Deliberative Democracy

On many science-related policy questions, the public is unable to make informed decisions, because of its inability to make use of knowledge obtained by scientists. Philip Kitcher and James Fishkin have both suggested therefore that on certain science-related issues, public policy should not be decided on by actual democratic vote, but should instead conform to the public’s counterfactual informed democratic decision. Indeed, this suggestion underlies Kitcher’s specification of an ideal of a well-ordered science. This article argues that this suggestion misconstrues (...) the normative significance of CIDDs. At most, CIDDs might have epistemic significance, but no authority or legitimizing force. (shrink)

It is widely believed that open and public speech is at the heart of the democratic ideal. Public discourse is instrumentally epistemically valuable for identifying good policies, as well as necessary for resisting domination (e.g., by vocally challenging decision-makers, demanding public justifications, and using democratic speech to hold leaders accountable). But in our highly polarized and socially fragmented political environment, an increasingly pressing question is: do actual democratic societies live up to the ideal of inclusive public speech? In this essay, (...) I explore Maxime Lepoutre's (2021) defence of discursive democracy from the challenge of defective public discourse. I argue that political ignorance, dogmatism, and social fragmentation present more formidable challenges to discursive democracy than Lepoutre acknowledges. As a result, his account occasionally veers from warranted optimism to unwarranted idealism. (shrink)

(Pre-publication draft November 2015: Partial content of "Introduction: The 2030 Agenda," Journal of Global Ethics 11:3 [December 2015], 262-270) This introduction briefly explains the process through which the Sustainable Development Goals have developed from their receipt in 2014 to their passage in September 2015 by the UN General Assembly, and it considers their development in prospect. The Millennium Development Goals, which spanned 1990-2015, present a case study that reveals the changeability of such long-term multilateral commitments. They were enmeshed in overlapping (...) and inconsistent national and intergovernmental commitments reaching from 1995 to 2005, and the text of those goals also evolved, stabilizing for the last time in 2007. The Sustainable Development Goals and attendant commitments should be expected to evolve similarly over their fifteen year run. This presents a concern, for among the three committees established by the UN to create the goals, the two committees charged with public consultation were retired as planned in 2014. The process evident thereafter has displayed a shift towards a strategy of enrolling broad public endorsement that leaves such consultation and specific responsibility to those consulted in doubt. This bodes ill for public deliberation on the goals and for public accountability as the agenda proceeds towards 2030. (shrink)

How might discourse generate political change? So far, democratic theorists have focused largely on how deliberative exchanges might shift political opinion. Responding to empirical research that casts doubt on the generalizability of deliberative mechanisms outside of carefully designed forums, this essay seeks to broaden the scope of discourse theory by considering speech that addresses participants’ identities instead. More specifically, we ask what may be learned about identity-oriented discourse by examining the practice of religious preaching. As we demonstrate, scholars of homiletics—the (...) study of preaching—have identified three core features that support its focus on identity: its unconditionality, its appeal to authoritative texts and traditions, and its diffuse instrumentality. We then ask what each of these features might look like in more straightforwardly political contexts. Finally, we address several normative questions raised by this practice, as a way of exploring the promises and dangers accompanying identity-oriented discourse more generally. (shrink)

In this paper I provide a decolonial critique of received knowledge about deliberative democracy. Legacies of colonialism have generally been overlooked in theories of democracy. These omissions challenge several key assumptions of deliberative democracy. I argue that deliberative democracy does not travel well outside Western sites and its key assumptions begin to unravel in the ‘developing’ regions of the world. The context for a decolonial critique of deliberative democracy is the ongoing violent conflicts over resource extraction in the former colonies (...) of Africa, Asia and Latin America. I argue that deliberative democracy cannot take into account the needs of marginalized stakeholders who are defending their lands and livelihoods. The paper contributes to the literature by offering a critique of hegemonic models of democracy that cannot address issues of inequality and colonial difference and offering possibilities to imagine counterhegemonic alternatives for a democratization of democracy from below. (shrink)

The chapter develops a taxonomy of views about the epistemic responsibilities of citizens in a democracy. Prominent approaches to epistemic democracy, epistocracy, epistemic libertarianism, and pure proceduralism are examined through the lens of this taxonomy. The primary aim is to explore options for developing an account of the epistemic responsibilities of citizens in a democracy. The chapter also argues that a number of recent attacks on democracy may not adequately register the availability of a minimal approach to the epistemic responsibilities (...) of citizens in a democracy. (shrink)

Governments are often so focused on short-term gains that they ignore the long term, thus creating extra unnecessary burdens on their citizens, and violating their responsibilities to future generations. What can be done about this? In this paper I propose a package of reforms to the ways in which policies are made by legislatures, and in which those policies are scrutinised, implemented and evaluated. The overarching aim is to enhance the accountability of the decision-making process in ways that take into (...) account the interests of persons in the future. (shrink)

In this essay I situate John Dewey’s pragmatist approach to democratic epistemology in relation to contemporary “epistemic democracy.” Like epistemic democrats, Dewey characterizes democracy as a form of social inquiry. But whereas epistemic democrats suggest that democracy aims to “track the truth,” Dewey rejects the notion of “tracking” or “corresponding” to truth in political and other domains. For Dewey, the measure of successful decision-making is not some fixed independent standard of truth or correctness but, instead, our own reflective satisfaction with (...) the practical results. I argue that this approach better reconciles epistemic democracy with traditional models of popular authority (“the will of the people”) and bolsters the defenses of the epistemic democrat against elitist alternatives. (shrink)

La tesis central de este trabajo es que la tradicional tensión entre substancia y procedimiento socava las estabilidad de la justificación de la concepción liberal más extendida de la legitimidad (la Democracia Deliberativa). Dicha concepciones enfrentan problemas serios a la hora de articular de manera consistente dos dimensiones que parecen ir naturalmente asociadas a la idea de legitimidad: la dimensión procedimental, vinculada a la equidad del procedimiento, y la dimensión epistémica, asociada a la corrección de los resultados. En este trabajo (...) sostengo que a) esa tensión surge de la adopción de una concepción epistemológica social de tipo "veritativo-consecuencialista; b) es posible manejar dicha tensión mediante el remplazo de la epistemología subyacente por una concepción epistemológica social de tipo procedimentalista de orientación pragmatista y c) dicha operación orienta el diseño institucional en una dirección experimentalista. (shrink)

As the use of nudges by governmental agencies becomes more common, the need for normative guidelines regarding the processes by which decisions about the implementation of specific nudges are taken becomes more acute. In order to find a justified set of such guidelines one must meet several theoretical challenges to Libertarian Paternalism that arise at the foundational level. In this paper, I identify three central challenges to Libertarian Paternalism, and suggest that Susan Hurley's political philosophy as presented in her Natural (...) Reasons (1989) can be viewed as offering powerful responses to them. (shrink)

Reflectivists consider reflective reasoning crucial for good judgment and action. Anti-reflectivists deny that reflection delivers what reflectivists seek. Alas, the evidence is mixed. So, does reflection confer normative value or not? This paper argues for a middle way: reflection can confer normative value, but its ability to do this is bound by such factors as what we might call epistemic identity: an identity that involves particular beliefs—for example, religious and political identities. We may reflectively defend our identities’ beliefs rather than (...) reflect open-mindedly to adopt whatever beliefs cohere with the best arguments and evidence. This bounded reflectivism is explicated with an algorithmic model of reflection synthesized from philosophy and science that yields testable predictions, psychometric implications, and realistic metaphilosophical suggestions—for example, overcoming motivated reflection may require embracing epistemic identity rather than veiling it (à la Rawls 1971). So bounded reflectivism should be preferred to views offering anything less. (shrink)

Religion after Deliberative Democracy responds to gaps exposed by the case of religion in deliberative democratic theory. Religion's persistent visibility in political life has called for new solutions for healing deeply divided societies. In response, the author begins with Jeffrey Stout’s pragmatist vision of democracy before providing a series of supplements in subsequent chapters. Past legacies are refigured in a rapprochement with Jürgen Habermas’s work which is differentiated from the distinctive relevance of Hannah Arendt’s vita activa. New developments in comparative (...) political theology are complemented by recent systems theory approaches to institutional interactions. Peaceful protest movements are reframed in light of the trust-building capacities of minipublics. The result is reason for renewed confidence in democratic practices attuned to fostering political plurality and capable of responding to persistent religious partisanship. This book fills a crucial space in the literature on religion and democracy and will be of interest to students and scholars of philosophy of religion, theology, pragmatism, and political theory. (shrink)

This article explains how the issue of inclusion is central to Habermas’s theory of democracy and how it is deeply rooted in his conception of a political public sphere. After recalling Habermas’s views on the public sphere, I present and discuss various objections raised by other critical theorists: Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge, Nancy Fraser, Axel Honneth and Iris Marion Young. These criticisms insist on the paradoxically excluding effects of a conception of democracy that promotes civic participation in the public (...) debate. Negt, Kluge and Fraser develop a Marxist line of analysis that question who can participate in the public sphere. Honneth and Young criticize in various ways the excluding effect of argumentation: are unargumentative speeches excluded from the public debate? I show how Habermas’s model can provide some responses to these various objections by drawing inspiration from his treatment of the gap between religious and post-metaphysical world views. (shrink)

This paper contributes to growing debates over the decision-making ability of democracy by considering the epistemic value of deliberative democracy. It focuses on the benefits democratic deliberation can derive from its diversity, and the extent to which these benefits can be realised with respect to the complexities of political problems. The paper first calls attention to the issue of complexity through a critique of Hélène Landemore and the Diversity Trumps Ability Theorem. This approach underestimates complexity due to its reliance on (...) an ‘oracle assumption’ and this is shown to highlight more general difficulties for applying the benefits of diversity to the realities of political problems. The paper then develops a new model of deliberation—based on an relationship between cognitive diversity and diminishing returns to cognitive type—which does not involve an oracle assumption and can therefore support the epistemic value of deliberative democracy even for complex problems. The benefits of diversity are also argued to be better realised though sortition than either democratic elections or epistocracy, pointing to the value of deliberation between randomly selected citizens. Finally, and contrary to past work, the new account suggests that diversity cannot alone establish the superiority of democratic deliberation over all non-democratic alternatives, and that it is insufficient to mount a purely epistemic argument for deliberative democracy. The paper therefore furthers our understanding of the epistemic value of deliberative democracy by clarifying when and to what extent diversity is a benefit to political problem solving. (shrink)

Within any adversarial rule-governed system, it often takes time for strategically motivated agents to discover effective exploits. Once discovered, these strategies will soon be copied by all other participants. Unless it is possible to adjust the rules to preclude them, the result will be a degradation of the performance of the system. This is essentially what has happened to public political discourse in democratic states. Political actors have discovered, not just that the norm of truth can be violated in specific (...) ways, but that many of the norms governing rational deliberation can also be violated, not just without penalty, but often for significant political gain. As a result, the level of noise has come to drown out the signal. The post-truth political condition is the cumulative result of innovations developed by actors who adopt an essentially strategic orientation toward political communications. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Jason Brennan’s recent epistemic argument for epistocracy relies on the assumption that voter competence requires knowledge of economics and political science. He conjectures that people who would qualify as competent are mostly white, upper-middle- to upper-class, educated, employed men, who know better how to promote the interests of the disadvantaged than the disadvantaged themselves. My paper, first, shows that this account of voter competence is too narrow and, second, proposes a modified account of this concept. Brennan mistakenly reasons as (...) though it is obvious that socially disadvantaged and oppressed people, by virtue of lacking sufficient knowledge of political science and economics, do not belong on an epistocratic council. This is because there is another way of being competent: possessing first-personal experience and knowledge unique to disadvantaged or oppressed situatedness. Once voter competence is characterized accurately and more holistically, epistocracy’s problematic implications of privileging already dominant genders, races, and classes, which characterize Brennan’s account, no longer arise. (shrink)

The American criminal justice system falls far short of democratic ideals. In response, democratic communitarian localism proposes a more decentralized system with a greater emphasis on local control. This approach aims to deconcentrate power and remove bureaucracy, arguing local control would reflect informal cultural life better than our current system. This view fails to adequately address localized domination, however, including in the background culture of society. As a result, it underplays the need for transformative, democratizing change. Rejecting communitarian localism, I (...) defend a mass deliberative democratic approach to criminal justice reform that relies on institutions outside localities to democratize local institutions and background cultural patterns. Nonetheless, local institutions must be empowered to exert democratic control, as well as to influence institutions outside the locality. This process of democratic co-development offers greater hope for political equality, non-domination, and inclusive democratic deliberation about criminal law than democratic communitarian localism. (shrink)

We argue that deliberative decision-making that is inclusive, transparent and accountable can contribute to more trustworthy and legitimate decisions on difficult ethical questions and political trade-offs during the pandemic and beyond.

According to a frequent objection coming from the tradition of political realism, deliberative democracy is impotent in the face of actors who, wielding power and money, refuse to engage in deliberation, or seek to distort deliberative processes. With the aim of disproving this objection, in this essay I proceed in three steps: first of all, I show that the realpolitik objection is based on a dyadic, two-person theoretical model of argumentative speech acts. To this model, considered limited and unsatisfactory by (...) many sociolinguists, I counter a more complex and articulated framework. Second, I aim to demonstrate that this latter framework is capable of accounting for a temporally and spatially enlarged democratic deliberation which can be rejected or distorted barely, if at all, by agents relying on positions of power. In the third section, I highlight the many and important differences in grounding, nature and finalities between the model of enlarged democratic deliberation and forms of power politics based on strategic calculations and tactical alliances. Finally, I focus on the application of the model to societies characterized by structural injustices and distortions, with the aim of showing how it can help marginalized and victimized groups have their requests heard and discussed in the public sphere and in deliberative settings. (shrink)

There is a growing consensus among philosophers of science that core parts of the scientific process involve non-epistemic values. This undermines the traditional foundation for public trust in science. In this article I consider two proposals for justifying public trust in value-laden science. According to the first, scientists can promote trust by being transparent about their value choices. On the second, trust requires that the values of a scientist align with the values of an individual member of the public. I (...) argue that neither of these proposals work and suggest an alternative that does better. When scientists must appeal to values in the course of their research, they should appeal to democratic values: the values of the public or its representatives. (shrink)

Online deliberation is one important instance of civic tech that is both for and by the citizens, through engaging citizens in Internet-supported deliberative discussions on public issues. This article explains the origins of a set of symposium articles in this journal issue based on the 2017 'International Conference on Deliberation and Decision Making: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Civic Tech' held in Singapore. Symposium articles are presented in a sequence that flows from designing decision making systems to platforms to specific technological nudges.

In this chapter I argue that intellectual humility is related to argumentation in several distinct but mutually supporting ways. I begin by drawing connections between humility and two topics of long-standing importance to the evaluation of informal arguments: the ad verecundiam fallacy and the principle of charity. I then explore the more explicit role that humility plays in recent work on critical thinking dispositions, deliberative virtues, and virtue theories of argumentation.

Recently, Margaret Gilbert has argued that it appears that the wisdom of a society impinges, greatly, on its freedom. In this article, I show that Gilbert’s “negative argument” fails to be convincing. On the other hand, there are important lessons, particularly for democratic theory, that can be by looking carefully, and critically, at her argument. This article will proceed as follows. First, I present Gilbert’s argument. Next, I criticize her understanding of freedom, and then, using arguments from Christopher McMahon, criticize (...) her understanding of a wise society. Finally, I discuss how what has been said can inform how one should think about democratic theory. (shrink)

In this article, I identify some good-making features of a deliberative democratic theory. The article will proceed as follows: First, I present both some important insights and some shortcomings of Rawls’ theory. I then present Robert Talisse’s account, focusing on how Talisse both accommodates what is right about Rawls while avoiding some of Rawls’ weaknesses. Finally, some positive claims are made about what an adequate deliberative theory might look like.

The public sphere should be regulated so the distribution of political speech does not correlate with the distribution of income or wealth. A public sphere where people can fund any political speech from their private holdings is epistemically defective. The argument has four steps. First, if political speech is unregulated, the rich predictably contribute a disproportionate share. Second, wealth tends to correlate with substantive political perspectives. Third, greater quantities of speech by the rich can “drown out” the speech of the (...) poor, because of citizens’ limited attention span for politics. Finally, the normative problem with all this is that it reduces the diversity of arguments and evidence citizens become familiar with, reducing the quality of their political knowledge. The clearest implication of the argument is in favour of strict contribution limits and/or public funding for formal political campaigns, but it also has implications for more informal aspects of the public sphere. (shrink)

In this chapter, I consider the claim for pluralism commonly advanced in political philosophy as a claim concerning the standards, methods, and norms for forming belief and judgment about certain kinds of facts rather than the nature of facts themselves. After distinguishing between descriptive and normative epistemic pluralism, I contend that in this context, pluralism needs to rest on grounds that are stronger than fallibilism yet weaker than relativism in order to enjoy a distinct standing. The idea of reasonable pluralism (...) seems to devise a variety of normative pluralism designed to meet this demand. I argue, however, that this is an unstable position and suggest that an epistemic view of deliberation may be better suited to making sense of political justification. The latter view, though, is bound to dispense with normative pluralism. (shrink)

Democratic governance is under increasing scrutiny as a result of waning trust in political institutions, and a widening gap between public aspirations and government performance. The purpose of this paper is to address what is currently diagnosed as a democratic deficit by calling into question the notion of consent, procedures advocated in its pursuit, and its relationship with democracy. To this purpose, the paper reviews seminal works that have investigated the nexus of democracy and consent over time: The Calculus of (...) Consent, The Engineering of Consent and Manufacturing Consent. In this, it presents different understandings of the processes whereby consent is arrived at, and questions whether they support or undermine democratic aspirations. (shrink)

Inspired by impossibility theorems of social choice theory, many democratic theorists have argued that aggregative forms of democracy cannot lend full democratic justification for the collective decisions reached. Hence, democratic theorists have turned their attention to deliberative democracy, according to which “outcomes are democratically legitimate if and only if they could be the object of a free and reasoned agreement among equals” (Cohen 1997a, 73). However, relatively little work has been done to offer a formal theory of democratic deliberation. This (...) article helps fill that gap by offering a formal theory of three different modes of democratic deliberation: myopic discussion, constructive discussion, and debate. We show that myopic discussion suffers from indeterminacy of long run outcomes, while constructive discussion and debate are conclusive. Finally, unlike the other two modes of deliberation, debate is path independent and converges to a unique compromise position, irrespective of the initial status quo. (shrink)

This chapter explores some features of pragmatic pluralism as an ethical perspective on climate change. It is inspired in part by Andrew Light’s work on climate diplomacy as U.S. Assistant Secretary of Energy for International Affairs, and by Bryan Norton’s environmental pragmatism, while drawing more explicitly than Light or Norton from classical pragmatist sources such as John Dewey. The primary aim of the chapter is to characterize, differentiate, and advance a general pragmatist approach to climate ethics. The main line of (...) argument is that we are suffering culturally from a sort of “moral jetlag” due in part to “moral fundamentalist” habits, and that a critical focus on pragmatic pluralism—in moral theory generally and climate ethics particularly—would be salutary for our recovery if philosophers are to speak more effectively to “wicked problems” in a way that aids public deliberation and social learning. Moral fundamentalist habits, and the monistic one-way assumption that unintentionally—but not blamelessly—exercises and unduly reinforces them, are obstacles to fostering habits of moral and political inquiry better suited to dealing with predicaments rapidly transforming our warming planet. (shrink)

Although successive generations of digital technology have become increasingly powerful in the past 20 years, digital democracy has yet to realize its potential for deliberative transformation. The undemocratic exploitation of massive social media systems continued this trend, but it only worsened an existing problem of modern democracies, which were already struggling to develop deliberative infrastructure independent of digital technologies. There have been many creative conceptions of civic tech, but implementation has lagged behind innovation. This article argues for implementing one such (...) vision of digital democracy through the establishment of a public corporation. Modeled on the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in the United States, this entity would foster the creation of new digital technology by providing a stable source of funding to nonprofit technologists, interest groups, civic organizations, government, researchers, private companies, and the public. Funded entities would produce and maintain software infrastructure for public benefit. The concluding sections identify what circumstances might create and sustain such an entity. (shrink)

Epistemic justifications for democracy have been offered in terms of two different aspects of decision-making: voting and deliberation, or ‘votes’ and ‘talk.’ The Condorcet Jury Theorem is appealed to as a justification in terms votes, and the Hong-Page “Diversity Trumps Ability” result is appealed to as a justification in terms of deliberation. Both of these, however, are most plausibly construed as models of direct democracy, with full and direct participation across the population. In this paper, we explore how these results (...) hold up if we vary the model so as to reflect the more familiar democratic structure of a representative hierarchy. We first recount extant analytic work that shows that representation inevitably weakens the voting results of the Condorcet Jury Theorem, but we question the ability of that result to shine light on real representative systems. We then show that, when we move from votes to talk, as modeled in Hong-Page, representation holds its own and even has a slight edge. (shrink)

Epistemic democracy is standardly characterized in terms of “aiming at truth”. This presupposes a veritistic conception of epistemic value, according to which truth is the fundamental epistemic goal. I will raise an objection to the standard (veritistic) account of epistemic democracy, focusing specifically on deliberative democracy. I then propose a version of deliberative democracy that is grounded in non-veritistic epistemic goals. In particular, I argue that deliberation is valuable because it facilitates empathetic understanding. I claim that empathetic understanding is an (...) epistemic good that doesn’t have truth as its primary goal. (shrink)

Volume 20, Issue 5, June 2020, Page 80-81.

In this essay, I address some questions and challenges brought about by the contributors to this special issue on my book ‘Democracy without Shortcuts’. First, I clarify different aspects of my cri...

In this essay, I address several questions and challenges brought about by the contributors to the special issue on my book Democracy without Shortcuts. In particular, I address some implications of my critique of deep pluralism; distinguish between three senses of ‘blind deference’: political, reflective, and informational; draw a critical parallelism between the populist conception of representation as embodiment and the conception of ‘citizen-representatives’ often ascribed to participants in deliberative minipublics; defend the democratic attractiveness of participatory uses over empowered uses (...) of deliberative minipublics; clarify why accepting public reason constraints does not imply limiting deliberation to questions about constitutional rights, and argue that overcoming a state-centric conception of democracy does not require replacing the ‘all subjected’ principle with the ‘all affected’ principle. (shrink)

Post-truth has become a commonplace strategy. No longer are objective facts viewed as having evidentiary value; scientific knowledge is on a par with emotions or personal beliefs. We intend to show that in the context of post-truth, those proffering and receiving an assertion do not care about the truth-value of the assertion or about the best way to gather evidence concerning it. Such attitudes raise several questions about how relativism can be a corrupting influence in contemporary democracies. We will analyse (...) Steve Fuller’s use of the term «post-truth» – especially, the political connotations about epistemic democracy that he highlights. Instead, we offer a pragmatist defence of the truth and an alternative meaning of epistemic democracy. (shrink)

Democratic institutions are appealing means of making publicly justified social choices. By allowing participation by all citizens, democracy can accommodate diversity among citizens, and by considering the perspectives of all, via ballots or debate, democratic results can approximate what the balance of reasons favors. I consider whether, and under what conditions, democratic institutions might reliably make publicly justified social decisions. I argue that conventional accounts of democracy, constituted by voting or deliberation, are unlikely to be effective public justification mechanisms. I (...) conclude that the limitations of conventional mechanisms can be ameliorated through the use of lotteries instead of elections. (shrink)

El presente trabajo se propone señalar algunas tareas posibles para la ética del discurso de Karl-Otto Apel en la actualidad. Tales tareas pueden concentrarse en la necesidad de una teoría de la institucionalización del discurso práctico, como forma de racionalidad práctica realizada socialmente. La pregunta que se ha de responder es qué condiciones marco debe cumplir el discurso para que pueda ser puesto en práctica y qué efectos político-institucionales puede producir en el contexto de instituciones realmente existentes. A partir de (...) Gehlen y de Luhmann -aunque en menor medida-, Apel interpreta a las instituciones como sistemas de autoafirmación que, por un lado, liberan a los sujetos de la carga de la acción, pero, por otro lado, limitan o condicionan la racionalidad práctica consensual-argumentativa propia del discurso. Las coerciones (Sachzwänge) funcionales de las instituciones configuran un campo de acción y un tipo de racionalidad que, de acuerdo con Apel, deberían estar bajo el control del discurso institucionalizado como esfera pública racional (Öffentlichkeit). La relación entre los criterios normativos ideales del discurso práctico institucionalizado y las instituciones realmente existentes debe interpretarse como una tensión o entrelazamiento dialéctico no superable. Si esta interpretación es correcta, la ética del discurso, en tanto teoría crítica de la sociedad, no puede ser entendida como una aplicación sin más de criterios normativos ideales a la realidad histórica o de adecuación de esa realidad a los criterios ideales en su sentido vertical, sino como de mutua correlación horizontal. (shrink)

A link between populism and social media is often suspected. This paper spells out a set of possible mechanisms underpinning this link: that social media changes the communication structure of the public sphere, making it harder for citizens to obtain evidence that refutes populist assumptions. By developing a model of the public sphere, four core functions of the public sphere are identified: exposing citizens to diverse information, promoting equality of deliberative opportunity, creating deliberative transparency, and producing common knowledge. A wellworking (...) public sphere allows citizens to learn that there are genuine disagreements among citizens that are held in good faith. Social media makes it harder to gain this insight, opening the door for populist ideology. (shrink)

美国和世界正处于人口过度增长的崩溃过程中,其中大多数在上个世纪,现在全部归功于第三世界人民。消耗资源,增加40亿人口,将崩溃工业文明,带来惊人的饥饿、疾病、暴力和战争。地球每年至少损失1%的表土,因此 ,当它接近2100年时,大部分粮食的生长能力将消失。数十亿将死去,核战争几乎可以肯定。在美国,由于大规模移民和移民再生产,加上民主带来的滥用,这大大加速了这一点。堕落的人性无情地把民主和多样性的梦想变 成了犯罪和贫穷的恶梦。只要中国坚持限制自私的独裁统治,中国将继续压倒美国和世界。崩溃的根本原因是我们与生俱来的心理无法适应现代世界,这导致人们把不相干的人当作他们共同的利益对待。人权观念是左派分子宣扬 的邪恶幻想,旨在转移人们对无节制的第三世界母性无情毁灭地球的注意力。再加上对基础生物学和心理学的无知,导致部分受过教育的控制民主社会的人产生社会工程错觉。很少有人明白,如果你帮助一个人,你伤害了别人— —没有免费的午餐,任何人消耗的每一件东西都会破坏无法修复的地球。因此,各地的社会政策是不可持续的,一个个、没有严格控制自私的社会将崩溃为无政府状态或独裁。最基本的事实几乎从未提及过,即美国或世界上没有 足够的资源来使相当一部分穷人摆脱贫困并使他们继续生活。这样做的企图正在使美国破产,毁灭世界。地球生产食物的能力每天都在下降,我们的遗传质量也是如此。现在,和往常一样,穷人最大的敌人是其他穷人,而不是富 人。如果不进行戏剧性和立即的变化,就不可能阻止美国或任何遵循民主制度的国家的崩溃。.