I spent yesterday evening at a friend's house trying to get a linux box back on the network. It has worked reliably as a firewall and home network router for a couple of years -- my friend has treated it like an appliance, stuck under the table, headless, it has purred along nat-ing and routing and blocking malicious packets. A few days ago, it stopped being able to get an address via DHCP from the cable-modem provider. We confirmed we could still connect using our powerbooks, but we could not with the linux box. We tried swapping out that ethernet card for a different card. We tried updating the version of pump. We tried using dhcpcd. All was to no avail. My suggestion was to burn a debian install disk and reinstall debian. There's no important data or complicated configuration on the machine that needs to be preserved and the version that was on there is a couple of years out of date anyway and ought to be upgraded.

BoingBoing pointed out a paper about emergent democracy. It is an interesting synthesis of a lot of the ideas that are currently running through the blog ecosystem. Bloggers are convinced that blogging (or maybe moblogging) is the "next big thing" that will transform the world by means of the internet. I remember in 1990 and 1991, as a graduate student, I would try to explain email and Usenet to faculty. Initial skepticism often gave way to wild enthusiasm once they finally experienced the benefits. The experience was similar when I set up a world wide web server. (I tried to convince my advisor to let me do my dissertation on the educational use of hypermedia. His response was, "Well, this hypertext stuff is cool, but you really need to choose a more established field to ground your work in. This World Wide Web thing may never catch on." I shudder to think where I might have ended up if I had graduated in 1996 with a PhD in the educational use of hypertext.) Regarding blogs, I think its still too early say whether they'll be the next big thing, but, Hey! I'm writing one, aren't I?

I'm reading De Tocqueville looking for a quote about town meeting. I haven't the one I'm looking for, but I found this one, which is pretty good.

It cannot be repeated too often that nothing is more fertile in prodigies than the art of being free; but there is nothing more arduous than the apprenticeship of liberty. Such is not the case with despotic institutions: despotism often promises to make amends for a thousand previous ills; it supports the right, it protects the oppressed, and it maintains public order. The nation is lulled by the temporary prosperity which accrues to it, until it is roused to a sense of its own misery. Liberty, on the contrary, is generally established in the midst of agitation, it is perfected by civil discord, and its benefits cannot be appreciated until it is already old.

These two bits also say a lot about our current circumstances.

A highly civilized community spurns the attempts of a local independence, is disgusted at its numerous blunders, and is apt to despair of success before the experiment is completed.

The transient passions and the interests of an hour, or the chance of circumstances, may have created the external forms of independence; but the despotic tendency which has been repelled will, sooner or later, inevitably reappear on the surface.

I really can't even understand the pro charter position. It's like the underwear gnomes.

  1. Get rid of town meeting
  2. ???
  3. profit!!

Below is the letter I sent to the Amherst Bulletin about the charter.

People who support the charter should ask themselves whether or not they believe Amherst is a special placeto live . If you do, and I certainly do, I believe you should also question whether the institution of Town Meeting hasn't contributed to creating and preserving the special qualities of Amherst. Alexis De Tocqueville, in 1835, noted

Town-meetings are to liberty what primary schools are to science; they bring it within the people's reach, they teach men how to use and how to enjoy it. A nation may establish a system of free government, but without the spirit of municipal institutions it cannot have the spirit of liberty." (Democracy In America, Volume 1)

Town Meeting provides a forum where people from every constituency in Amherst speak to one another on equal terms. Not everyone may choose to participate in Town Meeting, but it is large enough that almost anyone who wants to participate can. It provides a mechanism where newcomers to government can become acquainted with the town, its culture, and the community of engaged citizenry. People can establish a record and begin to orient themselves to the important questions of the day. Without Town Meeting, where will the candidates for other town positions come from? And how will you know what they stand for?

The institution of Town Meeting has a long history of organizing local action and preserving liberty that goes back to the revolutionary war. In The First American Revolution, Ray Raphael describes the role Town Government played in organizing civil disobediance in response to the Intolerable Acts. In places like Hadley, Worcester, and Pittsfield people organized grass roots resistance. Without the structure of Town Meeting there might have been no rebellion, no revolution, and no United States.

I have spoken with several colleagues about what they perceive as the problems of Town Meeting. I'm not going to try to say that Town Meeting is without problems. Still, as the saying goes, if your horse has a broken leg, you can shoot the horse, but it doesn't fix the leg. What will Amherst look like without Town Meeting? Town Meeting has made Amherst what it is. If you like the way Amherst is, vote no on the proposed charter and keep what makes Amherst special.

There's finally a Not This Charter website. I'll replace the local pages with pointers to the actual site now.