Link Living 06.12.12

• Amnesty International’s ‘Trial By Timeline’ campaign. Would what you post on Facebook put you in jail in other countries? 
• Greenpeace brings in volunteers to help plan new campaigns. Greenpeace Mobilisation Lab.

Link Loving 06.12.12

• 3 things you need to know about today’s Autumn Statement. James Meadway
• Do we love ‘things’ not enough, rather than too much? Woodbrooke Good Lives Project.
• Totnes, in the UK’s southwest, takes its own route as austerity measures lead to high national unemployment. Laurence Lee.

   

Cracking The Code: The System Of Racial Inequity – Trailer

Link Loving 05.12.12

• Time to end corporate personhood. Jonathan Kent.
• So apparently I live in North America’s smartest city. Boyd Cohen.
• Why it’s hard to replace the ‘fiscal cliff’ metaphor. Suggestion: austerity bomb. George Lakoff.
• Calculating the impact of campaigning in the Philippines. Duncan Green.

Ira Glass On Storytelling

Iceland – Request For Contacts

Readers – a request for you.

Following all the amazing activism and impact from social pressure in Iceland over the last couple of years, I’m planning a trip to Iceland with dear friend Daniel Vockins.

We would love to meet with anyone who fits into the following categories:

• activists
• union organisers
• people involved with the rewriting of the constitution
• parliamentarians
• students
• civil servants
• faith groups
• media movers-and-shakers
• financial sector workers
• anyone who has a story to tell about the protests and what impact they had

If you know anyone, or know someone who might have a useful contact – I’d really appreciate to be linked up. Drop me a line – caspertk[at]gmail.com. Thank you so much!

Link Loving 03.12.12

• A really useful set of questions when making decisions (or, said otherwise – creating critical systems heuristics). Curtis Ogden.

The Field

“Beyond our ideas of right-doing and wrong-doing,
there is a field. I’ll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase ‘each other’
…doesn’t make sense any more.”

Rumi

Link Loving 02.12.12

• Gemma Bone reviews ‘Debt: The First 5000 Years’ by David Graebers and it sounds utterly fascinating. Read it.
• Three trending innovations in mobilisation from Greenpeace and its allies. Some great stories and campaigns. Michael Silbermann, Marianne Manilov and Bron York.
• Two Welsh tax-justice campaigners do an awesome action.
• Vicki Arroyo’s TED talk – Let’s prepare for our new climate. Pretty terrifying.
• Non-profits have a charter to be innovators. Seth Godin.

Awesome Jeremy Gilbert Quotes

On democracy

“Our contemporary polities are for the most part no longer ‘democracies’ in even the most attenuated sense, but ‘post-democracies’, wherein a set of consultative, representative and legislative institutions inherited from the moment of the mid-twentieth century persist with ever-decreasing efficacy: a Fordist institutional framework increasingly unable to gain any purchase on a post-Fordist world.”

On personal freedoms and market relations

“So the shift from the culture of mid-twentieth century capitalism to 21st century capitalism accompanies a move away from a highly regulated, conformist, collectivist, form of social life which, for all of its oppressively homogenising elements, was nonetheless relatively amenable to intervention by political institutions which were, comparatively speaking, relatively sensitive and accountable to the needs and desires of the governed. In its place emerges a system which tolerates far higher levels of diversity and personal freedom, so long as that freedom is expressed primarily through private consumption and as long as its expression does not take the form of substantial public claims. We move from a situation in which the price of democracy is the suppression of individual desires (or rather, the demand that desires themselves conform to a pre-determined norm), to one in which the price of personal freedom is the demand that all social life operate according to the logic of market relations, and in which any form of effective democracy seems impossible.”

Jeremy Gilbert