Jay Rosen writes an autopsy of the Dean campaign in early February.#

It contains this brilliant comment from Jeff Jarvis:

One way to be right about what the Internet can do is to lower your expectations. Weblogger Jeff Jarvis, also a journalist and Internet division head for the Newhouse empire, was quoted in Salon on this theme. "We all learned lessons in Iowa," he said. "Howard Dean learned the biggest one -- stop being an asshole. We learned about the insular nature of this medium. We learned not to blow up the bubble, not to put too much emphasis on what this thing can do. It can do miraculous, wonderful things, but it can't win an election. It can change the world, but it can't win an election."

Dean Esmay writes about differences between Western and Eastern story-telling techniques.#

Americans tend to tell stories in an action-oriented fashion. Even our soap operas, our gentle romantic comedies, and our news reports are written this way. We set a scene, and then describe events and reactions.

[...]

But the Japanese (and other southeast Asian cultures--I just concentrate on Japan because I've seen a lot of Japanese cinema, read a lot of Japanese fiction) have a slightly different frame of reference. It is not alien, nor is it either superior or inferior. It is just different, in an interesting, thought-provoking way. Nor is it difficult to understand. Once you get it, you can appreciate their artistic works more. Furthermore, if you're a creative type, you can draw a good deal of inspiration from it.

So what is the difference? Japanese art tends to put more emphasis on being there rather than getting there. Being somewhere, rather than doing something. There's often a great deal more emphasis on setting a scene, and looking at the scene from different angles.

I finally got around to reading Jim Moore's essay The Second Superpower Rears its Beautiful Head about the power of the Internet.#

As the United States government becomes more belligerent in using its power in the world, many people are longing for a "second superpower" that can keep the US in check. Indeed, many people desire a superpower that speaks for the interests of planetary society, for long-term well-being, and that encourages broad participation in the democratic process. Where can the world find such a second superpower? No nation or group of nations seems able to play this role, although the European Union sometimes seeks to, working in concert with a variety of institutions in the field of international law, including the United Nations. But even the common might of the European nations is barely a match for the current power of the United States.

And an interesting image:

How does the second superpower take action? Not from the top, but from the bottom. That is, it is the strength of the US government that it can centrally collect taxes, and then spend, for example, $1.2 billion on 1,200 cruise missiles in the first day of the war against Iraq. By contrast, it is the strength of the second superpower that it could mobilize hundreds of small groups of activists to shut down city centers across the United States on that same first day of the war. And that millions of citizens worldwide would take to their streets to rally. The symbol of the first superpower is the eagle—an awesome predator that rules from the skies, preying on mice and small animals. Perhaps the best symbol for the second superpower would be a community of ants. Ants rule from below. And while I may be awed seeing eagles in flight, when ants invade my kitchen they command my attention.

Richard and Patrick Logan link to two different reports from a talk that Jared Diamond gave about the decline of societies.#

From The Edge report.

For example, the Easter Islanders, Polynesian people, settled an island that was originally forested, and whose forests included the world's largest palm tree. The Easter Islanders gradually chopped down that forest to use the wood for canoes, firewood, transporting statues, raising statues, and carving and also to protect against soil erosion. Eventually they chopped down all the forests to the point where all the tree species were extinct, which meant that they ran out of canoes, they could no longer erect statues, there were no longer trees to protect the topsoil against erosion, and their society collapsed in an epidemic of cannibalism that left 90 percent of the islanders dead. The question that most intrigued my UCLA students was one that hadn't registered on me: how on Earth could a society make such an obviously disastrous decision as to cut down all the trees on which they depended? For example, my students wondered, what did the Easter Islanders say as they were cutting down the last palm tree? Were they saying, think of our jobs as loggers, not these trees? Were they saying, respect my private property rights? Surely the Easter Islanders, of all people, must have realized the consequences to them of destroying their own forest. It wasn't a subtle mistake. One wonders whether — if there are still people left alive a hundred years from now — people in the next century will be equally astonished about our blindness today as we are today about the blindness of the Easter Islanders.

As always, Jared Diamond is incredibly interesting and insightful.

From the Princeton University lecture.

There's overwhelming recent evidence from archaeology and other disciplines that some of these romantic mystery collapses have been self-inflicted ecological suicides, resulting from inadvertent human impacts on the environment, impacts similar to the impacts causing the problems that we face today. Even though these past societies like the Easter Islanders and Anasazi had far fewer people, and were packing far less potent destructive practices than we do today.

This second article is more detailed, although it has the same examples as the other.

One of the things I like about Jared Diamond is that he does not see technology as a saviour and often more the case than the solution of problems. This is something I feel very strongly about: (1) There's no silver bullet; and, (2) there are laws that cannot be broken, whether we know them yet or not.

Dave Pollard writes about a "Systems Approach" to Population.#

Of all the radical ideas I have espoused in How to Save the World, none has proven to be as controversial as my belief that substantial human population reduction is a necessary condition (I am not sure whether it is a sufficient condition) to prevent ecological catastrophe in this century. The chart above, which I explained in this post, shows the impact of our continued population explosion, far beyond the levels of sustainability represented by the green and red lines on the chart (the green line allows for coexistence with other creatures, the red line hogs all resources on earth for humans).

The chart below right shows the vicious cycle that Daniel Quinn argues, in The Story of B, has led us to this point. The argument is that (a) the exponential curve shown above is creeping up on us so quietly and quickly that if we wait for the first undeniable evidence of cataclysm, it will be too late, and (b) the root cause of the population explosion is excessive and ever-increasing food production, and the paradoxical and counter-intuitive solution to human misery caused by overpopulation and starvation is to cut food production.

He makes this point beautifully about the events of around 4000 BCE:

Now note well that no one thought that the appearance of states and armies was a bad sign -- a sign of distress. They thought it was a good sign. They thought the states and the armies represented an improvement. The water was just getting delightfully warm, and no one worried about a few little bubbles.

And slowly things get hotter in the cauldron:

What do I need to say about the water steaming in our cauldron in this era? Is it boiling yet, do you think? Does the first global economic collapse, beginning in 1929, look like a sign of distress to you? Do two cataclysmic world wars look like signs of distress to you? Stand off a few thousand miles and watch from outer space as 65,000,000 are slaughtered on battlefields or blasted to bits in bombing strikes, as another 100,000,000 count themselves lucky to escape merely blinded, maimed, or crippled. I'm talking about a number of people equal to the entire human population in the Golden Age of classical Greece. I'm talking about the number of people you would destroy if today you dropped hydrogen bombs on Berlin, Paris, Rome, London, New York City, and Hong Kong.

Dave talks about how the best thing to is stop producing more and more food and find a equilibrium. He has this comment about "the starving millions:"

And of course I have to deal with the starving millions. Don't we have to continue to increase food production in order to feed the starving millions? There are two things to understand here. The first is that the excess that we produce each year does not go to feed the starving millions. It didn't go to feed the starving millions in 2003, it didn't go to feed the starving millions in 2001, it didn't go to feed the starving millions in 2000, it didn't go to feed the starving millions in 1999 -- and it won't go to feed the starving millions in 2004. Where did it go? It went to fuel our population explosion.

It's still unclear how to do this however.

Next, I get around to reading Joi Ito's Emergent Democracy paper.#

The world needs emergent democracy more than ever. Traditional forms of representative democracy are barely able to manage the scale, complexity and speed of the issues in the world today. Representatives of sovereign nations negotiating with each other in global dialog are very limited in their ability to solve global issues. The monolithic media and its increasingly simplistic representation of the world cannot provide the competition of ideas necessary to reach consensus. Emergent democracy has the potential to solve many of the problems we face in the exceedingly complex world at both the national and global scale. The community of toolmakers should be encouraged to consider their possible positive effect on the democratic process as well as the risk of enabling emergent terrorism, mob rule and a surveillance society.

We must protect the ability of these tools to be available to the public by protecting the commons. We must open the spectrum and make it available to the people, while resisting increased control of intellectual property, and the implementation of architectures that are not inclusive and open. We must work to provide access to the Net for more people by making the tools and infrastructure cheaper and easier to use.

Richard links to a study from James W. Prescot about pleasure and pain.#

The basics of the idea is that pleasure and pain are inversely related and the increased incidence of pain in the world is because pleasure, particularly in childhood and with regards to sexuality, is being repressed.

Richard does a great job of summarizing:

The article, with the emphasis in the original, covers a lot of ground: it attacks the Judeo-Christian basis for the denial of bodily pleasure; the way the culture and laws of the United States allows some addictive drugs that give people competitive edges (more in the culture than law) or that either deny pleasure or encourage violence and bans the drugs that enhance pleasure; the relationship between sexual repressive cultures and the amount of pornography (in place of normal sexual expressions); the relationship between sexually repressive cultures and incidents of rape; the inverse relationship between corporate business structures and family closeness; that it's best not to let babies cry themselves to sleep but see to their needs in order to build a relationship based on trust; and much more. It doesn't go into much detail about the above, but much conventional wisdom—wisdom still "true" today—is called into question. It is a remarkable article.

This note about promiscuity is intriguing and likely to be important to opponents of Prescot's theory:

If we accept the theory that the lack of sufficient somatosensory pleasure is a principal cause of violence, we can work toward promoting pleasure and encouraging affectionate interpersonal relationships as a means of combatting aggression. We should give high priority to body pleasure in the context of meaningful human relationships. Such body pleasure is very different from promiscuity, which reflects a basic inability to experience pleasure. If a sexual relationship is not pleasurable, the individual looks for another partner. A continuing failure to find sexual satisfaction leads to a continuing search for new partners, that is, to promiscuous behavior. Affectionately shared physical pleasure, on the other hand, tends to stabilize a relationship and eliminate the search. However, a variety of sexual experiences seems to be normal in cultures which permit its expression, and this may be important for optimizing pleasure and affection in sexual relationships.