Tuesday, May 07, 2024

Citizen Diplomacy

The UN declaration on human rights is a bold piece of literature, however "citizenship" as a concept has failed to extend to a critical number, which explains why we keep looking for newer solutions. 

I keep hearing that diplomacy is not happening amongst the principals but that's begging the question of who the principals are. High profile celebs, other influencer talking heads, are galvanizing the public to track the issues, and the more the official diplomatic class refuses to engage, the less its influence, a tautology.

In global university terms, "diploma" and "diplomat" are closely related in that it takes rhetorical skills to stay in the ring without blowing one's top, losing one's cool or whatever the lingo. Judges take a dim view of undisciplined lollygagging. The well-trained debater is not so easily thrown off balance.

You'll have seen in these blog posts how teams could be fielded and convoyed without communicating tyrannical messages. A traveling circus is not a threat, except maybe unaware parents in sleepy towns don't know how strongly junior dreams of growing wings. The folklore around traveling circuses does tend to get ugly where abduction is concerned.

Yes, I'm talking about the trucker teams able to fly around the world and try out different road systems, sometimes always working for the same company, other times within a network of affiliates. The wrinkle is the academic credit that potentially goes with becoming a citizen diplomat. So many affordances!

The trucker, any attributes (such as pronouns) is modeled within a personal workspace (PWS) within GST. If you want a GST primer, I've got a few pithy pages at Grunch.net (a domain), or just Google it. Try "Kenneth Boulding" as a search term. It's a kind of updated Economics, a source of healthy competition for other econ models.

I'm not suggesting that only the trucker community is engaged in cross-border diplomacy, not to mention paperwork. These long haulers do have a natural edge though, when it comes to having access, by necessity, to the world's infrastructure.  We're not about to lose the trucking angle.