.” He can be seen riding his bike all over London and plans to add solar panels and a wind turbine to his home in the fashionable Notting Hill neighbourhood. He’s gone so far as to question the dominance of corporate power in the UK, declaring in a recent newspaper ad, “We should not just stand up for big business but to big business.”

While this might sound like some sort of political gimmick, there are signs that Cameron is sincere about pioneering a new brand of “green” conservativism—which could become as globally influential as Thatcher’s free-market policies were in the 1980s. If the environment ceases to become a divisive issue among parties of the left, right and centre around the world, we will see a new flowering of green initiatives.

Read the whole article at: Right Turn on Green

Thanks to Greater Democracy member Erika Keller Rogoff for bringing this to my attention.

Everyone has different phrases to talk about new trends in journalism that have been enabled by the Internet: Citizen Journalism, Hyper Local Journalism, Stand Alone Journalism, and so on. It is hard to keep them all straight.

So, instead of helping clarify things, let me add a new idea to the mix, Micro-Journalism. The idea comes from micro-breweries. The argument for micro-breweries was best presented to me in the quote from “A River Runs Through It”: What a wonderful world it was once when all the beer was not made in Milwaukee, Minneapolis, or St. Louis.

People got tired of all the same old beer. People started making beer in their homes, Citizen Brewing. They formed companies to make beer for their local community, hyper local brewing. The idea has spread to other finely crafted products, whether you are talking about wine, jelly beans, ice cream, or, as I just read about yesterday, New England Vodkas. Perhaps fine, hand crafted, local journalism is no different.

People have gotten tired of tasting news from a major cable network, or a national chain of newspapers. They want something with a little more individualism, a little more local flavor.

So, what does this have to do with the Irish Potato Famine? In the early nineteenth century, Irish farmers were forced to grow the highest yielding potatoes, independent of any flavor advantages or hybrid vigor. The lack of hybrid vigor, which is a grave danger of monocultures, allowed a fungus to wipe out much of the potato crop.

Today, a growing dissatisfaction with the universally bland pabulum, spiced only with occasional disasters and depravity, could well be the fungus that is threatening media organizations. The high yield of going back to a small set standard sources instead of doing the hard work of investigative reporting and nurturing new sources is compounding this monoculture.

Columbia Journalism Review Daily Traces the Birth of a Narrative. They talk about how cable news reporters and pundits are questioning whether the tide is turning for Bush. They comment, “How are they answering themselves? It’s a mixed bag. But if a question gets asked often enough in the media, the answer begins to (almost) not matter. And before long the question mark is dropped entirely and a narrative is born.”

They sum up the discussion with “And there it is, in the blink of an eye, so fast that you might have missed it: A narrative is born.”

I lived on a sailboat for several years and one thing you learn on a boat is that the tide changes four times a day.

Another phrase that people use is if Bush is experiencing a “bounce”. Here, I go back to my experiences on Wall Street. When a market has experienced a sharp decline, similar to how Bush’s approval has declined, everyone looks for any positive uptick. The question that always gets asked is if we are experiencing a market reversal, or if the uptick is merely a “dead cat bounce”.

This goes back to the old saying in investing that even a dead cat will bounce if dropped from high enough. When a market experiences a dead cat bounce, there is a brief respite from the downward trend, but the downward trend resumes before you know it.

Is Bush a dead cat? A lame duck? Perhaps the emergence of another narrative gives us a little insight into this. Staying with the Wall Street focus, today’s Wall Street Journal asks, Will 2006 Reprise 1994? This question keeps getting asked and as with the other narrative, ”the answer begins to (almost) not matter”

The narratives feed into another part of the political process, the expectations game. If Bush can claw his way back to only 40% perhaps, Republicans think, maybe they can change the other polls about a plurality of voters thinking we would be better off if Democrats controlled Congress. Of course this 40% is a low expectation compared to Clinton’s 48% approval rating in 1994.

Yet all of this still stays with the horse race narratives. We really need to be talking about narratives around how we will get back to having a government of, by, and for the people.

My wife and I saw “An Inconvenient Truth” recently. Good audience, even if not quite sold out. Great film. As I told my friend Dewayne, if Al doesn’t run for president, I’ll be extremely disappointed.

Clearly, the implosion of the environment is THE defining challenge facing us. It trumps terrorism and all of the issues that Bush and Rove have used to define their agenda. It actually makes a mockery of them. The collapse of the environment as we have come to utterly depend on it is THE national security issue of the 21st century. It will be the organizing principal of the next effective political party with an agenda that ignites passions in its members.

Who lost the Environment? Who lost 8 precious years that could have made a real difference?

The Bush party of me, myself, and my money ignored Global Warming — worse, they denied it.

Where is the party of we and I? The party of environmental stewardship? The party of cooperative gain?

Professor Dr. Farooq Hassan

At the beginning of May 2006, a Preparatory Committee Meeting was held in Warsaw, Poland, to work the details of the next World Congress of Families IV to be held there in 2007. This will be the fourth such international event, the previous three having been held in Prague, Geneva and in Mexico City. Each of these famous international Congresses, known by their sequential numbers as I, II and III, produced landmark Declarations for the protection, welfare, and support of the Family by the State and the society as a basic human institution.

These memorable documents contained a forceful reiteration of the leading international text on this subject, namely Article 16 (3) of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which had proclaimed as far back as 1948 that:

“The family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society
and is entitled to protection by the society and the State.”

In college, I majored in philosophy before dropping out. What I know about politics, I’ve learned on the campaign trail, and what I know about filmmaking, I learned from watching Siskel and Ebert as they talked about which way they would point there thumbs.

However, I’ve now been blogging for several years, which gives me a right, if not a responsibility to opine on any subject that strikes my fancy, and so today I want to talk about online political videos.

At the Personal Democracy Forum conference this year, one of the liveliest and most interesting panels was “Is Online Video More Powerful Than TV Ads?” I’ve been thinking a lot about this. The Nedheads group on YouTube has done a great job of gathering videos in support of Ned Lamont, whose campaign I’m currently working for. From this interest, I’ve ended up as a convener of the Media Giraffe Project’s Citizen Filmmaking Track which will be at University of Massachusetts, Amherst on July 29th.

So, what makes for good online political videos? This is perhaps too general a question, since there are really many different types of online political videos, but it seems as if there are some key ingredients. Like any other medium, they need to get the message across, ideally both directly and indirectly. More importantly, they need to have the sort of appeal that causes people to spread the word virally.

Speaking of the “the corruption of democracy, itself”, as Tom Atlee does below, consider tnis:

Friend Bob Weber forwarded this note to me. It is very much worth reading. How will we counter election fraud, apparently a fundamental and essential tactic of the Bush administration, in 2006 and 2008? Election fraud is both necessary and sufficient for Bush to assure “victory”.

If you read one thing this year, let it be the compelling article by RFK Jr. on the theft of the 2004 election.

And look at the accompanying chart:

This one is going to be hard to ignore.