Tag: politics

Pioneers


i ran into ed cone and lance knobel last night.
i talked with ed about tara sue, and how she was the pioneer for political weblogs. mentioned that something interesting may soon happen with political weblogs in switzerland. lance used to run the davos meetings of the WEF, and has had a weblog for years. in years past, he used to provide very good inside coverage, something that is now sorely missed. he made me aware of some MP in the UK that really understand political weblogs, and consequently write them themselves.

Openoffice screws Kucinich

i have a confession to make. i almost obliterated a good chunk of kucinich supporters (well, their email addresses). i was trying to be helpful, offering to do some data mangling / cleanup tasks as a token of appreciation for henri, who graciously hosted me in san francisco.
so i sat down with the openoffice spreadsheet and went into tinkering mode. after a while, i had the procedure down, and was happily getting rid of dupes and sorting the addresses in various ways. scanning through the dataset, i noticed something odd: entire letters were missing from the alphabetically ordered list. openoffice had somehow munged ~30% of all records (~100k email addresses). fortunately, i had backups. redid the job with excel, without a glitch.

Interactive politics

funnily, i’m knee-deep in politics on this trip. between helping my friend henri who is in charge of IT for kucinich and advising chris who is running for office in palo alto, i’m getting a good idea of how the campaigning works around here. tobias mentions swiss politicians and weblogs. i’m not very hopeful that they will get a clue any time soon, but there are some political weblogs in switzerland. of course they only pay lip service. i mean, what’s up with not updating since december 2002?

endorsement

with the dust off my body, and water around me in sufficient quantities, i can once more muse on this blog. one very nice person i got to know on this trip is chris kelly, berkman alumnus and currently running for office in palo alto.
from my limited personal experience with politicians, chris really cares and has a clue. he is working on privacy issues in his day job, so i quizzed him on the transparent society. chris wants to shape a policy around brin’s notions which sounds sensible to me.

Netizens 2.0

Charlie Nesson’s ideas always seem crazy until about a year later. So Charlie walks into the office yesterday and says he has an idea that is crazy even for him..(but once we hear it, we like the idea)
Charlie’s idea is to run a candidate for President of the United States who is supported by the worldwide community of web-enabled activists. Essentially this person would be a second superpower candidate for the key power role in the first superpower.
Charlie is suggesting John Perry Barlow as the candidate, because John is excellent at debating and discussing controversial issues, and the role of the candidate will be to change minds–not simply to win votes.

a new try at establishing a net culture, seemingly:

The power sphere of the second superpower is in a different dimension from nations, and as such, the second superpower can and does work to influence the behavior and balance the power of nations. As individuals we are all members of one nation or another, and we may choose to be members of the second superpower. We can be both. Second superpower people identify themselves as citizens of the world, and care about social development, collaboration, innovation, open societies, and commons. They believe that at heart all people are precious and are one. Second superpower people need not be conventionally liberal or conservative, because there is political and social innovation yet to be done, and current political categories are certainly outmoded.

i am ready to shed my nationality (which i don’t care about), and adopt better principles.

Emigration to europe

I wonder how many Americans have applied for resident visas to European countries claiming political asylum from the current US administration. I certainly can’t be the first person in this country to think of such a radical departure from the norm. How many non-resident aliens will decide that America really isn’t the place they want to live in for the rest of their lives? How many will suddenly start looking at other countries if the US goes into another Great Depression, as some economic scholars are predicting? What will this mean for US-born citizens and their children? I mean, who wants to be from a country that is beginning to be so universally hated simply because the political administration is so damn clueless about foreign policy?

and then there is stuff like this.

principles

i found these, and liked them sufficiently enough to merit a post.

The Libertarian Party’s Statement of Principles

We, the members of the Libertarian Party, challenge the cult of the omnipotent state and defend the rights of the individual.

We hold that all individuals have the right to exercise sole dominion over their own lives, and have the right to live in whatever manner they choose, so long as they do not forcibly interfere with the equal right of others to live in whatever manner they choose.

Governments throughout history have regularly operated on the opposite principle, that the State has the right to dispose of the lives of individuals and the fruits of their labor. All political parties other than our own grant to government the right to regulate the lives of individuals and seize the fruits of their labor without their consent.

We, on the contrary, deny the right of any government to do these things, and hold that where governments exist, they must not violate the rights of any individual: namely, (1) the right to life — we support the prohibition of the initiation of physical force against others; (2) the right to liberty of speech and action — we oppose all attempts by government to abridge the freedom of speech and press, as well as government censorship in any form; and (3) the right to property — we oppose all government interference with private property, such as confiscation, nationalization, and eminent domain, and support the prohibition of robbery, trespass, fraud, and misrepresentation.

Since governments, when instituted, must not violate individual rights, we oppose all interference by government in the areas of voluntary and contractual relations among individuals. People should not be forced to sacrifice their lives and property for the benefit of others. They should be left free by government to deal with one another as free traders; and the resultant economic system, the only one compatible with the protection of individual rights, is the free market.

Reign of the flyover territory

democracy is a curious beast. what began as a sensible balance of power between cities and the back country is shifting ever more towards the backwaters being in control. due to representational logic, landscapes with hardly a living being hold far more relative power than densely packed urban hubs. this holds true in both switzerland and the us. while the cities are generating the wealth that is then redistributed to the countryside, they do not get to decide over issues that affect this wealth directly. the democrats in the us took the laudable step of picking the first female to become minority leader. her only problem: she is too liberal for the barbecue hinterland, being from san francisco. seems its time to end this second middle age by setting up city states again. this would eliminate quite a few problems:

  • no more SUVs (no space)
  • no more urban sprawl (densely populated areas being preferable)
  • less firearms (again, no space to enjoy them)
  • less cults (easier access to higher education)
  • a slimmer populace (overweight isn’t fun in a city)