These are notes to myself. If you discover them and find them useful I would love to hear from you. Most of these are related to travel I did, books I read, or tech notes for Matomo and the LAMP stack.
Browse my topics here
What I Learned From - Power to the People - Use Your Voice
activismBook #
Danny Sriskandarajah's book is Power to the People: Use Your Voice, Change the World.
He says it is a footnoteless version of what he usually writes. His normal books are for academics. This one is deliberately an outlined idea, supported completely by anecdotes: Estonian online elections, growing up in Sierra Leone, the example of SNICC and Rosa Parks, et al.
Podcast #
Danny was interviewed on The New Books in Public Policy podcast. Episode 4 - 49: September 17, 2024
Capitalism #
Democracy SAVES capitalism. In a vacuum, capitalism is missing a lot of the "invisible hands". Regulation of capitalism puts it in fetters: a good thing. Capitalism needs inputs on: its externalizations, the planet, inequality, mobility of populations, jobs and work. The solution, to allow people input on capitalism. To do that, people need engagement with the state, they need democracy and civics education.
Four arenas #
- Democracy
- Economy (Cooperatives, Capital institutions, etc)
- Digital Space
- Global Governance (Climate and human movement are globally solvable, only.)
His "Why" #
Civic organizations make people happy - directly. Forget all the stuff in the notes above: participating makes happiness. Take a lesson from the fascists and throw a great party that makes people feel belonging to something and efficacy.
But really, just make them directly happy.
Eudaimonics #
Eudaimonia, in Aristotelian ethics, is the condition of human flourishing or of living well."
The conventional English translation of the ancient Greek term, “happiness,” is unfortunate because eudaimonia, as Aristotle and most other ancient philosophers understood it, does not consist of a state of mind or a feeling of pleasure or contentment, as “happiness” (as it is commonly used) implies. For Aristotle, eudaimonia is the highest human good, the only human good that is desirable for its own sake (as an end in itself) rather than for the sake of something else (as a means toward some other end).
- from Peter Singer in https://www.britannica.com/topic/eudaimonia