Dissent Is the Health of the Democratic State - "We live in big, complex societies, which means we are thoroughly interdependent on each other, and that we will naturally have different ideas about how our life in common should go, and will have divergent interests. This means that politics we shall always have with us. It also means that political problems are largely ones about designing and reforming the institutions which shape how we interact with each other..." (
via)
[more inside]
posted by kliuless
on Mar 6, 2013 -
9 comments
David Graeber profile:
Meet the anthropologist, activist [
1,
2]
, and anarchist who helped transform a hapless rally into a global protest movement... " 'Most people don't think anarchism is a bad idea. They think it's insane,' says Graeber. 'Yeah, sure
it would be great not to have prisons and police and hierarchical structures of authority, but everybody would just start killing each other. That wouldn't work, right?' Graeber's father, however, had
seen it work."
posted by kliuless
on Nov 27, 2011 -
70 comments
Anger, Politics and the Wisdom of Uncertainty - "If there's somebody or even some institution to blame, it turns out people are much more likely to get angry... anger tends to inspire individuals to engage in more political activities than they would otherwise... Without someone to blame, respondents mostly just grow fearful and anxious... A particular danger of anger seems to be closed-mindedness. Research finds that when citizens get angry, they close themselves off to alternative views and redouble their sense of conviction in their existing views. Fear and anxiety, on the other hand, seem to promote openness to alternative viewpoints and a willingness to compromise." (
via)
[more inside]
posted by kliuless
on May 18, 2011 -
18 comments
Prelude to Federation - Like a neocolonial
SEZ (or
TAZ)
Paul Romer,
not to be confused with
David,
posits "less developed countries contract with capitalist nations to set up Hong Kong's for them... that we rethink sovereignty (respect borders, but maybe import administrative control); rethink citizenship (support residency, but maybe import voice in political affairs); and rethink scale (instead of focusing on nations, focus on cities—on city states like Hong Kong and Singapore)." cf.
neocameralism [
1,
2,
3]
[more inside]
posted by kliuless
on May 21, 2009 -
16 comments
Murder Update: "Syria's Lebanese allies are trying to undermine the Hariri investigation from within, and are expected to escalate their efforts very soon, maybe even
this week."
posted by kliuless
on Nov 21, 2006 -
8 comments
The wisdom of crowds and
the miracle of aggregation, arguably, are the reasons why
markets and
democracy work as well as they do. As
New Yorker James Surowiecki explains in his
new book, "consider the show
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. When a contestant on the show is stumped by a question, he has a couple of choices in asking for help: the audience or someone he's designated as an expert. The experts do a reasonable job: They get the answer right 65% of the time. But the audience is close to perfect: It gets the answer right 91% of the time, even though it's made up of people who have nothing better to do than sit in a TV studio and watch Regis Philbin."
The new, new tipping point?
posted by kliuless
on May 25, 2004 -
25 comments
