Howdy Maniacs!
I am posting this here and on Dkos (already up at DK) tonight in hopes of getting a few more responses. But….since you guys are probably pretty talked out on this, in about a half an hour or so I will be putting up some subversive videos to slake your lust for entertainment!
On to the reprint!
One of our many Quixotic quests over at Docudharma is ….don’t laugh now!…trying to find ways to bring both the Progressive Blogosphere and progressives in general closer together. Finding ways to unite us, and by uniting us making us more powerful and more effective.
Herding cats from ponyback.
One of the ways we think might be effective is coming up with a very basic and simple (we hope!) list of things we agree on. A manifesto. The internet is full of the things we do not agree on….including whether we need a manifesto or not. But not much is regularly said about what we do agree on. And what we DO agree on is in essence…..who we are.
Agreeing what we agree on is the first tiny step in bringing us closer together, to claiming the power we have….and are not using. Defining the principles and issues that are most important to us can help us focus.
We have two categories. Issues and Principles. If you are an organized type of person, go ahead and make a list of your top five or top ten in each category. If you are a more casual person, just throw in whatever ideas you have and we will try our best to collate and rank them.
Soon we will start the winnowing process, through more diaries asking y’all to vote on the lists we end up with.
Many people have been kind enough to respond with lists of their top issues and principles, but of course, the more folks who respond the better a sampling we get.
If you are so inclined, submit your priorities below….
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…my whole pile of pretentious shit for this is on another computer…but here goes…
Principles:
1. General acknolwedgement of UN delcarations of human rights, political and economic, and the geneva conventions as the most basic starting point for human rights. There’s a lot of nits to pick but it represents a body of thought about the relation of indidual and society which is _not_ about a boot forever descending on a human face, and a fifty year consensus.
2. Recognition of our point in history — that we are living through a global die-off of on a geologic scale; and that the relationship of humans to nature is a fucking disaster. This is explicitly _not_ framed soley as global warming, which is sort of the spotted owl of the global environmental movement — a downstream consequence of a larger and more complex problem, namely, the fact we have and continue to exceed the carrying capacity of the planet. Because it’s unique in human history — and in cause, planetary history, on the widest scale — this is a principle, from which issues derive.
3. That as individual voice with potentially global distribution, our most powerful statements are not generalizations about policy, but effective, artful and approachable descriptions of individual truth, about our lives and our direct relation to society.
4. We’re all cranks, as ek says. As such we should be nice to the other cranks.
Issues
1. The practical relation of individual to society. That is, what is it to live with and without particular freedoms, wherever we are in the world? What is it to live in a country at war? Undergoing a religious revival? We are in a unique position to put forward and popularize voices which would never otherwise be heard. We should listen to these voices, help them refine their message, and wherever possible refer people to those voices in the first person.
2. Human rights standards. As a policy issue, how and were are human rights at risk? How can we find and disseminate those voices.
3. Sustainable technology. We on the web can provide infrastructure to the development of sustainable technology. We should be making it cool. Instead, we’re talking about how much things suck to each other.
4. The nature and extent of temporary governments. As human population moves ever upward, in a world undergoing increasing environmental instablity, millions of human beings will be living without the most basic of needs being met, and more still will be living without fundamental civil liberties. We should be promoting — as an issue — basic human rights for every person, whether in a refugee camp in Sudan or Detroit, and making clear that no threat — not even existential ones — nor level of want — is a reason for the oppression of human beings. I think handling human rights in “pro tem” environments will be one of the pivotal moral issues of our century.