- Aug 2018
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www.wesjones.com www.wesjones.com
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Are there, in other words, any fundamental "contradictions" in human life that cannot be resolved in the context of modern liberalism, that would be resolvable by an alternative political-economic structure?
Churchill famously said "...democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time..."
Even within this quote it is implicit that there are many others. In some sense he's admitting that we might possibly be at a local maximum but we've just not explored the spaces beyond the adjacent possible.
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The triumph of the West, of the Western idea, is evident first of all in the total exhaustion of viable systematic alternatives to Western liberalism.
Total exhaustion?
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www.newyorker.com www.newyorker.com
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But events in Europe unfolded more or less according to Fukuyama’s prediction, and, on December 26, 1991, the Soviet Union voted itself out of existence. The Cold War really was over.
Or ostensibly, until a strong man came to power in Russia and began its downturn into something else. It definitely doesn't seem to be a liberal democracy, so we're still fighting against it.
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There would be a “Common Marketization” of international relations and the world would achieve homeostasis.
Famous last words, right?!
These are the types of statements one must try very hard not to make unless there is 100% certainty.
I find myself wondering how can liberal democracy and capitalism manage to fight and make the case the the small tribes (everywhere, including within the US) that it can, could and should be doing more for them.
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Fukuyama’s argument was that, with the imminent collapse of the Soviet Union, the last ideological alternative to liberalism had been eliminated.
"Last" in the sense of a big, modern threat. We're still facing the threats of tribalism, which apparently have a strong pull.
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cstroop.com cstroop.com
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I think it’s important for liberal Americans who do not come from a patriarchal religious background to hear our stories and to sit with that shock. Why? Because I remain convinced that if American civil society and the American press fail to come to grips with just how radically theocratic the Christian Right is, any kind of post-Trump soft landing scenario in which American democracy recovers a healthy degree of functionality is highly unlikely.
I haven't directly experienced this patriarchal religious background to the extreme that the writer has, but I grew up in "Jesus Land" and know it exists. I suspect he's largely correct here.
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- Jun 2018
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en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
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Epistemic democratic theories refer to the capacity of the populace, either through deliberation or aggregation of knowledge, to track the truth and relies on mechanisms to synthesize and apply collective intelligence.
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- Apr 2018
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www.theguardian.com www.theguardian.com
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Hillman accuses all kinds of leaders – from religious leaders to scientists to politicians – of failing to honestly discuss what we must do to move to zero-carbon emissions. “I don’t think they can because society isn’t organised to enable them to do so. Political parties’ focus is on jobs and GDP, depending on the burning of fossil fuels.”
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- Nov 2017
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Jeff Kao found 1.3 million comments to the FCC that were generated by substituting similar phrases into the same comment against net neutrality.
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- Oct 2017
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www.youtube.com www.youtube.com
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Some interesting takeaways from this video ...
Some democracies, like the US and France, started with principles and constitutions first. The rest of the world, had to build democracies out of pre-existing orders There's a strong debate about whether democracy and religion can co-exist. In the end, it seems to be most compatible when those pre-existing beliefs are abstracted and distilled for their most humanistic principles. For democracy to have a religious or cultural element, that religion or culture has to be a humanist interpretation Democracy without rights is not only imperfect, but susceptible to reversal or failure. In any aggregation of power, the power has the ability to construct, so fundamental irreversible rights of those who are not in power are essential to know that democracy is fair and complete. Democracies can evolve, just as the US did. They can evolve through the evolution of the rights of the citizens. Politics also follows social change -- politics is a trailing phenomenon. It requires social change and demand for rights for rights to be politically distributed. Politics that try to lead social change don't have the ability to sustain attack over long periods of time.
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The abuse is the free speech issue. Kicking Nazis off of Twitter reduces the platform of a small number of people who are using that platform to terrify and silence others. Leaving them on suppresses, in all meaningful terms, the voices of entire classes of female intellectuals, people of color, and any other subgroup the mob decides to turn it spotlight towards when that subgroup gets a little too uppity.
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engagements2017-18.as.virginia.edu engagements2017-18.as.virginia.edu
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Ethics
I would be curious to see how the founders would have pictured and wanted an 'ethics' class to be like. It would be interesting to compare how they would be taught today and see concepts like democracy that are held equally but human rights and equality possibly have a large discrepancy.
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www.nytimes.com www.nytimes.com
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Back in 2012, Zeynep Tufecki pointed out that election campaigns driven by big-data and social media could be bad for democracy.
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www.politico.com www.politico.com
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DEFCON, the world’s largest hacker conference, will release its findings on Tuesday, months after hosting a July demonstration in which hackers quickly broke into 25 different types of voting machines.
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Though the report offers no proof of an attack last year, experts involved with it say they’re sure it is possible—and probable—and that the chances of a bigger attack in the future are high.
“From a technological point of view, this is something that is clearly doable,” said Sherri Ramsay, the former director of the federal Central Security Service Threat Operations Center, which handles cyber threats for the military and the National Security Agency. “For us to turn a blind eye to this, I think that would be very irresponsible on our part.”
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- Sep 2017
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rampages.us rampages.us
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mainstream pundits with more legitimacy
This is what is so hard about democracy in the modern digital age. Habermas tells us that democracy requires an open and free exchange of idea in a equally accessible public space. While the internet is not entirely open, free and equally accessible, it is very close. Yet, we have lost the ability to vet, validate and trust most information. What does that mean about democracy in the modern age?
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- Jul 2017
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www.openculture.com www.openculture.com
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Hunter S. Thompson saw the Hell's Angels of the 1960s as an example of a problem that was going to get much worse -- people left behind, who therefore have nothing to do but demonstrate their growing resentment for society.
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The backfire effect is getting turbocharged online. I think we’re getting more angry and convinced about everything, not because we’re surrounded by like-minded people, but by people who disagree with us. Social media allows you to find the worst examples of your opponents. It’s not a place to have your own views corroborated, but rather where your worst suspicions about the other lot can be quickly and easily confirmed.
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www.bloomberg.com www.bloomberg.com
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“The only way to save a democracy is to explain the way things work,” says Linus Neumann, a CCC spokesman and information security consultant. “Understanding things is a good immunization.”
democracy and web literacy
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www.thenation.com www.thenation.com
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The GOP intends nation-wide voter suppression.
- The House Appropriations Committee voted to defund the Election Assistance Commission, which helps states protect voting machines from hacking.
- The DOJ sent a letter to all 50 states, essentially instructing them to purge voter rolls.
- The White House commission on election integrity sent a letter to all 50 states, asking for detailed voter data including political party.
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- May 2017
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hetq.am hetq.am
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National Endowment for Democracy
This may be a front group. Investigate, find additional sources, and leave research notes in the comments.
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www.thechronicleherald.ca www.thechronicleherald.ca
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Democracy Watch
This may be a front group. Investigate, find additional sources, and leave research notes in the comments.
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www.greaterkashmir.com www.greaterkashmir.com
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National Endowment for Democracy
This may be a front group. Investigate, find additional sources, and leave research notes in the comments.
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www.tribuneindia.com www.tribuneindia.com
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National Endowment for Democracy
This may be a front group. Investigate, find additional sources, and leave research notes in the comments.
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uprootedpalestinians.blogspot.com uprootedpalestinians.blogspot.com
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National Endowment for Democracy
This may be a front group. Investigate, find additional sources, and leave research notes in the comments.
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www.indiatvnews.com www.indiatvnews.com
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National Endowment for Democracy
This may be a front group. Investigate, find additional sources, and leave research notes in the comments.
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richardedmondson.net richardedmondson.net
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National Endowment for Democracy
This may be a front group. Investigate, find additional sources, and leave research notes in the comments.
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www.nigeriatoday.ng www.nigeriatoday.ng
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National Endowment for Democracy
This may be a front group. Investigate, find additional sources, and leave research notes in the comments.
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www.thehindu.com www.thehindu.com
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National Endowment for Democracy
This may be a front group. Investigate, find additional sources, and leave research notes in the comments.
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www.tibetsun.com www.tibetsun.com
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National Endowment for Democracy
This may be a front group. Investigate, find additional sources, and leave research notes in the comments.
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www.newindianexpress.com www.newindianexpress.com
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National Endowment for Democracy
This may be a front group. Investigate, find additional sources, and leave research notes in the comments.
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www.oneindia.com www.oneindia.com
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National Endowment for Democracy
This may be a front group. Investigate, find additional sources, and leave research notes in the comments.
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uprootedpalestinians.blogspot.com uprootedpalestinians.blogspot.com
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National Endowment for Democracy
This may be a front group. Investigate, find additional sources, and leave research notes in the comments.
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www.cbc.ca www.cbc.ca
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Democracy Watch
This may be a front group. Investigate, find additional sources, and leave research notes in the comments.
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www.torontosun.com www.torontosun.com
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Democracy Watch
This may be a front group. Investigate, find additional sources, and leave research notes in the comments.
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news.nationalpost.com news.nationalpost.com
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Democracy Watch
This may be a front group. Investigate, find additional sources, and leave research notes in the comments.
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hetq.am hetq.am
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National Endowment for Democracy
This may be a front group. Investigate, find additional sources, and leave research notes in the comments.
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www.straight.com www.straight.com
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Democracy Watch
This may be a front group. Investigate, find additional sources, and leave research notes in the comments.
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www.phnompenhpost.com www.phnompenhpost.com
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National Endowment for Democracy
This may be a front group. Investigate, find additional sources, and leave research notes in the comments.
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eaworldview.com eaworldview.com
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National Endowment for Democracy
This may be a front group. Investigate, find additional sources, and leave research notes in the comments.
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www.bloomberg.com www.bloomberg.com
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National Endowment for Democracy
This may be a front group. Investigate, find additional sources, and leave research notes in the comments.
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National Endowment for Democracy
This may be a front group. Investigate, find additional sources, and leave research notes in the comments.
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bc.ctvnews.ca bc.ctvnews.ca
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Democracy Watch
This may be a front group. Investigate, find additional sources, and leave research notes in the comments.
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themillenniumreport.com themillenniumreport.com
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National Endowment for Democracy
This may be a front group. Investigate, find additional sources, and leave research notes in the comments.
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shift.newco.co shift.newco.co
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Lawrence Lessig is concerned about impeachment happening while polls show that only 2% of Trump voters would change their vote. He says it's our duty to convince them Trump needs to go -- in spite of "how impossibly hard that seems".
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www.theatlantic.com www.theatlantic.com
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The world has arrived at an age of cheap complex devices of great reliability; and something is bound to come of it.
Part of what we now know is that the large-scale manufacture of such "cheap and complex devices of great reliability" is linked to our excessive depletion of natural resources, our pollution and destruction of the global environment -- most especially our large and ever-increasing impact on the atmosphere. Heavily industrialization and consumerism are provoking long-term climate change across the planet. In the second decade of the 21st century, we realize that we are at a tipping point where the negative impacts are likely to exceed, increasingly, the positive effects that Bush evokes. So... how do we proceed from here? That's the important question. [Addendum: Donald J. Trump's undoing of environmental regulation and climate-change-mitigation and monitoring initiatives is, very clearly, a wrong pathway, unless the intent is to hasten the destruction of the stable and sustaining natural environment that allowed humanity to rise to this kind of thriving and global dominance.]
Are there ways of harnessing tagging, linking and associative tools like Hypothes.is to help pull together the disparate webs of evidence and arguments on climate change that will help us as a species understand the dangers and the risks? Are there ways in which such tools might increase the democratic and ecological effectiveness of knowledge and learning? Do they have the potential to shift cultures and mindsets? Can technology prove helpful here?
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- Apr 2017
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explorecommonsense.com explorecommonsense.com
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Massanello
Masaniello (an abbreviation of Tomasso Aniello) led a revolt against Spain in 1647. Born and raised in Naples, Masaniello was a fisherman and fishmonger. In the 1640s, Spain, which ruled Naples, imposed a series of heavy taxes in order to help fund its wars elsewhere. The Neapolitans revolted on July 7, 1647, and Masaniello, a well-known man, attempted to discipline the mob. Eventually, he became the rebel leader, negotiated terms with the Spanish, and became "captain-general of the Neapolitan people." However, he began to act erratically, and by July 17, 1647, he had been assassinated.
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idlewords.com idlewords.com
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Obviously, in this situation whoever controls the algorithms has great power. Decisions like what is promoted to the top of a news feed can swing elections. Small changes in UI can drive big changes in user behavior. There are no democratic checks or controls on this power, and the people who exercise it are trying to pretend it doesn’t exist
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On Facebook, social dynamics and the algorithms’ taste for drama reinforce each other. Facebook selects from stories that your friends have shared to find the links you’re most likely to click on. This is a potent mix, because what you read and post on Facebook is not just an expression of your interests, but part of a performative group identity.
So without explicitly coding for this behavior, we already have a dynamic where people are pulled to the extremes. Things get worse when third parties are allowed to use these algorithms to target a specific audience.
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any system trying to maximize engagement will try to push users towards the fringes. You can prove this to yourself by opening YouTube in an incognito browser (so that you start with a blank slate), and clicking recommended links on any video with political content.
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This pull to the fringes doesn’t happen if you click on a cute animal story. In that case, you just get more cute animals (an experiment I also recommend trying). But the algorithms have learned that users interested in politics respond more if they’re provoked more, so they provoke. Nobody programmed the behavior into the algorithm; it made a correct observation about human nature and acted on it.
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www.thenation.com www.thenation.com
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The ACLU of Iowa reports that 11 percent of eligible Iowa voters--260,000 people--don’t have a driver’s license or non-operator ID, according to the US Census and the Iowa Department of Transportation, and could be disenfranchised by the bill.
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So far in 2017, 87 bills have been introduced in 29 states to restrict access to the ballot, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. (And that’s on top of the 21 states that already passed new voting restrictions since 2010.)
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shareblue.com shareblue.com
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Trump-Russia sock puppets posing as "Bernie bros" targeted women and black men with harassment on Twitter when they expressed support for Hillary Clinton.
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www.thedailybeast.com www.thedailybeast.com
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The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters, Tom Nichols
These are dangerous times. Never have so many people had so much access to so much knowledge and yet have been so resistant to learning anything. In the United States and other developed nations, otherwise intelligent people denigrate intellectual achievement and reject the advice of experts. Not only do increasing numbers of lay people lack basic knowledge, they reject fundamental rules of evidence and refuse to learn how to make a logical argument.
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www.kansascity.com www.kansascity.com
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It looks like French voters might make the same stupid mistakes Americans and British made -- either falling for bullshit lies, or failing to vote at all because they don't think their vote matters or they aren't thrilled with their options.
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- Mar 2017
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sourcebooks.fordham.edu sourcebooks.fordham.edu
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I feel that, however feeble the influence my voice can have on public affairs, the right of voting on them makes it my duty to study them: and I am happy, when I reflect upon governments, to find my inquiries always furnish me with new reasons for loving that of my own country.
This excerpt goes to show that Rousseau's main reason for supporting democracy of laws and regulations is so that the voices of various crowds of people are more well heard than in a dictatorship. Rousseau states, "voting on them makes it my duty to study them", which he is saying that his job as a citizen when voting is to make the most justifiable decision based on what he has obtained for knowledge of the subject. I agree with democracy, but this statement by Rousseau shows the issue there is when it comes to democracy. There is not always a background of knowledge amongst crowds that vote for various future laws or regulations. I do agree that it is the duty of the citizens whom chose to vote that they should dig deep in history to obtain at least a background knowledge on an ideal, but today public is mostly swayed by simply the media. I also agree with Rousseau that, "My inquiries always furnish me with new reasons for loving that of my own country", because the more you get to discover of your country and how it was brought up based on the various ideals gives you a more appreciative mindset on what needs to be adjusted for the future.
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www.theguardian.com www.theguardian.com
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26 March 2017. Russians protest government corruption. Police gave an estimate of 7,000 protesters in Moscow. Hundreds were detained.
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hapgood.us hapgood.us
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When asked to explain a topic, students often realize that they don't understand it as well as they thought. The same thing happens when someone is asked to explain the consequences of a government policy. They tend to realize they don't understand the issue very well, and moderate their opinion.
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drive.google.com drive.google.com
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in every society the pro-duction of discourse is at once controlled, se-lected, organized, and redistributed by a certain number of procedures whose role is to ward off its powers and dangers, to gain mastery over its chance events, to evade its ponderous, formi-dable materiality.
We've read before about discourse as democratic, and this seems to challenge that.
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www.scientificamerican.com www.scientificamerican.com
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Another way to implement the ten proposals would be to create new, unorthodox institutions. For example, it could be made compulsory for every official body to take on an “advocatus diaboli”. This lateral thinker would be tasked with developing counter-arguments and alternatives to each proposal. This would reduce the tendency to think along the lines of “political correctness” and unconventional approaches to the problem would also be considered.
Hypothes.is annotators should be active on this article...
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- Feb 2017
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www.csicop.org www.csicop.org
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The climate scientists gave the conspiracy theorists an opening by letting their advocacy color their science, which compromised the legitimacy of their enterprise and, ironically, weakened the political movement itself.
Check out this book on the intersection of science and democracy.
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static1.squarespace.com static1.squarespace.com
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Must we collect the voices of others, before we fonn any judgment for our-selves, of what deserves applause in eloquence or poetry?
The "voices of others"? Surely not.
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Growing up as a conservative Christian, I was warned about secular, liberal relativism. Nothing’s really bad, who knows, it’s all relative. We had to be careful about such slippery slopes.
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Balance_fallacy<br> balance fallacy - The mistaken assumption that two sides of an argument have equal merit, so the truth or solution lies somewhere between the two. In reality, one view is often entirely wrong, and should be rejected. Or both views may be wrong, and the truth or solution has not yet been considered.
Why won't "liberals" just accept that Trump is president? Because Trump is an evil, incompetent piece of shit who should not be allowed to hold any government position, let alone the presidency. It isn't just liberals rejecting Trump -- it's anyone with common sense and decency.
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static1.squarespace.com static1.squarespace.com
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irresistible power over the thoughts and purposes of his audience. It is this which hath been so justly celebrated as giving one man an ascendant over others, superior even to what despotism itself can bestow; since by the latter the more ignoble part only, the body and its members arc enslave
Well that's intense. And on the next page, with the thunder and lightening, it seems like oratory has even a godlike power. I guess I'm surprised to read this since he was so influenced by Enlightenment thinkers like Locke, and I tend to associate the Enlightenment with democracy and rhetoric in general with democracy, but at the same time, the idea of words and knowledge as power and the importance of rhetoric for leaders is also a huge thing. So I wonder to what extent Campbell's view of rhetoric was present, not just during the Enlightenment but throughout its history? Has there always been a tension between this "irresistible power" and democracy in terms of rhetoric?
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www.theguardian.com www.theguardian.com
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Andrew Postman says his father Neil got it right in "Amusing Ourselves to Death": our situation is more like Brave New World than 1984. But it's like both. Constant entertainment is a big part of what got us here, but we also have politicians practicing newspeak, and excessive surveillance.
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Jay Rosen on the challenges journalists face under Trump, and several suggested countermeasures. An important one is making direct connections with common people and listening to their concerns, which will help build trust.
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- Jan 2017
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www.washingtonpost.com www.washingtonpost.com
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An economist from Venezuela advises us that polarization is the main weapon of populism. We need to counter it.
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A rant against those on the far left who refuse to compromise, and criticize centrist Democrats -- yet don't hold their leaders to the same standards.
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thecorrespondent.com thecorrespondent.com
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How could political leaders betray what were supposed to be national values? How could brutal practices be embraced by ordinary Americans?
Or, as she put it, “Why did no one stop people from doing bad things?”
The answer you’re supposed to give to children – one I heard myself as a child – is “That’s just the way things were.” You’re supposed to say “Lots of good people owned slaves” or “It was legal then”. You’re supposed to pretend that historic injustices have either been resolved or that they were never that bad, that they didn’t linger and structure the politics of the present.
You’re supposed to normalize cruelty, and in doing so exonerate those who practiced it.
A lot of people will do whatever they can get away with. There aren't always enough people brave enough to bluntly say something is wrong.
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blog.lareviewofbooks.org blog.lareviewofbooks.org
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One of the most alarming aspects of the rise of Trump is (or should have been) his embrace of the Orwellian lie.<br> ...<br> we are not talking about garden variety lying here — we are talking about the totalitarian lie: lies told, repeatedly, loudly and insistently, in direct confrontation with the indisputable truth. Lies purposefully designed to undermine the very capacity to make truth claims.<br> ...<br> It is a plain fact that our political system is compromised. Nowhere is this more evident than in the financial sector and its (non-) oversight, a bipartisan catastrophe two decades in the making<br> ...<br> It is simply not possible to shy away from the ugly fact that racism was an essential ingredient to his election.<br> ...<br> the playing field has changed, empowering some actors at the expense of others. Or put another way: no internet, no Trump.<br> ...<br> The internet is exponentially more pernicious: entry is free, accountability is absent, and — here we are more stupid — the ability of people to distinguish between fact and fiction has virtually vanished. We are living in a post-fact, post-rationalist, post-deliberative society, in which people believe what they want to believe, as if they were selecting items from different columns of a take-out menu.<br> ...<br> from this point forward we will always be the country that elected Donald Trump as President. And as Albert Finney knew all too well in Under the Volcano, “some things, you just can’t apologize for.” This will be felt most acutely on the world stage.
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www.psychologytoday.com www.psychologytoday.com
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What Is Emotional Intelligence?
Three key skills of emotional intelligence -understanding emotion in self and others -harnessing emotion for useful purposes -regulating emotions in self and others
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www.eetimes.com www.eetimes.com
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Obama to Urge Protection for Chip Industry
Finally, the free traders are beginning to understand how China has been using a pretense of "free trade" in its effort to dominate the world. It is almost certain that China will become more powerful than America. The only questions is whether America and western democracies can remain relatively strong enough to resist Communist China's domination. And to do this we have to prevent China from dominating electronics, computing, cyber, and artificial intelligence.
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www.nytimes.com www.nytimes.com
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Lessons From the Media’s Failures in Its Year With Trump
This is a very important issue -- the mainstream media bears much of the responsibility of Trumps having been elected, because they gave him so much free publicity.
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randomdatablog.com randomdatablog.com
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But for me, hope is not a feeling. It is not an emotion. Hope is action. Hope is found in motion.
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Hope begins the moment that somebody stands up and says, “Let’s roll.”
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It is clear to me though that hopelessness and despair often lead to an inability to act. When that happens, we must rely on others to act. Anyone that was gone through trauma and faced extended periods of indecisiveness can understand this. This is why a sense of community is so important, and that we share in our action by relying on others to back us up.
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- Dec 2016
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examined-life.com examined-life.com
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The question that I think we should be asking ourselves is, what is it that my culture is preventing me from seeing?
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It seems that education is more about filling brains, than teaching people to think.
Education ought to be about drawing something out, not putting something in. One of the things that people should be taught at school, is to think critically about the things that they consider most indisputably correct.
-- Iain McGilchrist (The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World)
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www.theatlantic.com www.theatlantic.com
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Despair and Hope in Trump’s America
In general I consider James Fallows a valuable public voice, but I find this article disappointing. It fails to talk honestly about the serious reasons for fear or anger than many Americans have toward the mainstream media and the liberal intelligentsia. Let me quickly list some of these reasons.
America's relative power in the world is rapidly decreasing. For the first time since the late 1800's America is no longer the world's largest economy by certain important measures. China is, and it it still growing much faster than we are. China is rapidly arming, and is already ahead of us in multiple different types of weapon systems. In thirty year it it could have an economy twice the size of America's and much more sophisticated weaponry.
There are large areas of America in which the real value of average incomes has decreased substantially, such as in the rust belt.
Political correctness means that many tens of millions of people with traditional values are being constantly told by the mainstream media that their value are all wrong. Any one who publicly dares question or provide counter arguments to this political correctness is subject vicious public attack.
Race relations are not allowed to be honestly discussed in our media. For month after month in both the Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown cases the mainstream media's propaganda message was that those killings were unjustified murders -- when, in fact, the majority of the evidence in both cases indicated those killings were totally justified as self defense. The politically correct racism of the media hypes the notion of white guilt, but greatly downplays the much larger problem of black guilt, including the fact that blacks have seven times the per capita violent crime and murder rates as whites and that blacks murder twice as many whites as whites murder blacks.
So why aren't whites allowed to protest that White Lives Matter? Because that would be racist? No! It's because political correctness, itself, is a racist/sexist double standard.
And no major candidate but Trump has had the balls to attack political correctness as much as he has (although his crude attacks are neither well reasoned or articulate).
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deborahmeier.com deborahmeier.com
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Deborah Meier points out that democracy has to be learned, and we aren't teaching it adequately. Most schools are authoritarian environments where students are taught, explicitly and implicitly, to do what they're told. We need to give kids experience with democracy -- productive debate, compromise, trial and error, and acknowledging one's own mistakes.
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www.bloomberg.com www.bloomberg.com
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The escapist appeal of looking at other people’s beautiful homes turned Home & Garden Television into the third most-watched cable network in 2016, ahead of CNN and behind only Fox News and ESPN.
You want to know how stupid our democracy is: Home & Garden Television has more viewes than CNN.
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press.princeton.edu press.princeton.edu
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In this trenchant book, Brennan argues that democracy should be judged by its results—and the results are not good enough. Just as defendants have a right to a fair trial, citizens have a right to competent government. But democracy is the rule of the ignorant and the irrational, and it all too often falls short.
I have not read this book by I saw the author's BookTV one hour interview. He said that only about 1/4 of U.S citizens know enough about most issues being voted on to vote intelligently. So no wonder our government does so many stupid and wasteful things.
To make democracy intelligent -- i.e., capable of making decisions that provide the greatest good for the large majority of its citizens over long periods of time -- we need to deal intelligently with the issues of voter ignorance, apathy, and stupidity.
We also need to eliminate the censorship of political correctness and mass marketing sponsored media, each of which in their own way prevent important sides of many issues from being properly aired in the public forum.
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harvardmagazine.com harvardmagazine.com
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What Drives Successful Crowdsourcing?
An article relevant to intelligent democracy, because it shows that opensource-like collaboration often out performs corporate of governmental organizations at solving problems well.
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thinkprogress.org thinkprogress.org
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It seems that some (or many?) people who vote Republican consciously ignore policies that are against their interests. They either think the Republicans won't actually try to do the things they say, or won't be able to pass them into law.
In one of the most heartbreaking interviews in Kliff’s piece, a voter whose husband is waiting for a liver transplant was able to get health insurance for her family thanks to Obamacare. Yet she told Kliff that she backed Trump because “I guess I thought that, you know, he would not do this, he would not take health insurance away knowing it would affect so many people’s lives.”
In 2012, a Democratic super PAC convened a focus group to assess whether Republican candidate Mitt Romney’s support for the GOP’s fiscal proposals could be used against him. Yet the focus group’s reactions to these proposals resembled the conversations Kliff had with Trump voters in Kentucky. When the super PAC “informed a focus group that Romney supported the Ryan budget plan — and thus championed ‘ending Medicare as we know it’ — while also advocating tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, the respondents simply refused to believe any politician would do such a thing.”
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www.dannyzuker.com www.dannyzuker.com
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TV writer and producer Danny Zuker suggests putting on a big televised music and comedy concert on inauguration day to oppose Trump, with all proceeds going to non-profit organizations.
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hapgood.us hapgood.us
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Mike Caulfield points out that "digital literacy" needs to include solid knowledge of the Web and how to use it, such as search techniques and uses of specific websites. Principles of site evaluation are not enough.
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extranewsfeed.com extranewsfeed.com
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From 15 Nov 2016, an insightful and entertaining rant about the 2016 election campaign and its outcome.
"Hillary Clinton didn't fail us, we failed Hillary Clinton."
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www.nytimes.com www.nytimes.com
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Paul Krugman points out that our current situation is like that during the rise of fascism in the 1930s. And it is also like the situation during the gradual decline of the Roman Republic. Political norms are being ignored. Republicans are placing their party, their wealthiest campaign donors, and their careers, before their nation.
"Famously, on paper the transformation of Rome from republic to empire never happened. Officially, imperial Rome was still ruled by a Senate that just happened to defer to the emperor."
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For most of my friends on the Left, the argument against Trump is about fitness: Trump, they say, is not fit to be President. I agree with this claim.
But that claim has been rendered democratically irrelevant. 62 million Americans heard that argument, and disagreed with it. That doesn’t make the claim “Donald Trump is unfit” false. But it does render it unusable by an elector as a reason not to vote for Trump. Whatever they were meant to be originally, we cannot now see electors as democratic guardians of our Republic. They cannot be entitled to second guess the judgment of the people with respect to an issue the people can reasonably be said to have considered.
I disagree with this. The very purpose of the Electoral College is to judge the candidate. That can mean telling the majority that their choice was stupid. (And depending on how many Electors think so, the House is still likely to consider the issue yet again.)
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talkingpointsmemo.com talkingpointsmemo.com
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In an online guide made public Wednesday night, a number of those onetime Hill staffers say that the best way for individuals to derail the policy agenda of Trump and House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) is to organize locally and badger their own congressional representatives to vote against individual pieces of legislation.
The guide argues that, like the “Tea Party patriots” who found common cause in their unified loathing of President Barack Obama, progressives who oppose Trump should stand against him before all else rather than try to articulate a policy agenda that has no hope of advancing while the GOP controls all three branches of government.
Indivisible: A Practical Guide for Resisting the Trump Agenda
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Lawrence Lessig on the legal constraints and ethical obligations of the Electors. (First published in The Daily Beast, 13 Dec 2016.)
In my opinion, if the Electors don't reject Donald Trump, they have failed to do the only duty for which the Electoral College was created. (Putting aside the fact that the actual majority voted for Hillary Clinton...) The majority can make a stupid decision. It should be the sworn duty of the Electors to judge the candidate.
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docs.google.com docs.google.com
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Indivisible: A Practical Guide for Resisting the Trump Agenda (Former congressional staffers reveal best practices for making Congress listen)
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http://digipo.io/doku.php<br> The Digital Polarization Initiative<br> "The primary purpose of this wiki is to provide a place for students to fact-check, annotate, and provide context to the different news stories that show up in their Twitter and Facebook feeds. It's like a student-driven Snopes, but with a broader focus: we don't aim to just investigate myths, but to provide context and sanity to all the news – from the article about voter fraud to the health piece on a new cancer treatment."
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politicalbots.org politicalbots.org
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http://phys.org/news/2016-12-pro-trump-bot-colonised-pro-clinton-twitter.html
http://politicalbots.org/?p=787 Bots and Automation over Twitter during the U.S. Election
http://politicalbots.org/ An international research group studying political bots.
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hybridpedagogy.org hybridpedagogy.org
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The Web has become an insidious propaganda tool. To fight it, digital literacy education must rise beyond technical proficiency to include wisdom.
- Double-check every claim before you share.
- Be wary of casual scrolling.<br> Everything you see affects your attitudes.
- Don't automatically disbelieve the surreal (or unpleasant).
- Do not exaggerate your own claims.
- Be prepared to repeat the truth over and over.
- Curate good resources, and share updates to them.
- It will reinforce the previous information.
- it will boost search engine rankings of the collection.
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hapgood.us hapgood.us
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A survey of voters asked if they remembered seeing a headline, and if so, whether they believed it was true.
It may come as no surprise that high percentages of Trump voters believed stories that favored Trump or demonized Clinton. But the percentage of Clinton voters who believed the fake stories was also fairly high!
familiarity equals truth: when we recognize something as true, we are most often judging if this is something we’ve heard more often than not from people we trust.
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if you want to be well-informed it’s not enough to read the truth — you also must avoid reading lies.
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www.theguardian.com www.theguardian.com
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This is our internet. Not Google’s. Not Facebook’s. Not rightwing propagandists. And we’re the only ones who can reclaim it.
This is our nation, and our world.<br> It is up to us to reclaim it.
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a new set of ways to report and share news could arise: a social network where the sources of articles were highlighted rather than the users sharing them. A platform that makes it easier to read a full story than to share one unread. A news feed that provides alternative sources and analysis beneath every shared article.
This sounds like the kind of platforms I'd like to have. Reminiscent of some of the discussion at the beginning of TWIG: 379 Ixnay on the Eet-tway.
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medium.com medium.com
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A legal argument that winner-take-all allocation of Electors is a violation of the rights of the voters in the minority.
- In summary, a winner-take-all system of allocating Electors by the states denies the minority of voters within each state any representation whatsoever within the Electoral College and ultimately in the case of the 2000 and 2016 elections, denies the plurality of voters nationwide their choice for President under circumstances in which the constitutionally established small state advantage made part of the Electoral College wouldnot. This is neither a reasonable nor a rational result in a representative democracy. This result was dictated by the winner-take-all method of allocating Electors used by the states. It is this state law method of allocating Electors that is an unconstitutional violation of the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment and its bedrock principle of one man one vote.
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It’s perfectly clear that the Attorney General of New York or California could walk into the Supreme Court tomorrow, and ask the Court to hear the case. Delaware tried to do this exactly fifty years ago, but the Court ducked the question. But based on that complaint, were I a citizen of California, I’d ask my current AG (and future Senator) why hasn’t CA done the same thing? And were I a citizen of New York, I’d ask my AG the same. Why are these big states standing by quietly as their voters are essentially silenced by the unconstitutional inequality?
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codkashacabka.files.wordpress.com codkashacabka.files.wordpress.com
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about their expectations
The less we expect of our people, the less democracy we have.
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www.huffingtonpost.com www.huffingtonpost.com
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It is not only the right, but the duty of the Electoral College to reject Donald Trump. But we've never had a candidate as unfit for office as Trump, so that duty has been ignored and subverted. We need to do all we can to let the Electors know that we expect and support that they will exercise personal judgment to do what is best for the nation and the world.
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Concerns about election integrity. Quite a few links.
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- Nov 2016
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This is an interesting look at Trump's personality, but it shrugs off the danger we're in.
Donald Trump is a liar, a cheat, a narcissist, and a petty bully with no principles. And Trump himself is only part of the danger. I have no doubt that some members of the 1% are actively looking for opportunities to flush democracy down the toilet for the sake of making an extra billion. And they may be colluding with wealthy Russians.
That’s how you move Trump. You don’t talk about ethics. You play the toughness card. You appeal to the art of the deal. You make him feel smart, powerful, and loved. You don’t forget how unmoored and volatile he is, but you set aside your fear and your anger. You thank God that you’re dealing with a narcissist, not a cold-blooded killer. And until you can get him safely out of the White House, you work with what you have. People in other countries have dealt with presidents like Trump for a long time. Can we handle it? Yes, we can.
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www.theguardian.com www.theguardian.com
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I have watched as tobacco, coal, oil, chemicals and biotech companies have poured billions of dollars into an international misinformation machine composed of thinktanks, bloggers and fake citizens’ groups. Its purpose is to portray the interests of billionaires as the interests of the common people, to wage war against trade unions and beat down attempts to regulate business and tax the very rich. Now the people who helped run this machine are shaping the government.
Donald Trump has filled his staff with these liars.
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www.nytimes.com www.nytimes.com
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Yascha Mounk of Harvard and Roberto Stefan Foa of U. Melbourne have proposed 3 criteria to measure the strength of a democracy.
- How important do citizens think it is for their country to remain democratic?
- How open are citizens to the idea of non-democratic forms of government such as military rule?
- How strong are political parties with an antisystem platform calling the current government illegitimate?
If support for democracy is falling, while opposition to democracy is rising, the democracy is "deconsolidating" -- in danger of falling to an authoritarian government. Under these criteria, democracy is in danger in a number of Western countries, including the US, UK, and AU.
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Trump is dangerous. But his election has also angered many millions of people who don't like him. We need to take advantage of that.
We've been too dependent on the theory of monolithic power, "the idea that government and the representative leaders within our institutions are the primary means to change people’s lives." Government and civil rights organizations are necessary, but not sufficient. We can't sit back and depend on them to work for us.
"Together, we can redefine civic participation not by organizational membership but as movement-building. Movement-building is an ongoing process of building leadership, relationships and avenues for getting involved."
Strategic Unity and Common Purpose: "We may disagree on specific policies, but we can be united around values and a common vision for the future — the American ideal of inclusivity, around civil liberties, around a secular government that protects the freedom of diverse religions, and around the right to decide what happens to our bodies."
Participatory Leadership: "We need participation-oriented leaders whose job is to empower and activate rather than represent and control, allowing communities around the country to replicate the same behavior"
Strategic Action: protest is good, but it isn't a strategy. "Strategic action feeds movement growth by ensuring each action leads people to another action."
Existing movements have been working hard (and sometimes bleeding) to fight for the rights most of us have taken for granted. "White Americans ready to fight must either prioritize minorities' struggles or we will all lose."
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www.thenation.com www.thenation.com
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Donald Trump's "lies about voter fraud are a prelude to massive voter suppression." This has become typical of the Republican party. But Trump and his staff are sure to make it worse, and they're already showing it.
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Widespread voter suppression targeting minorities, and suspicious "errors" in Wisconsin vote counts.
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Lawrence Lessig is tired of hearing that the US is not a democracy. The US is not a direct democracy. But it is a republic -- a representative democracy.
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www.npr.org www.npr.org
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Interview with a man who has run several fake news sites since 2013.
Well, this isn't just a Trump-supporter problem. This is a right-wing issue.
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We've tried to do similar things to liberals. It just has never worked, it never takes off. You'll get debunked within the first two comments and then the whole thing just kind of fizzles out.
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Journalism faces an 'existential crisis' in the Trump era, Christine Amanpour
As all the international journalists we honor in this room tonight and every year know only too well: First the media is accused of inciting, then sympathizing, then associating -- until they suddenly find themselves accused of being full-fledged terrorists and subversives. Then they end up in handcuffs, in cages, in kangaroo courts, in prison
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First, like many people watching where I was overseas, I admit I was shocked by the exceptionally high bar put before one candidate and the exceptionally low bar put before the other candidate.
It appeared much of the media got itself into knots trying to differentiate between balance, objectivity, neutrality, and crucially, truth.
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The winning candidate did a savvy end run around us and used it to go straight to the people. Combined with the most incredible development ever -- the tsunami of fake news sites -- aka lies -- that somehow people could not, would not, recognize, fact check, or disregard.
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The conservative radio host who may be the next white house press secretary says mainstream media is hostile to traditional values.
I would say it's just the opposite. And have you read about the "heil, victory" meeting in Washington, DC this past weekend? Why aren't there more stories about the dangerous rise of the far right here and in Europe? Since when did anti-Semitism stop being a litmus test in this country?
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J. Alex Halderman, Professor of Computer Science at U. Michigan, says yes, it's possible that the election was hacked. We should audit the results. And paper ballots should always be used in future elections.
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billmoyers.com billmoyers.com
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"Farewell, America", Neal Gabler
If there is a single sentence that characterizes the election, it is this: “He says the things I’m thinking.” That may be what is so terrifying. Who knew that so many tens of millions of white Americans were thinking unconscionable things about their fellow Americans?
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The virus that kills democracy is extremism because extremism disables those codes. Republicans have disrespected the process for decades. They have regarded any Democratic president as illegitimate. They have proudly boasted of preventing popularly elected Democrats from effecting policy and have asserted that only Republicans have the right to determine the nation’s course.
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The media can’t be let off the hook for enabling an authoritarian to get to the White House. ... When he ran, the media treated him not as a candidate, but as a celebrity, and so treated him differently from ordinary pols. The media gave him free publicity, trumpeted his shenanigans, blasted out his tweets, allowed him to phone in his interviews, fell into his traps and generally kowtowed until they suddenly discovered that this joke could actually become president.
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Prof. Timothy Frye on the disturbing abnormalities of the 2016 election -- and their similarity to the status quo in weak democracies.
- candidate keeping his finances a secret
- threats to imprison a political opponent
- racism, xenophobia, and misogyny
- interference by a foreign government
- media circus
- politicization of security services (FBI)
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www.palmerreport.com www.palmerreport.com
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Bill Palmer's opinion:
In order to believe that the official vote tallies are legitimate, you have to accept that all of the above legitimately happened: African-Americans in the south went from turning out in droves for Hillary Clinton in the primary to not caring if she won the general election. Donald Trump got perhaps seventy percent of the same-day voting in Florida. The polling averages were wrong for the first time in modern history. Trump beat his poll numbers despite having spent the primary season tending to fall below them. Clinton fell below her poll numbers despite having spent the primary season tending to beat them. In every state where Trump pulled off a shocking upset victory, he just happened to do it with one percent of the vote. And in an election that everyone cared particularly deeply about, no one really turned out to vote at all.
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www.washingtonpost.com www.washingtonpost.com
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Paul Horner publishes fake news that is often shared widely. He claims that his stories are intended to be taken as satire like The Onion.
Honestly, people are definitely dumber. They just keep passing stuff around. Nobody fact-checks anything anymore — I mean, that’s how Trump got elected. He just said whatever he wanted, and people believed everything, and when the things he said turned out not to be true, people didn’t care because they’d already accepted it. It’s real scary. I’ve never seen anything like it.
My sites were picked up by Trump supporters all the time. I think Trump is in the White House because of me. His followers don’t fact-check anything — they’ll post everything, believe anything. His campaign manager posted my story about a protester getting paid $3,500 as fact. Like, I made that up. I posted a fake ad on Craigslist.
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www.theguardian.com www.theguardian.com
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Leonid Ragozin: "We Russians have watched our president embrace anyone prepared to join his gang and do his bidding. Americans will see the same from [Trump]." Expect him to neutralize criticism over xenophopia, racism, and misogyny by welcoming people from various communities into his camp, and appointing some to government posts.
"Putin and Trump don't create ethnic movements, they create gangs in which the only criterion that really matters is whether you are 'with us' or 'against us'"
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www.alternet.org www.alternet.org
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If that's what democracy is worth to us, then we deserve what we get. Democracy requires support. It requires citizen support. It requires an investment of care and an investment of vigilance and an investment of participation more than deciding, “Yeah, I'm going to vote or I'm not going to vote.” It requires the fulfillment of a duty to be part of the public that counts and observes the counting of the votes so we don't have the ludicrous situation where we hand our ballots to a magician who takes them behind a curtain, you hear him shred the ballots, then comes out and tells you so-and-so won. This is what we've got now and it's what we've accepted.
Steven Rosenfeld interviews Jonathan Simon, author of "Code Red: Computerized Election Theft and the New American Century" about exit polls and vote counts.
Exit polls are not entirely trustworthy. But if they disagree much with the vote counts -- and especially if they tend to disagree in a particular direction -- it's a big red flag that something is wrong.
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But as managing editor of the fact-checking site Snopes, Brooke Binkowski believes Facebook’s perpetuation of phony news is not to blame for our epidemic of misinformation. “It’s not social media that’s the problem,” she says emphatically. “People are looking for somebody to pick on. The alt-rights have been empowered and that’s not going to go away anytime soon. But they also have always been around.”
The misinformation crisis, according to Binkowski, stems from something more pernicious. In the past, the sources of accurate information were recognizable enough that phony news was relatively easy for a discerning reader to identify and discredit. The problem, Binkowski believes, is that the public has lost faith in the media broadly — therefore no media outlet is considered credible any longer. The reasons are familiar: as the business of news has grown tougher, many outlets have been stripped of the resources they need for journalists to do their jobs correctly.
The problem is not JUST social media and fake news. But most of the false stories do not come from mainstream media. The greatest evils of mainstream media are sensationalism, and being too willing to spin stories the way their sources want them to.
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Columbia Law Professor Richard Briffault on the history of the Electoral College and the issues surrounding "faithless" electors.
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www.npr.org www.npr.org
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But a former employee, Antonio Garcia-Martinez, disagrees and says his old boss is being "more than a little disingenuous here."
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"There's an entire political team and a massive office in D.C. that tries to convince political advertisers that Facebook can convince users to vote one way or the other," Garcia-Martinez says. "Then Zuck gets up and says, 'Oh, by the way, Facebook content couldn't possibly influence the election.' It's contradictory on the face of it."
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Lawrence Lessig argues that the Electoral College should reject Donald Trump and elect Hillary Clinton.
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Mike Caulfield says Facebook's feed algorithms are far from its only problem. The entire site design encourages sharing of items that users haven't inspected beyond reading the headline.
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www.nytimes.com www.nytimes.com
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When Hughes writes, in the first two lines of his poem, “Let America be America again/ Let it be the dream it used to be,” he acknowledges that America is primarily a dream, a hope, an aspiration, that may never be fully attainable, but that spurs us to be better, to be larger. He follows this with the repeated counterpoint, “America never was America to me,” and through the rest of this remarkable poem he alternates between the oppressed and the wronged of America, and the great dreams that they have for their country, that can never be extinguished.
-- Harry Belafonte
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www.nytimes.com www.nytimes.com
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The forces that propelled Mr. Trump’s rise need to be confronted and defeated. It won’t be easy, given that tens of millions of Americans will vote for him and believe deeply in him. But if these forces are not defeated, what happened this year will be replicated in one form or another, and the Republican Party will continue to inflict great harm on our republic.
- Anti-intellectualism [Actually, outright insanity. Complete disregard for reality. Trump and his followers "believe" whatever they want to "believe". The Republican party has become a party of frauds and liars.]
- Political recklessness [Playing bullshit games instead of doing the duties they were elected to do. The refusal to vote on President Obama's Supreme Court nominee is one example.]
- Appealing to nativism and xenophobia [No shit. This article is otherwise forthright. He should have said fascism and white supremacy.]
Aside from the sins of the Republican Party:
- Major media failed us by giving this asshole all kinds of free publicity.
- Responsible journalists did their jobs. We need to support them, and we need more of them.
- Entertainers pretending to be serious political commentators and fake news sites have become a danger to democracy.
- Trump supporters: shameless racists, or just astonishingly stupid? [No, moron, Hillary Clinton is not just as bad as Trump.] Can we please improve education at least enough to counterbalance the ineducable?
the greater sin of the Republican Party wasn’t that Mr. Trump won the nomination by carrying a plurality of votes in a large field. It was that people who surely knew better rallied to Mr. Trump once he became the nominee. Some advised him, others defended him and excused him, and still others tried to ignore him.
And we should never forget who those people were, Paul Ryan.
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www.vox.com www.vox.com
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Facebook hasn’t told the public very much about how its algorithm works. But we know that one of the company’s top priorities for the news feed is “engagement.” The company tries to choose posts that people are likely to read, like, and share with their friends. Which, they hope, will induce people to return to the site over and over again.
This would be a reasonable way to do things if Facebook were just a way of finding your friends’ cutest baby pictures. But it’s more troubling as a way of choosing the news stories people read. Essentially, Facebook is using the same criteria as a supermarket tabloid: giving people the most attention-grabbing headlines without worrying about whether articles are fair, accurate, or important.
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www.thenation.com www.thenation.com
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GOP States Keep Ignoring Court Orders to Restore Voting Rights -- Wisconsin, Ohio, Texas, and North Caroline won't stop suppressing the vote.
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- Oct 2016
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civicskunk.works civicskunk.works
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The motivations of Trump supporters.
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blog.jonudell.net blog.jonudell.net
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Jon Udell and Mike Caulfield discuss web annotation and personal wikis as tools for fact-checking on the Internet.
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shorensteincenter.org shorensteincenter.org
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Conservative Media's Influence on the Republican Party<br> Jackie Calmes, 27 July 2015
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bigstory.ap.org bigstory.ap.org
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laws nationwide are mixed on whether voters are allowed to take pictures of themselves in the act or of their ballots — "ballot selfies".
Federal judges have struck down bans on selfies in New Hampshire and Indiana, and rules have been changed in places like California and Rhode Island, but in many states it's still a violation that carries potential fines or jail terms.
There are laws against sharing any photo of your ballot in 18 states, while six other states bar photography in polling places but do allow photos of mail-in ballots
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issues.org issues.org
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Democratizing science does not mean settling questions about Nature by plebiscite, any more than democratizing politics means setting the prime rate by referendum. What democratization does mean, in science as elsewhere, is creating institutions and practices that fully incorporate principles of accessibility, transparency, and accountability. It means considering the societal outcomes of research at least as attentively as the scientific and technological outputs. It means insisting that in addition to being rigorous, science be popular, relevant, and participatory.
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www.theguardian.com www.theguardian.com
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“Among millennials, especially,” [Ross] Douthat argues, “there’s a growing constituency for whom rightwing ideas are so alien or triggering, leftwing orthodoxy so pervasive and unquestioned, that supporting a candidate like Hillary Clinton looks like a needless form of compromise.”
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“I don’t see sufficient evidence to buy the argument about siloing and confirmation bias,” Jeff Jarvis,a professor at the City University of New York’s graduate school of journalism said. “That is a presumption about the platforms – because we in media think we do this better. More important, such presumptions fundamentally insult young people. For too long, old media has assumed that young people don’t care about the world.”
“Newspapers, remember, came from the perspective of very few people: one editor, really,” Jarvis said. “Facebook comes with many perspectives and gives many; as Zuckerberg points out, no two people on Earth see the same Facebook.”
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- Sep 2016
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www.nytimes.com www.nytimes.com
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First — and this cannot be said enough — Clinton and Trump are not equally bad candidates. One is a conventional politician who has a long record of public service full of pros and cons. The other is a demagogic bigot with a puddle-deep understanding of national and international issues, who openly courts white nationalism
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Second, a vote isn’t just about the past — although comparing these two candidates on their pasts still leaves one as the clear choice — but about the present and the future.
There is a simple truth here: Either Clinton or Trump will be the next president of the United States. Not Jill Stein. Not Gary Johnson. Clinton or Trump
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- Aug 2016
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berkeleyjournal.org berkeleyjournal.org
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Gunnar Myrdal
True Confessions: I've never read Myrdal even though his work was of great influence. These days, I read people who cite him. For example, Roberts and Klibanoff start Chapter 1 of their great 2006 book, The Race Beat, immediately talking about Myrdal in depth. Sampler is here at Amazon:
When I need insight into Myrdal, I know where to go first, thanks to this book.
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allmoocs.wordpress.com allmoocs.wordpress.com
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As Neil Selwyn (2013) notes, the expansion of technology (and the rise of EdTech) coincides with a growth in libertarian ideals and neoliberal governmental policies, a one-two punch of individual exceptionalism and belief in the power of the outsider.
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Clay Shirky explains that voting for a third-party presidential candidate is wasting your vote.
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- Jul 2016
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www.newyorker.com www.newyorker.com
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I am joined by a trans woman about my age. People get afraid, she tells me, and nobody wants to feel afraid. But if you get angry, you feel empowered. Trump is playing on people’s fears, to get them angry, which in turn makes us, on the other side, feel fearful. It’s a domino effect.
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The night was sad. The center failed to hold. Did I blame the rioting kids? I did. Did I blame Trump? I did. This, Mr. Trump, I thought, is why we practice civility. This is why, before we say exactly what is on our minds, we run it past ourselves, to see if it makes sense, is true, is fair, has a flavor of kindness, and won’t hurt someone or make someone’s difficult life more difficult. Because there are, among us, in every political camp, limited, angry, violent, and/or damaged people, waiting for any excuse to throw off the tethers of restraint and get after it. After which it falls to the rest of us, right and left, to clean up the mess.
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Trump seems to awaken something in them that they feel they have, until now, needed to suppress. What is that thing? It is not just (as I’m getting a bit tired of hearing) that they’ve been left behind economically. (Many haven’t, and au contraire.) They’ve been left behind in other ways, too, or feel that they have. To them, this is attributable to a country that has moved away from them, has been taken away from them—by Obama, the Clintons, the “lamestream” media, the “élites,” the business-as-usual politicians. They are stricken by a sense that things are not as they should be and that, finally, someone sees it their way. They have a case of Grievance Mind, and Trump is their head kvetcher.
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- Jun 2016
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www.lewrockwell.com www.lewrockwell.com
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Automated posts from social media accounts pretending to be real individuals are being used to influence public opinion. (The Chinese government uses regular employees to post "real" messages at strategic times.)
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en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
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or group to seclude themselves
Group privacy is much more infrequently discussed than individual privacy. At least in Euro-American contexts. Quite likely a very important bias.
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fractastical.github.io fractastical.github.io
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and if the prediction market favors a policy that allows such a state of affairs to come into being, and if the citizen in question wants to do it, can one reasonably block its adoption
The meta-question here would be (in a purely nomic system) could there be a case where the citizens could change the entire operating rules of their political union? If so, would it be feasible for them to grant themselves progressively less power? It is arguable that this has already happened in the ostensibly democratic system in the United States.
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known to be effective: prediction markets
Known by whom? In what circumstances? These are key points.
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Economically rational voters should not vote
Which means that democracy has to take a quasi-religious character...
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- May 2016
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hybridpedagogy.org hybridpedagogy.org
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Digital tools offer the opportunity to refocus how power works in the classroom.
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- Apr 2016
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blog.jonudell.net blog.jonudell.net
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Jon Udell on productive social discourse.
changeable minds<br> What’s something you believed deeply, for a long time, and then changed your mind about?
David Gray's Liminal Thinking points out that we all have beliefs that are built on hidden foundations. We need to carefully examine our own beliefs and their origins. And we need to avoid judgment as we consider the beliefs of others and their origins.
Wael Ghonim asks us to design social media that encourages civility, thoughtfulness, and open minds rather than self-promotion, click-bait, and echo chambers.
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hapgood.us hapgood.us
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If, at the dawn of the web, I was to take a list of things the web would bring about and show them to a researcher, they might disagree on the level of interest people would have in things (what’s with the cat pictures, spaceman?) but there’d be little there to surprise them except for one item: the most used reference work in the world will be collaboratively maintained by a group of anonymous and pseudonymous volunteers as part of a self-organizing network.
It would be nice if on this day, as we marvel about the rise of Wikipedia, we could turn some of our attention to the Wikipedias of the future. Where are opportunities for this mode of collaboration that we’ve missed? Why are we not confronted by more impossible things? How can we move from the electronic dreams of the 1970s to visions informed by the lessons of wiki and Wikipedia? Some people might think we’ve already done that. But I’m pretty sure we’re barely getting started.
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blog.enkerli.com blog.enkerli.com
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true liberal democracy
A “well-informed citizenry” require journalistic assistance. Which is why US elections are such a neat context to discuss literacy, public opinion, agency, representativeness, and populism.
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- Mar 2016
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gamesandlearning.wordpress.com gamesandlearning.wordpress.com
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more democratic pathway
This one remains to be demonstrated. As we keep saying, exclusion may be passive but inclusion is by definition active. Open annotations may not sound so exclusive for those who appropriated it as a technology, the same way literacies are often taken for granted. But we often tend to take “democratization” as a given.
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- Feb 2016
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collectiveliberation.org collectiveliberation.org
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But community must not mean a shedding of our differences, nor the pathetic pretense that these differences do not exist
What a great, simple critique of bullshit "solidarity" cries.
Of course, it raises for me feelings of discomfort because I've observed that even those who frequently profess to value difference within a community often still believe it important that the community present a unified face when perceived by outside groups.
Even within a single company, this sort of philosophy manifests frequently as executives fighting viciously with one another while smiling and acting as though they are all of one mind when presenting to the rest of the company.
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www.psychologytoday.com www.psychologytoday.com
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It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position.
-- James Truslow Adams, coining the phrase "The American Dream" in his 1931 book The Epic of America.
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www.e-flux.com www.e-flux.com
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At some dark day in the future, when considered versus the Google Caliphate, the NSA may even come to be seen by some as the “public option.” “At least it is accountable in principle to some parliamentary limits,” they will say, “rather than merely stockholder avarice and flimsy user agreements.”
In the last few years I've come to understand that my tolerance for most forms of surveillance should be considered in terms of my confidence in the judiciary.
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If the panopticon effect is when you don’t know if you are being watched or not, and so you behave as if you are, then the inverse panopticon effect is when you know you are being watched but act as if you aren’t. This is today’s surveillance culture: exhibitionism in bad faith.
This has an accelerative effect on cultural change at the margins of battlegrounds from which the State is retreating. Previously forbidden behavior can become quickly recognized as commonplace.
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backchannel.com backchannel.com
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According to numbers from the American Journalism Review and the Pew Research Center, less than a third of U.S. newspapers have a reporter present at the statehouse (either full- or part-time) and almost no local television stations assign a reporter to state politics.
Net result: the public’s awareness of and access to the activities of state government is vanishing, at the same time that the decisions made by state-level actors are having greater effects on American lives.
The first step towards righting this asymmetry is access, and there’s a good idea out there you need to know about: State Civic Networks are state-based, non-profit, independent, nonpartisan, “citizen engagement” online centers, and they should exist in every state. (Think C-SPAN, but way better, and focusing on statehouses.)
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- Jan 2016
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www.popularresistance.org www.popularresistance.org
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Sanders is giving these views a voice. When Bernie asserts on national television that it is Wall Street that regulates Congress instead of the other way around, he strikes a chord that potentially enables people to resonate together — Republicans and Democrats alike. Second, Sanders defies the political class by projecting a vision of how our country could move toward justice.
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“One of the great things about Bitcoin is its lack of democracy”
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www.amazon.com www.amazon.com
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"Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right", Jane Mayer (19 Jan 2016)
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The explicit right to a free press it seems to me, though I’m no constitutional scholar, should translate today to an infrastructure not only for publishing information but for protecting those publishing, providing, or consuming it, as well as those financially supporting its publication. Just as the rights to speech, assembly, and petition should translate to online infrastructure in which discourse at all levels is protected and groups can meaningfully express their views (let alone the fourth amendment right to protection of your own information). With these essential rights, a democracy can function and use its mechanism of governance to create new rights and protections.
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www.informationdiet.com www.informationdiet.com
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there's a case to be made that citizens providing feedback on actual policy is just as important than who they elect.
In some J-Schools, this case is hard to make as journalists claim they're the ones through whom this process happens.
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er.educause.edu er.educause.edu
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Moreover, the experience of building and participating within a digitally mediated network of discovery is itself a form of experiential learning, indeed a kind of metaexperiential learning that vividly and concretely teaches the experience of networks themselves.
With a wide open network, it also makes the world look smaller.
This is a great essay by Gardner Campbell. I'd add more notes. But every time I try, I start sounding like a crazed revolutionary. Like this...
Ask not how you can be a more suitable corporate drone. Ask how you can knock them down a few pegs.
The computer is an unprecedented partner for the human mind. We've barely begun to tap its potential. Stop trying to turn it into television.
Stop training kids to do what they're told. Teach them to teach themselves and one another.
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medium.com medium.com
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As any debate club veteran knows, if you can’t make your opponent’s point for them, you don’t truly grasp the issue. We can bemoan political gridlock and a divisive media all we want. But we won’t truly progress as individuals until we make an honest effort to understand those that are not like us. And you won’t convince anyone to feel the way you do if you don’t respect their position and opinions.
The two-party system, formal debate, and typical advice for essay writing all emphasize picking A or B, and then defending it to the death. We should place more emphasis on the identification of alternatives and the collection of objective facts.
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In psychology, the idea that everyone is like us is called the “false-consensus bias.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False-consensus_effect
We tend to assume that most people think and feel similarly to us. We then categorize those who don't as "other" and somehow inferior. This tendency is intensified when we gather with people who are in fact like-minded. And that happens in social media, where we tend to follow those with similar views.
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Sharing links that mock a caricature of the Other Side isn’t signaling that we’re somehow more informed. It signals that we’d rather be smug assholes than consider alternative views. It signals that we’d much rather show our friends that we’re like them, than try to understand those who are not.
I agree. But on the other hand, "mocking a caricature of the Other Side" is a description of satire, which seems to be a valuable way to spread ideas.
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- Dec 2015
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motherboard.vice.com motherboard.vice.com
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Take the net neutrality law in Europe. It's terrible, but people are happy and go like "it could be worse.” That is absolutely not the right attitude. Facebook brings the internet to Africa and poor countries, but they’re only giving limited access to their own services and make money off of poor people. And getting government grants to do that, because they do PR well.
Interview with Peter Sunde, co-founder of file-sharing site The Pirate Bay. (He was incarcerated for one year after they were convicted of assisting copyright infringement.) "We have already lost." he says. "Well, we don't have an open Internet. We haven't had an open Internet for a long time."
I'm not as pessimistic. But we are too complacent. A free Internet will contribute to a free society and democracy. A closed Internet will contribute to oppression and plutocracy. We need to fight the tendency toward devices that give the user little control. We need more open source hardware, nonprofit maker spaces, and cooperatives. We need to work on alternative Internets.
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tutormentor.blogspot.com tutormentor.blogspot.com
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When Bernie Sanders talks about a 'revolution' in America, he's talking about getting millions of people deeply involved in the political process. I think he's also talking about getting millions of people personally involved, in their communities, in building solutions that don't need government involvement, such as volunteer-based tutoring, mentoring and learning organizations.
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www.moodlenews.com www.moodlenews.com
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drive, in part, the development of the Moodle project through a democratic mechanism.
Social scientists among us may dispute this “democracy” label. The whole “one dollar, one vote” system is literally a textbook example of the Matthew Effect (through which the rich get richer).
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- Nov 2015
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ballotsandbeer.xyz ballotsandbeer.xyz
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Democracy Act
A good editorial from NJ.com outlining why the Democracy Act was needed for NJ voting.
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- Sep 2015
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medium.com medium.com
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But the rules have to be different when we’re talking about news.
Good ole appeal to journalistic exceptionalism.
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- Aug 2015
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www.vox.com www.vox.com
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But politics is about who shows up. The fossil fuel interests that are threatened show up. Nerds like Urban, vaguely repulsed by politics, do not.
A thousand times yes that "politics is about who shows up."
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There are two broad narratives about politics that can be glimpsed between the lines here. Both are, in the argot of the day, problematic.
The two paragraphs that follow are spot on. Nerds think government doesn't do anything right and they see government as this monolith thing apart from themselves rather than something they can and should work to affect, rather than circumvent.
One thing I got out of reading Graeber's "Democracy Project" was the idea that it is not rational people that inhabit the middle of the political spectrum. Most people are more radical than the media makes it seem. The media reinforces the narrative that if you hold strong political opinions you are a radical. Your neighbors think you're crazy. You should probably just follow the herd, more.
While there are definitely fundamentalists at the political extremes, there are also great thinkers.
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- Apr 2015
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Local file Local file
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Despite their frequent use of the word ‘democra - tization’, such efforts are profoundly anti-democratic, insisting that the introduction of devices and software by a self-identified technocratic elite trumps duly-enacted laws and law enforcement mechanisms, and that a kind of market – a market in adoption of such services – is the exclusive method society should use to judge the provision of these services.
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- Jan 2015
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newleftreview.org newleftreview.org
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that the ease of horizontal mobilization afforded by social networks is of limited help if it doesn’t generate more lasting political structures that can contest the military rule outside the squares
Therefore, generalising, more long lasting political structures are required. So the question in the West is to what extent are democratic structures augmented, enhanced or detracted from? If the Internet is used to effectively syphon off discontent while amplifying indoctrinating messages this is not what can be called progress.
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- Nov 2014
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www.hackeducation.com www.hackeducation.com
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If we believe in equality, if we believe in participatory democracy and participatory culture, if we believe in people and progressive social change, if we believe in sustainability in all its environmental and economic and psychological manifestations, then we need to do better than slap that adjective “open” onto our projects and act as though that’s sufficient or — and this is hard, I know — even sound.
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- Apr 2014
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coreyrobin.com coreyrobin.com
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Israel, the Jewish State, is predicated on a decisive and stable Jewish majority of at least 70 percent. Any lower than that and Israel will have to decide between being a Jewish state and a democratic state. If it chooses democracy, then Israel as a Jewish state will cease to exist. If it remains officially Jewish, then the state will face an unprecedented level of international isolation, including sanctions, that might prove fatal.
Quoted from Michael Oren in Commentary.
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- Feb 2014
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yanisvaroufakis.eu yanisvaroufakis.eu
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The Athenians invented neither slavery nor sexism. What they did invent, however, was the notion of a citizen who enjoys not only free speech but also isigoria (equal say in the final formulation of policy) independently of whether he was rich, comfortably off, or indeed a pauper eking a modest existence out of manual labour.[7] In this reading, the key figure was not Pericles, or orators of stunning talent like Demosthenes, but, rather, the anonymous landless peasant who, despite his propertylessness, had a voice in the Assembly of equal weight to that of the great and the good. This was the remarkable novelty of Athenian society which has probably never been replicated since.
Assumption of "equal weight" incredibly charitable assumption toward classical Athenian democracy.
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It is, however, easy to dismiss Athenian democracy on two grounds: Its hypocrisy and its irrelevance for the modern world. Regarding the former, one might argue plausibly that, since the Athenian economy (public, private and domestic) engaged slave labour, and women along with resident aliens (the metics) enjoyed no citizenship, their democracy was a sham.
Current democracies are only 2/3 on these!
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Judging by the large retinue of definitions in the emergent literature on E’democracy, the safest route to defining it is through the successive elimination of that which we do not want it to be: According to Coleman and Gotze (2003), it ought to be irreducible to e’government (as it is possible to imagine a dictatorship deploying highly efficient e’government systems); to pose no threat to representative democracy (i.e. it need not be a Trojan Horse for direct or plebiscitary democratic alternatives); to have little to do with technology as such and a great deal to do with re-conceptualising the ‘space’ between the ‘people’ and their ‘political rulers’…
why not pose a threat to representative democracy? perhaps I'm confused by the double negative: "do not want it to be...need not be"
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- Oct 2013
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rhetoric.eserver.org rhetoric.eserver.org
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A Democracy is a form of government under which the citizens distribute the offices of state among themselves by lot, whereas under oligarchy there is a property qualification, under aristocracy one of education.
democracy
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The forms of government are four -- democracy, oligarchy, aristocracy, monarchy. The supreme right to judge and decide always rests, therefore, with either a part or the whole of one or other of these governing powers.
Four forms of government. Judgement lies with government.
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- Sep 2013
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caseyboyle.net caseyboyle.net
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nd since in addressing a king I have spoken for his subjects, surely I would urge upon men who live under a democracy to pay court to the people.
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I am wont to deal with princes as well as with private men
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