White Courtesy Telephone

FOX News on Radical Internet Assassins

Tom DeLay: “It just seems that the Left are never held accountable.”

Join the Interplanetary WCT Team

Have you always admired the jet-setting lifestyle of civil society bloggers, but didn’t know how to start?  Have you always wanted to blog, but didn’t want the hassle of starting and maintaining your own site?  We’re looking for a few good writers interested in opining about nonprofits, philanthropy, and civil society.  Send an e-mail to courtesy_telephone (at) yahoo.com and we’ll start you on a glamorous blogging career.  We’ll help you develop post ideas and give you feedback that will set your writing skills back many years.  We can scrupulously preserve your anonymity or tell the whole world where you live—your choice.  We welcome guest bloggers.  Drop us a line.  This is no joke! 

Gates Keepers: New Blog on the Block

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A concerned citizen?  A disaffected employee?  The anonymous blogger at Gates Keepers has a wry sense of humor and a minimalist style that contrasts sharply with the overblown polemics of White Courtesy Telephone.

The primary message is in GK’s choice of material.  Then there’s the sometimes subtle play between a headline and a post’s occasional snap of the towel.

GK was inspired to blog by a Toronto Star op ed that raised alarms about the Buffett gift to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.  I look forward to keeping up with the Gateses.

The Phenomenology of Blogging

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I am present to the blog.  Beneath its textual exterior, I sense the movement of its eidos.  But I don’t grasp it in its absolute essence, in its “flowing thisness,” as Husserl called it.  It’s a state of consciousness that appears to me: the state of a self-identical real ego-subject.

I’m so caught up in my present doing, in the writing of this post, that I fear the clear impression will slip away.

Stephan Bodian, Dharma teacher in the Zen tradition and the author of several books, including Meditation For Dummies, writes:

From the highest spiritual perspective, we can never lose our connection with being. In fact, the separation between being and doing is just another fabrication of the mind. No matter how still we try to become, doing is always happening …

Beyond the vivid intuition that it is there-for-me, what, then, is my blog doing?  It is …

Satisfying my need for self-expression.   Perhaps I demand freedom of speech as compensation for the freedom of thought I seldom exercise.  Dixi et animum levavi (I have spoken and given my soul rest).

Creating a space for the free exchange of ideas.   Let this blog be a lake in which elephants can wade and sheep can swim.  Let it play a role, if it can, in democratizing moral and intellectual authority.

Introducing and propagating memes.   Dawkins’s catch-phrases, beliefs, fashions, ways of making pots—they’re all here at White Courtesy Telephone.  In the days of Noah, some of these might have been called “ideas.”

Transforming a group of loosely associated individuals into a community with shared understandings about the world and how to change it.

Perhaps most of the time my blog is doing none of these things.  Let me remember, however, as it sits there on my screen, staring at me blankly with its reptilian eyes, that there’s a beating heart beneath its tightly stretched skin.

Blogging Philanthropy: Now That We've Got Your Attention

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Phil Cubeta asks:

Now we [philanthropy and nonprofit bloggers] seem to have a small audience, what could be done with it, for a larger purpose? Your points about the weakness of the web for organizing more than talk are well taken.  At least we seem to have disconcerted some of the existing players, and made a space for new voices.  What now?

One of the original goals of White Courtesy Telephone has already been realized: There are more bloggers than ever, engaging broader audiences in discussions about philanthropy and the nonprofit sector.  (I take no credit for this; I’m simply glad it happened.)  We still lack racial and ethnic diversity, but the conversation is richer than it was even just a year ago.

Younger voices, tech-savvy voices, curmudgeons, and representatives of the donor community offering up new ideas; smart people from outside the nonprofit world looking in, making essential corrections; GiftHub, our alma mater, urging all of us to speak louder and more thoughtfully.

Should we try to be more than the sum of our separate parts, and if so, how?

What would we say with one voice, and is this even essential?  How would we know we’ve made a difference in the lives of the people ultimately served by philanthropy and its institutions?  Are there ways for us to link arms before and after we’re brought together in Sean Stannard-Stockton’s Giving Carnival, or in Peter Panepento’s Philanthropy Give and Take column?  Beyond aggregating our various contributions, can we find ways to connect them?