[liberationtech] Democracy (was: Re: Would you like to put the list under permanent moderation?

Mon Jan 13 01:25:27 CET 2020

I think that in the 1920's when (I think) polling was invented it was
thought that the politicians would use it to guide their actions... Of
course that's not the way it came out.

Civil society can use "polling" in various ways but it still won't / can't
substitute for political will — quality and quantity — to fight
well-resourced efforts. (I'd substitute civic intelligence for political
will because to me "will" is just one element of intelligence. )

—  Doug

On Sun, Jan 12, 2020 at 3:15 PM Andrés Leopoldo Pacheco Sanfuentes <
alps6085 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Polling? Really? Well, that’s the basis of marketing, and there’s a whole
> “science” about “modulating the masses” that makes “polling” a moot
> indicator of “the will of the people!”
>
> References:
>
> The good friendly well-meaning wonderful Noam Chomsky said somewhere about
> the power of “public opinion,” but of course he didn’t say anything about
> the “modulation” of such “public opinion” by the marketing empire, although
> he most likely read Gilles Deleuze’s brilliant and SUCCINCT (an incredible
> feat for a french theorist) essay, “Postsctipt on The Societies of Control”
> - maybe that’s it- it wasn’t an essay just a “postscript!”
>
>
> http://home.lu.lv/~ruben/Deleuze%20-%20Postscript%20On%20The%20Societies%20Of%20Control.pdf
>
> Regards / Saludos / Grato
>
> Andrés Leopoldo Pacheco Sanfuentes
>
> On Jan 12, 2020, at 1:07 PM, Rand Strauss <rand at peoplecount.org> wrote:
>
> I did reject any *empirical determination*.  But I didn’t mean to.  I
> reject the *current* empirical determinations, judging legislative
> outcomes vs polled desires.  Better (and more expensive) would be a
> comparison of legislative outcomes to the desires of people involved in
> deliberative democracy exercises.  But for this to work, the participants
> would also have to know that their desires at the end of the exercises
> would be taken as indicative of the nation’s- they’d need to feel
> responsible for shaping their future.
>
> This might be a *good metric for how democratic a political system is*-
> polling people to ask them:  How much do your desires guide national
> legislation? I suspect it’s similar in America’s to our 20% approval rating
> of Congress, a bit high due to people’s lack of being well informed- that
> is, these people are happier.  That suggests another metric: How much
> responsibility do you have to guide political decisions that decide your
> country’s future?  In particular, how much responsibility daily, weekly or
> monthly?
>
> *Mostly I reject limiting the conversation to existing political systems*.
> While this is valuable basic work, I believe there are no good ones yet, so
> this limit cuts off possibilities.  People seem very reluctant to consider
> changes or additions.  They quickly become negative, like on this list
> someone said, "But who’ll moderate the moderator?" instead of asking, "How
> can we ensure moderation isn’t biased?"
>
> As someone else said, the existing political systems with better results
> are smaller and have amore homogeneous citizenry. This lessens the
> diversity of viewpoint allowing a poor political system to work well
> enough.  It’d be like measuring the quality of road maintenance systems and
> ranking highly the country that lives is a completely flat region.
>
>
> I propose *augmenting America’s political system* with a communication
> system where voters have *two new political responsibilities*, with
> respect to accountability.  If you read the links I sent
> <https://blog.peoplecount.org/accountability/what-is-political-accountability/> (and
> if so, I don’t know- you’re welcome to send me feedback or
> acknowledgement), you know that political accountability is basically a
> relationship where the voters tell politicians what to do and then receive
> and judge their reports.  To act together, voters must also communicate to
> each other what they want and their judgements.  Atop this, much, much more
> is possible, but this would create the first democratic political system
> that actually has a sufficient foundation to work.
>
> The crux of this system is that i*t gives citizens ongoing responsibility*
> with respect to government- as much or as little as they want.  While it
> isn’t entirely equitable, favoring people more competent at these tasks and
> those with more time, I believe it *can* provide the peaceful revolution
> in governance that humanity so desperately needs.
>
> I could go on about how this solves almost every current political
> problem, or leads to its solution, but the above is probably already too
> much…  (There’s plenty written about this- I seem to lack the ability to
> put it into a book, though…)
> -r
>
>
> On Jan 12, 2020, at 1:23 AM, David Stodolsky <dss at socialinformatics.org>
> wrote:
>
>
>
> On 12 Jan 2020, at 02:25, Rand Strauss <Rand at PeopleCount.org> wrote:
>
> Direct democracy and generally direct action assumes an interaction
> between an individual and a state of the world / physical object. So, the
> above definition is limited to a republican form of governance. It isn’t
> possible to compare two things, if the definitional frame eliminates one
> from consideration.
>
>
> We’re not comparing "two things."  We’re looking at how democratic current
> political systems are.  Republics aim to be democratic as well as
> constitutional.  They can be evaluated along both axes.  They can be
> evaluated along other axes as well as others, such as how free they are, or
> how equitable they are, though these aren’t part of the explicit definition
> of "republic"…
> -r
>
>
> We are not looking at how democratic systems are. You specifically
> rejected any empirical determination and you reject the theoretical
> distinction I presented. My question is how to operationalize a concept
> like representation within a republican form of government.
>
>
> dss
>
> David Stodolsky, PhD                   Institute for Social Informatics
> Tornskadestien 2, st. th., DK-2400 Copenhagen NV, Denmark
> dss at socialinformatics.org          Tel./Signal: +45 3095 4070
>
>
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-- 
Douglas Schuler
douglas at publicsphereproject.org
Twitter: @doug_schuler

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