how to save the world

Critical Thinking and the Difference Between Knowledge and Propaganda

Posted on April 12, 2007 by Dave Pollard

This year, the CBC, which usually features illustrious and thought-provoking speakers in its Ideas series and the related Massey Lectures, disgraced itself by inviting an Australian ethicist, Margaret Somerville, to present a diatribe of right-wing political propaganda disguised as intellectual discourse. The thesis of the week-long series of talks was essentially that everything that the Catholic Church and other so-called right-to-life groups espouse regarding ‘family values’ is moral and ethical and should be encouraged, and everything they oppose in this regard (notably abortion and homosexuality) is immoral and unethical and should be made illegal.

There is a reason why intellectual debates usually shun such issues. They are matters of personal morality, and no amount of rationalization is likely to inform a debate on such a subject, or change anyone’s mind. So it was not surprising that Somerville wasted CBC listeners’ time stating her personal morality, over and over and over ad nauseam. I am sure that opponents of abortion and homosexuality were astonished and perhaps delighted, and that proponents of abortion and homosexually were as appalled as I was. She did not support her position with any information that one would not hear from a papal sermon, because it is impossible to bring information to bear that justifies any particular moral or religious view. There is a reason we call it ‘faith’. So we were presented with a week-long orthodox religious sermon, devoid of information, and devoid of ideas.

Somerville has been controversial before, and the muddle-headed people at the CBC defended their decision to allow the people’s money to be used for her religious tirade on the basis that ‘opposing views’ and free speech need to be respected. So I suppose we can look forward to future Ideas and Massey Lectures expressing opposing liberal personal moral and religious convictions, and likewise adding heat and no light to moral issues that have been around as long as civilization. It is not Somerville’s arch-conservatism that is at issue here ñ listeners would and should have been equally outraged to hear a left-wing moral harangue disguised as intellectual discourse. Both Somerville’s sermons and their liberal mirror image views, when misrepresented as new information and ideas, are simply propaganda.

It is alarming to realize that seemingly intelligent people no longer seem able to distinguish between knowledge and propaganda. Perhaps we can blame the trashy tenor of most tabloid newspapers, talk radio and blogs for confusing us. For those who need a refresher, propaganda is “the systematic propagation of a doctrine or cause, or of information reflecting the views and interests of those advocating such a doctrine or cause”, primarily through appeal to the emotions. Anyone who reads the tabloid press, listens to talk radio, reads blogs or editorials or attends sermons at the church of their choice knows what to expect. Much of the content in all these media is propaganda. It is designed to produce, as Calvin said in the cartoon in my post yesterday, “the sense of solidarity and identity that comes from having our interests narrowed and exploited by like-minded” people. The content of such media is carefully selected to include only information (and misinformation), often with emotionally-tinged word selection, that supports the author’s (and the echo-chamber audience’s) opinion.

We are all entitled to our opinion. There are many places for us to express it. But there is also a need for a forum for the exchange of information and ideas, what most of us call ‘knowledge’. Knowledge is information that enables us to do something more effectively than we could before we had it. And although there are contrarians who argue that everything is opinion, that there is no ‘objective’ knowledge, I think most of us can tell the difference between knowledge and opinion, whether the opinion is one we agree with or not. There are cases when we get both in a single package (e.g. most documentaries, lectures, textbooks and educational media of all kinds). We have, it is hoped, acquired enough critical thinking skill through a lifetime of experience to be able to separate the knowledge from the opinion, though sometimes we need to ‘park’ what appears to be one or the other until we can, through personal research or conversation, categorize it correctly.

We can tell when Exxon or Shell or Monsanto or Big Nuclear or Big Agribusiness or Big Pharma tells us what they’re doing is unequivocally good for us, that such whitewashing and greenwashing is pure propaganda. We can tell when mysterious ‘citizens coalitions’ launch expensive political ads to slander their opponents, that we are being had. When an esteemed public broadcaster seems unable to distinguish unvarnished personal opinion from knowledge, however, I think this is cause for alarm.

The last time I was dismayed by such confusion was when the US military ’embedded’ mainstream media in Iraq and used them as public mouthpieces for government propaganda. The US government and the military establishment certainly knew what they were doing (using the mainstream media for propaganda is well-established procedure, especially in wartime). But astonishingly, the mainstream media apparently didn’t realize they were being used. Some normally intelligent moderates were outraged at being accused of parroting propaganda. We now know (and more and more of the media are now admitting) that they were simply mouthpieces, made even more dangerous by the air of objectivity they portrayed. The consequences, for the US and the world, have been tragic. We keep thinking we won’t get fooled again, and then they fool us again.

The only defence against propaganda is good critical thinking skills. We cannot depend on laws or ‘rights’ or, alas, the media (of any stripe) to protect us against it. We cannot expect people to avoid using propaganda on moral grounds. And we can’t depend on the education system to teach us these critical thinking skills. So how do we acquire them?

There are courses you can take, but you know me ñ I prefer a self-managed approach. This is how I think I learned to be a reasonably competent critical thinker:

Learn something new every day. The best way to get better at any kind of thinking is to do more of it. Practice.
Think about how you think. Specifically, when you are making decisions, stop and think about how you are making them. What’s influencing you that shouldn’t? What’s missing that would help you decide better? What are you assuming that you know, that you believe, and that you don’t know? Do those assumptions bear scrutiny?
Let-Self-Change. Or, more precisely, allow yourself to be open to change. Err on the side of skepticism and tentativeness.

Image: Kurt Vonnegut, a brilliant critical thinker who knew the difference between knowledge and propaganda, and was pretty good at both. He diedyesterday.

Category: The Media

Posted in How the World Really Works | 2 Comments

Why Are There So Few Great Craftspeople and Great Conversationalists?

Posted on April 11, 2007 by Dave Pollard

Calvin & Hobbes by Bill Watterson, from It’s a Magical World
I think every generation laments the loss of what it considers important skills from one generation to the next. Some of this is nostalgia, and some of it is simply due to changing societal needs and expectations. What I have noticed, in my own generation especially, is an apparent loss of skill at making things well, and at conversing precisely and articulately.

I make a habit of buying Canadian-made products, even though they tend to cost more than the predominant Chinese-made crap. And while Canadian-made products are better, I could excuse people for believing they’re not good enough to warrant the higher price. The suits and sweaters I buy tend to last twice as long as the cheap imports, but that’s not saying much. Frayed seams, buttons falling off, and lack of durability seem to be the rule. Canadian-made furniture now shows some of the same sloppiness in the finishes, the same roughness of construction, and inability to stand up to normal wear and tear. And anything with moving parts, from jewelry to bird-feeders, seems to fall apart in record time.

My generation tends to blame all this on lack of pride, but I’m not so sure. When I return Canadian-made products that are prematurely broken or worn, I am usually surprised at how embarrassed, and quick to fix the problem, the manufacturer or craftsperson is. I’m left to conclude that the problem has two causes:

not enough people take the time to return unsatisfactory products, and
most people don’t get enough practice to become really good at what they do.

Both these problems are self-compounding. If no one returns poorly-made goods, the poor processes that cause the poor construction are left unchallenged and unchanged. And if only a few are willing to pay extra for Canadian-made products, relatively fewer of them will be made, and the producers will have less opportunity to learn from their mistakes and hone their skills.

Lack of practice is also, I think, the principal reason that our conversational skills are declining. The generations following mine are content to talk (and text) much faster than we do, and arrive at an understanding by a sort of successive approximation. It is easier, and just as fast, to say things badly at first and then, as others respond, correct yourself. Most of us, as Pascal once said, blather on at length because we “don’t have the time to make it shorter” anymore. And as the cartoon above suggests, the subjects of most modern conversations are such that being clearly understood or persuasive in your communication is not often very important. So, without practice at conversing well, we never acquire good conversational skills. In fact, our poor quality (but frequent) conversations tend to reinforce bad conversational habits.

I don’t know that there’s any solution to this, other than, one person at a time, deciding to Let-Self-Change, to learn lost skills and practice getting better. Just as losing these skills is self-compounding, re-acquiring them is its own reward. Learning to make things well, for yourself, will make you more self-sufficient and more self-confident, and can provide an example that will spur others to do likewise. Learning to converse well will make you more popular and will also help you to think better, more constructively and critically, to listen better, and to write better. For each of us, this is a matter of reaching a tipping point at which we’re no longer willing to put up with being lousy at things that are important, and no longer willing tobe dependent on others for things we should be able to do for ourselves.

I think I’m there.

Category: Let-Self-Change

Posted in Collapse Watch | 4 Comments

Changing Information Behaviours

Posted on April 10, 2007 by Dave Pollard

Last week I was given the task by one of my work colleagues of helping her create a new community of practice. I can’t divulge the precise topic of the community, but let’s suppose it was “food poisoning”. The task was to get all of the people in Canada (a couple of hundred) whose job it is to capture and report instances of this, to share information, practices and challenges, so they can collaborate effectively. Currently there is no overall national authority for what this community does, so the objective is to get these people to self-manage the community in a coordinated way. This is of necessity a voluntary process ñ no one can mandate participation in the community because it falls under a host of different jurisdictions, and there is no hierarchy.

The current ‘information behaviour’ of the group is largely ad hoc. Each person does what their job description and the local ordinances and regional laws dictate. There is some peer-to-peer sharing but it tends to be local, among people who already know each other well, and it is done almost exclusively by e-mail. A complicating factor is that divulging personal information to others is a criminal offence, so there is a good reason not to share information. Most of the people in this ‘community’ do not know each other. There is considerable overlap in jurisdictional authority and responsibilities.

Why would anyone care about creating a community where none exists? Well, in the “food poisoning” example, if there had been such information sharing, the tragic poisoning of thousands of dogs and cats by Menu Foods, Nestle Purina, Del Monte, Hills and others might have been averted. And it’s estimated that every year one out of four people in affluent nations contracts at least one case of food poisoning. Much of the meat we eat is contaminated with salmonella and other toxic bacteria that thrive in the miserable conditions farmed animals live in. And poisoning of the food supply is high on the list of terrorism risks. So since prevention of food poisoning is, alas, not an option, the task becomes identifying, among the hundreds of millions of cases of food poisoning every year, the ones that will kill or permanently sicken the most people if a recall is not instituted quickly. It’s needle in a haystack work. Important work. My colleague’s prospective community of practice’s work is equally important.

Suppose we were to set up a database, a wiki, a group blog, an RSS aggregator page, a discussion forum and other tools to allow my colleague’s couple of hundred potential community members to share knowledge and collaborate. Would any of them use these tools? Would these tools replace the current ad hoc e-mail groups and peer-to-peer phone calls that are currently used for this purpose? Would prospective users be turned off by the substantial security front-end needed to protect confidential information? By the unfamiliarity of wikis and blogs? By the boring yet complicated user interface of commercial databases? And how would we deal with the fact some people want information pushed to them (in e-mails etc.) and others prefer to go and get it from a designated site they can pull it from when they’re ready?

Last year, riffing off an article by Dave Snowden, I identified a set of four necessary preconditions for organizational innovation. By analogy, I think they can be generalized into four necessary preconditions for any sort of organizational behaviour change, including information behaviour change:

a need or scarcity
a sense of urgency
a perspective shift (that suggests the current way of doing things is inadequate, and another way is possible)
a capacity for change

The first two preconditions go together, and Dave Snowden calls them starvation (internal motivation) and pressure (external motivation). You need people to want to change before they will. It is very difficult to create this sense of urgency, and those who try to do so usually find the sense of urgency they have momentarily created disappears as soon as they turn their backs. Generally that sense of urgency needs to be created by some real event. We do what we must, and there is no time left over in most of our lives for nice-to-do’s.

In my colleague’s particular case there is a need, but there is no sense of urgency. In other words, there is some personal ‘starvation’ but no real pressure.

How about a perspective shift? My sense is that new technologies, as enjoyable and intriguing as many of them are, do not constitute a perspective shift, a significantly better way of doing what they are doing now. They might get prospective community members to visit once or twice out of curiosity, but (just as most new websites and community spaces never get much traction) simply offering new information-sharing tools is unlikely to bring about any sustained information behaviour change.

Do the potential participants have the capacity for change? Are they willing to trust each other, to share peer-to-peer with people they don’t know, to pay attention to people who have no say in their performance evaluation? In my colleague’s case, unlike most groups I am familiar with, I think the answer is yes. Her cohorts are professionals who are largely self-driven, and I think they have great capacity for self-organization and self-management, if the other three preconditions could be met.

But my suggestion to my colleague is that, with only two of the four preconditions (#1 and #4) met, her best bet is to work on #3, and then put something in place that is ready when precondition #2 gets met by some major “food poisoning” crisis.

How do you create a perspective shift? I think the best approach is to create a story. This was how Steve Denning got the World Bank to see the value of a major investment in knowledge management ñ he told a (true) story about how sharing information between aid workers in two distant struggling nations saved lives. My colleague needs to find a story about how sharing information about “food poisoning” openly, promptly and extensively has “saved lives”. By telling and retelling that story, putting together the tools and processes for her community to enable them to share what they know more effectively, and then waiting patiently for the crisis that will create the missing sense of urgency, the community will, when it’s ready, be born and flourish. Until then, I think she should keep her expectations low.

What do you think? Am I too jaundiced about people’s propensity for change? Are there other preconditions for information behaviour change that I’ve missed, or can some of the four I’ve identified beshort-circuited? What’s the most successful sustained community of practice you’ve been involved with, and what has been the secret of its success?

Category: Collaboration

Posted in Working Smarter | 4 Comments

A Methodology for Complex Problems (version 3)

Posted on April 9, 2007 by Dave Pollard

A year ago I presented a second version of a cobbled-together methodology for grappling with complex problems. These are the problems that traditional analytical methodologies cannot handle, because analytical approaches require a near-complete understanding of the phenomenon, the variables that enter into it, and their causality. Complex problems simply have too many variables to ever be ‘knowable’ to the extent required by such methodologies.

My last effort drew together ideas from a dozen different complexity theorists. I was trying to accomplish two things that I think previous attempts to define such methodologies have lacked. The first was to tweak the invitation process so that the ‘crowd’ that was attracted to the event was truly diverse (some such events are too self-congratulatory and suffer from groupthink). Dave Snowden has even suggested that debate and disagreement are probably essential to progress in addressing complex problems.

The second was to ensure that, while the process had to be principally self-managed (or at most loosely facilitated), the attendees would be sufficiently informed about both the process (the methodology, and the nature and challenges of complex problems) and the specific problem they were addressing, that they left their preconceptions and pre-formed conclusions behind, and came to the event both knowledgeable and open-minded.

But it has since occurred to me that these two additional ‘ingredients’ (diversity and lack of preconceptions) are to some extent at odds. Let’s suppose for example the complex problem we’re tackling is creating natural enterprises — finding people to make a sustainable, joyful living with, and establishing and operating an enterprise with those people. A couple of weeks ago I presented a model for what I think is the first and most difficult part of that process: finding the right people to make a living with. Having put a lot of thought into it (and having a lot of entrepreneurial success stories and horror stories to draw on that support it) my propensity would be to provide this model as pre-reading for a ‘creating natural enterprises’ event, to help inform attendees. But what if that model were to turn off potential attendees who didn’t like that model, or who didn’t think finding the right partners was an important part of the process of creating natural enterprises? Would ‘my’ event end up being attended only by people who (perhaps erroneously) agreed with my ideas?

The great challenge we have in any open, self-managed process is that the more informed you are about a subject, the more likely you are to have already formed conclusions about approaches and even answers to the problems it presents. This is human nature — we form opinions quickly and change them slowly and reluctantly, as Lakoff’s theory of frames and worldviews has demonstrated. So we have a choice, in our invitees to complex problem events, between people who have already made up their minds what should be done (and will fiercely defend those views during the event) and those who are open-minded and are likely to accept the first intelligent view they hear at the event (not necessarily the most defensible). You’ve probably seen this dynamic in meetings and conferences you’ve attended. And notwithstanding the urgings of Scharmer, Varela et al to practice teaching ourselves to be open to new ideas, to ‘let go’ of our preconceptions and ‘let come’ new emergent possibilities, this is, I think, asking most of us to be what we are not.

What has, in my experience, led to the creation of extraordinary natural enterprises is a fortunate synchronicity of a group of people with complementary gifts who love each other (no I do not think ‘love’ is too strong a word) and who have learned something new on a subject about which they had no preconceptions at a time when they had the energy and predisposition and resources to do something about it. People who love each other are more willing to be open to new ideas, more willing to ‘let go’ and ‘let come’ and to persevere past the inevitable hurdles in new enterprise creation and operation.

If I were to organize and invite people to an event to address the challenges of creating natural enterprises, my guess is that it would attract roughly the right people — mostly people looking to create natural enterprises for themselves, and therefore engaged and motivated. It would, however, probably include some annoying people with magic, one-size-fits-all formulas for how to create natural enterprises that they’d try to force down everyone else’s throat.

The big problem would be that most of the motivated attendees would come with a lot of burdensome baggage, including preconceptions that natural enterprises, like other small enterprises, inevitably require:

External ‘market’ financing
A sales force, and lots of ‘marketing’
A huge amount of work and self-sacrifice
A tolerance for stress and the high likelihood of failure
Hiring and ‘motivating’ employees
Competition with ‘established players’ and adversarial relationships with some stakeholders
Continuous growth

I have tried many times to smash these myths of entrepreneurship, but as long as business schools and other entrepreneurs keep repeating and reinforcing these myths, they will continue to prevail in the minds of most prospective entrepreneurs (and keep most from even trying to become entrepreneurs).

My great fear is that, if I were to convene an event on creating natural enterprises, it would be hijacked by:

Believers in the myths above, who will try to focus the attendees’ attention on how to finance, sell, market, sacrifice, cope with stress, survive, hire, motivate, compete, defeat and grow, and
Advocates of one-size-fits-all ‘turnkey’ solutions (ý la eMyth) trying to ‘sell’ their preconceived solution to the whole group.

If that were to happen, I think I would probably throw up my hands and walk out of my ‘own’ event. And I think there is a substantial likelihood that it would happen. I think that is the reason so many people end up developing and trying to sell their own entrepreneurial formulas (and there are a million of them out there) rather than put up with the disagreements that collaboration seems destined to bring. I also think that is the reason that I haven’t already held a event on creating natural enterprises.

If I were to hold one, the complex problem methodology I would propose to use is shown above right. It is simpler and more iterative than my previous attempts. The first three steps are pre-event activities, while the latter four are event activities. Here’s how they would work:

Research the Issue: Draw together as much information as possible about the issue. Post it somewhere, ideally using a wiki or some other collaborative format. Cite sources. Interpretations are permitted, but solutions and prescriptions, at this stage, are not.
Articulate the Challenge: Develop a clear, succinct statement of the problem or challenge, and why it is such a challenge (i.e. extent, intractable nature, why previous ‘solutions’ appear to have failed).
Invite People to Address the Challenge: Send out an open invitation (Open Space style) designed to attract a diverse, engaged, reasonably informed and open-minded set of attendees. Invite people, whether they can attend or not, to contribute to the collective research developed so far. Ask invitees to study and think about the research. Also, ask invitees to think about how the challenge might be parsed (divided up into aspects for the brainstorming conversations during the event), and to post their thoughts on this to the collective research repository.
Parse the Challenge: At the start of the event, have the group decide (self-managed, Open Space style) which aspects of the challenge to address in smaller groups. They may draw on the parsing ideas in the repository, or may not.
Brainstorm Each Aspect: Over the next hours or days, have the self-selected groups converse, brainstorm, and self-document (using mindmaps or similar techniques, and transcribed stories) their learnings and ideas. Each session should start with an overview of the pertinent research from the respository, which should be available to everyone, and linked to from the mindmaps.
Integrate Learnings: This is a period for each participant to read and think about the mindmaps and stories from all the sessions.
Decide on Next Steps: Each participant tells the others, in turn, what they plan to do next, personally or with others, to use what they learned from the sessions. Participants may self-organize into groups to pursue some of these next steps. These next steps could include research towards another, perhaps more specific, event.

That’s it. I’ve deliberately made it as flexible as possible, and tried to avoid being overly prescriptive. The only differences from Open Space are the more substantive up-front research and the use of specific technologies (wikis for collaborative research, mindmaps and stories for documenting conversations). It could be used for a session on global warming, or world poverty, or creating a health system or an education system that actually works. It would be iterative, with high-level events leading to other events on more focused subjects, approaches or aspects of a problem. The events would probably have to be face-to-face, but there’s no reason they couldn’t be broadcast live and recorded, for Internet viewing.

So for an event on creating natural enterprises, for example, I would set up a wiki with all the data on underemployment, entrepreneurial failure rates and the reasons for them etc., but not including my Natural Enterprise models — that would be jumping to solutions. After articulating the challenge I would send an open invitation to the event, and open the wiki to others. I might suggest, on the wiki, as parsing options, a session on finding the right people to make a living with, and sessions on organic financing, viral marketing, how to research unmet needs, non-hierarchical organization, and succeeding without growth. As Open Space requires, whoever shows up would be the right people. I would not twist arms, nor would I refuse anyone who wanted to come.

And then the event would occur, and I would be just one of the participants, equal to all others. My guess is that, especially since Open Space would be a new process for most of the participants, it would be as much an experience learning about Open Space as grappling with the challenge of creating natural enterprises. I suspect I would be disappointed with what got accomplished, but not with the process. I expect some important new relationships would be formed and they would lead to some important new collaborations. I doubt that a strong consensus on how to create natural enterprises would emerge, though that might come later. I doubt that anyone would find others to make a living with at the first event, or decide on a product or service for a new natural enterprise, but I think it’s possible that future events on each of these two more specific subjects might well be more fruitful in those regards.

What is holding me back, I think, is fear of failure. Fear that I won’t be able to convince anyone that the myths of entrepreneurship are just that. Fear that I’m too far ahead in my thinking, and that no one will come, or understand. Fear that someone will try to hijack the event to sell their stale or naive ideas. Fear that people will not like, or not follow, the process. Fear that people will not be open to new ideas, or will be too open to new ideas. And most of all, fear that we no longer have the patience, or the time, to commit to any process that can actually work, that can actually make a difference in our beleaguered world.

But I think I will do it anyway. Probably a weekend this summer. Time to stop talking about it and do something. Stay tuned.

Category: Complexity & Discovery

Posted in Working Smarter | 6 Comments

Sunday Open Thread – April 8, 2007

Posted on April 8, 2007 by Dave Pollard

What I’m planning on writing about soon:

Getting Better: Why are there so few excellent craftspeople, and so few excellent conversationalists? Bad practice?
Changing Information Behaviours: It’s very difficult, but here’s how it can be done.
On Propaganda and the True Nature of Transactions: How CBC’s illustrious Ideas disgraced itself.
A Methodology for Complex Problems (version 3): The last time I will amend this methodology until I test it, this summer, with an Open Space event on (what else) Creating Natural Sustainable Enterprises.
Are We Violent By Nature?: Are we more like chimps or bonobos?
The ‘M’ word.

What I’m thinking about:

My temper. It’s been a long, cold, miserable spring, but by now I should know better than to lose it. This is my first, and perhaps most important, Let-Self-Change challenge. What’s getting to me? Intolerant people. Dishonest, manipulative people. Greedy people. Mean-spiritedpeople. Sheesh!

What’s rubbing you the wrong way?

Posted in Our Culture / Ourselves | 7 Comments

Saturday Links for the Week – April 7, 2007

Posted on April 7, 2007 by Dave Pollard

Photo floating around on the Internet, source unknown

What it All Means This Week:

Advising Others What to Do: Jeremy Heigh wonders aloud how we can advise others what to do with their lives when we’re not that sure what to do with our own. Even when we may know our Genius, our Gift, our Passion, what to do about it is often far from unclear. In the comments to that post, Chris Corrigan suggests two important steps: practice and reflection. I’d add two more steps to that: experience different ways to make a living, and imagine possibilities. Most of us don’t really know what we’d love to do, what we’re gifted at doing, what’s really needed, or who we’d love to make a living with, because we haven’t experienced enough, haven’t tried doing enough different things (I blame the narrow, experience-poor education system, mostly). And we think too much in terms of careers, categorized, neatly packaged and steered by others, and not enough of what is possible if, with that experience, we free ourselves to imagine how we could make a living, doing something unorthodox in unorthodox ways. What we’re meant to do.

Live Your Life: In the same vein, Walker at MaxSpeak blog points us to a delightful 30-second animation by Danny Smith challenging us to stop consuming and start living for ourselves and those we love.

Web 2.0 in a Nutshell: A 2-hour Don Tapscott video on the eLearning Forum sums up Web 2.0 with humour and intelligence. Thanks to Earl Rudolfo for the link.

Canada’s 20 Best Employers You’ve Never Heard Of: Most ‘best employers’ surveys are fraudulent — employers bribe or coerce their employees to vote for them. A new one by Queen’s University seems more rigorous, and not surprisingly, the top 20 are all unknown companies. The survey report itself is, alas, outrageously expensive. Anyone have a copy I could read? Or know first hand about any of the 20 winning companies?

Global Warming Crises Promise to Create New Regional Conflicts: If the environmental, climatic and biological catastrophes that await us as a result of global warming weren’t bad enough, we’re beginning to see what will happen when their effects are exported, deliberately or inadvertently, to neighbouring countries. The classic example is water diversion — damming river water when yours runs low, at the expense of countries downstream. But now, downwind Korea and Japan are suffering from the deadly mix of industrial toxins and sand and dust from desertified China. Korea has decreed it “yellow dust terrorism“. Expect to hear much more about this global warming (with the emphasis on ‘global’) side-effect.

The Start of the End of Oil in Saudi Arabia and Mexico: In Saudi Arabia, Ghawar, one of the largest oil fields in the world is now producing mostly water, and the Oil Drum has a fascinating and thorough analysis of why. And HTWW profiles a similar occurrence in the giant Cantarell oil field in Mexico.

Canadians Don’t Really Care About the Environment: Notwithstanding national polls that show Canadians consider global warming and the environment to be the ‘most important’ issue of our time, other polls belie this. Opinion polls suggest aversion to Liberal Party leader and environmentalist StÈphane Dion (stirred up again by Dion’s recent willingness to readmit some of the criminals whose theft led to the party’s demise) is so intense they would elect a Conservative majority if a vote were held today. Nothing could be worse for the Canadian environment, as that party’s leaders are worse global warming deniers than the Republicans, and are virtually owned by Big Oil. And another study by Angus Reid pollsters suggests few Canadians would give up their gas guzzling SUVs, pay more for gasoline, cut back on air travel, or turn down their thermostats to reduce carbon emissions, and that the richest Canadians (and Albertans) are least willing to make any compromises to their lifestyle. Meanwhile the right-wing media and Big Oil, seeing a crack in Canadians’ will, are ratcheting up the anti-environment propaganda machine. And to top it all off, Canada’s disgrace, the annual seal hunt, has begun again this week, with hardly a peep of protest. I’m ashamed to bea Canadian.

Thought for the Week: From David Jordan: Wisdom is knowing what to do next. Thanks to Andrew Campbell for the link.

Posted in Our Culture / Ourselves | 1 Comment

Five Bloggers Who Make Me Think Hard

Posted on April 6, 2007 by Dave Pollard

Because I read blogs to learn, all of the blogs on my blogroll at right* are written by thinking bloggers. So when I got tagged by Janet as one of five bloggers that make her think, and challenged to pass on the meme (originated by The Thinking Blog) I wasn’t sure how to respond. Any list of five I could come up with would almost certain annoy those not included.

And then I thought: One of the challenges of the blogosphere is that articles that really make you think, that make you think differently, have to compete for attention with the firehose of (mostly) more accessible, shorter, simpler articles. Many readers have told me that it is the length, complexity, and seriousness of my articles that have prevented me from becoming an ‘A-list’ blogger. “You make me work too hard, to the point I groan each time I visit, or fall behind” is how one put it.

So I decided to raise the bar on the meme a notch, and identify five bloggers who do likewise: who are not only thoughtful, but who demand a lot of the reader, who make us work hard to understand and appreciate information and arguments that are important, who stretch us and our thinking. Writers who are on to something big, and who are too far ahead of their time to expect mainstream blog popularity.

I quickly came up with twenty such bloggers (and if you think you were one of them, you’re probably right ;-). The five I list here are not necessarily those who have the biggest ideas or make me think the hardest. I selected them because they write about completely different subjects, and make us understand how reading and understanding a widely diverse spectrum of topics is essential to understanding how the world really works, and imagining possibilities for coping with some of its great challenges. Just as my blog has a broad, overarching and provocative theme (mine is preparing for civilization’s end) each of these have something important and underappreciated running through everything they write. Here, with my take on those themes, is my list:

Kathy Sierra, Creating Passionate Users: Here’s what I got out of this, let’s have a conversation about it. Life, making a living, and learning have to be fun. There is genius in whimsy. Is this a crazy idea? Let me draw you a picture.
Mark Woods, Wood s Lot: An appreciation of art, beauty and history is essential to an understanding of the world, a grasping of life’s purpose, and a joyful life. Pay attention.
Evelyn Rodriguez, Crossroads Dispatches: Be utterly open. Challenge everything but judge nothing. Don’t rule out possibilities. To understand, keep asking questions.
Jim Kunstler, Clusterfuck Nation: That way of thinking got us into this mess, and won’t get us out. Try thinking this way instead. And then start doing something. Just start, you’ll figure it out.
Max Sawicky, MaxSpeak: Here’s how the rich and powerful are taking advantage of your ignorance of how the world really works. Here are the hard numbers made easy. And here’s what we could do.

Who would be on your list of Blogs That Make You Think Hard?

*Yes I know my blogroll is sorely in need of updating. A lot of these links are obsolete, some of them are defunct, and I have about 60 more toadd. I’ll get to it.

Category: Other Blogging Articles

Posted in Using Weblogs and Technology | 6 Comments

Chicken Out: Something Simple to Do for Your Health, and Animal Welfare

Posted on April 5, 2007 by Dave Pollard

As we’ve learned more about the health hazards of ‘red meat’, the chicken factory farming industry has exploded, and with it the cruel treatment of battery caged and ‘broiler’ chickens and the dangers of factory farmed meat and eggs to human health. I won’t subject you to details of what the 98% of all Canadian and US egg-laying chickens who spend their entire lives in battery cages go through, or the gruesome life of the ten billion chickens born, fattened up and slaughtered at the average age of six weeks in North America each year (if you want this information and can stomach it, go to factoryfarming.com or themeatrix.com).

What I do want to mention is what ingesting these poor chickens and their eggs can do to your health:

15% of the weight of broiler chickens is the filthy ‘fecal soup’ they are rinsed in to try to rid the meat of some of its toxins
many or most broiler chickens are diseased and/or hemorrhaged and/or otherwise badly injured when they are slaughtered (salmonella infections, for one, are so endemic to factory farmed chickens the USDA no longer even tries to keep count)
you don’t want to know how modern eviscerating machines operate, and what ends up in ‘chicken by-products’ in processed human and pet foods
no one knows what the massive quantities of antibiotics, disinfectants and other toxic chemicals broiler chickens are fed, injected with, sprayed with and soaked in will do to long-term human health (they are suspects in the epidemic of human immune system diseases, and have given rise to antibiotic-resistant supergerms)
it takes 815 gallons of fresh water to ‘produce’ a single pound of edible chicken
the crap that’s fed to battery-caged egg-laying chickens makes its way, in concentrated form, into the eggs you eat (that’s why battery-hen eggs are virtually devoid of the Omega 3 that used to be one of the main nutritional benefits of eggs)
chicken and egg factory farming is now strongly suspected to be the cause of virtually all poultry flu outbreaks, and this flu poses one of the greatest threats to human life and health we face today
many USDA inspectors (and there are similar reports from Canadian inspectors) are so revolted by what they see in factory farms and slaughterhouses that they do not feed their own families factory-farmed chicken or eggs, and acknowledge they are forced to approve tainted food by the powerful agribusiness oligopoly

There is something you can do about this:

Only eat chicken and eggs that are produced by small, local farms using free-range chickens. They’re not that hard to find. They may be more expensive, but they’re much better for you, for the environment, and for the poor creatures who give their lives to feed you. If possible, confirm that the free-range claims on the package are true (there’s a lot of fraudulent and misleading labels on big agribusiness products; don’t mistake ‘organic’ for free-range) by visiting and picking up your produce from the farms themselves. It’s a relationship worth fostering for you and the local farmer.
Consider becoming a vegetarian or vegan. This is a little harder, but there are millions who’ve made the transition and, despite the agribusiness propaganda, they’re healthier, not sicker, than the rest of us. If you’re skeptical, at least go online and learn how easy it is.
Adopt the 100-mile diet (learn more at 100milediet.org). This can also be a challenge if you try to do it 100%, but if you find out what happens to food (and the environment) when it’s trucked thousands of miles, you’ll appreciate that it’s worthwhile taking the pledge to buy local.

Don’t be fooled into believing the chicken and eggs you’re eating are safe, healthy and cruelty-free, unless you’ve verified it yourself. There’sat least a 98% certainty they’re not.

Itís time we all ‘chickened out’.

Categories: Activism: What You Can Do Personally, and Understanding & Caring for Our Animal Friends

Posted in Collapse Watch | 1 Comment

Why We Hate

Posted on April 4, 2007 by Dave Pollard

Recently, a generous and uncontroversial business blogger, Kathy Sierra, whose blog has always been a must-read for me, was victimized by what can only be described as savage and unprovoked hate-mongering on the Web (some of it on sites that seem to me to have been specifically set up for that purpose), and also on her blog, and in her e-mail. The threats she received were severe enough that, had they occurred in person, they would, from what I can determine, have resulted in police arrests.

The blogosphere is full of commentary on this, and the best summary of the issues I’ve seen is Ross Mayfield’s. Ross makes the point about the delicate balance between free speech and safety, and between the need for transparency (without which deep relationships are next to impossible to build, and dangerous echo-chambers can flourish) and the need to allow for anonymity (without which, just as one example, whistle-blowers will self-censor).

The issue of balancing the rights of free speech against the safety of people who may be victimized by that free speech is much older than the Internet. Does a lynch mob have the right to use words that incite a crowd to violence against another person or group, even if those words are substantially true? Ross (and others in this debate) lament that as the Internet/blogosphere is largely a self-managed system, we should be able to police ourselves, and not have to turn to authorities (real or Web-based) to mediate the dispute. That’s the same view that has prevailed in all frontier communities, and it’s admirable, but probably a bit idealistic. I think there is a point at which communities may reluctantly have to admit self-management failure and bring in a mediator, one with or without enforcement tools. Mediation online is in some ways more problematic than face-to-face. But the issue of who, and how, to mediate when these conflicts arise is one that others can comment on more ably than I can.

The issue that has been largely ignored in this uproar is why people hate others to the point they are driven to commit anti-social acts in the first place. We’ve seen this recently in a flurry of online cyber-bullying, which is the cyber version of the schoolyard bullying, name-calling and clique hate-mongering that has been a part of the education system at least as long as I’ve been alive.

In some cases hatred is understandable ñ if you’ve been victimized by someone else’s illegal, unethical, irresponsible, ignorant or unfair behaviour towards you personally, it takes a pretty extraordinary person to forgive and forget. But so much hatred is of those we don’t even know, have never met, and who, while they may represent something we don’t agree with, have done us no harm and have harboured no animosity toward us or those we love.

At first, I couldn’t understand this impersonal, abstract hatred. I am capable of losing my temper with those who have committed acts or espoused actions (or inactions) that threaten or afflict me or those I love. But I just can’t hate anyone who merely represents something that I don’t particularly like. If they have a belief that I disagree strongly with, or an attribute or behaviour that I find unattractive, then as long as it has no effect on me, nor on anyone I love, I just can’t get that worked up about it. Live and let live, and all that.

For example, fashion slavery, of every variety, rubs me the wrong way, but I would never judge anyone by his/her attire, nor would I participate on a website that went out of its way to ridicule fashion slaves, whether they be rap stars or anorexic models. I don’t know these people, and they’ve never done anything to hurt me or anyone I love, so I just couldn’t be bothered to waste my time and energy in a personal attack on anyone just because of how they dress.

What I saw in the attack on Kathy, and what I have seen in cyber-bullying of students on some websites, was therefore just perplexing to me in its virulence and animosity. One of the people on one of the offending sites, the self-styled ‘rageboy’, admitted he wrote “I don’t like Kathy Sierra” and “Kathy Sierra is a hopeless dipshit”. He condemned the vicious pictures and threats on the site, a site he apparently managed, but saw nothing wrong in his own behaviour. What I couldn’t understand is: What inspired this expression of hatred? As far as I can see Kathy didn’t say anything about him, or any group he belongs to. So it appears to me that what he and others hate about Kathy, to the point they devote time and energy on a website apparently dedicated to this kind of “fun”, is that she is a successful, gregarious businesswoman who is adored by her readers. Misogyny, jealousy and envy rolled into one ugly ball — that’s how it looked to me. What would one expect from a guy who defines himself by his rage?

There is a propensity on the part of a lot (and I think, a growing number) of people to put down people who are personally successful, or who represent groups that are successful or influential, solely to bolster their own weak egos. I see this in the general meanness and stereotyping in current ‘comedy’ television shows and movies (and not just in North America). I see it in the ‘nyaah nyaah’ and the more nasty, vituperative behaviours of insecure juveniles in the schools, the malls, and on social networking sites. I see it in political rhetoric which is pure ad hominem. I hear it in the misogynist and racist lyrics of popular songs. I sense it in the massive antipathy of a large majority of us, in every country, towards immigrants (often styled and tacitly equated, tellingly, with the derogatory ‘illegals‘) and towards just about any other group that fails to conform to social norms.

But then I thought: perhaps the perpetrators of hate do feel threatened by Kathy, by immigrants, by liberals (or conservatives), by those who act, look or think differently from themselves. I consider Bush and Cheney fair game for personal attacks. I have written that I’d like to see mega-polluters jailed and socially ostracized for their behaviour, because our ecosystem and its suffering creatures are victims of their actions, and they are all part of ‘those I love’. Is that really all that different from those who loathe immigrants because they feel (rightly or wrongly) that their jobs and their family’s safety are threatened by them? Or those who hate and fear homosexuals (and successful, independent women) because they feel (rightly or wrongly) that they espouse beliefs and lifestyles that threaten the fragile social fabric of our whole society?

The slippery slope of Why We Hate becomes even more treacherous when it is viewed through personal frames that see the world in completely different ways. We can’t draw a line between justifiable and unjustifiable hatred based on real or perceived threats, because no two people will draw that line in the same place. And if we can’t draw that line, how can we legislate against actions that cross it, that act on that hatred? Is it OK to attack (in print or speech) public figures but not private ones? When is it OK (free speech) and not OK (endangering safety) to fear-monger or hate-monger against individuals, or against groups?

It is our unwillingness to trust lawyers, politicians and enforcers to decide where free speech ends and endangering safety begins that leads us to try so hard to self-manage, to look after each other and draw the line in a way that is informed by knowledge of the details of the conflict, in context. When Kathy met ‘rageboy’ the other day, the two of them apparently got along quite well. There have been other circumstances, however, where physical meetings of those with profound disagreements have just produced more animosity and even violence.

Tim O’Reilly has proposed a seven-part code of conduct for bloggers:

Take responsibility not only for your own words but for the comments you allow.
Label your tolerance for abusive comments.
Consider eliminating anonymous comments.
Ignore the trolls.
Take the conversation offline, and talk directly, or find an intermediary who can do so.
If you know someone who is behaving badly, tell them so.
Don’t say anything online that you wouldn’t say in person.

Does anyone think these well-intentioned rules could work? Rule 2 would seem to be an invitation for hate-mongers, where they could go off by themselves and whip themselves up into a fury without any moderate voices present, and seems to contradict rule 1. Rules 3 and 7 would seem to mitigate against whistle-blowing online, and other valid purposes for anonymity.

What it comes down to, I think, is that we are emotional creatures under enormous modern stress and prone to groupthink. We can thank that volatile combination of nature and circumstance for genocides, the holocaust, and probably most of the wars and violence, physical and psychological, that plague our world. It only takes a few people unable to cope with this stress to lash out, scapegoat, direct and give voice to their hatred, and pretty soon it sets off a chain reaction, and we all get caught up in it. Extremism of all kinds preys on this vulnerability. So we get flame wars, bench-clearing brawls, lynch mobs, gang wars, street riots, eye-for-an-eye retribution and escalation, and it’s all downhill from there.

The Internet (and notably the blogosphere and discussion forums) merely provides another, highly visible, forum for fanning the flames of stress-based hatred. But it is also, for many, a vehicle for learning, for seeing other points of view, and hence for discharging that hatred. In that sense it is no different from talk radio, or any other form of political, social or religious association. Every technology we have ever invented has presented opportunities to make things better, and others to make things worse, and the Internet is no exception.

So what’s my prescription? What should we do to make the Internet a force for learning, moderation and sympathy, and prevent it being used as a lightning rod and amplifier for hatred, an echo-chamber for misinformation, and a school for extremism?

I don’t think there’s anything we can do, other than what we’re already doing. Kathy is, unfairly, the victim of the cyberspace equivalent of road rage. A small, angry stressed-out group, provoked by some ‘last straw’ lost it, and looked for someone to take their rage out on, and Kathy, alas, happened to be there. No question the fact that she is female, successful, and beloved, increased the likelihood of her being picked on, and that is despicable, but that is the way we are — scapegoaters pick on the visibly different (because they’re identifiable targets) and the successful (because demeaning them makes the enraged feel better about themselves).

It’s human nature, and except perhaps for Gandhi, none of us is immune to it. Most of us manage to keep it under control. And just as self-management dictates most of our behaviour on the physical highways, I think self-management, most of the time, works on the Internet as well. And just as on the physical highways, sometimes it doesn’t, and we have to let authorities step in and arrest those who abuse the privileges ofthe road, sometimes on the Internet we will have to do the same.

Category: Being Human

Posted in Our Culture / Ourselves | 10 Comments

Endless Summer

Posted on April 3, 2007 by Dave Pollard

It’s celebrated in dozens of popular songs — Endless Summer, Wonderful Summer, The Boys of Summer:

A little voice inside my head said, “Don’t
look back. You can never look back.”
I thought I knew what love was,
What did I know?
Those days are gone forever
I should just let them go but-
I can see you-
Your brown skin shinin’ in the sun
You got that top pulled down and that radio on baby
And I can tell you my love for you will still be strong
after the boys of summer have gone

For many of us, summer vacation stirs up fond memories — nothing scheduled, nothing that has to be done. “Oh, that magic feeling, nowhere to go”. Sleep in, eat slow, laze in the sun or shade, make love, do whatever you feel like doing in the moment. Neil Young, Goin’ Back:

In a foreign land, there were creatures at play
Running hand in hand, needing nowhere to stay
Driven to the mountains high
They were sunken in the cities deep
Livin’ in my sleep.

I feel like goin’ back, back where there’s nowhere to stay
When fire fills the sky I’ll still remember that day
These rocks I’m climbin’ down have already left the ground
Careening through space.

I used to build these buildings, I used to walk next to you
Their shadows tore us apart and now we do what we do
Driven to the mountains high, sunken in the cities deep
Livin’ in our sleep.

I feel like goin’ back, back where there’s nowhere to stay.

And then, as we get older, or the summer fades, dread sets in — we have to return to ‘civilized life’. We try to grab brief pieces of this “magic feeling” all our lives — weekends, two-week vacations, but they’re almost over before they’ve begun. Not like those endless summers of our childhood.

We are taught to believe that the behaviours and experiences of long summer vacations are lazy, irresponsible, decadent, self-indulgent. But I would suggest the reason we love them so much is that they are the way we were meant to live. The way we lived before agriculture and civilization. The way the other creatures we share this planet with have always lived. and still do, except for those we imprison on our farms and in our laboratories or drive out of their natural habitats.

It’s the way we will perhaps one day live again, after civilization falls, and our lives of artificial scarcity, overextended systems, overconsumption and overpopulation have ended.

‘Idle’ summer vacations are about as close to a natural life as most of us will ever experience.

But for so many, by the time we are ready to retire, we have become so used to our artificial lives, so indoctrinated in the way we have come to live, that the idea of being able to live, at last, a natural life, fills us with foreboding, fear, and doubts about our worth in a society that equates worth with wealth and value with ‘earned’ income.

And more and more of us will never be able to afford to retire, so we will be like the modern Russians, whose life expectancy has fallen years behind normal retirement age. We’ll never know what we missed.

Is it too late? Between our overextended economy, the propaganda of civilization, and our fading memories, could most of us ever rediscover the sheer joy of a natural life, and, more than that, insist on it as our birthright as free citizens of Earth? Perhaps the new hunter-gatherers of civilization, the nearly 1.5 billion humans living in squatter communities in struggling nations, can offer us some clues. Those who know these people say that, despite their poverty, lack of access to healthcare, education and other ‘essential’ services, they are happy, and reluctant to leave their makeshift communities, even when they have the opportunity to do so. “No one is controlling what you do here.”

My April Fools’ post suggested the world would be much better if we all made love instead of working, and it was, of course, mocking the truth, even that of possibility. But could we, just like those of so many civilizations (like the Anasazi) before us, just walk away from our culture of hierarchy and scarcity, just stop putting up with it, not out of necessity like the squatters od struggling nations, but out of choice? Is it really irresponsible to refuse to work and consume and live in debt in a culture that is destroying our world?

We do what we must, then we do what’s easy, and then we do what’s fun. The natural life of our endless summer vacations was certainly easy and fun. When will we reach the point where we no longer must turn our backs on natural life in favour of a culture that makes us everybody else? How much say do we have over our own lives? If our lives are movies we script ourselves, who is producing and directing them?

Maybe the first step isn’t natural enterprise or intentional community, a walk on the Edge. Maybe the Anasazi had it right. Maybe the first step is to just walk away, and everything else will follow. But how do we walk away when there are no longer any frontiers to walk away to?

Perhaps the answer is to walk away to right where we are. All we need is love, food, and, in harsher climates, collective warmth and shelter. How much can that cost? In an affluent nation, I calculate it at $14,000 per family, which, for an extended community sharing space and facilities would work out to about $3,000 per person. To be free, happy, and totally in charge of your own life. We could earn this by cashing in what we already have and don’t need, or by working maybe anhour a day or a day a week in a sustainable community enterprise.

We could, most of us, do this tomorrow. Endless summer, for the rest of our lives. Remember that feeling? What’s holding us back? What’s keeping us from just walking away? What will it take to set us free?

(photo off the Internet by Chris Chin)

Category: Building a Community-Based Society

Posted in Collapse Watch | 3 Comments