🚀 go-pugleaf

Deborah, I would agree with most of what you say.  The 2 existing parties are
sometimes too much like different flavors of the same non-nutritive
substance.

Back to the topic of devmedia, though.  It is ironic to me that given current
trends in the North American economy (widening gaps between haves and
have-nots) we may soon be the very model of the 3rd world paradigm... Elites
with money and political leverage controlling every aspect of society to suit
their own agenda... like the Marcos family controlling the media in the
Phillipines for so many years.  How will any kind of new information order
manage to topple such an entrenched hegemony?

I really appreciated the perspective of Roberto Savio as posted a few weeks
ago here:

   Growing globalisation thus steadily reduces the ability of the
   state to play a strong national role, while people become
   increasingly indifferent, and political parties are seen more and
   more as power machines.

   However, globalisation must not be seen merely as a negative
   phenomenon, but rather as an indispensable process of adjustment,
   delayed far too long by the Cold War.

The last sentence in the first paragraph captures Deborah's sentiments as
well as most people that I deal with.  But then the next paragraph says that
we need to stay alert during this period of change and try to analyze where
the transnationals corporations are taking us.  Is this to be a new era of mor
e rational behavior on the part of groups of humans based on simple market
conditions?  (Maybe peace is more profitable than war?)  Or are we entering a
world more like that envisioned by Ursula Le Guin in "The Dispossesed" in
which elites use disinformation and simple coercion to inspire an underclass
to fight wars and do other dirty work while they live in the magical world of
high tech gadgetry and grand plans?  Roberto Savio's call for building a new
world information paradigm is on target.

Being an old unabashed 60s person, I tend to refer to things of that period
that were part of the fabric of hippie life.  One of these items was the "I
Ching" book of wisdom.  In there, there is one Taoist sentiment that seems to
offer some direction for us at this point.  To paraphrase it badly: In times
of great evil, it is possible that the best thing to do is not to combat the
evil directly but rather to do good.

Or as Woody Guthrie tells it:

These two rabbits were trapped behind a rock by some hunters.  The he-rabbit
said to the she-rabbit, "We're in a tough spot.  What are we going to do?"
 And the she-rabbit said, "Let's wait em out and eventually we'll outnumber
'em."

P.S., Deborah, good luck on dissertation.  Just think of it as one king-hell
paper.