[FRIAM] Navalny - Berlin Diary - Klemperer - Daily News

Sun Jun 29 14:00:58 EDT 2025

This is related to what you say.  Many people work because it brings them
self esteem.

Frank

---
Frank C. Wimberly
140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
Santa Fe, NM 87505

505 670-9918
Santa Fe, NM

On Sun, Jun 29, 2025, 11:55 AM Stephen Guerin <stephen.guerin at simtable.com>
wrote:

> Joaquin, your claim that “communism fails because no one owns anything, so
> no one works” might oversimplify both human motivation and economic
> organization. It assumes private property is the only incentive, ignoring
> that people also work for meaning, contribution, and shared purpose — as
> seen in teaching, caregiving, or open-source work. Attention and reputation
> are important motivators — being forms of wealth beyond money and physical
> assets
>
> While state-run economies like the USSR suffered inefficiencies, these
> often stemmed from centralized bureaucracy, not the absence of ownership.
> Crucially, collective ownership — especially in distributed groups — does
> not mean no ownership. It means shared stewardship, clear norms, and mutual
> accountability. Co-ops and digital commons thrive on such principles,
> sustaining motivation without relying on private profit.
>
> More importantly, collective ownership can also yield collective profit —
> and through self-governing rules, communities determine how that profit,
> along with authority and responsibilities, are fairly distributed. These
> rules are tailored to context: effort, contribution, equity, or consensus.
> This kind of bottom-up governance creates sustainable motivation and avoids
> both centralized control and extractive inequality.
>
> Elinor Ostrom documented how communities across the world govern
> common-pool resources — fisheries, forests, irrigation — through local
> rules and cooperation, not markets or state command. One vivid example is
> the Acequia system, with origins in Spain and the Middle East, and still
> practiced in the American Southwest.
>
> Acequias are community-managed irrigation networks where water is
> collectively governed, not privately traded. Responsibilities are shared,
> maintained through traditions like the annual cleaning and roles like the
> mayordomo. They represent a third way — neither capitalist nor statist —
> built on collective ownership, self-regulation, and distributed governance.
>
> This model inspires our digital Acequia: a decentralized system for
> stewarding shared data, computation, and sensing infrastructure. Built on
> open protocols (WebDAV, WebRTC, local-first tools), it supports collective
> perception and collective action, enabling collective intelligence to
> emerge from distributed participation.
>
> Just as physical Acequias channel water through mutual care, the digital
> Acequia channels insight, shared value, and coordinated action — forming a
> resilient, co-governed commons for the digital era.
>
> - Stephen and Dan
>
> ____________________________________________
> CEO Founder, Simtable.com
> stephen.guerin at simtable.com
>
> Harvard Visualization Research and Teaching Lab
> stephenguerin at fas.harvard.edu
>
> mobile: (505)577-5828
>
> On Sun, Jun 29, 2025, 1:09 AM Jochen Fromm <jofr at cas-group.net> wrote:
>
>> I was born in West Germany when the country was deeply divided in East
>> and West. British, French and American forces had occupied the Western
>> part, Russian/Soviet forces the Eastern part. My home town was part of the
>> British zone. I remember British barracks, British forces on the streets,
>> and British radio stations (British Forces Broadcasting Service, BFBS). At
>> that time Putin was a small, insignificant KGB officer in Dresden in the
>> Eastern part - the city where Victor Klemperer lived and suffered earlier.
>>
>> Americans were seen in the Western part as heroes. They were the ones who
>> had defended England and freed France from the Nazis, rescued West-Berlin
>> by the Berlin Airlift, and stopped the communists. In the cinemas Americans
>> were the heroes too: first in American Western movies, like "The Tin Star"
>> (Henry Fonda), "High Noon" (Gary Cooper), etc., later in action movies like
>> Tom Cruise's Top Gun or Harrison Ford's Indiana Jones.
>>
>> After the Soviet Union collapsed everybody thought America and liberal
>> democracy had won. Francis Fukuyama wrote "The End of History". As we see
>> now maybe it is not that simple. Communism has drawbacks - mainly that
>> nobody has an incentive to work because no one owns anything - but
>> capitalism has a dark side too: it unleashes evil corporations and tends to
>> destroy nature.
>>
>> There is evil on multiple scales and in multiple dimensions. Corporations
>> and their CEOs can be evil, politicians and presidents too, churches can be
>> evil (think of "Roman Inquisition") and political parties in totalitarian
>> systems can be supremely evil. Even if we look at nature where animals eat
>> each other alive we must wonder if Vasily Grossman was right in his book
>> "Life and Fate", where he asks whether life itself is evil.
>>
>> Yes, we live in interesting times. We have more knowledge at our
>> fingertips than all generations before us, and yet it does not seem to make
>> us wiser or act better.
>>
>> -J.
>>
>>
>> -------- Original message --------
>> From: steve smith <sasmyth at swcp.com>
>> Date: 6/28/25 11:51 PM (GMT+01:00)
>> To: friam at redfish.com
>> Subject: [FRIAM] Navalny - Berlin Diary - Klemperer - Daily News
>>
>> TD;DR (Too Downer Don't Read)
>>
>> I am reading Shirer's Berlin Diary
>> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_Diary> as Mary reads Navalny's
>> autobiography <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriot_(book)> (aloud to
>> me) while our daily news rolls by this season (year? decade?) is pretty
>> disturbing, but also comforting in a disturbing way.   We read (Mary out
>> loud to me) Victor Klemperer's Journals
>> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_Klemperer> (nod to Jochen's recent
>> reference) a few years ago.
>>
>> <PriviedWhiteMaleSplaining>
>>
>> The *dis*comfiting part is really obvious I would say...  watching,
>> through first person accounts of how an otherwise functioning, and in some
>> cases vibrant culture can slip into a self-destructive spiral, usually with
>> a strong opening game of abusing some *other* group of scapegoats
>> (non-White, non-Christian, non-MAGA) on the way down.  Maybe invading your
>> neighbors (Canada, Greenland, Panama?)
>>
>> Navalny's reports are most salient to some of the conversations here,
>> notably glen's references to holding stocks as a strategy to keep tabs on
>> our *evil corporate overlords* and even (potentally) attend stockholder
>> meetings or demand extra documentation, etc.   It appears Navalny made this
>> into a fine art in his early days of rising to attention and influence.
>> *I* reduced all of my "blood stocks" to 1 share about the time of the
>> election, some significantly before.  My dirtiest financial secret was
>> riding Elno's coat-tails some ways up, but did begin to distance myself
>> well before he went full-MAGA before the election.
>>
>> And best I can tell, as Chomsky indicated about "socially responsible
>> investing", they are *all* blood stocks.   Some more than others.
>> Palantir, Anduril, United Health, Purdue anyone?
>>
>> In Berlin Diary, I am just at the point where Paris has been occupied and
>> the extreme contrasts THAT yielded.   The French government (as many may
>> know) withdrew and declared Paris an "Open City" meaning they would not
>> attempt to defend it as they had other cities and villages in the path of
>> the Nazi Wermacht.   I was raised (anecdotes and history books) to believe
>> that this represented some kind of moral failure of the entire French
>> People (live to fight another day!).
>>
>> Shirer, an American, having lived/worked in Paris was very attached, and
>> was "sent" into Paris (from Berlin) because all other foreign media had
>> *fled* in the face of possible invasion (in spite of the Open City)
>> status.  His reports of the police and fire remaining (mostly) intact
>> (albeit disarmed) directing traffic (mostly Wermacht vehicles) while
>> hundreds of thousands of evacuees were suffering (unto dying) on the roads
>> leading away was stunning.  But the destruction of Paris itself (and the
>> millions who did not flee) would not have served anything either?
>>
>> I also just spent 90 mins on a video chat with my Ukrainian colleagues
>> (from Kiev) who have been unavailable since the invasion began.  We avoided
>> direct discussion of their "troubles" in lieu of strictly technical
>> discussions of their developments.   They did "let slip" that the bulk of
>> their progress halted 4 years ago and they were just now trying to marshall
>> those results into something marketable (e.g. triangular LED panels
>> designed for constructing dome-sections at a scale from 9m to 90m
>> (diameter)...   knowing that they are doing this under the constant threat
>> of kinetic attacks from Russia and some of their (previous) descriptions of
>> how hard they fought as young professionals (in their 30s) against the
>> systemic corruption of (post) Soviet Ukraine gives me a little more
>> perspective.
>>
>> As for the daily news: I recommend the apocryphal Twain quote: “I never
>> read the newspapers until at least two weeks after they're published — that
>> way I can be sure the lies have been corrected.”  and Tom Hanks' movie
>> News of the World
>> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/News_of_the_World_%28film%29> for some
>> perspective?
>>
>> Bottom line is "how good we have it" juxtaposed starkly with "this is how
>> it all slides into oblivion", juxtaposed with "this too shall pass".
>> Jochen (born in Cold-War E. Germany?) and Pieter (came of age through
>> Apartheid), et al  can probably speak more personally to these contrasts?
>>
>> </PriviedWhiteMaleSplaining>
>>
>> Interesting times?
>>
>>
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