358 Matching Annotations
  1. Mar 2024
    1. 12:00 assassinations of many african leaders. Muammar Gaddafi, patrice lumumba of congo, sir abubakar tafawa balewa of nigeria, thomas sankara... history is repeating itself, only the actors are changing. -- 50 years ago, the empire called this "war on communism", nowadays the empire calls this "war on terror" or "war on nationalism" or "fighting for democracy" or "fighting for freedom"... and the empire will ALWAYS find useful idiots to fight for these lies, because human stupidity is the most stable resource of all, human stupidity is infinite.

      The great Alexander's empire collapsed,<br /> the empire of the ancient Romans<br /> and the empire of Napoleon fell into ruins,<br /> they were built on the power of weapons.

      But the Empire of New Rome<br /> has existed for almost 1500 years<br /> and will last for who knows how long,<br /> because it rests on the most solid foundation:<br /> the stupidity of humans.

      -- Otto von Corvin

    1. democracy is just a sign of decadence.<br /> boomers dreaming of pretty ideas, living in good times, creating hard times for their children

  2. Feb 2024
    1. If, for ex-ample, we were to reengineer ourselves into several separate and unequalspecies using the power of genetic engineering, then we would threatenthe notion of equality that is the very cornerstone of our democracy.

      I find it hard to believe that equality is "the very cornerstone of our democracy".

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  3. Jan 2024
    1. There's two broad processes that we need.
      • for: steps towards a democracy collaborative

      • description

        • two steps to form a democracy collaborative
          • more inclusive ownership
          • building the next system of capital
  4. Dec 2023
    1. what i would call a kind of epistemic fragmentation where where we're losing the ability as societies to have agreement on very basic facts and to the extent that we don't agree on 00:36:41 basic facts about the nature of the world and the nature of the challenges we face it's very hard to to solve those problems effectively democracy for instance can't effective effectively function 00:36:52 if if the people who are talking to each other don't actually agree on what the problems are
      • for: definition epistemic fragmentation, no agreement on basic facts, political polarization, adjacency - epistemic fragmentation - polarization - democracy

      • definition: epistemic fragmentation

        • when major parts of society disagree on basic facts
      • adjacency between
        • epistemic fragmentation
        • polarization
        • democracy
      • adjacency statement
        • democracy is critical to solving our challenges but it won't function if there is so much epistemic fragmentation that we can't agree on basic facts
    1. its design as by its original destination, the car is a luxury good. And luxury, in essence, cannot be democratized: if everyone has access to luxury, no one benefits from it; on the contrary: everyone cheats, frustrates and dispossesses others and is cheated, frustrated and dispossessed by them.
      • for: quote - luxury cannot be democratized, 1% - democracy, elites - democracy, adjacency - luxury - democracy, luxury is not democratic, luxury is inequality, Andre Gorz, Terrestrial website, adjancency - luxury - democracy, quote luxury

      • quote

        • ... By its design as by its original destination, the car is a luxury good. And luxury, in essence, cannot be democratized: if everyone has access to luxury, no one benefits from it; on the contrary: everyone cheats, frustrates and dispossesses others and is cheated, frustrated and dispossessed by them.
      • author: Andre Gorz
      • date: Sept. 25, 2023
      • publication: Terrestrial

      • comment

        • insightful comment reveals an adjacency between luxury and democracy that is obvious in hindsight, but missed seeing in foresight!
      • adjacency between:

        • luxury
        • democracy
      • adjacency statement
        • luxury is, by definition a premium artefact so by definition is beyond the reach of most people. It is therefore un-democratic by design.
  5. Nov 2023
  6. Aug 2023
    1. I should like to add that specialization, instead of makingthe Great Conversation irrelevant, makes it more pertinentthan ever. Specialization makes it harder to carry on anykind of conversation; but this calls for greater effort, not theabandonment of the attempt.

      The dramatic increase in economic specialization of humanity driven by the Industrial Revolution has many benefits to societies, but it also has detrimental effects when the core knowledge and shared base of the society is lost.

      Certainly individuals have a greater reliance on specialists for future outcomes (think about the specialization of areas like climate science which can have destructive outcomes on all of humanity or public health outcomes with respect to vaccines and specialized health care delivery), but they also need to have a common base of knowledge/culture and the ability to think critically for themselves to be able to effect necessary changes, particularly when the pace of those changes is more rapid than humans have generally been evolved to accept them.

    2. If leisure and political power requirethis education, everybody in America now requires it, andeverybody where democracy and industrialization penetratewill ultimately require it. If the people are not capable ofacquiring this education, they should be deprived of politicalpower and probably of leisure. Their uneducated politicalpower is dangerous, and their uneducated leisure is degrad-ing and will be dangerous. If the people are incapable ofachieving the education that responsible democratic citizen-ship demands, then democracy is doomed, Aristotle rightlycondemned the mass of mankind to natural slavery, and thesooner we set about reversing the trend toward democracythe better it will be for the world.

      This is an extreme statement which bundles together a lot without direct evidence.

      Written in an era in which there was a lot of pro-Democracy and anti-Communist discussion, Hutchins is making an almost religious statement here which binds education and democracy in the ways in which the Catholic church bound education and religion in scholasticism. While scholasticism may have had benefits, it also caused a variety of ills which took centuries to unwind into the Enlightenment.

      Why can't we separate education from democracy? Can't education of this sort live in other polities? Hasn't it? Does critical education necessarily lead to democracy?

      What does the explorable solution space of admixtures of critical reasoning and education look like with respect to various forms of government? Could a well-educated population thrive under collectivism or socialism?

      The definition of "natural slavery" here is contingent and requires lots of context, particularly of the ways in which Aristotle used it versus our current understanding of chattel slavery.

    3. Democracy and Education was written before the assemblyline had achieved its dominant position in the industrialworld and before mechanization had depopulated the farmsof America.

      Interesting history and possible solutions.

      Dewey on the humanization of work front running the dramatic changes of and in work in an industrial age?


      Note here the potential coupling of democracy and education as dovetailing ideas rather than separate ideas which can be used simultaneously. We should take care here not to end up with potential baggage that could result in society and culture the way scholasticism combined education and religion in the middle ages onward.

    4. This Western devotion to the liberal arts and liberal educa-tion must have been largely responsible for the emergence ofdemocracy as an ideal.

      Graeber and Wengrow seem to indicate otherwise.

    1. We are in the midst of a remarkable social and civic experiment: democracy by device
      • for: democracy - by device, quote, quote - Barry Chudakov, quote - democracy by device
      • quote
        • We are in the midst of a remarkable social and civic experiment, democracy by device
      • author: Barry Chudakov
      • for: titling elections, voting - social media, voting - search engine bias, SEME, search engine manipulation effect, Robert Epstein
      • summary
        • research that shows how search engines can actually bias towards a political candidate in an election and tilt the election in favor of a particular party.
    1. In our early experiments, reported by The Washington Post in March 2013, we discovered that Google’s search engine had the power to shift the percentage of undecided voters supporting a political candidate by a substantial margin without anyone knowing.
      • for: search engine manipulation effect, SEME, voting, voting - bias, voting - manipulation, voting - search engine bias, democracy - search engine bias, quote, quote - Robert Epstein, quote - search engine bias, stats, stats - tilting elections
      • paraphrase
      • quote
        • In our early experiments, reported by The Washington Post in March 2013,
        • we discovered that Google’s search engine had the power to shift the percentage of undecided voters supporting a political candidate by a substantial margin without anyone knowing.
        • 2015 PNAS research on SEME
          • http://www.pnas.org/content/112/33/E4512.full.pdf?with-ds=yes&ref=hackernoon.com
          • stats begin
          • search results favoring one candidate
          • could easily shift the opinions and voting preferences of real voters in real elections by up to 80 percent in some demographic groups
          • with virtually no one knowing they had been manipulated.
          • stats end
          • Worse still, the few people who had noticed that we were showing them biased search results
          • generally shifted even farther in the direction of the bias,
          • so being able to spot favoritism in search results is no protection against it.
          • stats begin
          • Google’s search engine 
            • with or without any deliberate planning by Google employees 
          • was currently determining the outcomes of upwards of 25 percent of the world’s national elections.
          • This is because Google’s search engine lacks an equal-time rule,
            • so it virtually always favors one candidate over another, and that in turn shifts the preferences of undecided voters.
          • Because many elections are very close, shifting the preferences of undecided voters can easily tip the outcome.
          • stats end
    2. What if, early in the morning on Election Day in 2016, Mark Zuckerberg had used Facebook to broadcast “go-out-and-vote” reminders just to supporters of Hillary Clinton? Extrapolating from Facebook’s own published data, that might have given Mrs. Clinton a boost of 450,000 votes or more, with no one but Mr. Zuckerberg and a few cronies knowing about the manipulation.
      • for: Hiliary Clinton could have won, voting, democracy, voting - social media, democracy - social media, election - social media, facebook - election, 2016 US elections, 2016 Trump election, 2016 US election, 2016 US election - different results, 2016 election - social media
      • interesting fact
        • If Facebook had sent a "Go out and vote" message on election day of 2016 election, Clinton may have had a boost of 450,000 additional votes
          • and the outcome of the election might have been different
      • for: polycrisis, collapse, tweedledums, tweedledees, wicked problem, social mess, stuck, stuckness, complexity
      • title
        • Is This How Political Collapse Will Unfold?
      • author
        • Dave Pollard
      • date
        • Aug 3, 2023
      • comment
        • thought provoking
        • honest, diverse, open thinking
        • a good piece of writing to submit to SRG / Deep Humanity analysis for surfacing insights
        • adjacency
          • complexity
          • emptiness
          • stuckness
            • this word "stuckness" stuck out in me (no pun intended) today - so many intractable, stuck problems, at all levels of society, because we oversimplify complexity to the point of harmful abstraction.
      • definition

        • Tweedledums

          • This is a Reactionary Caste that believes that salvation lies in a return to a non-existent nostalgic past, characterized by respect for
            • authority,
            • order,
            • hierarchy,
            • individual initiative, and
            • ‘traditional’ ways of doing things,
          • governed by a
            • strict,
            • lean,
            • paternalistic elite
          • that leaves as much as possible up to individual families guided by
            • established ‘family values’ and
            • by their interpretation of the will of their god.
        • Tweedledees

          • This is a PM (Professional-Managerial) Caste that believes that salvation lies in striving for an impossibly idealistic future characterized by
            • mutual care,
            • affluence
            • relative equality for all,
          • governed by a
            • kind,
            • thoughtful,
            • educated,
            • informed and
            • representative
          • elite that appreciates the role of public institutions and regulations, and is guided by principles of
            • humanism and
            • ‘fairness’.
        • references
        • Aurélien
        • source
        • led here by reading Dave Pollard's other article
    1. At the same time, our whole sense of community has been lost as the requirement of modern societies rely on us living in anonymous neighbourhoods with people we don’t know or share much of anything in common. Who are these representatives presuming to represent anymore anyway?
    2. It’s no wonder that fewer than half of citizens can be bothered to vote
      • for: broken system, voting, low turnout, low voter turnout, together alone
      • adjacency
        • low turnout
        • low voter turnout
        • alienation
        • anonymous neighbourhoods
        • anonymous community
    3. It probably isn’t even a stretch to suggest that herds and flocks of many other animals use a form of direct democracy in making their decisions. Again despite the myths, “alphas” do not make decisions for others, “leadership” roles rotate regularly, the “law of two (or four) feet” tests the group’s readiness for consensus, and principles such as the “first follower” enable wild creatures to reach a decision in their group’s best collective interest. Dissenters and unpersuaded group members are free to go off and look for another group, except at critical times (such as breeding season, or when under attack), when all members of the group instinctively pitch in to share the extra burden or workload, or help work through the crisis or challenge. We’re not so different, or, at least, we weren’t.
      • for: animal decision-making
      • adjacency
        • animal herding behavior and
        • direct democracy
      • claim
        • herds and flocks of many other animals (other than human) use a form of direct democracy in making decisions
        • Alphas do not alone make decisions, as leadership often rotates
        • The law of "two feet (or four" tests the group's readiness for consensus and the "first follower" principle
        • dissenters and unpersuaded group members are free to go off and look for another group
          • except at critical times such as
            • breeding season
            • under threat
  7. Jul 2023
    1. democracyrequires liberal education for all.

      Two of the driving reasons behind the Great Books project were improvement of both education and democracy.

      The democracy portion was likely prompted by the second Red Scare from ~1947-1957 which had profound effects on America. Published in 1952, this series would have considered it closely and it's interesting they included Marx in the thinkers at the end of the series.

    2. The reiteration of slogans, the distortionof the news, the great storm of propaganda that beats uponthe citizen twenty-four hours a day all his life long meaneither that democracy must fall a prey to the loudest andmost persistent propagandists or that the people must savethemselves by strengthening their minds so that they can ap-praise the issues for themselves.

      Things have not improved measurably since the 1950s apparently. The drumbeat has only gotten worse.

    3. We believe that the reduction of the citizen to an object ofpropaganda, private and public, is one of the greatest dangersto democracy.

      How would Robert Hutchins view the new millennium?

  8. Jun 2023
    1. I do think it’s helpful for members of the public to know some basic facts about the past. For me, it’s the same idea as the saying “If you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything.” Similarly, if you know nothing you can be convinced of anything.

      These are much pithier versions of what Robert Hutchins is getting at when he's talking about the importance of the Great Conversation with respect to Democracy.

    1. One of Dewey’s principal concerns was for the relationship between educationand democracy. He made the point that democracy is not just a form ofgovernment—it is, rather, ‘a mode of associated living, a conjoint communicated

      experience’ (1916: 101).

  9. Apr 2023
    1. For many people, “Camelot” is more familiar as a metaphor than as a musical — it depicts a noble effort to create a just society, often associated with the Kennedy administration, because Jacqueline Kennedy, in an interview shortly after President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, mentioned her husband’s fondness for the show, and quoted a final lyric: “Don’t let it be forgot, that once there was a spot, for one brief shining moment, that was known as Camelot.”

      The Kennedy administration became culturally associated with Camelot because Jacqueline Kennedy mentioned her husband's affinity for the show in an interview with Theodore H. White for LIFE Magazine following his death and quoted the show's closing lyric: “Don’t let it be forgot, that once there was a spot, for one brief shining moment, that was known as Camelot.”


      Somewhat curious that there's T. H. White of The Once and Future King and a separate Theodore H. White who interviewed Jackie Kennedy following her husband's death with mentions of Camelot.

    1. A political system, he said, needs people who are fair,open-minded, and think for themselves; it doesn’t want people who aresubservient to authority.

      Is there a better direct quote from Locke for this indirect one?


      Oddly, large portions of the religious right and Republican right are highly subservient to authority while simultaneously espousing the idea of "freedom".

      Apparently the base definition of "freedom" on the right has shifted in large portions of American culture.

  10. Mar 2023
    1. Rejecting familiar recitations of problems of ecological declineand planetary boundaries, this compact book instead offers a spir-ited explication of what everyone desires: a good life. Fundamentalconcepts of the good life are explained and explored, as are forcesthat threaten the good life for all. The remedy, says the book’s seveninternational authors, lies with the concept of consumption corri-dors, enabled by mechanisms of citizen engagement and deliberativedemocracy.
      • Consumption corridors are proposed as the way to live what we all consider a good life, within planetary boundaries.
      • Citizen engagement and deliberative democracy are key to co-creating a system that works for us all
  11. Feb 2023
    1. introduction of so-called manual training, shop-work, and the household arts—sewing and cooking.

      Why is this bad? We have such shortages in the trade schools now.

      Is this back to the bias of the "wisest parent"

    2. It is to this, then, that I especially ask your attention: the effort to conceive what roughly may be termed the “New Education” in the light of larger changes in society.

      This is an older text John Dewey was considered a founder in one of the two main branches of American Pragmatism. The writing style can be dated. This makes it hard to comprehend.

      The topic sentence is not always the first sentence. If it is stated in the paragraph it is still an explicit topic sentence. If you have to infer the topic sentence it is an implicit sentence.

      Good writers never trust their audiences to infer nothing. Assume they know knowthing. Define everything.

    3. compared with the training of attention and of judgment that is acquired in having to do things with a real motive behind and a real outcome ahead

      A real motive and real outcome is also important as a learning outcome is cdntral to Dewey's thought.

      He sees schools, while rejecting the industrial model, as the engine to drive societal reform.

    4. object-lessons, got up as object-lessons for the sake of giving information, can afford even the shadow of a substitute for acquaintance with the plants and animals of the farm and garden, acquired through actual living among them and caring for them.

      Learning is best as a Lived Experience is central to Dewey's thinking.

    5. We cannot overlook the factors of discipline and of character-building involved in this

      If we know that schools, by their nature impact character-building what role does the teacher play in character building? In teaching ethics?

      Where is the line between the explicit character building schools do and what falls under the domain of parents?

    6. The entire industrial process stood revealed

      Have we over played

      "no industrial model of education"

      Could it be direct instruction in well managed classrooms are the most efficient way for students to learn?

      Wait is that the industrial model? The scientifically proven model? Does the science only work because it is the statistics of the industrial era?

    7. Those of us who are here today need go back only one, two, or at most three generations, to find a time when the household was practically the center in which were carried on, or about which were clustered, all the typical forms of industrial occupation.

      Was this the better model?

      Schools are a relatively new human invention

    8. discussion of a new movement in education, it is especially necessary to take the broader, or social view.

      This is an interesting thought. Any reform you have on schols will impact society as a whole.

      The State of Connecticut just took away local control of the reading curriculum. You must pick from five pre-approved curriculum........

      Just five....so much for local control of schools

    9. Here individualism and socialism are at one.

      Hey #EDu106 this is a good philosophical question for you to chew on.

      Can you square socialism and individualism

      Is Dewey's call for schools to be Democracy factories indoctrination? What does indoctrination mean from critics of Public School? Are they correct?

    10. arrow and unlovely; acted upon, it destroys our democracy.

      How do you feel about charter schools? Do they destroy democracy?

      Ask the children being dug up In Canada in schools for Indigenous Children if schools were tools for democracy.

      Literacy can not be separated from culture. Words can be used to give or take away power.

      What power should parents have with charter schools? Homeschooling?

    11. What the best and wisest parent wants for his own child, that must the community want for all of its children.

      A central tenant in the American Republic and form of liberalism is a protection of the minority from tyranny of the majority.

      Does Dewey violate this principle with with this thesis? Who is the best and wisest parent? Who gets to decide?

      Why is what is wise for one parent wise for my kid?

  12. Jan 2023
    1. At least one prominenthistorian of European political thought has indeed suggested thatsome of the democratic forms later developed by Enlightenmentstatesmen in the North Atlantic world most likely were first debutedon pirate ships in the 1680s and 1690s:

      see: Markoff, John. “Where and When Was Democracy Invented?” Comparative Studies in Society and History 41, no. 4 (October 1999): 660–90. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0010417599003096.

  13. www.thepostil.com www.thepostil.com
    1. This site is a cesspool of authoritarian, fascist-apologist, conspiracist mind-mangling content. It's a good place to find out what kinds of bizarre notions people (particularly Catholics of an authoritarian bent) are being fed, and consuming — ridiculous fabrications and warped interpretations of the sort contributing (with giddy joy) to the suffocation of democratic inclinations and institutions.

      The site does have some interesting images. I think this will be an inspiration for some dystopian and horror fiction ideas.

    1. Discourse within the public sphere signals the normative will of the democratic citizenry to the steering institutions of governance. It also articulates and rearticulates (expresses and reshapes) the core of the civic, the vital beating heart of a democracy. This core is a political morality of intentional action motivated by reasoned understanding and moral imagination. In the political morality I see emerging, the separation of the political and the normative is subsiding. Conceptually, power and right are becoming entangled rather than bifurcated. 

      !- quotable : growing impact of democratic citizenry affect the steering institutions of governance

    2. As I use the term here, “governance” is not limited to the official activities of government alone. Governance in the broad sense is an interlocking system of collective action steering mechanisms ideally guided by impartial rules of law and comprised of the administrative and representative political institutions of government, economic and sociological institutions, and cultural systems of norms, meanings, and relationships. In a democracy, the steering of these systems of collective action is ultimately subject to judgments concerning the justice and legitimacy of current and proposed future governance by a discursive participatory citizenry. This citizenry continually engages in a process of pluralistic debate refereed by reason and the persuasive force of the better argument. Such participatory dialogue is often referred to as the civic or “public sphere” of society. It is a place of norms and ideals—a declarative place of what is the case, and a subjunctive place of what could be the case.

      !- role of participatory democracy : governance

      !- comment - this is what bottom-up rapid whole system change relies upon - Indyweb / SRG / TPF aspires to create such a global space

    3. Much of what they do can be done without eliciting the ire of nation-states. Bike shares, pedestrian zones, insulated buildings, renovated port facilities, congestion fees, car emission limits, furnace specifications, fuel upgrades (from oil to gas to alternative energy) and white paint roofs, for example, are only some of the innovations city officials can promote to effect significant reductions in emissions and pollutants.

      !- cities actions : can be done without eliciting ire of nation state - bike shares - pedestrian zones - insulated buildings - renovated ports - congestion fees - car emission limits - furnace specifications - fuel upgrades - white paint roofs - cities are the right level for focusing on effective global climate action

    4. here states have grown dysfunctional and sovereignty has become an obstacle to global democratic action—as when the United States (or China, France, or Canada) refuses to compromise its sovereignty by permitting the international monitoring of carbon emissions on its soil—cities have increasingly proven themselves capable of deliberative democratic action on behalf of sustainability, as they have actually done in intercity associations like the C-40 or ICLEI. If presidents and prime ministers cannot summon the will to work for a sustainable planet, mayors can. If citizens of the province and nation think ideologically and divisively, neighbors and citizens of the towns and cities think publicly and cooperatively.

      !- claim : cities can mitigate corrupted democracy and foster global cooperation - ie. C40 or ICLEI (also Covenant of Mayors) - cities are not plagued by the problems of state actors who cannot reach any meaningful agreement at COP conferences

    5. democracy today is held captive by nation states that are, in turn, held captive by money, business, and banking interests—and a wholly owned corporate media that, far from informing the public, participate in misleading it.

      !- nation states : all practice a corrupted form of democracy - captured by money, business, banking interests, corporate-owned media - supreme court supports corporations - Citizens United treats corporations as persons, - Buckly vs Valeo treats money as speech - These cases corrupt democracy by giving money constitutional legitimacy - faux charitable lobbies like Americal Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) buys off lawmakers to act on behalf of corporations - democracy is trapped within national sovereignty and cannot respond across borders to global challenges like climate change - very ineffective global cooperation/response

    6. our crisis in democracy—a system dominated by big money, special interests, and the “tyranny of me”—impact and morph into our crisis in sustainability.

      !- crisis: democracy - big money, special interests, tyranny of me - has shaped the climate crisis

    7. In our real world of corrupted, minimalist democracy, we privilege individual, special-interest thinking and ask citizens to do no more than express their private preferences. We confound opinion and knowledge and sometimes even seem to think that by denying expert science we honor “democratic” thinking (as if shared ignorance and democracy were the same thing). In this corrupted version of democracy, “now” trumps “later,” today takes precedence over tomorrow, and no one takes responsibility for that greater democracy about which Edmund Burke spoke—the democracy that encompasses not only the interests of the living, but the interests of those who are gone and those as yet unborn. Generational thinking can only be cultivated in a setting of prudent deliberation; contrarily, our short-term present-mindedness shrinks the temporal zone.

      !- claim : we live in a corrupted and minimalist democracy with the consequence that we lack generational thinking - privilege individiual, special-interesting thinking - only ask citizens to express their private preferences - confound opinion and knowledge - we even deny expert science, believing it is tantamout to democratic thinking !- claim : within this minimalist, corrupted version of democracy, present thinking trumps future thinking - we do not apply generational thinking aka Edmund Burke - Burke's idea of generational thinking conceptualizes an ideal democracy that encompasses past, present and future generations - generational thinking requires a space of prudent deliberation rather than present-mind thinking only

    8. A deliberative democracy in which competent citizens participate in policy decisions about the long-term challenges facing their society is an ideal setting for confronting the threat of climate change. Democratic deliberation is designed to help selfish individuals reformulate their interests in the language of the communities to which they belong—to allow them to move from “me thinking” to “we thinking” and to substitute long-term, future-minded thinking for the short-term, present-minded, special-interest thinking. It allows private opinion to be shaped by shared belief and the discipline of inter-subjective (“scientific”) knowledge.

      !- Key concept : deliberative democracy of competent, participative citizens driving long term policy decisions is ideal for confronting climate change - transform self-centered individual to group-centered - shift from Me to We (invert the M) - shift from short term to long term thinking - intersubjective scientific knowledge

    9. Democracy and Climate Change: How Cities Can Do What States Can’t

      !- Title: Democracy and Climate Change: How Cities Can Do What States Can't !- Author: Benjamin Barber

    1. I'm a fan of liquid democarcy on a conceptual level so this result is surprising to me. Started a side project to test it out in a game environment, basically an online Nomic[1] although I have abandoned it for now. Reading through some of the paper makes me realize I didn't think it through as deep as the authors and I'm probably not smart enough.I understand they used a perceptual test to figure out who the experts are.And 'over delegation' results in losing benefits of delegates who have information that might be useful?This is not clear to me: "...it (over delegation) reduces the variety of independent information sources"In a perceptual task where one is found to be better than the other participants, why wouldn't it be the case that voting for the best participent (the expert) gives you the best result? I think I'm missing something[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomic

      .

  14. Dec 2022
    1. Dominance by powerful vested interests has also become characteristic of what is called democracy. Rule by the people (the demos) has become corrupted by rule (kratos) by the powerful and hence is no longer a democracy at all, but, properly speaking, an oligarchy or plutocracy. It’s worse than that; capitalism is now run by what can be technically called corruption. Corporations and oligarchs use their autocratic power and wealth to influence policy, manipulate public officials, and minimize regulation. It is this form of government that is blatant in most parts of the world but more powerful, if not more subtle, in the so-called advanced countries of the western world.

      !- inadequacy : concept of democracy - government policies are decided by the rick through their lobbyists - and is actually a form of oligarcy / plutocracy and corruption

    1. Instead, to counter US hegemonic narratives, the Kremlin took to systematically presenting alternative narratives and dissenting voices. Russia’s public diplomacy tool — the international television channel Russia Today — was rebranded as RT in 2009, probably to hide its clear links to the Russian government11. After an aggressive campaign to expand in English-, Spanish-, German- and French-speaking countries throughout the 2010s, the channel became the most visible source of Russia’s disinformation campaigns abroad. Analysis of its broadcasts shows the adoption of KGB approaches, as well as the use of novel tools provided by the global online environment
    1. Alexis de Tocqueville referred to this in his 1840 treatise on America as self-interest properly understood. In fact, the full title of the chapter from his book,Democracy in America, is, “How the Americans Combat Individualism by theDoctrine of Self-Interest Properly Understood.” His basic premise was that“one sees that by serving his fellows, man serves himself and that doing good isto his private advantage.”6
    1. Although there is no server governance census, in my own research I found very few examples of more participatory approaches to server governance (social.coop keeps a list of collectively owned instances)

      Tarkowski has only seen a few more participatory server governance set-ups, most are 'benevolent dictator' style. Same. I have seen several growing instances that have changed from 'dictator' to a group of moderators making the decisions. You could democratise those roles by having users propose / vote on moderators. It's what we do offline in communal structures.

    1. A lot has changed about our news media ecosystem since 2007. In the United States, it’s hard to overstate how the media is entangled with contemporary partisan politics and ideology. This means that information tends not to flow across partisan divides in coherent ways that enable debate.

      Our media and social media systems have been structured along with the people who use them such that debate is stifled because information doesn't flow coherently across the political partisan divide.

  15. Nov 2022
    1. τις άλλες γλώσσες, χρησιμοποιείται κατά κανόνα ο ίδιοςόρος (monarchy) για δύο ξεχωριστές έννοιες, που στα ελληνικά υπάρχει ηευχέρεια να αποδοθούν με δύο διαφορετικούς όρους: «βασιλεία» και«μοναρχία». Κατά συνέπεια, μπορεί στα ελληνικά να γίνει λόγος για«βασιλευόμενη δημοκρατία», ενώ στις άλλες γλώσσες το ίδιο ακριβώςκοινοβουλευτικό πολίτευμα ορίζεται ως «συνταγματική μοναρχία»(constitutional monarchy).

      Για το πως αποκαλουμε τα πολιτευματα.

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  16. Oct 2022
    1. His best known publication is his essay "The Significance of the Frontier in American History," the ideas of which formed the frontier thesis. He argued that the moving western frontier exerted a strong influence on American democracy and the American character from the colonial era until 1890.
    1. This effort, which Americans have supported almostfrom the beginning of the national existence and which is oneof the cornerstones of our democratic way of life, has hadremarkable results.

      Read in juxtaposition with the knowledge of orality and along with Graeber & Wengrow's The Dawn of Everything, one could certainly argue that there are other ways of knowing which provide potentially better pathways to democracy.

      Further, the simple fact of basic literacy doesn't necessarily encourage democracy. Take a look at the January 6th (2021) insurrectionists who were likely broadly literate, but who acted more like a damaged oral society and actively subverted democracy.

      Literacy plus "other things" are certainly necessary for democracy. How do we define these other things, and then once we have, is literacy still part of the equation for democracy?

    1. Mosca backs up histhesis with this assertion: It's the power of organization thatenables the minority always to rule. There are organizedminorities and they run things and men. There are unorganizedmajorities and they are run.

      In a democracy, is it not just rule by majority, but rule by the most organized that ends up dominating the society?

      Perhaps C. Wright Mills' work on the elite has some answers?

      The Republican party's use of organization to create gerrymandering is a clear example of using extreme organization to create minority rule. Cross reference: Slay the Dragon in which this issue is laid out with the mention of using a tiny amount of money to careful gerrymander maps to provide outsized influences and then top-down outlines to imprint broad ideas from a central location onto smaller individual constituencies (state and local).

  17. Sep 2022
    1. Between 1970 and 2010, the share of democratic governments in the world more than doubled to 53 percent. Since then, however, the trend has been steadily downward. At the same time, autocracies are increasingly successful economically. They are now the source of a 60 percent share of all patent registrations.
    1. McConnell said it’s up to the Republican candidates in various Senate battleground races to explain how they view the hot-button issue.   (function () { try { var event = new CustomEvent( "nsDfpSlotRendered", { detail: { id: 'acm-ad-tag-mr2_ab-mr2_ab' } } ); window.dispatchEvent(event); } catch (err) {} })(); “I think every Republican senator running this year in these contested races has an answer as to how they feel about the issue and it may be different in different states. So I leave it up to our candidates who are quite capable of handling this issue to determine for them what their response is,” he said.

      Context: Lindsey Graham had just proposed a bill for a nationwide abortion ban after 15 weeks of pregnancy.

      McConnell's position seems to be one that choice about abolition is an option, but one which is reserved for white men of power over others. This is painful because that choice is being left to people without any of the information and nuance about specific circumstances versus the pregnant women themselves potentially in consultation with their doctors who have broad specific training and experience in the topics and issues at hand. Why are these leaders attempting to make decisions based on possibilities rather than realities, particularly when they've not properly studied or are generally aware of any of the realities?

      If this is McConnell's true position, then why not punt the decision and choices down to the people directly impacted? And isn't this a long running tenet of the Republican Party to allow greater individual freedoms? Isn't their broad philosophy: individual > state government > national government? (At least with respect to internal, domestic matters; in international matters the opposite relationships seem to dominate.)

      tl;dr:<br /> Mitch McConnell believes in choice, just not in your choice.

      Here's the actual audio from a similar NPR story:<br /> https://ondemand.npr.org/anon.npr-mp3/npr/me/2022/09/20220914_me_gop_sen_lindsey_graham_introduces_15-week_abortion_ban_in_the_senate.mp3#t=206


      McConnell is also practicing the Republican party game of "do as I say and not as I do" on Graham directly. He's practicing this sort of hypocrisy because as leadership, he's desperately worried that this move will decimate the Republican Party in the midterm elections.

      There's also another reading of McConnell's statement. Viewed as a statement from leadership, there's a form of omerta or silent threat being communicated here to the general Republican Party membership: you better fall in line on the party line here because otherwise we run the risk of losing power. He's saying he's leaving it up to them individually, but in reality, as the owner of the purse strings, he's not.


      Thesis:<br /> The broadest distinction between American political parties right now seems to be that the Republican Party wants to practice fascistic forms of "power over" while the Democratic Party wants to practice more democratic forms of "power with".

  18. Aug 2022
    1. Right, it’s a problem of authority. When people don’t trust those charged with conveying the truth, they won’t accept it. And at some point, like I said, we’ll have to reconfigure our democracy. Our politicians and institutions are going to have to adjust to the new world in which the public can’t be walled off or controlled. Leaders can’t stand at the top of pyramids anymore and talk down to people. The digital revolution flattened everything. We’ve got to accept that.

      Martin Gurri holds that we need to reconfigure our democracy where the public cannot be walled off or controlled by politicians or institutions because the digital revolution flattened everything.

  19. Jul 2022
    1. It wasnot until we had completely re-sorted all our innumerable sheets ofpaper according to subjects, thus bringing together all the facts relatingto each, whatever the trade concerned, or the place or the date—andhad shuffled and reshuffled these sheets according to various tentativehypotheses—that a clear, comprehensive and verifiable theory of theworking and results of Trade Unionism emerged in our minds; tobe embodied, after further researches by way of verification, in ourIndustrial Democracy (1897).

      Beatrice Webb was using her custom note taking system in the lead up to the research that resulted in the publication of Industrial Democracy (1897).

      Is there evidence that she was practicing this note taking/database practice earlier than this?

    1. If you live in a democratic state, itmeans you have the right to criticize your government’s policies.

      Some might even say you have a duty to criticize your government's policies.

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  20. Jun 2022
    1. 18. The success of the referendum orga nized by Uber and Lyft to preserve their ex-tremely precarious model in California in 2020 illustrates the limits of an idyllic visionof direct democracy, as well as the need to reconceive a salarial status that makes it pos-sible to reconcile protection and autonomy.
    1. O sir, we should have fine times, indeed, if, to punish tyrants, it were only sufficient to assemble the people! Your arms, wherewith you could defend yourselves, are gone; and you have no longer an aristocratical, no longer a democratical spirit. Did you ever read of any revolution in a nation, brought about by the punishment of those in power, inflicted by those who had no power at all? You read of a riot act in a country which is called one of the freest in the world, where a few neighbors cannot assemble without the risk of being shot by a hired soldiery, the engines of despotism. We may see such an act in America.

      Oh the ironies of this as he was talking about a small proportion of the population at the time, a large swath of which (namely enslaved persons with no power) had no arms to protect themselves against him.

      His definition of "freemen" was painfully limiting for someone speaking about freedom in such lofty terms.

  21. May 2022
    1. We don’t know how many media outlets have been run out of existence because of brand safety technology, nor how many media outlets will never be able to monetize critical news coverage because the issues important to their communities are marked as “unsafe.”
  22. Apr 2022
    1. Researchdemonstrates that students who engage in active learning acquire a deeperunderstanding of the material, score higher on exams, and are less likely to failor drop out.

      Active learning is a pedagogical structure whereby a teacher presents a problem to a group of students and has them (usually in smaller groups) collectively work on the solutions together. By talking and arguing amongst themselves they actively learn together not only how to approach problems, but to come up with their own solutions. Teachers can then show the correct answer, discuss why it was right and explain how the alternate approaches may have gone wrong. Research indicates that this approach helps provide a deeper understanding of the materials presented this way, that students score higher on exams and are less likely to either fail or drop out of these courses.

      Active learning sounds very similar to the sorts of approaches found in flipped classrooms. Is the overlap between the two approaches the same, or are there parts of the Venn diagrams of the two that differ, and, if so, how do they differ? Which portions are more beneficial?

      Does this sort of active learning approach also help to guard against "group think" as the result of comparing solutions from various groups? How might this be applied to democracy? Would separate versions of committees that then convene to compare notes and come up with solutions improve the quality of solutions?

  23. Mar 2022
    1. Masistes, Artembáres passed: Imaeus too, the bowman brave, Sosthánes, Pharandákes, drave— And others the all-nursing wave Of Nilus to the battle gave; Came Susiskánes, warrior wild, And Pegastágon, Egypt’s child:

      Emphasis on mortal characters' strengths as Athens or those supporting Athens build support for democracy. Aeschylus may have known and fought alongside people with similar personalities, strength of individual mortals also emphasized (unlike one divine, absolute ruler in EoG).

      Further, while EoG represents the rise of good to conquer evil, The Persians shows how one bad ruler (out of hubris and greed) of an otherwise good kingdom can become an antagonist -more complex setup than EoG

    1. http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/trs/97-21/97-21.html

      A view of internet technology from 1998. It's filled with techno-utopianism, but provides some thought and admonishment against watching out for design which may have future deleterious consequences.

      It's a bit amazing how many problems he highlights as relatively easily solvable are still unsolved and largely untouched: search/search engines, academic publishing workflows, democracy, and general digital humanism.

    2. Democratic processes take time. The goal of a legislation-writing genex is not necessarily to speed the process or increase the number of bills, but to engage a wider circle of stakeholders, support thoughtful deliberation, and improve the quality of the resulting legislation.

      What are the problems here in such a democratic process online or even in a modern context?

      People who aren't actually stakeholders feel that they're stakeholders and want to control other's actions even when they don't have a stake. (eg: abortion)

      People don't have time to become properly informed about the ever-increasing group of topics and there is too much disinformation and creation of fear, uncertainty and doubt.

      Thoughtful deliberation does not happen.

      The quality of legislation has dropped instead of increased.

      Bikeshedding is too easy.

      What if instead of electing people who run, we elected people from the electorate at random? This would potentially at least nudge us to have some representation by "one of the least of these". This would provide us to pay more attention to a broader swath of society instead of the richest and most powerful. What might the long term effects of this be?

    3. Important tools are still needed for group formation and discussion within communities of tens, thousands, and millions of people. Participation in democratic political processes are appealing, but ensuring informed participation, respect for opposing views, and adequate time for deliberation will be difficult. A major research effort would help to grapple with complex issues of thousand of active participants in discussion groups. How would an electronic Robert's Rules of meetings help to keep orde r, permit caucusing of subgroups, support voting, and allow objections to be aired?

      Highlights of some important humanist problems that haven't had nearly enough work on the internet. Instead we allow rampant capitalism of certain areas without forcing companies to spend time working at the harder problems.

    4. The current mass media such as t elevision, books, and magazines are one-directional, and are produced by a centralized process. This can be positive, since respected editors can filter material to ensure consistency and high quality, but more widely accessible narrowcasting to specific audiences could enable livelier decentralized discussions. Democratic processes for presenting opposing views, caucusing within factions, and finding satisfactory compromises are productive for legislative, commercial, and scholarly pursuits.

      Social media has to some extent democratized the access to media, however there are not nearly enough processes for creating negative feedback to dampen ideas which shouldn't or wouldn't have gained footholds in a mass society.

      We need more friction in some portions of the social media space to prevent the dissemination of un-useful, negative, and destructive ideas swamping out the positive ones. The accelerative force of algorithmic feeds for the most extreme ideas in particular is one of the most caustic ideas of the last quarter of a century.

  24. Feb 2022
    1. Also, we shouldn’t underestimate the advantages of writing. In oralpresentations, we easily get away with unfounded claims. We candistract from argumentative gaps with confident gestures or drop acasual “you know what I mean” irrespective of whether we knowwhat we meant. In writing, these manoeuvres are a little too obvious.It is easy to check a statement like: “But that is what I said!” Themost important advantage of writing is that it helps us to confrontourselves when we do not understand something as well as wewould like to believe.

      In modern literate contexts, it is easier to establish doubletalk in oral contexts than it is in written contexts as the written is more easily reviewed for clarity and concreteness. Verbal ticks like "you know what I mean", "it's easy to see/show", and other versions of similar hand-waving arguments that indicate gaps in thinking and arguments are far easier to identify in writing than they are in speech where social pressure may cause the audience to agree without actually following the thread of the argument. Writing certainly allows for timeshiting, but it explicitly also expands time frames for grasping and understanding a full argument in a way not commonly seen in oral settings.

      Note that this may not be the case in primarily oral cultures which may take specific steps to mitigate these patterns.

      Link this to the anthropology example from Scott M. Lacy of the (Malian?) tribe that made group decisions by repeating a statement from the lowest to the highest and back again to ensure understanding and agreement.


      This difference in communication between oral and literate is one which leaders can take advantage of in leading their followers astray. An example is Donald Trump who actively eschewed written communication or even reading in general in favor of oral and highly emotional speech. This generally freed him from the need to make coherent and useful arguments.

  25. Dec 2021
    1. It would be just as easy (actually, rather easier) to identify things thatcan be interpreted as the first stirrings of rationalism, legality,deliberative democracy and so forth all over the world, and only thentell the story of how they coalesced into the current global system.24

      Nationalistic, racial, and cultural blinders have led us to posit broadly accepted (positive) ideas like democracy as having developed and grown out of Western ideas rather than attributing them to historical cultures and societies all over the world.

    2. The framers of the US Constitution, for example, were quiteexplicitly anti-democratic and made clear in their own publicstatements that they designed the Federal Government in largepart to head off the risk of ‘democracy’ breaking out in one ofthe former colonies (they were particularly worried aboutPennsylvania). Meanwhile, actual direct democratic decision-making had been practised regularly in various parts of Africaor Amazonia, or for that matter in Russian or French peasantassemblies, for thousands of years; see Graeber 2007b.

      To most Americans today, this in an incredibly radical statement. Worth pulling up the reference and seeing the evidence on this.

      Given the reference, this is more attributable to David Graeber.

  26. Nov 2021
    1. Striketober

      I am just realizing that I was not listening to The New York Times about the strikes spreading across the United States of America. Of course, the editors would not want to be causing this mass panic or a labour movement.

      I was learning about this from Democracy Now!

    1. But the real, and nonpartisan, lesson is this: No one—of any age, in any profession—is safe. In the age of Zoom, cellphone cameras, miniature recorders, and other forms of cheap surveillance technology, anyone’s comments can be taken out of context; anyone’s story can become a rallying cry for Twitter mobs on the left or the right. Anyone can then fall victim to a bureaucracy terrified by the sudden eruption of anger. And once one set of people loses the right to due process, so does everybody else. Not just professors but students; not just editors of elite publications but random members of the public.
  27. Oct 2021
    1. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/10/facebook-papers-democracy-election-zuckerberg/620478/

      Adrienne LaFrance outlines the reasons we need to either abandon Facebook or cause some more extreme regulation of it and how it operates.

      While she outlines the ills, she doesn't make a specific plea about the solution of the problem. There's definitely a raging fire in the theater, but no one seems to know what to do about it. We're just sitting here watching the structure burn down around us. We need clearer plans for what must be done to solve this problem.

  28. Sep 2021
    1. “From the culture’s point of view, Adler was a dead white male who had the bad luck to still be alive.”

      This is a painful burn by the writer Alex Beam.

      Perhaps worth modifying for Donald J. Trump?

      From the perspective of the American experiment and the evolution of democracy, Donald J. Trump was a dead white male who had the bad luck to still be alive."

  29. Aug 2021
    1. Fukuyama's work, which draws on both competition analysis and an assessment of threats to democracy, joins a growing body of proposals that also includes Mike Masnick's "protocols not platforms," Cory Doctorow's "adversarial interoperability," my own "Magic APIs," and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey's "algorithmic choice."

      Nice overview of work in the space for fixing monopoly in social media space the at the moment. I hadn't heard about Fukuyama or Daphne Keller's versions before.

      I'm not sure I think Dorsey's is actually a thing. I suspect it is actually vaporware from the word go.

      IndieWeb has been working slowly at the problem as well.

  30. Jul 2021
    1. Ebooks don’t have those limitations, both because of how readily new editions can be created and how simple it is to push “updates” to existing editions after the fact. Consider the experience of Philip Howard, who sat down to read a printed edition of War and Peace in 2010. Halfway through reading the brick-size tome, he purchased a 99-cent electronic edition for his Nook e-reader:As I was reading, I came across this sentence: “It was as if a light had been Nookd in a carved and painted lantern …” Thinking this was simply a glitch in the software, I ignored the intrusive word and continued reading. Some pages later I encountered the rogue word again. With my third encounter I decided to retrieve my hard cover book and find the original (well, the translated) text. For the sentence above I discovered this genuine translation: “It was as if a light had been kindled in a carved and painted lantern …”A search of this Nook version of the book confirmed it: Every instance of the word kindle had been replaced by nook, in perhaps an attempt to alter a previously made Kindle version of the book for Nook use. Here are some screenshots I took at the time:It is only a matter of time before the retroactive malleability of these forms of publishing becomes a new area of pressure and regulation for content censorship. If a book contains a passage that someone believes to be defamatory, the aggrieved person can sue over it—and receive monetary damages if they’re right. Rarely is the book’s existence itself called into question, if only because of the difficulty of putting the cat back into the bag after publishing.

      This story of find and replace has chilling future potential. What if a dictatorial government doesn't like your content. It can be all to easy to remove the digital versions and replace them whole hog for "approved" ones.

      Where does democracy live in such a world? Consider similar instances when the Trump administration forced the disappearance of government websites and data.

  31. Jun 2021
    1. One thing that should be learned from the bitter lesson is the great power of general purpose methods, of methods that continue to scale with increased computation even as the available computation becomes very great. The two methods that seem to scale arbitrarily in this way are search and learning

      This is a big lesson. As a field, we still have not thoroughly learned it, as we are continuing to make the same kind of mistakes. To see this, and to effectively resist it, we have to understand the appeal of these mistakes. We have to learn the bitter lesson that building in how we think we think does not work in the long run. The bitter lesson is based on the historical observations that 1) AI researchers have often tried to build knowledge into their agents, 2) this always helps in the short term, and is personally satisfying to the researcher, but 3) in the long run it plateaus and even inhibits further progress, and 4) breakthrough progress eventually arrives by an opposing approach based on scaling computation by search and learning. The eventual success is tinged with bitterness, and often incompletely digested, because it is success over a favored, human-centric approach.

  32. May 2021
  33. Mar 2021
    1. There's a reasonably good overview of some ideas about fixing the harms social media is doing to democracy here and it's well framed by history.

      Much of it appears to be a synopsis from the perspective of one who's only managed to attend Pariser and Stround's recent Civic Signals/New_Public Festival.

      There could have been some touches of other research in the social space including those in the Activity Streams and IndieWeb spaces to provide some alternate viewpoints.

    2. Tang has sponsored the use of software called Polis, invented in Seattle. This is a platform that lets people make tweet-like, 140-character statements, and lets others vote on them. There is no “reply” function, and thus no trolling or personal attacks. As statements are made, the system identifies those that generate the most agreement among different groups. Instead of favoring outrageous or shocking views, the Polis algorithm highlights consensus. Polis is often used to produce recommendations for government action.

      An example of social media for proactive government action.

    3. The United States has no real answer to these challenges, and no wonder: We don’t have an internet based on our democratic values of openness, accountability, and respect for human rights. An online system controlled by a tiny number of secretive companies in Silicon Valley is not democratic but rather oligopolistic, even oligarchic.

      Again, a piece that nudges me to thing that a local-based IndieWeb provider/solution would be a good one. Either co-op based, journalism-based, or library-based.

    1. In this respect, we join Fitzpatrick (2011) in exploring “the extent to which the means of media production and distribution are undergoing a process of radical democratization in the Web 2.0 era, and a desire to test the limits of that democratization”

      Something about this is reminiscent of WordPress' mission to democratize publishing. We can also compare it to Facebook whose (stated) mission is to connect people, while it's actual mission is to make money by seemingly radicalizing people to the extremes of our political spectrum.

      This highlights the fact that while many may look at content moderation on platforms like Facebook as removing their voices or deplatforming them in the case of people like Donald J. Trump or Alex Jones as an anti-democratic move. In fact it is not. Because of Facebooks active move to accelerate extreme ideas by pushing them algorithmically, they are actively be un-democratic. Democratic behavior on Facebook would look like one voice, one account and reach only commensurate with that person's standing in real life. Instead, the algorithmic timeline gives far outsized influence and reach to some of the most extreme voices on the platform. This is patently un-democratic.

  34. Feb 2021
    1. Elections are only democratic if they are truly free and fair. This requires the freedom to advocate, associate, contest, and campaign.

      what makes a true democracy

    2. in which citizens trust one another and interact as political equals. In sustainable democracies, institutions of good governance--such as impartial judicial systems and vigorous audit agencies--induce, enforce, and reward civic behavior

      path to genuine democracy

    3. they must listen to their citizens' voices, engage their participation, tolerate their protests, protect theirfreedoms, and respond to their needs

      path from predation to democracy

    4. it must have more than regular, multiparty elections under a civilian constitutional order

      what is a genuine democracy

    5. lections are only democratic if they are truly free and fair.

      What does genuine democracy look like

    1. For example, the United Nations Gender Inequality Index combines several measures related to women’s progress toward equality. One of the measures used in the GII is “representation of women in parliament”. Two countries in the world have laws mandating gender representation in their parliaments: China and Pakistan. As a result these two countries perform far better in the index than countries that are similar in all other ways. Is this fair? It doesn’t really matter, because it is confusing to anyone who doesn’t know about this factor. The GII and similar indices should always be used with careful analysis to ensure their underlying variables don’t swing the index in unexpected ways.

      Given how the US Senate is composed and elected, why don't we mandate one male and one female from each state to better balance our representation.

      How might we fairly do this to ensure better ethnic and socio-economic representation as well?

  35. Jan 2021
  36. trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov
    1. consent of the governed

      What is the word that describes "the principle that just government required the consent of the governed..?"

      • Democracy is only mentioned 12 times in this document 9 of which are in a list of student prompts written to question the legitimacy of democracy as an American principle.
      • There are 46 mentions of Republic.
      • Only 2 mentions of Federalism (so much for the old Republican party)
    1. But brand safety requires us to do two things: 1.) keep our ads away from hate speech and 2.) fund our news ecosystem. When you know your vendors are failing at both, can you afford to look away?
  37. Dec 2020
    1. There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”

      Not just in the US but increasingly seen around the world as part of the anti-intellectualism associated with the Wokeness.

  38. Nov 2020
    1. Facebook Inc. FB 0.73% is demanding that a New York University research project cease collecting data about its political-ad-targeting practices, setting up a fight with academics seeking to study the platform without the company’s permission. The dispute involves the NYU Ad Observatory, a project launched last month by the university’s engineering school that has recruited more than 6,500 volunteers to use a specially designed browser extension to collect data about the political ads Facebook shows them.

      I haven't seen a reference to it in any of the stories I've seen about Facebook over the past decade, but at it's root, Facebook is creating a Potemkin village for each individual user of their service.

      Not being able to compare my Potemkin Village to the possibly completely different version you see makes it incredibly hard for all of us to live in the same world.

      It's been said that on the internet, no one knows you're a dog, but this is even worse: you probably have slipped so far, you're not able to be sure what world you're actually living in.

    1. Between 1950 and 1973 GDP doubled or more. This prosperity was broadly shared, with consistent growth in living standards for rich and poor alike and the emergence of a broad middle class.
  39. Oct 2020
    1. However the political crisis within the state apparatus develops over the next month, American democracy is at death’s door. The serendipitous accident of the White House pandemic cannot restore health to a social and political system that is rotten to the core.
    1. Abandoning democracy and social solidarity, the Californian Ideology dreams of a digital nirvana inhabited solely by liberal psychopaths.

      And nearly twenty years later, isn't that roughly what we've got? (aside from the digital nirvana, which didn't work out so well.)

    1. The Twenty-Six Words that Created the Internet is Jeff Kosseff’s definitive history and analysis of the current fight over Section 230, the fight over who will be held responsible to forbid speech. In it, Kosseff explains how debate over intermediary liability, as this issue is called, stretches back to a 1950s court fight, Smith v. California, about whether an L.A. bookseller should have been responsible for knowing the content of every volume on his shelves.

      For me this is the probably the key idea. Facebook doesn't need to be responsible for everything that their users post, but when they cross the line into actively algorithmically promoting and pushing that content into their users' feeds for active consumption, then they do have a responsibility for that content.

      By analogy image the trusted local bookstore mentioned. If there are millions of books there and the user has choice when they walk in to make their selection in some logical manner. But if the bookseller has the secret ability to consistently walk up to children and put porn into their hands or actively herding them into the adult sections to force that exposure on them (and they have the ability to do it without anyone else realizing it), then that is the problem. Society at large would further think that this is even more reprehensible if they realized that local governments or political parties had the ability to pay the bookseller to do this activity.

      In case the reader isn't following the analogy, this is exactly what some social platforms like Facebook are allowing our politicans to do. They're taking payment from politicans to actively lie, tell untruths, and create fear in a highly targeted manner without the rest of society to see or hear those messages. Some of these sorts of messages are of the type that if they were picked up on an open microphone and broadcast outside of the private group they were intended for would have been a career ending event.

      Without this, then we're actively stifling conversation in the public sphere and actively empowering the fringes. This sort of active targeted fringecasting is preventing social cohesion, consensus, and comprimise and instead pulling us apart.

      Perhaps the answer for Facebook is to allow them to take the political ad money for these niche ads and then not just cast to the small niche audience, but to force them to broadcast them to everyone on the platform instead? Then we could all see who our politicians really are?

    1. We need citizens to be equipped to navigate the world around us. Because good journalism is great for democracy but a citizenry equipped to meet the challenges of democracy is necessary for democracy.
    2. On the right — that’s what democracy looks like. At City Bureau we believe the future of journalism looks more like this. It’s made of networks, it’s collaborative, it practices radical transparency and it equips people to be makers.

      This chart is very reminiscent of a similar chart I saw just this morning that was looking at the differences between unicorns and zebras within an economic framing.

    1. If everyone would subscribe to such a system and create good metadata for the purposes of describing their goods, services and information, it would be a trivial matter to search the Internet for highly qualified, context-sensitive results: a fan could find all the downloadable music in a given genre, a manufacturer could efficiently discover suppliers, travelers could easily choose a hotel room for an upcoming trip. A world of exhaustive, reliable metadata would be a utopia. It's also a pipe-dream, founded on self-delusion, nerd hubris and hysterically inflated market opportunities.

      Apparently this also now applies to politics and democracy too.

    1. What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.

      What if, in fact, we've only just found a local maximum? What if in the changing landscape there are other places we could potentially get to competitively that supply greater maxima? And possibly worse, what if we need to lose value to get from here to unlock even more value there?

  40. Sep 2020
    1. while a Minister’s view is always slanted on matters that affect his own interests, so that instead of promoting deserving persons he will fill the places with his own creatures, and will try to strengthen his own position by the number of persons whom he makes dependent on his fortunes;

      Here, we see a distrust of Democratic systems, commoners, and burgher-capitalism.

      The thread of logic is that people from lower classes - coming from positions of less power and wealth - are more susceptible to corruption as they attempt to shore up their own interests by surrounding themselves with flunkies and sycophants.

      The nobility, on the other hand, need no such false assurances.

  41. Aug 2020
    1. It's wishful thinking to believe that a group of people competing to advance their agendas will be universally pleased with any hierarchy of knowledge. The best that we can hope for is a detente in which everyone is equally miserable.

      The fate of true democracies.

  42. Jul 2020
  43. Jun 2020
  44. May 2020
  45. Apr 2020
    1. The tyranny of the majority (or tyranny of the masses) is an inherent weakness to majority rule in which the majority of an electorate pursues exclusively its own interests at the expense of those in the minority. This results in oppression of minority groups comparable to that of a tyrant or despot
    1. Direct democracy was not what the framers of the United States Constitution envisioned for the nation. They saw a danger in tyranny of the majority. As a result, they advocated a representative democracy in the form of a constitutional republic over a direct democracy. For example, James Madison, in Federalist No. 10, advocates a constitutional republic over direct democracy precisely to protect the individual from the will of the majority
    2. In the New England region of the United States, towns in states such as Vermont decide local affairs through the direct democratic process of the town meeting.[22] This is the oldest form of direct democracy in the United States, and predates the founding of the country by at least a century.
  46. Feb 2020
    1. an O’Byrne,assistant professor of education at the College of Charleston, wrote, “Power and money ultimately influence decisions made by democratic bodies. With growing unrest,citizens can use social media and current/new digital tools to make themselves heard. Ultimately this will be pushed back again by existing powerholders and nothing may ultimately change. The existing powerholders will continue to exert their influence, and citizens will be left to continue to voice their opinions by shouting into the cyberverse.”

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    1. socialists do not support capitalism, meaning they want workers to control the means of production

      Workers controlling the means of production sounds like co-operative industries. This paradigm is not antithetical to 'capitalism' in the sense that there is still private ownership of the means of production. I disagree with the statement that democratic socialists do not support capitalism.

      A good debate on this topic here - https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/323/are-worker-cooperatives-socialist-capitalist-or-their-own-category

  47. Jan 2020
    1. power of the people is not only limited to the right of vote, but it extends further and provides us the right to participate in a democratic system by observing, suggesting and discussing, contemplating, questioning, negotiating and dissenting its system or function in various circumstances
  48. Dec 2019
    1. Madison’s design has proved durable. But what would happen to American democracy if, one day in the early 21st century, a technology appeared that—over the course of a decade—changed several fundamental parameters of social and political life? What if this technology greatly increased the amount of “mutual animosity” and the speed at which outrage spread? Might we witness the political equivalent of buildings collapsing, birds falling from the sky, and the Earth moving closer to the sun?

      Jonathan Haidt, you might have noticed, is a scholar that I admire very much. In this piece, his colleague Tobias Rose-Stockwell and he ask the following questions: Is social media a threat to our democracy? Let's read the following article together and think about their question together.

  49. Nov 2019
  50. Oct 2019
  51. Jun 2019
    1. In November last year, Gordon Brown suggested that an assembly might resolve the Brexit crisis. Last month, Damon Albarn, Rowan Williams and a number of other public figures wrote an open letter to the Guardian in support, and the idea now has this newspaper’s backing.

      Further, a group of Labour MPs tabled amendments to the Brexit deal that included a Citizens' Assembly on Brexit, and a host of other campaigning and civil society organisations have started looking at this as a potential solution. Devolved administrations such as the Scottish government are also increasingly interested in this model of deliberative democracy

  52. May 2019
    1. To win a majority in the country, Labour needs to win seats in the parts of the UK that backed leave. There is no route to 10 Downing Street that doesn’t run through areas that voted heavily to leave and heavily to remain.

      The difference between Labour and the Lib Dems/Brexit Party is that Labour is the only party that can realistically aim for government at the next GE. Given the current state of British politics, this means bridging the Brexit divide.

    2. I am yet to meet more than a handful of people who have changed their minds.

      If People's Vote was intended to change people's minds on Brexit, then there is no doubt that they failed disastrously by repeating the same mistakes on the 2016 Remain campaign. Labour can only succeed if it commits to taking a different, more democratic approach to Brexit

    3. Labour is urged to pick a side in this ongoing tug-of-war. That is a dead end for the party and for a very divided country.

      Labour's split in the 2016 referendum between Leave and Remain mirrors the UK's own split: most constituencies where Remain support was the highest voted Labour in the 2015 general elections, and yet, seven out of ten Labour MPs represent constituencies that voted Leave.

  53. Feb 2019
    1. Is the freedom of the individual served by neoliberalism? Centrality of the state for this freedom, which NL denies. “neoliberal thinkers deliberately sustain the fiction that ‘the market economy’ is a natural and spontaneous order that must be placed beyond politics … The question of how authority can be something other than domination and private power shaped the ideas and action of those who built the tradition of constitutional democracy in western societies from the 16th to the 20th centuries … basic needs were those that had to be met before the individual could practically enact the status of a free subject or person. It was such needs provision that made it possible for individuals to be both personally secure and to enjoy an equality of opportunity to develop as individuals free to discover their talents and gifts … the representation of market society as a spontaneous order is pitched to the punters while, within the tent of the doctrine’s initiates, it is fully understood that the state has to be both a strong state, and to be re-engineered in order to impose neoliberal institutional design.” YeatmanFreedom.pdf
    1. “Constitutional patriotism”—as understood by those who originally put forward the idea and as understood in this essay—designates the idea that political attachment ought to center on the norms, the values and, more indirectly, the procedures of a liberal democratic constitution. Put differently, political allegiance is owed primarily neither to a national culture, as proponents of liberal nationalism have claimed, nor to “the worldwide community of human beings,” as, for instance, Martha Nussbaum’s conception of cosmopolitanism has it. Constitutional patriotism offers a vision distinct from both nationalism and cosmopolitanism, but also from republican patriotism as traditionally understood in, broadly speaking, the history of Euro-American political thought.” (Müller)

      KCD2M33B

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    1. Agreeing that the Condorcet criterion is desirable is equivalent to saying that moderate candidates should always win.

      Yes, candidates who are moderate relative to the voters should always win.

      The goal of an election is to find the candidate who best represents the electorate. If the electorate is left-wing on average, the winner should be too. If the electorate is "strong on both personal freedoms and economic freedoms", then the winner should be too.

      Anything else is undemocratic.

  54. Jan 2019
  55. Nov 2018
    1. Entscheidend ist, dass sie Herren des Verfahrens bleiben - und eine Vision für das neue Maschinenzeitalter entwickeln.

      Es sieht für mich nicht eigentlich so aus als wären wir jemals die "Herren des Verfahrens" gewesen. Und auch darum geht es ja bei Marx. Denke ich.

  56. Aug 2018
    1. 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.

    2. 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?

    1. 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.

    2. 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.

    3. 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.

    1. 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.

  57. Jun 2018
    1. 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.
  58. Apr 2018
    1. 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.”
  59. Nov 2017
  60. Oct 2017
    1. 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.

    1. 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.

    1. 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.

    1. 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.

      ...

      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.”

  61. Sep 2017
    1. 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?

  62. Jul 2017
    1. 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.

    1. “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

    1. 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.