Without the state

links for 2007-03-15

• Neighbourhoods: A future of participation?
  # consultation without engagement is damaging and always has been. So - # start community engagement at the most local level and take the lessons up a level at a time, cautiously (Ben Page made some potent points about scale) # do not use the C word to im
  (tags: consultation engagement participation Community conferences networking)
• Designing for Civil Society: Open source Osborne gets serious techie endorsement
  distinction between consultation - join in your system - and participation - join in a shared system. This meant that the ownership of political process and deliberation should sit outside Westminster, and political parties.
  (tags: consultation participation politics opensourcepolitics)
• Camille Paglia quoted on Samizdata.net - that must be a first!
  Last year, Global Exchange, a San Francisco human rights group, pressured Hershey to disclose the sources of its cocoa beans and to take further steps to ensure proper working conditions. This kind of outreach to expose and remedy injustice represents the
  (tags: humanrights CamillePaglia paglia leftism capitalism)

links for 2007-03-14

• Decision from European Court of Human Rights
  The European Court of Human Rights has ruled that unions can legitimately expel BNP members, thanks to a case brought by ASLEF. They found that whilst BNP members did have a right to freedom of association, this worked in reverse too, and didn’t need to
  (tags: law europe echr humanrights legaljudgment BNP ASLEF freeassociation)
• Stumbling and Mumbling: Private equity: what it does
  Private equity firms succeed largely because publicly-quoted firms are inefficient; their profits come partly from eliminating such inefficiencies. Which raises the question. If conventional shareholder ownership is inefficient, what business structures a
  (tags: privateequity business finance shareholders workerownership)
• Stumbling and Mumbling: Why aren't there more co-ops?
  a look at the factors affecting coop formation - legal and institutional
  (tags: coop cooperative law mutual)
• Gene Expression: The Lamp Post Rule
  There's a problematic tendency, particularly prevalent when dealing with emotionally-charged subjects, for people with little or no understanding of a complex subject to handle numbers that come out of that subject in much the same way that Moses handled
  (tags: thinkingtools lamppostrule)

Feeling sorry for myself...

I haven’t posted for a while and for a number of reasons. In part it is because I’ve been ill with a persistent infection – nothing life threatening, but draining enough to stop me working and making it hard to concentrate. As a consequence I’ve seen more daytime TV than I would like and found it increasingly difficult to give serious attention to the antics of politicians like Blair and Cameron or to the often equally ludicrous posturings of posters on Samizdata or the Adam Smith Institute - life's too short.

Having reached 60 and because this illness has kept me effectively housebound I suppose inevitably I start thinking about my own mortality. As I said, the infection per se is not major, but it – or rather the immobilisation it causes - is perhaps a foretaste of what may be facing me over the next few years. It isn’t exactly a cheerful prospect to think about such narrowing of horizons, especially since I had promised myself that I would be spending more time on photography and perhaps return to painting.

Perhaps it was bad timing, but this narrowing took place at the same time as I resigned from the professional body I have been a member of for some 30 years. I’m not sure what I expected, but it wasn’t ‘please return your certificate of membership’. The closing of that particular door, even though it wasn’t a door I had ventured through for some time, perhaps reinforced my feeling that I was on a cusp, but without knowing quite what was facing me.

That lack of interest in the banalities of political life is a further problem in itself, since this blog is not (normally) a personal journal and I definitely don’t see it as journalism. It has always had elements of a commonplace book, but it has also been a place where I can practice the craft of writing. Without stimulus, without some idea, I have nothing to craft, other than write about my problems in writing, the classic response of any blocked writer I suppose.

I have several posts unfinished in draft; some now well past their sell by date. I may be able to revive them but for the moment while I’m stuck here, infected foot elevated and feeling sorry for myself, postings will be irregular.