From Jim Lehrer’s comments at the opening of the presidential debate:
Tonight?s will last 90 minutes, following detailed rules of engagement worked out by representatives of the candidates. I have agreed to enforce their rules on them.
The umbrella topic is foreign policy and homeland security, but the specific subjects were chosen by me, the questions were composed by me, the candidates have not been told what they are, nor has anyone else.
For each question there can only be a two-minute response, a 90- second rebuttal and, at my discretion, a discussion extension of one minute.
A green light will come on when 30 seconds remain in any given answer, yellow at 15, red at five seconds, and then flashing red means time?s up. There is also a backup buzzer system if needed.
Candidates may not direct a question to each other. There will be two-minute closing statements, but no opening statements.
There is an audience here in the hall, but they will remain absolutely silent for the next 90 minutes, except for now, when they join me in welcoming President Bush and Senator Kerry.
If the essence of democracy is dialogue, then something very strange is going on down in the USA.
Matthew Baldwin has a humorous take on the “rules of engagement.”
So, how can we do this better? Democracy, it seems to me, needs to be enlivened at all levels by dialogue and conversation. Debates between people running for office at the highest levels both here in Canada and in the USA have taken on the character of candidate window dressing. Shoppers are encouraged to choose an item based on how it looks in the window.
What if the candidates sat down together on a stage in a circle with eight randomly selected citizens and were given two hours to hash out ideas together about how to move forward? What if they were given the task of coming to an AGREEMENT after two hours on a specific question relating to the future and well being of the country? Everyone could contribute and the only rules of engagement would be David Bohm’s rules of dialogue.
That would really be something, eh?
Nushu text which reads “Beside a well one does not thirst, beside a sister one does not despair.”
From Intersol
Nushu, a secret language of Chinese women, has lost its most accomplished and perhaps last surviving writer and speaker. Yang Huanyi was a well known speaker and writer of the language which evolved 400 years ago as a secret script used exclusively by women to communicate with each other usually about initmate and domestic issues. Many Nushu songs and poems were composed and the written legacy of the language survives in letters and embroidered handkerchiefs.
Some Nushu resources:
- Yang Huanyi’s obituary from Xinhuanet
- Report of a Symposium on Nushu, including an interview with Yang Huanyi.
- Some articles on Nushu
- The world of Nushu
Recently I have received phone calls from CIBC Visa, TD Canada Trust, Telus, and a few smaller companies asking me to buy things. (I’m not providing links to these companies. They can generate their own markets.)
I would like you to know, if you are a telemarketer, that I don’t like cold calls. I consider it phone spam. If I’m looking for a line of credit, or a cheaper long distance plan or a VISA card with 5000 bonus airmiles, Google and I are perfectly capable of finding it.
So if you do call please be aware that I will subject you to one of the following treatments:
- The phone will be put on my desk while you prattle on and I continue working (the world record for this treatment is a full two minutes from someone soliciting funds from a police benevolent society).
- You will be passed to my three year old and be invited to try selling to him (let’s see how good you REALLY are).
- You will be subjected to an uncontrollable fit of laughing, coughing, sneezing or worse.
- You and I will have a conversation about spam.
I’m not a mean person, trust me. But if you phone me looking to sell me something I don’t need, I will respond to you with the same courtesy. If your company’s products and marketing are so shabby that you have to resort to phone spam, then you are not a step above the emailers who get trapped in my mail filters. The difference between them and you, is that you are on the end of my phone line and I’ll have a word with you before I delete you.
Argh. It drives me crazy how people always figure out the basest uses for the best technologies.
Apropos of what I blogged the other day on vision, Johnnie Moore has posted a nice piece at finding where the true potential lies.
Change is often spoken of as something to be done elsewhere, by other people. I think the effect is to make change some hypothetical process, and perhaps to give the speakers a kind of illusory sense of power.
Turning the conversation to the one thing we can change – ourselves and the ways in which we interact with the world – creates a more empowering and realistic set of tasks, and works from a vision that feels truer becasue it comes from within.
I’ve been playing around with Webjay for a few months now. It’s a tool that creates playlists of music (and other media) from users all over the place. My musical tastes are pretty varied, but I have always loved what is known as “world music” and so I have distilled some great findings on the web into a rotating top 40 of sounds that are making my ears tingle at the moment. You might have heard of some of these artists, but I’m willing to be that most of them are new discoveries.
Go visit the playlist and have a listen. You can subscribe to the playlist’s RSS feed as well to be alerted to when I change it up, which should happen every week or so. There’s a link on the sidebar here, under “Little Projects” that goes to the playlist as well.
Happy listening!