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.
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.
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.
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).
Democracy Act
A good editorial from NJ.com outlining why the Democracy Act was needed for NJ voting.
But the rules have to be different when we’re talking about news.
Good ole appeal to journalistic exceptionalism.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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"
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
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.
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.
I am wont to deal with princes as well as with private men