Cirilla writes about Buy Nothing Day.#

Thanksgiving was one of the only holidays that has remained somewhat untouched by obligatory consumer activity. That is until some bright executive felt they could remedy that by holding massive sales, transforming the simple, family-centric holiday into yet another melee of frenetic spending.

Buy Nothing Day is an exercise, and I think of it as a way to resist the call to arms corporations send out. By staying home and NOT spending needlessly, you are proving that you aren't under the thumb of economic programmers who seek to invade your revery and capture your gaze until they've transferred what is YOUR money into THEIR profit, leaving you with goods you didn't need until they convinced you you did.

I am not above spending, but that is why I study it. I want to know why I've been so utterly seduced by something so harmful and I want to know if I can hit the brakes on this massive country-wide brainwashing. It's not a revolutionary act, but it is a start, one I think everyone should try.

Here are my thoughts on Buy Nothing Day and the comments to her original entry by other readers.#

Tim has written that while doing this shows that you are free from the economic programmers, you are not actually making much of a consistent statement. If you did want to you would "boycott holiday spending entirely." Previously I've linked to No-Shopping Christmas, where Agent000 describes such a statement and boycott:

No Shopping Christmas is a simple, yet heavy concept: buy no gifts for Christmas out of obligation, and inform others of your intent so that they do not feel obligated to buy you gifts in return. Don't waste money on lame decorations, and thank you kindly for not killing the trees. Spend time with your family and friends instead of spending money on them. Participate in the traditions of your religion of choice. Or not. Accept Christmas as a time for rest, relaxation, and spending time with people outside of shopping malls.

Implementing this concept, I see a world with much less stress and much more value. A world where children would receive fewer cheap plastic toys, but have their college education paid for. A world where we plant a tree in our backyard, not our living room. A world where time is valued more than money.

This holiday season, go out and don't buy something.

This, I think, shows some of the core of what Buy Nothing Day is about. Like a religious fast, it teaches the practitioners that they can have a happy, full life without giving into temptation and desire. In this context, Buy Nothing Day forces you to realize that you don't need to buy things every day - hopefully giving you the courage to plan what purchases you must make more wisely and lead a less stressful life. That is the case for controlling your buying in general. In the case of holiday shopping, a No-Shopping Christmas takes something negative ("Don't spend money on Christmas.") into something positive: "Show people that you really care about them, whatever the methods."

We have now reached a point where it is interesting to bring in Tim's next comment, that doing this would cause the market to become stagnant and that this would "cause more damage to the system" if everyone hoarded their money. I think inherent in this comment is both a misunderstanding of economics and an assumption about rights that the "market" has that it does not.

The market has no rights. It is not our responsibility, either individually or as a collective (i.e. the government), to guarantee that what was profitable in the past is profitable in the present or the future. The only markets that should flourish are the ones that are beneficial for the people that are involved in them. If you are providing a product or service that I want for a price we can agree on then I will buy it. If there is no one selling any product or service that I am interested in then I am not obligated to put my money into the market. (Note: This scenario would never occur anyways because of the specialization inherent in humans, there is always someone with a Comparative Advantage over me in something I need, so I would be better off trading with her.)

There seems to be a misunderstanding of the greater meaning of Buy Nothing Day. It serves as a symbol of choice against spending your money. It encourages you to think about WHY you are spending your money, and not spending simply because everyone else is or because advertising tells you to. Even Buy Nothing All Year doesn't suggest that you remove yourself from TRADE (the abstract of money,) it only suggest that you be mindful about where you put your money.

 

Adam writes,

furthermore, you aren't going to actually take away from the profits of the companys, because everyone's just going to go and spend their money within the next couple days anyway."

Again, the point is not to destroy the profits of large companies by one day of protest. Or even really to destroy the profits of large companies with continually boycott. The goal of Buy Nothing Day is to open your eyes and free your mind. And the goal of any boycott, I should mention, is to get the boycottee to change their methods and give in to your demands - in the case of many multinationals this is generally to treat their employees and the environment better. It would be malicious to just single out companies are destroy them through boycott for the sake of destroying them. If there is a successful company, that is not a monopoly, then it exists and is successful because it offers the market something of value and to deny your fellow man that value would be unjust. In fact, to deny that company market share would be to exercise monopoly power of your own, as monopoly is defined as the ability to control entry to a market.

As previously noted, I'm a highly opinionated arm-chair intellectual who consistently covers his ass in the final paragraphs of rants and criticisms. But I post this here because I would get grateful for corrections in my method of argument.#

Richard links to The Atlantic Monthly interview Harold Bloom about his hero, Shakespeare and his new book, Hamlet: Poem Unlimited.#

One of the more defining things about Harold Bloom is the way he holds literature and great authors in such reverence. Rather than take the traditional critic's path of assuming he knows more than the author about life and what the author was writing about, he instead looks to honor and by some measure understand the author.

Well, it's such a complex thing. I left the English department twenty-six years ago. I just divorced them and became, as I like to put it, Professor of Absolutely Nothing. To a rather considerable extent, literary studies have been replaced by that incredible absurdity called cultural studies which, as far as I can tell, are neither cultural nor are they studies. But there has always been an arrogance, I think, of the semi-learned.

You know, the term "philology" originally meant indeed a love of learning—a love of the word, a love of literature. I think the more profoundly people love and understand literature, the less likely they are to be supercilious, to feel that somehow they know more than the poems, stories, novels, and epics actually know.

He also has something to say about multi-culturalists who suppose that a piece of literature should be honored for more than it's content.

I've so talked myself to exhaustion with a sort of rant against cant that I'm reluctant to say much about it. Throughout the English-speaking world, the wave of French theory was replaced by the terrible mélange that I increasingly have come to call the School of Resentment—the so-called multiculturalists and feminists who tell us we are to value a literary work because of the ethnic background or the gender of the author.

Feminism as a stance calling for equal rights, equal education, equal pay—no rational, halfway decent human being could possibly disagree with this. But what is called feminism in the academies seems to be a very different phenomenon indeed. I have sometimes characterized these people as a Rabblement of Lemmings, dashing off the cliff and carrying their supposed subject down to destruction with them.

And near the end, Harold Bloom comments on his famous op-ed in the New York Times about Harry Potter.

I was asked to write the piece, quite innocently, by the editor of the op-ed page of The Wall Street Journal. I asked, "What is Harry Potter?" He explained who Harry Potter was. I said, "It doesn't sound like my sort of thing." He said, "Harold, there are people like myself who think you are probably as notable a literary critic as the world now has. You really ought to say something about this."

So I went round to the Yale bookstore and purchased an inexpensive paperback copy of the first volume. I could not believe what was in front of me. What I particularly could not bear was that it was just one cliché after another. In fact, I kept a little checklist on an envelope next to me, and every time any individuals were going, as you or I might say, to take a walk, they were going to "stretch their legs." At the fiftieth or sixtieth stretching of the legs, that was too much for me.

I wrote the piece, and it was published. It is not an exaggeration to say that all hell indeed broke loose. The editor called me ten days later and said, "Harold, we've never seen anything like this before. We have received over four hundred letters denouncing your piece on Harry Potter. We've received one favorable letter, but we think you must have written it." I said, "No, I assure you."

Harold Bloom is a true role-model in literary appreciation and cultural studies. I wonder why I've never seen his named mentioned next to Jacques Barzun (XXX: Link) because they seem to have similar ideas. I'll have to look into this more. I can't wait to read some of the books I've seen them mention.

Richard also linked to another Atlantic Monthly interview with William Langewiesche, who recently wrote an article about the Challenger crash.#

In the interview, he talks a great deal about the failure of the NASA organization and the failure on the part of America to more accurately articulate the desires of a space experiment.

What is it about NASA that discourages dissent?

That's a very complicated question. All large organizations do. NASA is astonishingly bureaucratic. I'm sure that people who are in the business of studying the sociology of large organizations would put it in a certain age group; it's sort of a young adult or an adolescent bureaucracy. It's at a certain stage in its development where the initial energies and camaraderie and ability to communicate and sense of mission—all that's disappeared. And it's not yet in the really mature stage, like the U.S. military is right now, where they've been able to work through a lot of these problems. I've been impressed by the Army, specifically, in my dealings with them in Bosnia and Kosovo, by the way communication does work within that organization. I mean, yeah, the Army is famously stupid, and there's the right way and the wrong way and the Army way and all this stuff… but in fact in the larger organization they've worked through a lot of problems. NASA hasn't done that.

Later on defining a space mission:

There are other fundamental problems here. Obviously, if you look at what NASA's been doing, the problems are deeper than a lack of communication. They have to do with a lack of real direction. There have been thirty years of half-baked policy formed by the White House and Congress, to which NASA acquiesced out of the sense of the need to survive. There's been the dishonesty of NASA leaders in presenting their case to the American public and to Congress. And there are NASA's problems with managing its budgets and over-promising things. All this is much more serious than the internal bureaucratic barriers—which are a very serious problem at NASA, but the larger thing is that the whole direction needs to be questioned at this point. And it's not just because a few people were killed.

As a nation, we need to rethink NASA. What are we doing in space? And to what end, and in what time frame, and how much money are we willing to spend to do this? We need to reconsider the definition of payback. What should we expect to see in terms of tangible benefits for this kind expenditure? One answer may very well be that we should expect a 300-year time period for payback—and that's fine. We can still afford, and in fact we mustafford, to continue with human space flight—but let's be honest that there may be no immediate payback.

And in the closing of the interview he comments on his writing process,

The main thing is, I don't ever want to lose the reader. You've got this rare, privileged position of having the reader's attention, and you don't want to abuse it. That's my number one concern—always, always, always: fear, in some ways, of not treating the reader with sufficient care and respect. Now, there are various ways you can screw up: you can bore the reader, you can lecture the reader, you can talk down to the reader, you can be overly plodding, you can be overly flip, you can be overly manipulative. Our readers are sophisticated, if they think the writer is doing some cheap trick, they'll put it down. So I think the main thing I have is this overriding concern for losing the reader.

Although I have some internal disagree over this point, I think that being mindful of your reader is very important for writing well and producing something interesting. I often write about how blogging is wonderful because it is writing with a passion, rather than with an end or a paycheck in mind, and that because of this passion the quality level is improved. That is not to say, however, that blogging is writing to solely please oneself. You could do that in a private journal, but because of the public consumption of a weblog (perceived or otherwise) one is tempted to have an audience.

This audience turns a scratching of notes for personal reminders into both a textual dialogue and a typed manuscript that will continue to be a sign post in a particular informational adventure after that adventure's mystery and gleam has left the eye of the initiator.

I am conflicted because I don't like to say "Weblogs are THIS." Or "Good writing is only THAT." There are certainly some amazing pieces of writing that were not for public consumption and there are many forms of writing that seem written in spite of their audience. This reminds of the question that, "Does meaning and purpose destroy art?" That is, if art is pure experience embodied in some form, then if it serves some purpose or greater meaning it is no longer pure experience and thus not art. Perhaps when I say writing I really mean prose rather than poetry. (Yet another meandering: Prose can be influenced by art, and artful, but that does not make it art. Art is more than technique - or less depending on how you look at it.)

Faré recently published an article about Government and Microsoft: a Libertarian View on Monopolies.#

The central thesis of the article is that both the assumptions of those on Government's side and on Microsoft's side are unfounded in the Libertarian world view. And, secondly that when talking about monopolies you must make the distinct between de facto monopolies, and de jure monopolies. The first being just and the second being unjust - and both not being mutually exclusive in anyone case.

The argument goes like this: It is not the ends of a monopolist that are worrisome, i.e. we don't care that Microsoft makes a lot of money, because they could make a lot of money because they are the best and worked the hardest. What matters is the path that a company takes to become a monopolist, the means, and in all cases the unjust monopolist is able to assert it's power by privilege given to it by government. The distinction is between monopolies In Fact or In Law.

At this point, Faré makes the following comment about how de facto monopolies are irrelevant on their own because they are undefinable in any absolute way:

Actually, post facto, every transaction involves a unique producer and a unique consumer and thus is both a de facto monopoly and de factomonopsony. Whether other transactions for "similar" services involve the same producer or not is irrelevant; indeed, by choosing appropriate definitions of "similar" for services, one can establish either the monopoly status or lack thereof of any firm. At one extreme, every company has a monopoly on the specific services issued with its name and address in the contracts and invoices; at the other extreme, all services are in competition with all other services for the resources of the consumers, who can always spend their resources in altogether different activities, provide for their own services, go to the black market, etc., so there is never really a monopoly. Is a trip in the same plane on a different seat a similar enough service to qualify as a competitive offer? Is a trip in plane from a nearby airport similar enough? Is a trip in train "similar" to a trip in plane? A trip in car? What about working or touring in nearby places instead of abroad? What about staying at home? Depending on the arbitrary answer to these questions, a lot of things can suddenly become or cease to be de facto monopolies.

The privilege that is given to a de jure monopolist by the government is the ability to exclude others from the market. That is, to prevent them from entering and thus competing for market share - thus denying the public from the ability to choose and to compete. This can only be enforced by public force, something that the government has a monopoly on itself. So, the government is the true source of the Evil related to monopoly.

So the problem is inherent to "Intellectual Property" laws:

The problem with Microsoft's monopoly is relatively minor. With free software and "Free Software", society could ultimately make this particular monopoly irrelevant given enough time, though it may cost all the resources wasted during that time: people will end up using free software, and ignoring any software upon which "Intellectual Property" claims are enforced. But the same isn't true of the problem with the source of Microsoft's monopoly, that is, Government. Government won't go away by simply ignoring it, because government consists precisely in invading people's lives, whether they like it or not; it doesn't leave you the choice of not interacting with it. So while it is important to know what should be done about Microsoft, namely to cancel its privileges, the more important question is to determine what should be done about Government, that caused the whole mess to begin with. We will soon reach the conclusion that what should be done is to identify and cancel the Government's über-privilege, the source of all privileges. The tricky problem will be how such thing can be achieved; however the solution to this particular problem deserves a study of its own, and is beyond the scope of this long enough essay.

The first thing to do is to understand the nature of Government and of privilege, so that whatever is done to existing governments is not, like splitting Microsoft, the displacement of the very same Evil into different entities with different names, without removing anything to that Evil. To make a long story short, the source of the Evil is in Coercion: the resort to force to deprive people from the liberty of using their legitimately acquired property as they see fit, and to evade the responsibility of one's decisions. Coercion is the tool that characterizes Government when people submit to it and that characterizes Bandits when people resist to it. To a libertarian, whether done by people wearing an official blue ribbon or by plain outlaws, both kinds of coercion are just as criminal. In other words, Might does not make Right. Once these basic concepts are understood, things are easily put to to their place, and it is possible to determine the "proper limits of government": the Government should do nothing, it shouldn't exist, for in a libertarian society, there is no place for coercion.

Fare is an excellent writer and he makes me want to learn more about true Libertarianism.

Among the things mentioned above, the article also discusses why monopoly is bad in the long-run for the monopolists, what the proper means for restoring justice after the fact are, and about Libertarianism as a theory of Law rather than Government, as it rejects Government.

Christopher Lydon interviews George Lakoff about Moral Politics, Language, and Linguistics.#

In Part Two, I begin with the paradox of our times: that we are learning to live with both an information revolution and a culture of propaganda. "What the Right has done," Lakoff answered, "is create a populist art form known as the rant." He laments the lost language of world leadership: who makes good use these days of key words like fairness, freedom, trust, cooperation, treaty obligations, the values of the United Nations charter, respect, competence, responsibility and openness? Lakoff sets Howard Dean's language and body-language in the Harry Truman tradition. Dean is "forceful, serious, honest--not namby-pamby." He thinks that a medical doctor makes "a very good messenger." He wishes Dean would campaign in the South around doctor's visits to Veterans Hospitals. "Talk to the patients and the doctors there about what it means to fight in a war--about what happens to you... and what happens to the other people you see." Lakoff thinks Dean and the Democrats in general are "not there yet."

A very fascinating conversation, particularly the parts about how the conservatives have much different values than the progressives and compete in both funding strategies and language. Lakoff says that because the conservatives are looser with money and put it where the biggest bang is, rather than spreading out a little bit to "people who need help," they're able to get much more productive work done. On the language note, he makes comments about how if you frame a question in a particular way it can vastly change the way that any answer is interpreted. Definitely go listen to it.

I went and read an article on Alternet by George Lakoff about the California re-election. It was verrry interesting, because Lakoff writes about his many theories and his book, Moral Politics.#

In 'Moral Politics,' I suggested that voters vote their identity — they vote on the basis of who they are, what values they have, and who and what they admire. A certain number of voters identify themselves with their self-interest and vote accordingly. But that is the exception rather than the rule. There are other forms of personal identification — with one's ethnicity, with one's values, with cultural stereotypes, and with culture heroes. The most powerful forms of identification so far as elections are concerned are with values and corresponding cultural stereotypes. The Republicans have discovered this and it is a major reason why they have been winning elections — despite being in a minority. Democrats have not yet figured this out.

The 'Moral Politics' discovery is that models of idealized family structure lie at the heart of our politics — less literally than metaphorically. The very notion of the founding fathers uses a metaphor of the nation as family, not as something we think actively about, but as way of structuring our understanding of the enormous hard-to-conceptualize social group, the nation, in terms of something closer to home, the family. It is something we do automatically, usually without consciously thinking about it.

[...]

In addition, Davis made the bad mistake of accepting the DLC's metaphor of campaigning as marketing. In the DLC model, you look for a list of particular issues that a majority of people, including those on left, support. In the last congressional election it was prescription drugs, social security, and a woman's right to choose. If necessary, you "move to the right" — adopt some right-wing values in hope of getting "centrist" voters. Davis, for example, favored the death penalty, tough sentencing, and supported the prison guards' union. It's a self-defeating strategy. Conservatives have been winning elections without moving to the left.

By presenting a laundry list of issues, Davis and other democrats fail to present a moral vision — a coherent identity with a powerful cultural stereotype — that defines the very identity of the voters they are trying to reach. A list of issues is not a moral vision. Indeed, many Democrats were livid that Arnold did not run on the issues. He didn't need to. His very being activated the strict father model — the heart of the moral vision of conservative Republicans and the most common response to fear and uncertainty.

Courtney links to 10 Habits of Highly Annoying Bloggers by Jeremy Zawodny.#

Bloggers who don't enable comments on their blogs.

Bloggers who rarely produce original content, instead simply aggregating links to other blogs that I already read.

Bloggers who don't provide any "about me" info on their blog, or pointers to it elsewhere on their site. I like to know more about the people I'm reading.

Bloggers who react but rarely act. Commenting on what other people say or do is interesting, but I'm annoyed by folks who never seem to have original material. (Yes, this is like #2 but it's not quite the same.)

Ouch, I suck.

Rick Heller figures out some statistics about what candidates are being blogged about.#

Which candidates do bloggers post about most? Just because a candidate is spoken about does not mean the campaign is succeeding. But in the absence of gaffes or scandals, mention of a candidate's name is one measure of interest in the campaign.

To come up with some numbers, I've written a script to query theFeedster search engine for posts over the last week which mention the Democratic presidential contenders. Feedster is a search engine which uses indexes and searches RSS feeds produced by blogs and news services. The summary data below includes items which appeared in blogs, and in major online media such as nytimes.com. Inspection of the source data suggests to me that the majority of posts are from blogs rather than major media, but I have yet to quantify this. While Feedster does not comprehensively index every blog and online new source, there is no indication that its data sources are skewed in a way which would favor any particular candidate.

Kaye Trammell wonders how to capture the largest political party in America.#

Back to the question at hand: What can we do to increase political participation? The answer to me seems obvious. Rocking the vote didn't work. We need to blog the vote.

Blogging the Vote 101:

• Read a political blog, regardless of whether or not you agree with what it says (even better if you don't!)
• Send your friends links to posts on political blogs
• Start blogging about politics yourself
• Visit candidate blogs & comment there
• Demand substance from candidate blogs

Registering to vote is not enough. We must educate ourselves, get involved, vote & stay engaged to ensure our demands are met.

Andrew Sullivan is right: the revolution will be blogged. Let's do it one post at a time.

Real Live Preacher will tell the real story of Christmas over the next few weeks. "The Christmas Story Uncut."#

Finally, three kings did not appear at his birth bringing gifts. The bible says that magi came, stargazing priests of ancient Persian tradition. The number of magi is not specified, and in any case, they did not arrive until perhaps two years later. By that time, Mary and Joseph had moved into a house. The magi story is from Matthew's gospel and has no real connection to the actual birth of Jesus.

It seems the real Christmas story is lacking many of our favorite elements. Perhaps you are wondering what kind of story might be left without the donkey and the animals in the barn, without the busy but kindly innkeeper, without the rickety manger, and without the stunning gifts lying in the straw.

Tom McDonald writes about Organ Donation.#

So we come to organ donation. One would think that after my experience, I would have the proper docs on the back of my driver's license - a pink card indicating that my organs can be donated. I do not. But my wife knows that I do indeed want to donate my organs at the proper time, defined by her. If I am truly dead, someone can ask her and she can answer. But it is not safe (IMO) for me to allow the hospital to make this sort of decision with an invite on the back of my I.D. Why? Because I don't trust them. I don't trust them to make the necessary effort to save *me* when there is profit in my not having been saved. It makes me feel bad for the potential donors which might lose out because of this conflict of interest.

I've seen wealthy people with recent kidney failures "magically" get kidneys while those who have suffered for years are passed over. There is supposed to be a "check" in place to thwart this sort of thing but it (IMO) is circumvented quite regularly. No no, I'll wait 'til my family is ready to give up my organs.

Andrew Bayer links to Hiwatha Bray on Google in the Boston Globe and criticizes Dave Winer.#

The article:

Winer says that Google may crush rival blogging systems like Radio Userland.

He points to the popular Google Toolbar program that's attached to millions of Web browsers. The toolbar makes it easy to do Google searches and block pop-up ads, but it also contains a link to Google's Blogger service. Microsoft's critics once warned that the company would use its browser toolbars to steer people to Microsoft products. Winer sees Google trying to pull the same stunt.

"Do they have a right to do it? Absolutely," Winer admits. "But I also have a right to hate them."

Dave Winer responds,

Bottom-line, I said Google screwed up by putting Blogger on the toolbar, a few weeks after promising they wouldn't do anything to favor Blogger. It made it impossible to trust them, and their business is built on trust. Google could have helped the whole blogging community, and it's not clear why they didn't -- it's not as if they make any money off Blogger, it's a freebie. They did the small, selfish thing. That's why I think they don't have what it takes to be a leader.

About Hiawatha Bray, the Boston Globe and professional journalists in general, this piece is a perfect demo why I hold them in such low regard. He's really writing a column, he thinks they pull "stunts" and "crush" small competitors, but instead of having the guts to say it himself, he puts the words in my mouth. He should become a columnist, write opinion pieces, or become a software industry leader, and test his ideas in the market.

Andrew Bayer comments on Dave's response,

What exactly is Dave saying here? That Google screwed over the blogging community by providing a link to a free blogging service - which they happen to own? Am I missing something here? Actually, that brings up a bigger question - as best as I can tell, Dave Winer does more harm than good to the blogging community as a whole, with his political games on formats, his single-minded obsession with the blog as the greatest thing since movable type (no pun intended) and himself as Gutenberg, his insistence on openness and flexibility - unless you're talking about doing things differently from HIM, etc... Yes, Dave's done some fantastic work with RSS and aggregators, but is he really that important any more? He doesn't work on Radio/Manila/Frontier any more. RSS 2.0 is already near being replaced by Atom. Is Dave Winer anything more than just a talking head at this point? Is there any reason we should pay any more attention to him than anyone else?

In the comments Xian tells Andrew why Dave is important,

His new Channel Z project is the perfect example of Dave as a doer instead of just a talker. The big problem with blogs so far has been the information-retrieval/KMi ssues. Reverse chron is a great way to enter data and a reasonable way to find the latest info in a given channel, but over time the archives get buried, the context gets lost, and there's very little hierarchical information to work with. Sure, he's doing it with his flawed RSS and OPML specs, but what's he's doing still looks very cool and is likely to influence the design of future weblogging tools. I think in the long run people will want faceted data that can be viewed via a number of different keys. I'm not willing to embrace Radio to get these benefits, but I'm still watching Dave's live experiment with great interest, even taking into account some of my frustration with his politics (in the human sense, not in the sense of government).

I'm incredibly biased, but I agree with Xian. At first glance anyone can seem like they are doing nothing but pushing around hot air but if you stop jumping to conclusions and put away your biases you often learn something you never knew.

David Weinberger writes about passion and decisiveness.#

Granted, we're not talking about Nazism here, but what do you do with a pointy-haired boss who is passionate about creating a truly oppressive, soul-less business environment for the people who report to him? It'd be foollish to deny that PHB's can ever be passionate. There are Taylorist guys with stopwatches dedicated to squeezing the life out of an organization who are completely committed to what they're doing: They spend their spare time reading about it, they can't wait to tell you about it, and they sleep well at night convinced that every day they're making the world a little better.

So, no, passion isn't enough. Passionate oppression is no better than dispassionate oppression. (It might be worse. I don't know.) But decisiveness is often the opposite of passion. It wants to end the suspense and take an act, any act. It doesn't like the doubt and uncertainty that is built into passion because decisiveness doesn't like possibility. It wants the future to be nailed down, and the decision is the first bang of the hammer. Decisiveness is essentially disengaged from the openness that is the future. Passion is the embrace of that openness. Just think about the difference between a manager who is overly-decisive and one who is passionate about the company's reason for existence.

mediaTIC writes something nice about me.#

Makeoutcity.com est un incroyable blog de citations au quotidien sur les nouvelles technologies. Il essaye et c'est là sa particularité, de saisir le chemin d'une conversation telle qu'elle a pu naître quelque part, rebondir sur un autre blog, mentionnée dans les commentaires... C'est véritablement atypique et l'on peut ainsi suivre le chemin d'un débat ou d'un argumentaire... Du point de vue de l'auteur-éditeur de Make Out City, tout de même ;-)

I really like his characterization of makeoutcity.com: It's like a daily newspaper, made possible through recent technologies, that will follow a story through quotation found anywhere, in a blog, to another, in the comments of another. They're all the same an get equal footing.

I'm trying to create a prototype of what I think will be a very useful form of content. Everyone on the Internet complains about it being hard to find useful content and to get their useful content seen by someone else. Automatic systems like Google aren't working in my opinion. They make the link-rich link-richer and have very naive means of finding what is worth reading about a given keyword. I think what will be more useful is a slew of real people reading websites, and linking and categorizing that which is interesting.

Right now I'm working on the reading and linking and I'm thinking about the categorization. But this is why I'm so excited about Channel Z from Dave Winer. It will make the whole process of creating such resources much easier.

mediaTIC links to Lou writing on the criticism of blogs.#

Moi je trouve qu'il vaux mieux passer sa vie sur internet à raconter sa vie, etc que de passer sa vie sur internet à critiquer ceux qui racontent leur vie.

Il y a aussi les réactionnaires; les blogs ce n'est plus ce que c'était, maintenant il y a plus de blogs de m... que de bons blogs, nous les bons blogs soutenons-nous pour rejeter en bloc tous les nouveaux qui ont un autre style que le nôtre.

Lou writes that she would rather live her life in the world and write about it on her blog, rather than spend her live criticizing people who write on blogs. And that the other types of criticism are equally foolish: those who say that blogs are nothing new at all, just pamphlets on the Internet; or those elitist bloggers who think all the new blogs are watering down the style and making it less interesting.

Will R. at Weblogg-ed writes about the difference between using weblogs and blogging.#

This is an important distinction for a couple of reasons. One, I've really come to believe that the act of blogging can be a valuable way to learn to write more effectively. I know there have been a lot of definitions of what Web logs are, but I'm not sure that is the case with the act of blogging. To me, the process of blogging is, most of the time, an ongoing series of steps: 1. Find and read material that is relevant to your life. 2. Capture the essence of this relevant reading, give credit to it's source, and synthesize those ideas into a piece of writing that advances a personal, perhaps greater understanding of that topic 3. Publish that writing for response and for perhaps pushing someone else's thinking on the subject. 4.Read some more. It's a process that I think teaches and practices a great deal of critical thinking, information literacy, research, collaboration and composition skills that on one level I think may be difficult to replicate with any other writing instruction. I know traditional expository writing instruction comes close, but rarely is there the personal interest in the writing that blogging provides. And it is that personal interest that I think helps writers really own the process and make it real, which in turn leads to some real learning.

But I'm wondering today if that kind of writing is truly possible in schools, both for students and teachers.

Jane writes about ROCK.#

The message of Andrew W.K. is the same as the message of Souris and Justin: "Do all the things that you love. Never let down. Don't stop living in the red." Go for what you believe in, trust in yourself, and just do what you love, to the ultimate of your ability. Otherwise there's no point to life at all.

And that is the essence of Rock. As I wrote in my rant, Rock is not merely a musical genre. It is an approach to life. When you ROCK, you throw yourself body and soul into whatever it is you've chosen to do. It doesn't matter what that is, along as you believe.

And quality rises. Passion confirms. Never bow to trends or public opinion, because those are fickle products of our modern society. Trust in yourself. And be open to a different idea of success than the one fed you by happy televised images or ambitious parents. Find your own success.

The only thing that can truly guide you - is you. And when you have that, success will simply come to you as naturally as rain to the earth.

Ralph Waldo Emerson in Self-Reliance:

I read the other day some verses written by an eminent painter which were original and not conventional. The soul always hears an admonition in such lines, let the subject be what it may. The sentiment they instil is of more value than any thought they may contain. To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, — that is genius. Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense; for the inmost in due time becomes the outmost,—— and our first thought is rendered back to us by the trumpets of the Last Judgment. Familiar as the voice of the mind is to each, the highest merit we ascribe to Moses, Plato, and Milton is, that they set at naught books and traditions, and spoke not what men but what they thought. A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for us than this. They teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression with good-humored inflexibility then most when the whole cry of voices is on the other side. Else, to-morrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another.

[...]

Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events. Great men have always done so, and confided themselves childlike to the genius of their age, betraying their perception that the absolutely trustworthy was seated at their heart, working through their hands, predominating in all their being. And we are now men, and must accept in the highest mind the same transcendent destiny; and not minors and invalids in a protected corner, not cowards fleeing before a revolution, but guides, redeemers, and benefactors, obeying the Almighty effort, and advancing on Chaos and the Dark.

Wendy Koslow writes about how she got to Berkman.#

In a couple of weeks, I'll have been at the Berkman Center for two years.

People ask me all the time how I ended up here. Turns out I didn't do anything fancy; I met a Harvard recruiter and she gave my resume to someone in Law School HR. It was all good timing that brought me to Berkman. If you'd told me when I started that two years later I'd have had two promotions and would be editing Filter and writing the home page blog and still feeding 20 people Indian food for lunch today, I'd have thought you were nuts.

Dave Winer posts a great Jewish joke.#

Harry Pierson writes about what he disliked about the Matrix Trilogy.#

The themes of Control and Choice were very strongly represented in the original Matrix. Choice was directly represented (red pill vs. blue pill), control somewhat less so, but still there. Certainly, there was enough material in those themes for two more movies. Choice is stated bluntly in the climatic battle between Neo and Smith when Smith asks Neo why he continues to fight and Neo replies "Because I choose to". A little corny and heavy handed to be sure, but still consistent with the original theme. Smith's relation to the theme of control (or lack thereof) is also stated bluntly by Neo: "The program Smith has grown beyond your control". Choice and Control come up over and over again: [Subtle Spoilers Omitted.] Pretty much every character has to deal with Choice and Control to some degree.

However, the Brothers Wachowski apparently decided that wasn't enough, so they added all the stuff about "exiled" programs.

The Yeti posts pictures of the girl he's dating.#

So, I decided to put up pictures of the woman I'm dating. Some are digital, some are the camera phone, and one is scanned.

I'm aware this is quite possibly an invasion of privacy - so I'm only leaving them up for today.

Go to my online photo album here.

Richard links to Colby Cosh commenting on the whole "McJob" thing and the true meaning of McDonalds.#

We are never going to stop regarding large corporations without suspicion, nor should we, but one wishes the "Mc-" prefix could be used in other, gentler ways. A 1998 collection of anthropological essays called "Golden Arches East" pointed out that tidy restrooms were all but unknown in Hong Kong restaurants before the global McMenace arrived with its nitpicky customer service. Maybe a well-kept bathroom should be called a McJohn? In Russia, customers of the first Moscow McDonald's had to be told that the personnel weren't mocking them, but were merely offering an unfamiliar Western treat -- service with a smile. Snort if you like, but how much less tolerable would our emotionally frosty McWorld be if food servers were encouraged to show their true feelings at all times? Can we consider praising friendly business establishments for their McPoliteness?

And let's note that, in one clear sense, Mr. Coupland's "McJob" is a bum rap. I find it decidedly odd that McD's should have become such a notorious symbol of globalization, considering that it's a franchise operation. When irony-deficient anti-globalization protesters trash a McDonald's shop front, they are usually venting their australopithecine rage on a locally owned business. The evil Golden Arches have provided financial independence and hands-on business training to tens of thousands of homegrown entrepreneurs in every corner of the globe. This is not to be dismissed just because one doesn't like the sauce on a Big Mac. Owning your own restaurant is really the ultimate "McJob."

Alexander Payne writes about terrible college campuses.#

I am thinking seriously of leaving my school, UMBC. I need to leave this place between Baltimore and Nowhere, MD. I need to leave this place where nobody makes friends outside their student organizations and their fraternities-without-frat-houses, where they eat lunch in groups and commute home alone in the evening, the campus grounds left starving for presence and activity. I can sit out at night by the beautiful man-made pond where the geese swim when it's warm and nobody walks by for hour stretches. It's not that it's a bad place, or that I cannot learn what I need to learn here. It's that if I'm going to do this college thing, where they tell me I'm to expand my horizons and meet people and acculturate, I should do it some place with culture and people and horizon expansion mechanisms. I'm a depressive geek who's never had a big circle of friends and even I'm having trouble at this smallish, technical, trying-not-be-a-commuter campus; it's much worse for more the extroverted Scott, the one good friend I've made here, who also has a mind to leave. It's an odd campus.

Peter Lindberg writes about what scientists and programmers have in common.#

There's a link between science and software development in that scientists and programmers are different from the prevalent image of them. I've been thinking about whether this can be shown using Kuhn's notions of normal and extraordinary science. But I'm not sure yet.

In science, the modus operandi is what Kuhn calls normal science, which is research based on a paradigm. It's not about invention, but of researching things anticipated by it, of articulating it. In software development, however, there seems to be more inventing going on. Software projects definitely need a strong shared vision, which is an important function of the paradigm in science, but for each feature to be implemented, innovation is required (albeit innovation within the constraints of the shared vision, metaphor, paradigm, or whatever). So there are commonalities, but I'm not sure of how far they go.

Moxie writes to the jerk who hit her car.#

I just want to send a shout out to the fucker who steamrolled my go cart — learn to parallel park you asshat. Learn to write your name and phone number, it will come in handy. Learn some goddamn accountability. You hit it, you pay for it. Or at least that's the way it works for people who have a conscience. Read about karma, because you have a ton of hot steaming shit headed your way.

That is all.

Moxie has an amazing conversation with a hipster.#

Tony Pierce says to keep rockin'.#

so much changes so fast my friends that it could change for the good, even if you dont see the light at the end of the tunnel.

you'll have to trust me on this.

one thing that i did when i was in my darkest hour was this: if i thought i was going to take a dangerous risky dumbass risk, i first asked out a super hot girl to the movies.

if she said no, i asked out a girl even hotter than her.

if she said no, i went to the movies alone.

then i wrote something.

some might say all that college angst and struggle ended up starting a pretty good habit.

keep rockin,

and drink the beer. it's there for a reason.

Krystal writes about things that make her happy.#

Warm nights

Sweatshirts borrowed from boys who smell good

[...]

Did I mentioned borrowed sweatshirts? I love them.

It couldn't be worse, but it's never been better.