Without the state

Open Space

Just occasionally an issue turns up that generates huge interest with large numbers of people wanting to have their say. Conventional meeting formats with 'top table' don't work in these conditions - too many people want to speak but can't, others when they get the their 2 minutes or whatever is allotted to them can't make the point they want quickly enough or are tongue tied and either way, end up as frustrated as if they had never spoken at all.

Open Space seems to offer a way through this problem. I have never run such a meeting although I have participated. I didn't personally find it as liberating as I had hoped, but the Open Space element was only about 90 minutes out of the day, which may have been the problem. Chris Corrigan who runs this site, also has a blog, offering comments and thoughts from the work he is doing.

Open Space operates under four principles and one law. The four principles are:

 

1. Whoever comes are the right people
 
2. Whatever happens is the only thing that could have happened.
 
3. When it starts is the right time
 
4. When it's over it's over

The Law is known as the Law of Two Feet:

"If you find yourself in a situation where you are not contributing or learning, move somewhere where you can."

The four principles and the law work to create a powerful event motivated by the passion and bounded by the responsibility of the participants.

 

The experiences Chris records seem to suggest that in the right circumstances, the process can be very liberating and satisfying for participants.

If anyone has experiences to share of this process, please get in touch.

Chris has two other blogs, which is how I found him (via Ecotone - also worth a visit)

Today on Flickr

vigeland3, originally uploaded by Jim Gleeson.

I visited this place when I was 18, some 40 years ago. I was blown away then so it is great to see these images.

Mutualist Blog: Free Market Anti-Capitalism

A relatively new blog set up by Kevin Carson is a nice counterbalance to the corporatists at the ASi and some of the wingnuts at Samizdata (where does that term come from I wonder - I worked out its counterpart Moonbat - I assume from George Monbiot - but wingnut?). This post on property and the meaning thereof, looked at three contrasting statements from Proudhon and is well worth a read.

On property, I'm sure someone has done it, but I never can work out why all these corporatists, defending the right of corporations to own property, never ask the question of how they acquired that property in the first place. In hunter/gatherer times, without formal ownership, there must have been some way of apportioning access to hunting and gathering lands. That may have involved violence, but seems just as likely to have been a form of timesharing access.

By the time we get to feudalism, when both land and people are property vested ultimately in the King, some form of violence must have been done to wrest control and to hold both land and people in this way. All modern property ownership in Europe can presumably trace its roots back to then, while in the US, the European settlers took the land they wanted from the indigenous peoples. To argue otherwise is to place yourself alongside the Boers and the roots of Apartheid.

I don't pretend to have studied the transition - although I'm sure Marx and others did - so if anyone has a pointer to where I start I would be grateful.

On this day

On 8 May 1945 a State commission compiled by the Soviets with advice from Polish, French and Czechoslovak experts revealed the full horror of conditions at the camp. Nearly 3,000 survivors of various nationalities were questioned and on the basis of their evidence the report estimated 4,000,000 people had perished there between 1941 and early 1945. The dead included citizens from the Soviet Union, Poland, France, Belgium, Holland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Italy and Greece.

The commission, which had previously investigated conditions at Majdanek, Treblinka and other camps, described Auschwitz as the worst in its experience. It found evidence of experiments carried out on humans "of a revolting character". According to the evidence, the commission said the Germans had moved out up to 60,000 inmates - those still fit enough to walk - when they retreated.

The few thousand who were left behind were freed by the Russians. They also found seven tons of women's hair, human teeth, from which gold fillings had been extracted and tens of thousands of children's outfits. The final death toll was later revised downwards to between 1 and 1.5 million, including 800,000 Jews.

Taken from http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/january/27/newsid_3520000/3520986.stm

...and read Norm

Climate change nonsense

If you are looking for another post on behalf of the oil companies you can go elsewhere. The nonsense in this case, rather surprisingly endorsed by our old friend Philip Stott at Envirospin Watch, comes from the Diplomad.

Start with this paragraph taken from a recent report.  Note especially the first sentence.

While no amount of climate change is safe and many communities, such as those in Arctic regions and low-lying island states, are already experiencing adverse impacts, scientific evidence suggests that there is a threshold of temperature increase above which the extent and magnitude of the impacts of climate change increase sharply. No one can say with certainty what that threshold is, but it is important that we make an educated judgment at this time based on the best available science.

Now look at this extract from the blog. Watch carefully because he's fast.

NO CLIMATE CHANGE AT ALL! The world's climate has NEVER EVER changed -- until evil man showed up and started doing stuff. And while "scientific evidence suggests a threshold of temperature" we have no friggin idea what it is, but we're not going to be deterred from doing something just because we don't know what we're doing!

See how quickly the (anonymous) author moves from selective misquote [No climate change at all] to a complete misrepresentation [the world's climate has never changed]  in the space of a single line. Breathtakingly dishonest - worrying too because the authors of this blog claim to be career diplomats in the US Foreign Service!

Of course this is not the first time they have been caught out - such dishonesty takes practice.

Philip Stott also commends another piece of malicious misrepresentation over at TechCentral Station, from Tim Worstall. This is from the same report.

"On the basis of an extensive review of the relevant scientific literature, we propose a long-term objective of preventing average global surface temperature from rising by more than 2°C (3.6°F) above its pre-industrial level (taken as the level in 1750, when carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations first began to rise appreciably as a result of human activities).

Worstall changes this into an assertion that the paper argues climate change only began in the  1750s.

We might also note that no one, no one at all, thinks that human influence on the climate started in 1750 AD. Try 8,000 BC with the invention of agriculture.

I don't normally go to the more lunatic regions of Blogistan, still less attempt to comment on them. This garbage seems worse than usual however, if only for its endorsement by Philip Stott who in his post says he is "increasingly angry that science can be so abused".

Well by the standard of these dishonest posts his scientific judgement is slipping -  will he be endorsing Velikovsky next?

Today on Flickr

art direction, originally uploaded by MY LIFE AS A HAINT.

Country style

If you read Normblog you will know that Norm is pretty partial to country and western music. This isn't a taste that I share by and large, although Johnny Cash I often like, and Dolly Parton is a great songwriter.  Just recently however, I got a slight inkling of what  Norm means when I heard a song by Patsy Cline called 'I go to pieces'. She isn't a great voice, but this performance has much of the same rawness of Billie Holiday not something I expected.

I fall to pieces
Each time I see you again
I fall to pieces
How can I be just your friend

You want me to act like we've never kissed
You want me to forget, pretend we've never met
And I've tried and I've tried but I haven't yet
You walk by, and I fall to pieces

I fall to pieces
Each time someone speaks your name
I fall to pieces
Time only adds to the flame

You tell me to find someone else to love
Someone who'll love me, too, the way you used to do
But each time I go out with someone new
You walk by and I fall to pieces

(I fall to pieces)
Each time someone speaks your name
(I fall to pieces)
Time only adds to the flame

You tell me to find someone else to love
Someone who'll love me too, the way you used to do
But each time I go out with someone new
You walk by and I fall to pieces

Crooked Timber: The centrality of coffee

A discussion which seems to have started at Crooked Timber, based on an article in the  NY Review of Books about "the centrality of coffee as a metaphor (or maybe synecdoche) for civilisation" has meandered over to City Comforts and seems to be developing into a discussion about 'third places' - coffee shops etc as a focus for community /civic life on the Mediterranean model. My comment at City Comforts was thus:

Any resemblance between Starbucks (at least in its UK manifestation) and a typical French/Italian/Spanish cafe is purely accidental. Starbucks is a designed product just as much as McDonald and Burger King. That doesn't mean there is anything wrong with them - apart from the price of a coffee. They are just not the sort of cafe I look for when I'm in Europe. At least in part that is because the European cafes (actually I suspect Mediterranean) mix coffee/soft drinks with alcohol sales and usually with some food - not just danish but sandwiches etc without any expectation that you will choose one over another - so a party may have a group of people some with alcohol, some with wine/beer, some eating, some not.

Our word is our weapon

I may have linked to specific posts at Our word is our weapon but so far as I can recall, not to the site proper. It is worth a look, doing a constructive and fact based demolition job on the simplistic posts emanating from the Adam Smith Insitute, Samizdata and the like.

This for example looks at the ASI's unhesitating and unthinking faith in globalisation and their willingness to bendd the facts in support of that faith, while this takes apart their anti-environmentalism (and records also that I'm not the only one who has critical comments deleted).

Finally this post looks at the general anti-UN stance taken by so many bloggers of the right, in this case pointing to a distorted and selective quoting so as to grossly misrepresent what the UN are doing after the tsunami.

The Indian Ocean tsunami is sure bringing out the cretin in some people. Mark Steyn is the latest one who cannot bring himself to admit that the UN might be helping the victims. So he selectively quotes from a UN press release in order to manufacture a clever-clever pay-off line:

Reading sites like the ASI, Envirospin Watch and Samizdata it is easy to get dispirited by their general biliousness. Our Word is our Weapon is a good counterbalance, which doesn't depend on bluster and sleight of hand to make telling points

Today on Flickr

parvaz, originally uploaded by shohreh.