Thought you might like to know that we have just set up a Facebook page to promote the book and a Twitter account for those who use Twitter. The web site, debtgeneration.org should be up later this week.
It would be great if any who have Facebook accounts, and who like ours, could set it as one of the pages you “like”. We have set it so that everyone who “likes” the page can post news on the wall and also start discussion threads. It seemed a technologically easier way of having a place for debates and threads that you set up, than trying to do it on the more unwieldy blog format. Though we can try to ammend the blog too, to make it more open, if you wish.
We are hoping that the Facebook can serve a complementary forum to the type of debate and discussions that take place on the blog. As everyone can post and start threads it will become what everyone makes of it.
This is only partly an effort to get news of the book out-and-about. It is also to try to create a place where we can meet, talk, exchange ideas and links, and perhaps begin to create some kind of community. We are facing times where we need new forms of organization, perhaps this could be part of that effort.
I don't like spybook, sorry facebook myself but the band could do with an account.
I do like the idea of new forms of organisation, and i think more people use facebook than blogger.
It also has the possibility of snowballing, which is what the country needs, a big stone filled, compacted to black hole density snowball.
I just invented a new game to do with money while at the cashpoint.
Wait till somebody turns up next to you and say "Wanna race?" Wait till the pin number bit comes up.
"321 Go!"
I won, he went for balance first the fool.
That does makes me think he wasn't taking it seriously though.
http://www.myspace.com/strangetowncollective
Good that you're on Facebook in that it may get a bigger audience. But I had a look and hoped to find these posts there . . . (dont use FB much myself so maybe missing something.)
My vote would be for FB to be a forum to promote your blog writings – which seem to be a scarily accurate summary of my own musings but with much more eloquence. Off the back of the blog texts I'm sure you'll sell the book . . . I've already preordered 2 copies! best wishes
Ben
Yeah, not an FB user either.
I think most people with a natural skeptic bent are averse to using Facebook. It is after all a profit making organisation and one whose only salable asset is its users personal data.
Love the Twitter though – will definitely follow on there.
Ben, Jamie,
I'll be confering with Mark tomorrow and will convey your thoughts about what you like, and what you think should appear where. He is much more up to speed on all this stuff than I am. I am still learning.
But as you say, if we want the book to have a chance we need to follow all avenues. What I am really hoping is that we can find a way that I can come to speak to people if anyone would be interested.
Anti-Facebook here as well, interesting correlation.
There was a group in the US who started up on a platform of anti bank bailouts and no taxation without representation. Now look what's being said about them… (particularly the comments)
What's your take on the TEA Party?
Unclear,
To be perfectly honest I haven't yet been on Facebook and have yet to create an account.But I will.
I am not a great fan of the social network sites. I find myself feeling negative about isted whose only function is to be 'social'. Maybe I'm just a misanthrope.
But if we want to get news of this blog and the book to spread we, Mark and I, felt we had to use all available means. We don't have the pr machine of a publisher and most apapers won't touch books that are not from big publishers.
So we need to contact people by other means. We will see. Either people will find what happens on facebook useful or not. Do you think discussion threads on Facebook might be attractive or do you want them to happen here? Or both?
As for the Tea Party I wrote about them in this post:
http://golemxiv-credo.blogspot.com/2010/08/american-revolution.html
The Tea party had several roots. I didn't see all of them. I did witness that part of its genesis among traders. That part's main interst was in fighting what they saw as Wall's Street's corruption of government.
I think what has happened is that, like any grass roots movement it attracted a wide range of discontented people looking for a movement and some, maybe many had racist and xenophobic attitudes.
What has happened since is that they have been very easy targets of rinfiltration. It is very easy to infiltrate such groups with people whose job it is to bring them into disrepute. Don't think it doesn't happen it does. I know.
I am not politically sympathetic to the Tea party. But not all of them are as ignorant and bigotted as the article suggests. There is a fundamentalist (check brain at door) wing, a racist (no brain to check) but there is also a radical libertarian, anti-Washington big government, free market wing.
I think they will, fior better or worse, upset the main two parties.
In my opinion we, in Europe and in GB also must have a new political movement and party. But not anything like the Tea Party. We need a party that is NOT alligned with the Freemarket, globalization-is-good ideology. That is not afraid to take on finance, bond holders and all. It can be done and must be.
Thanks for the link, Golem.
Although my question was intended to probe your thoughts on how people within a 'popular movement' shut out those people whose views they disagree with and whose views may provide an easy target for others to aim their barbs at.
The radical libertarian, anti-Washington big government, free market wing of the TEA Party have got Christine O'Donnell representing them; is that what they had in mind? Probably not. Could they have stopped it happening?
Your last para in the reply above was interesting. If you wanted to tap into a 'grass roots' dissatisfaction with Govt policy with regard to bailing out banks and quantitative easing, you would (probably) find a very broad base across the political spectrum to agree with you. If you wanted to tap into an anti-free market ideology as well, your in danger of losing most of the above.
For instance, if someone proposed that I sign a petition against free market economics, I'd politely ask them to return to the SWP stand from which they'd trotted. On the other hand, I agree with a lot of your criticisms and wish you all the best with your attempts to push this particular agenda and would be happy help in any way I can.
I suppose what I am long-windedly try to say is that stating bluntly you are anti free-market will alienate too many people before they hear the argument, in my opinion.
As ever, Unclear
Of course you are right about putting people off. AT THE MOMENT. I think people's love affair with the Free Market is not as rock solid as its fans like to think.
I personally do not think that the markets as unregulated entities work. Nor do I think any of our regulatory bodies are worth the cost of the paper clips they use up.
I do not think the theory of comparative advantage is anything more than many other table-napkin quality notions. It is a very poor way to try to run a world for teh benefit of those in it.
I do not think globalization as enshrined in its mantra of Free movement of people, goods and money has or will benefit the world and its people. I know the 'in theory' arguments. And they are just that – 'in theory'.
I do not advocate some clockwork leftists fantasy either. As far as I can see the left is as idiotically wedded to the SAME set of assumptions about growth and trade as the right with whom they are so blindly grappling.
It is my sincere hope that people can step back from the stale and pot-bound arguments of yesteryear, of left and right, and see the real and gigantic nature of the failure we confront.
I beleive we stand at a moment when nothing short of reformation will help us. We need to nail our demands to the doors of those who claim to know better and to whom we are told we must defer.
I say they are intellectually and morally corrupt and they must go.
Free markets are good for business not people as business will gravitate toward profit.
People or shall we say friends do not act like that.
Unless you add the word compassion to any economic system and the people running it it's always gonna screw over the common man.
I love the ramblings of EmsNews as she's dead against free trade and being american you can see why, even here we don't make much anymore.
It seems obvious to me that British people should make stuff for British people, unless it's champagne or Swiss cheese, that way the ratio would be the same worldwide.
Gotta be less profit in it though otherwise that's what would be happening, we're working for profits not people.
The profit should be for the good of civilisation, not individuals in big houses, of course hard work should have rewards, but plotting with your other rich pals to fix the deck is outrageous.
That's a crime against humanity and you should swing from a gallows pole for that.
And government should just be a boring system for the people, fully open, that you get called up to do like jury service, while the rest of us get on with being creative, having fun, enjoying life. because there are enough of us to be able to do that.
I agree with Unclear though it makes you look crazy infront of the masses. Of course the system we have is great though innit?
If people even had the inclination not to follow the herd we wouldn't be having this discussion. But they do and we are.
The question is what type of world do you want to live in?
Once you have the answer you can backtrack from that to find the systems that need to be in place for the free man to be free( if that's what you want, otherwise you'd make a system that makes you jump through hoops, sound familiar?), but we're still in the shadow of castles and swords rather than the shadow of flowers and music.
Maybe the next ice age will force that evolutionary step. Although if you look at nature we'll just eat each other and f$%k.
One Love (ever heard a banker say that?)
http://www.myspace.com/strangetowncollective
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