a dedicated review
ok, I had way too much fun writing this review...I picked up this book while walking around Barnes and Noble last night and well, you can read...F*ck your Book
stray bits...
Oh, Facebook
Enough is enough. And also, this is why Civ.Works. Wrote that up in more detail for LA Progressive - https://www.laprogressive.com/facebook-okays-political-lies/
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Wrote this, on Rojava, trying to organize actionable things in a collaborative way: RFC3: Rojava, Syria and Turkey 2019
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I will post this. Although it may ramble, be warned - this morning I have given myself permission to simply write, a sort of private-public diary, to try to tease one noodle out of the bowl, or to follow one twisted path of thoughts up to the root.
Reading Virginia Woolf helped, I think. Though it also made me discontent again in the routine I have accepted, the one where most of my life and day goes into work for something that I don't fundamentally care deeply about, that is not core to me. How did that happen - something to do with rent, bills, children I think. Yet it also has a benefit, this discipline, I have learned valuable patterns from it. The question is, can I find time to apply those patterns to what is core to me, before my mind becomes more fuzzy than it already is?
I have found, this past year, some threads that do feel deeply central, some possible solutions to the world that I want to try, that can be tried by a single person or a small group, that I believe can grow and live and combat some of the cancers that
Sense and Cents
The power of making sense...
The positive side of capitalism is a free flowing distribution of efforts and resources
Downside is that it is subject to both parasites and cancers
The real thing is the flow of information, effort and fixed resources. And this flow is more interesting if one starts with information rather than an anonymized proxy for resources. So information about what efforts are going on, how one can contribute, and what the intended outcome will be, allows people to optimize their contributions. trust networks, transparency and long term voluntary relationships minimize parasitism and cancers.
This is sort of a draft, will polish this later...
"money isn't everything"
indeed - its only an anonymized representation of value. But some types of value inherently cannot be anonymized. Some of those come under the category of 'love makes the world go round'
and a book review - The Night Listener
I may not be judging this book fairly as a work of fiction - I wanted to read it because I had originally read the Rock and a Hard Place, the book published by "Pete", when I was about twelve, and had really gotten into it. I'd felt a bit betrayed when I found out it was a hoax, and remembered the note from "Dad" assuring readers that "Pete" was real. So I wanted the story behind that, how Maupin had been hoaxed too.
The Night Listener felt like yet another hoax, unfortunately, a lie about how a lie came to be. Because it didn't account for how the boy's book _was_ published, with a long foreward from Maupin assuring readers that it was real. Why did the real Maupin do that? Did he have doubts at that time, was he trying to help the boy, or did he know it was false and it was some sort of coldhearted calculation in this strange world of elephants? I feel a bit more let down at the end, that this book was again some fantasy for suckers, and nothing to do with whatever the real motivations were in the real story
the benefits of lack of money
one has to make a certain kind of sense to attract investors or donors; but one has to make another kind of sense, perhaps even more sense, to grow organically without dollars. and so this becomes an interesting discipline, that can create a particularly healthy organism
"Here's how I know I've Made it in America"
"I've made it not because I assimilated, or because I have a little bit of money, or because my voice be heard. I've made it because I can disagree with and question what America is really all about. I've made it because I can demand more from my country."
-- Julissa Arce, My American Dream, p 285
good intentions
...not combined with good patterns/best practices not only pave the way to hell, the road is a bit bumpy.
in a hospital, the nurses not only desire not to kill patients, they check 3 times that the actions they take are correct
similarly best practices are important, esp when combined with power. Some of the greatest harm right now is coming from excessively powerful leaders who at one point had good intentions.