Open Thinking

Thinking that challenges or sidesteps the common model of modern society, about open culture, permaculture, alternate lifestyles or whatever. I might agree with some of it and disagree with the other, but one thing I agree with is that there should be more space in our societies for alternate choices, be they nomadic or economic or whatever, whether we understand them or not.
Oct 28 ’09
“No one is in control. Obama isn’t getting anything done, despite being the most powerful person on the planet, because he can’t. The ‘leaders’ aren’t going to deal with climate change or peak oil or pandemic disease or unsustainable debts, because no one has the power or authority to do anything, and because it would be political suicide to admit that the only solutions that might work will be radical, painful, and require a lot of sacrifice from everyone. So all you get is posturing, and it’s just going to get worse. This is what unsustainable means.”
— How to Save the World

1 note

Oct 21 ’09
I want us both to agree to say one true thing out loud everyday. To remember one real person. To remind ourselves that our tragedies—yours and mine—are lived and felt one person at a time; just like our hope, our renewal, our future can also be lived and carried out into the world, one person at a time. You have a chance to be that person. So make a promise with me: I promise to humble myself. I promise to grieve. I promise to bow down to truth. I promise to argue. I promise to listen and to live with intention. I promise to know my own strength. I promise to risk something. I promise to stop talking about what hasn’t been done and start doing something different. We are 6.7 billion real people who want to be remembered (via who we are / how we live: My Message to World Leaders )

I want us both to agree to say one true thing out loud everyday. To remember one real person. To remind ourselves that our tragedies—yours and mine—are lived and felt one person at a time; just like our hope, our renewal, our future can also be lived and carried out into the world, one person at a time. You have a chance to be that person. So make a promise with me: I promise to humble myself. I promise to grieve. I promise to bow down to truth. I promise to argue. I promise to listen and to live with intention. I promise to know my own strength. I promise to risk something. I promise to stop talking about what hasn’t been done and start doing something different. We are 6.7 billion real people who want to be remembered (via who we are / how we live: My Message to World Leaders

)

Oct 21 ’09
“Jean-Paul Sartre declared that the ultimate and final freedom that cannot be taken from a person is the ability to say “no.” To keep silent even in the face of torture or death is humanity’s most powerful, final act of will. What if that ability were to be lost? What if that final freedom is taken away and information can be taken from a person despite their act of resistance? Something precious will have been lost to the human condition because our inner lives will no longer be ours alone”
— Is My Mind Mine? - Forbes.com (via wildcat2030)

7 notes (via wildcat2030)

Oct 21 ’09
“

I want us both to agree to say one true thing out loud everyday.
To remember one real person.
To remind ourselves that our tragedies—yours and mine—are lived and felt one person at a time; just like our hope, our renewal, our future can also be lived and carried out into the world, one person at a time. You have a chance to be that person.

So make a promise with me:
I promise to humble myself.
I promise to grieve.
I promise to bow down to truth.
I promise to argue.
I promise to listen and to live with intention.
I promise to know my own strength.
I promise to risk something.
I promise to stop talking about what hasn’t been done
and start doing something different.

We are 6.7 billion real people who want to be remembered, who only want to live a life as good and as safe as the one you live. If we promise to think of you, to work with you; I hope you’ll promise to think of us, to work for us. One person, one small baby, one dream at a time.

”
— who we are / how we live: My Message to World Leaders

1 note

Oct 21 ’09
“In a culture like ours, long accustomed to splitting and dividing all things as a means of control, it is sometimes a bit of a shock to be reminded that, in operational and practical fact, the medium is the message.”
— The Medium Is the Message (Marshal MacLuhan) (via wildcat2030)

3 notes (via wildcat2030)

Oct 21 ’09
“

We cannot continue transferring the nation’s wealth to those at the apex of the economic pyramid — which is what we have been doing for the past three decades or so — while hoping that someday, maybe, the benefits of that transfer will trickle down in the form of steady employment and improved living standards for the many millions of families struggling to make it from day to day.

That money is never going to trickle down. It’s a fairy tale. We’re crazy to continue believing it.

”
—

Bob Herbert

Safety Nets for the Rich

(via Stove Boyd ambivalence)

2 notes (via ambivalence)

Aug 29 ’09
“After all, we’re a brain embedded in this larger set of structures.
You can call it culture, call it society, call it your family, call it your friend, call it whatever it is. It’s the stuff that makes people sign onto their Facebook a thousand times a day. It’s the reason Twitter exists. We have got all these systems now that really make us fully aware of just how important social interactions are to what it is to be human. The question is, how can we study that? Because that, in essence, is a huge part of what’s actually driving these enzymatic pathways in your brain. What’s triggering these synaptic transmissions and these squirts of neurotransmitter back and forth is thoughts of other people, what other people say to us, interacting with the world at large.”
—

CHIMERAS OF EXPERIENCE

JONAH LEHRER

Edge 286

(via wildcat2030)

2 notes (via wildcat2030)

Aug 25 ’09
“In essence, we have to be more moral than God. A quick glance over God’s rap sheet suggests that this is, indeed, possible.”
— Blake Stacey

Aug 25 ’09
“

What’s noticable is that the “debate” isn’t about the need for healthcare, or about actual medical issues. It’s about ideology, and outlook … Near as I can work it out from over here (caveat: I’ve spent somewhere between four and eight months of my life in the USA — this doesn’t make me an expert) there is a small but significant proportion of the US population who hate the poor and want them to die. (Or at least to go somewhere where they’re invisible and can’t act as a perpetual reminder to the haters that their own security is at best tenuous.)

I’m not sure why there’s this hatred — my personal feeling is that it springs from numerous sources: from prosperity theology (if you’re poor it’s because you’re ungodly and deserve to suffer), insecurity, lack of empathy, or a combination of these factors in different people. Other observers have different theories: M’Learned Friend opines that it’s because the American conservative movement rejects Rawls’s preconditions for justice. (That doesn’t go far enough for my taste; they also seem to want to reject the entire concept of the Social Contract.)

And then there’s the growing tendency towards eliminationist rhetoric against socially sanctioned out-groups. (Arguably the endorsement of maltreatment of convicts is an emergent part of this trend, feeding into and normalising it.) .

The subjects vary — crime and penal policy, healthcare, don’t get me started on foreign policy — but there is an ideological approach in America that is distinguished by one common characteristic: words and deeds utterly lacking in the quality of mercy.

There is a cancer in the collective American soul — a mercy deficit that has in recent years grown as alarmingly as the budget deficit. Nor is it as simple as a left/right thing: no political party has a monopoly on merciless behaviour. Rather, a creeping draconian absolutism has cast its penumbra across the entire arena of public discourse, tainting every debate, poisoning and hardening attitudes across the board.

”
— Charlie’s Diary: Merciless

Aug 18 ’09
“I imagine a retail sector for cultural products that’s organized around the attention span: not around “books” or “music” but around short stories and pop songs in one aisle, poems and arias in the other. In the long store: 5,000 piece jigsaw puzzles, big novels, beer brewing equipment, DVDs of The Wire. Clerks could suggest and build attentional menus. We would develop attentional connoisseurship: the right pairings of the short and long. We would understand, and promote, attentional health.I imagine attention-based pricing, in which prices of information commodities are inversely adjusted to the cognitive investment of consuming them. All the candy for the human brain — haiku, ringtones, bumper stickers — would be priced like the luxuries that they are. Things requiring longer attention spans would be cheaper — they might even be free, and the higher fixed costs of producing them would be covered by the higher sales of the short attention span products. Single TV episodes would be more expensive to purchase than whole seasons, in the same way that a six-pack of Oreos at the gas station is more expensive, per cookie, than a whole tray at the grocery store.”
— A Short Manifesto on the Future of Attention: Observatory: Design Observer