perfidy

The President's Commission on the Moon, Mars and Beyond is soliciting comments. Go here and you can submit your thoughts on space exploration, or just complain about the boring design of the website.

And speaking of governments seeking comments, this bit from Wired talks about how the government has been talking to game developers - specifically the designers of large multiplayer online games. At a conference arranged by Beth Noveck of the New York Law School, game developers and government officials sat down to talk about democracy, feedback and public participation in the legislative process. Interesting stuff, which puts me in mind (as do many things) of this essay by David Brin.

I have thought for quite a while now that pure democracy is overrated. Rule of law and a republican system are more important. But, that does not mean that I place more importance on the government that I do on the individual. As Brin talks about in his essay, the largely untapped capacity of individual citizens to operate in self organizing and directed groups is consistently ignored by the "experts." While we have (with the exception of central planning Marxists and Senators from New York) based our entire economic and social lives on this principle, we are reluctant to embrace it for security or government purposes.

I think that we lost something when we gave up on the idea of the general militia. But, the growth of the internet, and yes even the blogosphere has perhaps led to the rebirth of this ideal. Websites like the Northeast Intelligence Network, and others like it; Winds of Change and the Command Post; and hundreds of fevered bloggers collecting, analyzing and annotating countless bits of information are like a general militia devoted to military and strategic intelligence.

Obviously, much of the heavy lifting militarily will still be done by the Army, Navy and Marines. But that does not mean that we don't have a role, and one that the government should begin to take seriously, and not hinder us from performing.