Sunday Open Thread – February 25, 2007

Posted on February 25, 2007 by Dave Pollard
PC Vey cartoon

What I’m planning on writing about soon:

  • What’s New in Innovation: Five trends worth thinking about.
  • Blogging as Performance Art: Jon Husband’s new meme.
  • What a Fair Tax System Might Look Like: Taxing bads (to discourage socially and environmentally destructive behaviour) and excess wealth (to remedy the dire consequences of gross inequality): A tax system with a purpose other than funding war and corporatist handouts.
  • The Fourth Turning: The coming era of repression and violent reactionary tyranny?
  • What’s Good to Eat: Get rid of meat, processed foods, anything with chemical additives, artificial ingredients, sugars, salt, and bad carbs, and you’re not left with much. Or are you?
  • Religion as a Form of Slavery: The God Delusion and all that. And technophilia as the fastest growing religion of them all.
  • Finding & Working With Others to Save the World: Ways to enable billions to sync with us, on their own terms, in their own context, developing their own plan of action, and then to connect and collaborate in powerful ways, in experiments and in creating and refining working models in their own self-selected Earth-stewarding intentional communities, so that they no longer need the systems that are destroying our world.


What I’m thinking about:

Controlling my temper. I no longer suffer from road rage, but when I encounter stupidity, meanness, greed, dishonesty, waste, social & environmental destructiveness and a variety of other unnecessary human traits I can feel my stress levels rising. It does no good to get mad, so why can’t we train ourselves not to?

What are you thinking about these days?

Cartoon from the New Yorker by ex-National LampoonerPC Vey. Get your favourite New Yorker cartoons as prints or apparel here. Cartoonists need our support.
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7 Responses to Sunday Open Thread – February 25, 2007

  1. Jon Husband says:
    February 26, 2007 at 13:13

    There were comments here yesterday. Gone today ?Anyway, while it would be great to take credit for an idea as nice as Blogging As Performance Art (and yes, I have written before on tangentially related ideas / perceptions), I think you meant that it’s Evelyn’s new meme, not mine.That’s what my previous comment said as well.

  2. Barbara W. Klaser says:
    February 26, 2007 at 17:12

    As one of the last living people who has never owned a cell phone, I can see how technophilia could be viewed as a religion. I see people who can’t not answer their phones, no matter where they are or what they’re doing. The phone has become God.I remember being offended by a coworker, long ago, who would always interrupt a face-to-face conversation to answer his phone — and his phone rang a lot. I’ve since known a lot of people like this, and in fact it’s now the norm. When I became a supervisor, then a manager, I made a point of not answering the phone (unless I was expecting something particularly urgent) if I had someone in conversation in my office. I just can’t give a machine priority over a living, breathing person. That’s what voice mail is for, and if it was a genuinely urgent call, the caller usually knew how to get through to me. Some people who visited me were surprised by this, some didn’t notice. Others seemed to get that it meant they were important to me, and they appreciated it a lot.

  3. Barbara W. Klaser says:
    February 26, 2007 at 17:19

    But there’s nothing wrong with religion, as long as those who partake in it don’t allow it to replace their own critical thinking process, and as long as they don’t impose it on others.

  4. Bharat says:
    February 26, 2007 at 22:04

    Hi Dave, Iam eagerly waiting to see your “Religion as a form of slavery” article. Make sure you be conversant with all the core principles of major religions of the world before you paint religions with such a broad brush. Make sure you differentiate the core principles from the flawed implementations of today. Only then you will have done justice to your article.Regards

  5. MatthewJ says:
    February 27, 2007 at 10:46

    Hey DaveNo meat? How do you justify this when clearly humans evolved as omnivores, gettng much of their nuitrtion and all of their fat and protein from meat? Cereals and Grains were quite harmful to human health during the transition from the paleolithic to the neolithic (see dixon mounds).MatthewJ

  6. wendytomlinson@hotmail.com says:
    March 1, 2007 at 12:38

    I’m thinking about the same things you are.Anyone who isn’t a little worried and angry these days probably isn’t paying attention.

  7. Dave Pollard says:
    March 4, 2007 at 15:27

    Thanks everyone; this will inform my articles on these subjects. Don’t know what happened to the earlier comments — Radio Userland continues to decline in reliability; it’s as if Userland has just given up on it.

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