Minutes from Democafe meeting, Saturday 9th May 2015
Held at the Forge, Delancey Street, Camden NW1 7NL – DemoCafe-150509.

Present: Carol McNicoll, James Richmond, Sara Jolly, Alan Spence, Janos Abel, Eddie Farrell. Apologies: Mary Fee, Denise Arnold, Michael Mulvey.

Website:
We began with a big thanks for all the work and planning that Mary and Adrian have put into the Democafe website. Thanks to all their work we now have a wordpress website:
Sara: her experience with wordpress is a good one and says it’s fairly straight forward to use.
Janos: will the site enable comments? We presume yes but that will require members of Democafe to act a moderators. These and other questions to be put to Mary at next week’s meeting.
*Mary has stressed right from the beginning that the website will require Democafe participants to run it, it is too much work to leave to one person.

Last week’s presentation on climate change given by Denise:
We discussed: how to make sure future presentations and discussions are identified as personal opinions offered up by members or group position statements.
Sara and Janos: felt Michael Mulvey’s text was helpful in positioning Denise’s presentation and was read out:

Climate Change: My feeling is, but I stand to be corrected, that we should keep the “other view” very much in mind, but we need to express an opinion about what now needs to be done. Scientific opinion is bound to continue to be divided over such complicated issues but I don’t think that humanity can afford to wait for a “fully-fledged” scientific consensus to emerge.

We need meantime to be guided by the Precautionary Principle and by a sense of Intergenerational Solidarity. Self-restraint and life-style adjustment do not necessarily involve sacrifice, quite to the contrary, they may indeed lead us to devising more sustainable ways of doing things, and to avoiding some of the pointless human and environmental harm that mindless consumerism and resource-squandering occasion. Much of the technology for achieving these changes already exists and there is absolutely no reason why the “developing and emergent nations” should have to ape our, in many respects, stupid, destructive and wasteful ways of doing things in order to achieve for themselves levels of affluence and security that are sustainable.

Much depends, as I have already suggested elsewhere, on what labels we use: climate change – global warming – environmental degradation – ecological disruption. We need to choose terms that identify the real threat to our species and to its delicate habitat, Planet Earth. Whether what is happening is anthropogenic or “natural” is hardly the point, since in all probability it is something of both.

Either way, important things are happening (there is ample everyday evidence to support this – precious resource depletion, urban air-pollution, rising average temperatures, increased precipitation, bee-colony collapse, bio-phosphate-induced nervous disorders, etc, etc.) and few scientists would question the existence of these happenings, some of which are clearly man-made and need to be addressed before it is too late.

But, most important of all, we cannot leave crucial decisions about what needs to be done and how to an unelected profit-seeking transnational corporate sector. These decisions must be brought back under proper democratic control. The latter requires first and foremost panels of qualified scientific and technical advisors who are paid from public funds to provide an informed and balanced opinion – people, that is, who are by definition paid for their integrity and honest opinion, and not for telling their interest-invested paymasters what their paymasters want to hear. The public wants to hear the “truth” (as far as the latter can at any time be ascertained) however painful. Second, it must in my view be clearly understood that, however complicated these climate and environmental issues may be, decisions about how to address them and to what ends are not exclusively scientifico-technical, but ultimately political and moral issues for which we the Demos are responsible.

As I have asked elsewhere: “Mankind has surely not seen through theistic belief at last and escaped finally the epistemological clutch of the Church of God, only to run for cover behind the materialist “certainties” of a new Church of Science?” Mankind must grow up and realise that there are no certainties, there is no truth as such, only “regularities” and it up to us democratically to decide just how reliable those regularities are.

* It’s intended that Denise will make her presentation on climate change again soon. On that occasion we hope to film it and all the questions and discussions that take place around it.

Alan: felt it was important on all Democafe positions that website presentation stays as open as possible and shows the process of how specific standpoints are arrived at: beginning with a definition of what is being discussed and then all significant points that come up in discussion from that.

Drug Statement:
Carol and Sara; will find the latest amended version which was emailed out at some point. If anyone else can locate it can they repost it so we can add it to the website.

Housing:
Janos, James and Sara: in response to Michael’s email request for a strap line at for the Housing statement, settled for, Housing for Living not for Speculation.

Alan: to further the discussion on housing presented a paper – Minister_of_Housing – and asked if we could set aside 15 /30 minutes next week to discuss.
It was felt that this invitation could be sent to perhaps a broader housing group in Camden who could be invited to the discussion at next Saturday’s meeting…(does anyone know of such an organisation or body who we could invite?)

Economic Literacy:
Janos: suggested economic literacy as another discussion topic for another week, this was enthusiastically backed (Keiser Report mentioned: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mn4IHXrpuKg).

He also asked, are we just a talking shop or an agent for change? And if we are an agent for change what could we do to step things up?

Eddie: an idea has be floating around for some weeks now from Global Table and Critical Thinking, which began with Mary Fee discussing some young people she works with who are sent for work experience in order to still be able to receive unemployment benefit. Quite often this work is stacking shelves or other non-demanding stuff that doesn’t help anyone in upping their skill levels for finding a job.

That was how a suggestion came of starting a cafe in part run by these young people, where lectures and classes are given free by many of the experienced and often retired people who attend meetings like Democafe, Global Table etc Those lectures and the general organisation of the space would surely present a much more constructive program for young people.

Sara: there’s a cafe in Paris she was recently taken to that was working on similar principles.

Janos: could be linked to Russell Brand association as a network idea
(Keiser Report again! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZv02snt93g)

End 15 minutes on election….not too upbeat
Eddie referred to the Daily Pickings from Free Critical Thinking – Election Post Mortem – posted this morning and his response:

“Our political system is incapable of supporting research and analysis to arrive at real, durable solutions to the problems we face. We need to free academia and media to research and explore what is interesting rather than what tightens the grip of the Structural Elite but the system won’t allow it.

Here is the crux of the matter, time to stop participating with lame petitions and trying to negotiate with structures who don’t want to listen. The next five years of this regressive, hateful, mean, anti-social, bunch of banker and multi- national driven zombies will be a time for those who care to develop an alternative and life affirming existence for all who want it. Leave the self-absorbed psychopaths to their filthy demise…the future is over here my friends found somewhere within these pages of posts….Read on and think on with love and empathy for your fellow man…..Our only defence is together as an army I’ll hold you like a gun.”

*Eddie had also been to see the Pop Group at the Dome in Tufnell Park the night before…where there’s a will

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