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Bushfires, Isocracy etc, Search for A New Home

The South-East Australian bushfires continued to rage during the week. Estimates of the dead are now around three hundred, although the official toll has stood at 181 for some time. The number of animals that have died is estimated to be in the millions. Apparently one needs to be university researcher to blame trees and the Greens, and divine inspiration to blame the decriminalisation of abortion.

I have started a new public policy website in accord to my 2009 plan. The idea is to combine elements of liberal, socialist and anarchist theory into a practical and results-orientated perspective. The intention is to gradually build the movement, one person at a time, into something that is both far more interesting and independent than what passes for most political organisations. On a related topic, having become frustrated over the years by the inability of semi-professional organisations to deal with IT workplace issues (wages, OH&S, collective bargaining), I have joined the ACTU-affiliated APESMA.

For sequential unix timestamp day (hat-tip to

tajna for the name),

caseopaya and I went to the hills to look at housing to buy despite the smell and haze of smoke that covered the city. Our landlords have increased the rent on our apartment by almost 25% and we're in the situation when where we can buy a significantly larger property with a mortgage repayment of less than we're currently paying in rent. So we had a trip out to Belgrave, Sassafras, and Mt. Dandenong and had a very late lunch outside the William Ricketts Sanctuary. No firm decisions yet from the initial scouting mission.

During the week also had a visit from

hathalla and

ser_pounce; it was a belated birthday gathering for the latter. I provided him a signed copy of

robin_d_laws's HeroQuest and made an enormous tiramisu using a famous

frou_frou recipe.

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Just a brief comment about the site --

An isocracy avoids the common criticisms of democracy (e.g., tyranny of the majority) by limiting public governance to the public sphere and private governance to the private sphere.

So does, arguably, absolutely every single system of governance ever conceived, albeit entirely informally. Can we get some more meat on that paragraph at some point?

Well, as I suggested (following Arendt), constitutional limitations. And, I should perhaps add, a separation of powers (because that does seem to work). Any other suggestions?

Defining roughly what lies in the public sphere and what lies in the private sphere would seem rather crucial to me. Governments aren't particularly inclined to make that separation on their own, since they must settle problems ad hoc, and because historically there will always be this or that set of people for whom the topic to be settled, whatever it is, lies in the private sphere. Indeed, it's reasonable to assume there will always be ample demand around for the government to take on the "private sphere."

A summary version can be derived from the initial statement. Self-ownership and, by extension, mutual agreement would be outside the reach of public governance. Natural resources as the source of public income; and from that public governance of the use of that income.

Sounds like a planned economy.

It would seem that you've taken everything from the second sentence and nothing from the first.

More appropriately it could be described as a mixed economy, but mixed in the right places and in the right portions.

No, I'm simply cynical about how this combination of command over land with non-command of labour would work itself out in the real world.

Except it's not a command over land; "natural resources as the source of public income".

What does that mean, institutionally and legally?

It means that public income is derived from unimproved site rental values.

So the government would, essentially, be funded through its role as the universal land-lord of private business?

Businesses and individuals; otherwise that would be correct.

I'm not exactly overwhelmed, but at least this arrangement trumps many of the other alternative schemes on the market in terms of practicality. After all, it's not that much of a change compared to what we actually have already.

One would hope it's achievable. Of course, I cannot think of a single government in the world which even introduces these ideas as core principles.

I'm happy to load up LJ this afternoon and find that you've started up a separate updating website.

Is it contributor-only, or are you planning for a more forums-based approach? Am I looking at a blog or a discussion group?

Either way, much appreciated. This kind of thing is needed, and publicising it is the first step.

I've been meaning to do it for a while.

The general idea is to bring several people a week into the fold. After a while it will have it's own momentum.

Anyone who signs up this stage is a publisher, that is, they can make their own posts..

Please consider doing so yourself!

I would love to. I looked around for the signup mechanism and didn't see it, but I didn't have long to peruse at that moment.

Ahh, my bad. Defaulted to my standard drupal install which disables logins and account creation on the front page. It is there now.

As a secondary thing, the individual articles don't display (at least, on the main page) the authors of the individual blog-posts. It ought to, I think.

You're right. I've modified that as suggested.

Typo:

"...An isocracy is republican; there are no hereditary provision [sic] of power. By extension, an isocracy does not engage in moral distinctions in law on the grounds of race, sex etc."

Grammatical revision needed, and it doesn't seem like something I can fix myself.

I might be missing something here; "provision" as in a legal instrument?

It seems to me that it ought to read "An isocracy is republican; there are no hereditary provisions of power." Or, alternately, "...there is no hereditary provision of power."

*nods* You're right. I often get 'is' and 'are' incorrect, using them for tense rather than singular/plural distinction.

...as a further aside, I would appreciate a broad overview of the specific topics of interest on this page, so I don't go rattling about things that don't really belong there. Being invited to contribute is good and all, but I'd like to know more specifically what issues are being discussed. I gather this isn't just a "politics and current events" blog.

The broad idea is any topic is permissible but with a practical, public policy orientation. For example, a listing of wacky religious beliefs (e.g., http://www.fstdt.com/) is awesome and funny, but not really relevant except in the context of how this affects childhood education, how to balance this with separation of church and state, religious freedom etc.

How far afield can we go here? I'm personally for the abandonment of the entire concept of economics, the devotion of human energy to the elimination of economic scarcity, the abolition of nations and the pursuit of unified culture and language.

These are huge ideas, and probably could do with a lot more exploring before I go touting them on someone else's site, you know?

Those sorts of things would be absolutely acceptable - and you're right they are huge ideas.

Unified language is a good one. I've had a look at Esperanto, it's not too bad albeit with a European bias.

I think a European bias was probably unavoidable, considering they wanted (as far as I know) to find the simplest language possible, which happened to be some derivative of Polish.

Well, the words are mostly romance based, whereas the sounds are slavic...

Maybe it was the grammatical structure. I know they used Polish as one of the main bases for Esperanto.

In Seattle, there's still an internation Esperanto daily newspaper for sale. It's fascinating - ... ...and completely illegible to anyone. :P

Sassafras!

Such an awesome word.

*nods* I always thought so too. It actually adds a fair bit to the appeal. It rolls off the tongue, even more so than Lo-li-ta.

I certainly hope you bunch stay safe. All we have locally is bank-bursting rivers reducing a couple of sidestreets to one lane, due to a very strange and early thaw.

That is odd; I though that the northern hemisphere was going through a great deal of heavy cold at the moment - or is that just the UK?

cold snap in the UK - unseasonably balmy weather this week in Texas

I would use the word "jarring". We had huge snowfalls not long ago, and since then, cold snaps which alternate with periods of strange above-freezing temperatures, the most recent of which melted all but the biggest snow mounds. I'm currently looking out the window at a Sydneyesque blue sky, not a cloud I can see, and I'm going to guess in early March winter will throw us one final snow dump.

isnt 25% illegal?

good luck with the house hunting, first home bonus will b handy too but fires out that way are a bit scary.
a garden for the rats!

Perhaps. We've put in a request for an assessment with the Department of Justice and we'll see what they say on the matter.

fires out that way are a bit scary

They sure are!

BTW, I thoroughly expect to see you sign up to isocracy.org - after all, you were the one who pushed me a reminder to get it going!

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Bushfires, Isocracy etc, Search for A New Home

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