liberals believe they're right and so they need to convince you of that. nothing gets in the way of their arguments, not even a failure to sway you.
independents are the poor saps in the middle, hoping the radicals will stop screaming at each other enough so we can all have a productive conversation.
I am regularly confronted with the mutual disclosure argument...: In a world of ubiquitous surveillance, you'll know all about me, but I will also know all about you. The government will be watching us, but we'll also be watching the government...Please read the whole thing - and at the bottom, click through to Brin's rebuttal, in which he does not address Schneier's central idea (power) and does write rather snarkily, degrading his own position.This ... could easily be mistaken for a way out of the problem of technology's continuing erosion of privacy. Except it doesn't work, because it ignores the crucial dissimilarity of power.
...this mechanism fails utterly if you and I have different power levels to begin with.
An example will make this clearer. You're stopped by a police officer, who demands to see identification. Divulging your identity will give the officer enormous power over you: He or she can search police databases using the information on your ID; he or she can create a police record attached to your name; he or she can put you on this or that secret terrorist watch list. Asking to see the officer's ID in return gives you no comparable power over him or her...
Another example: When your doctor says "take off your clothes," it makes no sense for you to say, "You first, doc." The two of you are not engaging in an interaction of equals...
For those of us making wine "up north", the choices are tough: buy grapes trucked across country, buy juice or use grapes that grow in these climates.
The last choice can yield interesting wines, though they are in a different class than the Merlots, Cabernets, Zinfandels, etc.
However, much research is being done to enable growing grapes more of the latter types, further north. (Aside from the effects of global climate change. :/)
And as it turns out, there's a new vineyard just down the road from me - Lincoln Peak Vineyard - that's using a new and very promising grape called Marquette.
At least that's the one that strikes my fancy; click through to find out more about Marquette and several others.
Very interesting indeed...
There is no taking-part in the 'Great Debate' of Western civilisation... without some familiarity with the, remarkably few, thinkers in whose language and idiom the talk is conducted...There's nothing new in making condensed versions of the classics. What is different here is that these are neither the opinion of one person nor mere extracts. Instead, each has begun with a very wide analysis of quotations, citations and, especially, past examination papers (including UK A-Levels back to 1976), to establish which passages, which phrases, which lines, which words and which ideas, are generally considered the most important...
(Who knew you could do synomym searches?!)
Card says, summarizing from the book:
Crowds are wisest when these conditions are met:And then, arguably, turns to using the book, and those concepts, to show the it really was the best thing that George Bush was elected, that the Iraq war was a success (even decries "the CIA's intransigent rejection of President Bush's war plan in Iraq") and why the Democrats are such miserable, elitist, two-faced failures.1. Diversity of opinion. ("Each person should have some private information, even if it's just an eccentric interpretation of the known facts.")
2. Independence. ("People's opinions are not determined by the opinions of those around them.")
3. Decentralization. ("People are able to specialize and draw on local knowledge.")
4. Aggregation. ("Some mechanism exists for turning private judgments into a collective decision.")
But it's so easy to see how selective and self-serving the rhetoric is.
Think just a bit about the four points above, and you see that:
1) We have little "Diversity of opinion": There's the right-wingers, the left-wingers and the poor slobs in the middle who got the sales pitch of the millenium. And in the Neocon world, everyone's "on message" or they visit the woodshed til they get on message; quite scary really - but terribly sucessful, if measured in the acquisition, expansion and use of power.
2. We have little Independence: People's opinions were determined by the opinions of those around them; both in the sales pitch and in the endless hand-wringing about "electability".
3. Decentralization. "People are able to specialize and draw on local knowledge."? Huh? We have a virtually homogenized culture - and a presidential election is the epitome of that.
4. Aggregation: Sure, we've got voting, but among the many indications of fraud, various flavors of disenfranchising activities, the utter lack of any way to verify much of the voting (e-voting and others), ignoring the non "battleground" states, low percentage turnout... we're left with rather little to crow about.
But back to the title for a moment: "Does Democracy Really Work?"
It can - but like anything else, it can fail too. It can be twisted, and we're seeing an awful lot of that lately.
BY MARK BROWN SUN-TIMES COLUMNISTIt all sounds so reasonable doesn't it? I mean, maybe we just missed something right? We're not perfect and Bush really isn't the devil, huh?Maybe you're like me and have opposed the Iraq war since before the shooting started -- not to the point of joining any peace protests, but at least letting people know where you stood...
But after watching Sunday's election in Iraq and seeing the first clear sign that freedom really may mean something to the Iraqi people, you have to be asking yourself: What if it turns out Bush was right, and we were wrong?...
For now, though, I think we have to cut the president some slack about a timetable for his exit strategy.Ah, yes - I see the point now; seems to me like just another of the "but we're being oh so reasonable" right-wing attacks on the middle.If it turns out Bush was right all along, this is going to require some serious penance.
Maybe I'd have to vote Republican in 2008.
Sun Tzsu said the best way to win a battle is to not have to fight it. If you can get the left and middle to keep fighting themselves, you can keep focusing on your agenda of remaking the world in the image of right, eh?
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