Over at the comments to this post at Wealth Bondage, The Happy Tutor issues an invitation to me, and it’s one I am thrilled to accept: Waiting for Democracy to Emerge is very depressing, can you help us think how we might be more enaged? What line of thought led you to your own choices? Today’s post, inspired as it is from The Unconquerable World by Jonathan Schell will deal with the thought of Vaclav Havel, Alexis de Tocqueville and Hannah Arendt, and will end with a nice story about a Mohawk student at the University of British Columbia who …
In the process of redesigning my website I have added a couple of papers on power and freedom at the “Papers and Publications” page. Feel free to peruse.
Jonathan Schell is turning my crank these days. His latest book, The Unconquerable World is a stunning survey of the efficacy of non-violent action as it tore down the institutions of British and Soviet Imperialism in the 20th century. What I’ve been getting out of the book is a bunch of springboards for my current thinking on freedom, decolonization, and organizational and community life. Starting today you’ll read a series of posts here inspired by Schell’s writing, and more often by the writing of his sources. I’ll start here with a quote from Schell, which begins with four lines of …
Linkage: I just got invited to a meeting using Meeting Wizard. Dave Pollard muses on birds and the stories we carry about nature A list of models of change at Incipent Thoughts Credit Suisse Thought leader Forum on self-organization, via JOHO. Check out especially the paper by Steven Strogatz on “Sync” which is also the title of his new book. Email is where knowledge goes to die. So start asking questions in public. Feel free to use my comments boxes! Bernie DeKoeven on playing games intergenerationally: “…whatever it is that you�re playing, there are two things you have to take …
Happy Chinese and Korean New Year. It’s the Year of the Monkey, and isn’t necessarily good: The Year of the Monkey, 2004, in the Hsia calendar, is symbolized by two elements � with wood sitting on top of metal. According to the cycle of birth and destruction, which governs the inter-relationship between elements, metal will destroy wood. Therefore, wood sitting on its destroyer � metal, is a symbol of disharmony and this may lead to international conflicts. The yang wood is always compared to a tall tree, with the characteristic of being proud, tough, stubborn and sticking to principles, inflexible …