Searching for "democracy"

Portugal’s Carnation Revolution

https://mondediplo.com/2004/04/15mozambique

Otelo Saraiva de Carvalho — the leader of Portugal’s Carnation Revolution, which toppled the Estado Novo dictatorship of Antonio de Oliveira Salazar in April 1974 — died last week aged 84. Born in Mozambique, Saraiva de Carvalho negotiated its independence a few months after the revolution, as well as those of Angola and Guinea-Bissau. As an ally of the most leftwing faction of the Armed Forces Movement (MFA), he found himself increasingly marginalised as Portugal became a European democracy.

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more on history in this iMS blog
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fluctuations in social media

WhatsApp loses millions of users after terms update from r/worldnews

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/jan/24/whatsapp-loses-millions-of-users-after-terms-update

A poorly explained update to its terms of service has pushed WhatsApp users to adopt alternative services such as Signal and Telegram in their millions.

Apps like Signal, Telegram, Wickr, and WhatsApp offer privacy features ranging from end-to-end encrypted data transfer to ‘self-destructing messages’.”

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Fast-Growing Alternative To Facebook And Twitter Finds Post-Trump Surge ‘Messy’

https://www.npr.org/2021/01/22/958877682/fast-growing-alternative-to-facebook-twitter-finds-right-wing-surge-messy

MeWe markets itself as privacy forward. It doesn’t harness users’ data to sell ads or decide what content to show them. My note: but has to charge somehow, so, differently from FB Messenger, one needs to pay, in order to do audio call in MeWe.

MeWe’s Weinstein resists the comparison to Parler or Gab, which tout themselves as free-speech sites. For one thing, he says, MeWe is serious about putting limits on what people can say.

The tech website OneZero uncovered right-wing militia groups on MeWe as well as a “Stop the Steal” group that discussed shooting people. The company removed the groups after OneZero flagged them.

“I think we all still treat social media companies like they’re these inexpensive startups, but maybe they need to be treated more like starting an airplane company or a company that makes cars,” said Megan Squire, a professor at Elon University who studies online extremists. “You’ve got to think about seat belts.”

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The Post-Pandemic Liberal Arts College

To RSVP ahead of time, or to jump straight in at 2 pm ET this Thursday, click here:
https://shindig.com/login/event/volkbenedix

the topic of liberal education, in the company of two great advocates.  On Thursday, January 28h, from 2-3 pm ET, we’ll be joined by professors Beth Benedix and Steven Volk, authors of the new book The Post-Pandemic Liberal Arts College: A Manifesto for Reinvention (publisherour bookstore).

Beth Benedix teaches literature and religious studies at DePauw University. There she founded and directs The Castle, a nonprofit organization that partners with local public schools to build a culture of arts-integrated project-based learning, and TransformEdu, a consulting business that works with college educators to develop holistic, intentional and collaborative practices to energize the classroom. ​

Beth has published: Reluctant Theologians:  Kafka, Celan, Jabes; Subverting Scriptures:  Critical Reflections on the Uses of the Bible; Ghost Writer (A Story About Telling a Holocaust Story). She is working on a documentary film project about public education with film-makers Joel Fendelman and James Chase Sanchez.

She completed her B.A, M.A and Ph.D at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

Steve Volk is Professor of History Emeritus at Oberlin College where he taught Latin American History and Museum Studies between 1986-2016. He founded the Center for Teaching Innovation and Excellence (CTIE), Oberlin’s teaching and learning center, in 2007 and served as its director until retiring in July 2018. He was named Outstanding U.S. Baccalaureate Colleges Professor of the Year by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Center for the Advancement and Support of Education (CASE) in 2011. In 2012, he was named a Great Lake College Association Teagle Peadagogy Fellow. In 2003 he received the Nancy Lyman Roelker Mentorship Award from the American Historical Association, and was recognized for his teaching leadership by the Northeast Ohio Council on Higher Education. In 2001 he was commended by the Government of Chile for “his contributions in helping to restore democracy” in that country.

He blogs at https://steven-volk.blog/.

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The controversy over left-wing populism

The controversy over left-wing populism

by Chantal Mouffe: https://mondediplo.com/2020/05/14populism

recent book Le siècle du populisme (‘The Century of Populism’) (1), Pierre Rosanvallon

“populism consists in opposing a ‘pure people’ to a ‘corrupt elite’ and conceiving of politics as an immediate expression of the ‘general will’ (2) of the people.”

“There are only populisms, which explains why the notion produces so many interpretations and contradictory definitions.”

The left’s populist strategy appears particularly pertinent in the context of an exit out from the Covid-19 crisis which has been touted as a prelude for building a new social contract. This time, unlike in the 2008 crisis, a space could open up for the clash of opposing projects. A mere return to business as usual seems unlikely and the state will probably play a role that is both central and more prominent. We may witness the arrival of a ‘state capitalism’ that uses public authorities to rebuild the economy and restore the power of capital. It could take more or less authoritarian forms depending on the political forces at its helm. This scenario would signal either the victory of right-wing populist forces or neoliberalism’s defenders last-ditch attempt to ensure the survival of their model.

contrary to what Rosanvallon argues, far from threatening democracy, today left-wing populism is the best strategy if we want to orient the forces resisting a post-democratic, neoliberal order in an egalitarian direction.

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more on populism in this IMS blog
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Chief Disinformation Officer

“Trying to debunk misinformation after it has spread is like shutting the barn door after the horse has bolted. By pre-bunking, we aim to stop the spread of fake news in the first place,” said Dr Sander van der Linden, Director of the Cambridge Social Decision-Making lab and senior author of the new study.Game combats political misinformation by letting players undermine democracy: A short online game in which players are recruited as a “Chief Disinformation Officer” and use tactics like trolling to sabotage elections in a peaceful town has shown to reduce susceptibility to political misinformation from r/science

https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/game-combats-political-misinformation-by-letting-players-undermine-democracy

Game combats political misinformation by letting players undermine democracy

The free-to-play Harmony Square is released to the public today, along with a study on its effectiveness published in the Harvard Misinformation Review

It has been created by University of Cambridge psychologists with support from the US Department of State’s Global Engagement Center and Department of Homeland Security Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).

 

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more on disinformation in this IMS blog
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Economist Jeffrey Sachs and US post-election

https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/economist-jeffrey-sachs-on-the-u-s-after-the-election-a-18b6cc82-8db3-48e9-a55e-85a87c042b0d

Jeffrey Sachs was once a magnet for criticism over the market-based shock therapy he prescribed for Eastern Europe. Today, he is calling for the United States to move more in the direction of a social democracy, with Germany as a role model.

The man who was once the godfather of the birth of capitalism in Eastern Europe is now working to curb the influence of the free market in the United States. Sachs even endorsed self-proclaimed “socialist” Bernie Sanders for president.

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The Deconstruction of Literature

Hirsch, D. (1991). The deconstruction of literature : criticism after Auschwitz . Brown University Press.

https://mnpals-scs.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/permalink/01MNPALS_SCS/qoo6di/alma990010901510104318

Basement PN98.D43 H57 1991

p. 165 Anti-humanism at the American University

p. 169 Marxism, humanism, and literature in the university

Marx was a student if economic and political forces who believed he was conducting scientific inquiries into social political and economic structures; yes his works, students complain, are not taught at all in the Brown economics and political science departments. Students committed to post modern ways of thinking discover conspiracy in this phenomenon, but it is more likely that the omission is owning to the fact that professional economists do not respect marks as an economist. Those who pursue the study of economics essay science do not consider Marxist economic theories sufficiently scientific, and on the basis of what Dusty a risk of done to the economics of the Soviet union in the peoples Republic of China, which claim to be Marxist states, who can blame the process for being skeptical?

A similar situation exists with regard to Freud. Just as marks is very little taught in political science or economic departments, sort throat is not crowded these days in Department of psychology or psychiatry, and for similar reasons. Though what Freud dead in his own time may have passed for science and though he may have considered himself a scientist, he is not a scientist at all by contemporary standards. If Marxist economics has not produced utopias in Marxist states, so, by the same token, Freudian techniques of analysis have not consistently demonstrated the power to cure the more serious ( or even the most trivial) psychological disorders.

p. 170 If Marxist economics is no longer perceived is a tool that can be used to help solve economic problems, and Freudian analytics techniques are no longer applicable in helping to cure patients with mental disorders, what residue of Marxism and Freudianism remains?

p. 171 though they find an inhospitable climate in the social sciences and in the heart sciences, Marks in Freud have been given a warm home in certain humanities departments committed to postmodern ways of perceiving the world. But they have not found a home there is scientists. They have found a home, rather, as profits, or perhaps more accurately, as gods. And those who espouse Marxian in Freudian views become the “true believers.”

what happens to Marxist and Freudian ideas when they lose their empirical grounding in their power to explain events in the physical world? Free-floating Marxist and Freudian ideas have been fused to established at least one of the foundations of post modernist literature theory and to promulgate an image of the human form it’s a robot controlled by “ideology.”

p. 172. Because ideology works most effectively through its unconscious hold on subjects, it resists being made conscious or explicit. And ideology structures ‘seeing’ in ‘feeling’ before it structures ‘thinking,’ and appears to have no historical or social specificity but to be simply the natural way of perceiving reality.

Other residues of do descientizied Marx and Freud are  “the class struggle” in “sublimation.” But the class struggle is Marx conceived it never really took root in American culture.
Even know, empirical sociologists have difficulty in defining what constitutes “a class” in American culture, and in determining where one class ends and another begins.

It is well known that the vast majority of Americans define themselves as middle-class, which then makes it necessary for a sociologist interested in arriving it finally distinctions to divide the middle glass itself into upper, middle, and lower, and so on.

p. 173. Post modern Freudians are forced into similar absurdities. Freud based his theory of sublimation (neurosis-as-the-price-of-culture) on the very rigid Austro-German family, constituted by a strict, punishing, disciplinarian father, a submissive mother, and obedient son, and a subservient daughter. p. 174 Marks in Floyd analyzed Austro-German culture and thought they were analyzing the universe. For them Austro-German culture was universal culture, as it consequently becomes for believing Marxists and Freudians.

p. 179. And what are you, reader?

the humanities are in flux. Liberal democracy, on which the humanities real life for 16 ounce and which day in Torrance sustain, is under attack by ‘humanists”; literary criticism has nothing only become politicized, but politicized against the Vallas of liberal humanism.

p. 190. The Marxist-Gramscian thesis depends on a conspiracy theory according to which the “dominant classes” exert their influence over the “subordinate classes covered” the by means of educational, religious, and other institutions, and ‘ruling groups preempt the high ground of universal morality in truth.” Because the dominant classes dominate the oppressed classes in secrecy, by means of social institutions, de artist must respond to this dominance with symbolic representations.

digital ethics

O’Brien, J. (2020). Digital Ethics in Higher Education: 2020. Educause Review. https://er.educause.edu/articles/2020/5/digital-ethics-in-higher-education-2020

digital ethics, which I define simply as “doing the right thing at the intersection of technology innovation and accepted social values.”
Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy, written by Cathy O’Neil in early 2016, continues to be relevant and illuminating. O’Neil’s book revolves around her insight that “algorithms are opinions embedded in code,” in distinct contrast to the belief that algorithms are based on—and produce—indisputable facts.
Safiya Umoja Noble’s book Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power

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International Dialogue on “The Ethics of Digitalisation” Kicks Off in Berlin | Berkman Klein Center. (2020, August 20). [Harvard University]. Berkman Klein Center. https://cyber.harvard.edu/story/2020-08/international-dialogue-ethics-digitalisation-kicks-berlin

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more on ethics in this IMS blog
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faith in expertise

Nichols, T. (2017). How America Lost Faith in Expertise. Foreign Affairs. https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2017-02-13/how-america-lost-faith-expertise
The larger discussions, from what constitutes a nutritious diet to what actions will best further U.S. interests, require conversations between ordinary citizens and experts. But increasingly, citizens don’t want to have those conversations. Rather, they want to weigh in and have their opinions treated with deep respect and their preferences honored not on the strength of their arguments or on the evidence they present but based on their feelings, emotions, and whatever stray information they may have picked up here or there along the way.
Hofstadter argued that this overwhelming complexity produced feelings of helplessness and anger among a citizenry that knew itself to be increasingly at the mercy of more sophisticated elites. “
Credentialism can run amok, and guilds can use it cynically to generate revenue or protect their fiefdoms with unnecessary barriers to entry. But it can also reflect actual learning and professional competence, helping separate real experts from amateurs or charlatans.
Experts are often wrong, and the good ones among them are the first to admit it…. Yet these days, members of the public search for expert errors and revel in finding them—<b>not to improve understanding but rather to give themselves license to disregard all expert advice they don’t like.<b>
The convenience of the Internet is a tremendous boon, but mostly for people already trained in research and who have some idea what they’re looking for. It does little good, unfortunately, for a student or an untrained layperson who has never been taught how to judge the provenance of information or the reputability of a writer.
Libraries, or at least their reference and academic sections, once served as a kind of first cut through the noise of the marketplace. The Internet, however, is less a library than a giant repository where anyone can dump anything. In practice, this means that a search for information will rely on algorithms usually developed by for-profit companies using opaque criteria. Actual research is hard and often boring. It requires the ability to find authentic information, sort through it, analyze it, and apply it.
Government and expertise rely on each other, especially in a democracy. The technological and economic progress that ensures the well-being of a population requires a division of labor, which in turn leads to the creation of professions. Professionalism encourages experts to do their best to serve their clients, respect their own knowledge boundaries, and demand that their boundaries be respected by others, as part of an overall service to the ultimate client: society itself. 
Dictatorships, too, demand this same service of experts, but they extract it by threat and direct its use by command. This is why dictatorships are actually less efficient and less productive than democracies (despite some popular stereotypes to the contrary). In a democracy, the expert’s service to the public is part of the social contract.
Too few citizens today understand democracy to mean a condition of political equality in which all get the franchise and are equal in the eyes of the law. Rather, they think of it as a state of actual equality, in which every opinion is as good as any other, regardless of the logic or evidentiary base behind it.
#DunningKrugerEffect #metacognition #democracy #science #academy #fakenews #conspiracytheories #politics #idiocracy #InformationTechnology #Internet

Fukuyama Identity Politics

Francis Fukuyama: Identity politics

The demand for dignity and the nation state’s future

http://www.erstestiftung.org/en/francis-fukuyama-identity-politics/

7 March 2019 in Vienna. Francis Fukuyama

since 1989 or 1991, we had been living in a growing liberal international order.

The number of democracies in this period went from about 35 in 1970, and peaked at something like a 115 to a 120, depending on how you measure a democracy. By the early 2000s, the global output of the world economy quadrupled.

the rise of a couple of very self-confident and newly assertive authoritarian powers: Russia and China. But from my standpoint, the most disturbing thing was this emergence of populism within established democracies and in fact, within the two most established democracies: Britain and the US.

The first definition is an economic one: a populist is a leader, who promotes economic policies or social policies that are popular on the short run but disastrous on the long run.

The second definition is more of a political style than anything else: a populist leader tries to be charismatic and says: I have a direct connection with you, the people. And that is actually quite important because it makes a populist, I think, ipso facto anti-institutional.
A democracy is not just popular elections, it is also the protection of minority rights, it is also having a moderate government that really reflects the true will of the people. And populists tend to authoritarian politics because they do not like institutions getting in the way

The third definition is that a populist, when they say “I support the people”, often times do not mean the whole people. They mean a certain kind of person, usually defined by race or ethnicity. Often times in terms of traditional cultural values or as a traditional sense of national identity. And that does not correspond to the actual population that might live in that country.

Now we have a populist coalition in Italy, and Latin America elected its first Northern European style populist in Jair Bolsonaro. Most Latin American populists are like Southern European populists: they are left wing, they are not ethnically exclusive, they are more economic populists. But Latin America has decided to join the crowd, and so they elected a leader that is, you know, racially prejudiced, that has a fundamentalist Christian understanding of what Brasil should be about.

if you are a lower-skilled, less educated worker in a rich country, you are liable to lose out to a similarly skilled worker in a poor country.

Right from the beginning, the rap against democracy is that it produces weak government. Democracies cannot make decisions. there is a big desire on the part of a lot of ordinary people to have a strong man, a leader who can just cut through all this blather, make decisions and get things done.

The third reason is cultural, and that is the one that has to do with identity.
the word identity and Identity Politics was really not used commonly until the 1950s. A psychologist, Erik Erikson
the inner self is the one that is valuable, and the whole outside society has to change, and that is what is happening right now. Men are going through a cultural retraining, they are learning that actually their rules are not the right ones, and we need a different set of rules in relations between men and women that respect the dignity of the whole person in those kinds of relationships.

European Muslims, did not feel comfortable with their parents’ form of religiosity, they thought that it was too old fashioned and traditional, but they also did not feel well-integrated into the society, in which they were living.

“Strangers in Their Own Land” by sociologist Arlie Hochschild

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