New York Times | Election Tests Indonesian Democracy New York Times In the two decades since Indonesia ousted its last dictator, the country has evolved into a democracy based on tolerance and a moderate interpretation of Islam, an encouraging trend in a world where authoritarianism and religious extremism are on the rise. |
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Election Tests Indonesian Democracy - New York Times
Police confront a protester against Donald Trump, Los Angeles, November 2016. Photograph: Ringo Chiu/AFP/Getty Images
In 1995, Nicholas Negroponte, an MIT technology specialist, celebrated the emergence of the Daily Me a digital news service tailored to each readers specific interests. With the Daily Me, he suggested, you would no longer rely on newspapers and magazines to curate what you saw, and you could bypass the television networks. Instead, you could design a communications package just for you, with topics and perspectives chosen in advance.
If anything, Negroponte understated what was on the horizon. Its now easy to create your own information cocoon, simply by selecting online stories and sources that interest and please you. Even if you dont, an algorithm might do it for you.
But lets hold the celebration. The Daily Me is an enemy of democracy. Representative government depends on shared experiences, common knowledge and a host of unanticipated, unchosen encounters. All too often, information cocoons become echo chambers, which make mutual understanding impossible and which promote dogmatism, polarisation and the fragmentation of society.
The simplest explanation for the dangers comes from an old finding in social science, which goes by the name of group polarisation. When like-minded people get together, and speak and listen only to one another, they usually end up thinking a more extreme version of what they thought before they started to talk.
If group members begin with a certain point of view on, say, immigration, climate change or international trade, their internal discussions will make them more extreme. The rise of the Daily Me helps to explain apparently intractable political divisions in the UK, the US, France and elsewhere. It also helps account for some of the most intense forms of political enmity, not excluding terrorism.
What can be done? A clue comes froman obscure US constitutional doctrine, where the supreme court has ruled that public streets and parks must be kept open to the public for expressive activity.
In the most prominent case, from 1939, the court stated: Wherever the title of streets and parks may rest, they have immemorially been held in trust for the use of the public and time out of mind, have been used for the purposes of assembly, communicating thought between citizens, and discussing public questions. Such use of the streets and public places has, from ancient times, been a part of the privileges, immunities, rights, and liberties of citizens.
This public forum doctrine, as it is called, is meant to serve three purposes. It increases the likelihood that citizens will encounter diverse points of view including serious complaints and concerns even if they did not choose that encounter. Some of those encounters will affect people, perhaps in enduring ways.
It also ensures that speakers can have access to a wide array of people who walk the streets and use the parks. If they stop and listen, they may well hear peoples arguments about such issues as inequality, education, taxes, pollution and crime; they will also learn about the nature and intensity of views held by their fellow citizens.
Increasingly, technology enables people to create their own communications universes
In addition, the public forum creates an opportunity for shared exposure to diverse speakers with diverse views and complaints. In a city or town, many people will be simultaneously exposed to the same views and complaints: they will see them together at the same time. Anyone who has been to Speakers Corner in Hyde Park in London an area where public speeches and debates have been encouraged since the mid-1800s, when protests and demonstrations took place in the park will understand the important role of public forums in a functioning democracy.
We should not, of course, idealise public forums. In the second half of the 20th century, the media television stations, radio stations, newspapers, magazines carried out all three functions. At their best, they broadened peoples horizons by exposing them to novel topics (a scientific discovery in Berlin, a health crisis in Nigeria) and perspectives (left or right) that could change their views, their days, even their lives.
To be sure, the media could also promote polarisation, especially when they had identifiable political profiles. But even if they did, they often aspired to take readers and viewers out of their comfort zone by trusting them to display two characteristics intensely prized by democracies: humility and curiosity.
Public streets and parks continue to matter, and the same is true for the traditional media. But increasingly, technology enables people to create their own communications universes, limited to topics and perspectives they find congenial. That may seem like freedom, but its a prison.
However, technology is producing escape routes. An iPhone app, Read Across the Aisle, allows people to see, in real time, whether their reading habits are skewing left or right. PolitEcho shows you the political biases of your friends and news feed on Facebook.
Traditional media can also combat polarisation. The New York Times has a new feature, Right and Left: Partisan Writing You Shouldnt Miss, with the aim of exposing people to political ideas from other publications. In a way, this promotes serendipity. It increases the likelihood that people will stumble upon something that challenges their convictions and will be able to understand, and learn from, people they might otherwise demonise.
For providers and consumers of information, and those working at the intersection of democracy and technology, we need far more creative thinking in this vein. The stakes are not low. Ultimately, democracy depends on it.
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Challenge everything you think democracy depends on it - The Guardian
Bridgett Townsend and Jackson Koeppel 11:02 p.m. ET April 27, 2017
Communities should be able to determine their own energy futures, the authors write.(Photo: David Coates / The Detroit News)Buy Photo
In 2011, the city of Highland Parks streetlights were repossessed by DTE Energy and residents were left in the dark. This was not simply an inability to pay the bill, it was the result of archaic legislation designed to serve profits, not people. This also occurred in a city where the active destruction of school systems and emergency management have aggressively stripped citizens of their democratic rights and control over basic services, including public lighting.
Contrary to a recent coverage of Soulardarity, we are appalled by these assaults on local government, and the harm they cause in our communities. We work to ensure that community members have a say in the energy decisions that impact their lives, that all communities should have healthy, safe, and affordable power, and that human lives matter. We exist to create an energy democracy.
Michigan energy companies have raised costs on homes and businesses, and even attempted to stop cities from saving energy and money by raising the operating rates for LED streetlights. Their priorities are clear and they are not alone. Therefore, we cannot lay the blame for the repossession of streetlights in Highland Park at the citys feet.
We dont, however, give those in government a pass. We hold them accountable. True government is a tool, a reflection of the will of the people, an institution through which that will is brought to life. Despite the attempts to strip people of that right through emergency management, communities continue to advocate, resist, and engage in shaping our collective future.
When Highland Parks streetlights were removed, we came together. In a few years, we raised funds for and installed six solar streetlights on Highland Park streets, and organized a bulk purchasing program that bought almost 50 home and alley solar lights. Highland Parkers did not sit in the dark, waiting for better things to come. We built better things. But to be clear: six streetlights do not come near to replacing the 1,100 that were taken. Our years of work and extensive feasibility research have made it clear: To truly restore light to the city in a way that is equitable to all residents, we need our city government.
We are committed to working with the city of Highland Park to create and fund a plan to make the city of Highland Park the first city in this country to adopt solar street lighting technology full-scale, with integrated social services of affordable internet and improved emergency response. We believe in this vision, and the power of grassroots leadership to realize it. Some may find this line of thinking idealistic, perhaps unimaginable. But our work is precisely that to take the unimaginable and find the path to making it real and its working.
Michigan stands at a crossroads. Coal is on the way out, and investor-owned utilities are fighting hard to replace it with pipelines and natural gas plants. This will only lead to more monopoly, poverty, pollution, grid instability, and climate change. A better path is a world where communities control their futures using sun and wind for energy.
Bridgett Townsend is the board president and Jackson Koeppel is executive director of Soulardarity.
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Building energy democracy - The Detroit News
ANTHONY WALLACE/AFP/Getty Images
Pro-independence lawmakers Baggio Leung (L) and Yau Wai-ching (R) speak to the press outside the High Court in Hong Kong on November 30, 2016. Leung and Yau lost their appeal on November 30 against a ban preventing them from taking up their seats in parliament as Beijing faces accusations of stepping up interference in the city's politics.
Nine more people were arrested on Thursday and charged with participating in unlawful assembly, obstructing police, and inciting disorderly conduct in a public place for their participation in a November protest. Among them were chairman of the League of Social Democrats Avery Ng Man-yuen as well as Derek Lam Shun-hin and Ivan Lam Long-yin from the Demosisto Party.
All eleven have been released on bail, but they face prosecution and possible prison sentences, according to Human Rights Watch.
"The repeated use of vague charges reeks of an orchestrated and retaliatory campaign by the authorities to punish those that advocate for democracy," said Mabel Au, director of Amnesty International Hong Kong.
"The government should be protecting freedom of expression and peaceful assembly but instead it appears intent on intimidating people who are challenging the authorities."
As many as 11,000 demonstrators took to the streets in November after China banned Leung and Yao from LegCo in a judicial review that was Beijing's most significant form of legal intervention since Hong Kong's sovereignty was transferred from the U.K. to the mainland in 1997.
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Hong Kong gets slammed after arresting pro-democracy activists - CNBC
By Andrew MacDougall By Andrew MacDougall April 26
Andrew MacDougall is a columnist for the Ottawa Citizen and a contributor to the Globe and Mail, CBC.ca and Macleans Magazine. He was formerly director of communications forthen-Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper.
From a Canadian perspective, the most striking thing about J.J. McCulloughs take on Canadas democracy was its uncharitability.
It was uncharitable to Canada, uncharitable to apples-to-apples comparisons, and, most of all, uncharitable to the thousands of Turkish democrats currently clogging President Recep Tayyip Erdogans jails.
Underpinning McCulloughs lack of charity is a lack of clarity about what, exactly, makes up a democracy. A democracy is much more than its legislature; it is its voters, activists, journalists and the freedom for these groups and others to criticize and oppose elected power.
Want proof?
Why else has Erdogan spent so much capital in the wake of last summers aborted coup jailing journalists, judges and activists? In Erdogans parallel fight to crush the Kurds and supporters of Fethullah Gulen, his former comrade in bringing Islam into Turkish public life, Erdogan has also purged much of the military leadership.
The recent referendum in Turkey was meant to draw the ladder up after Erdogan reached the summit of power so that no one could threaten or replace him. This might please the soft Islamist masses Erdogan brought into democratic politics, but it terrifies those who have watched warily as hehas dismantled the secular state built by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. It wasnt, as McCullough suggests, to make government more effective, at least not in any way a Western democrat would understand.
No Canadian prime minister could or would mimic Erdogans self-serving power grab, although McCulloughs essay would lead its readers to think Canadas prime minister is already there.
Yes, the prime minister of a majority government in a Westminster parliament is a powerful figure, too powerful for some. Yes, the prime minister appoints senators to Canadas unelected upper house. But heres the thing, he or she doesnt appoint all of them in one go, they are appointed when vacancies arise, which ensures a polyglot Senate, barring, of course, a particularly long run for a prime minister in the elected lower house, itself the most important metric of democracy.
The same goes for Canadas judiciary. A prime minister appoints judges, usually on the recommendation of the relevant advisory committees, to a number of important benches, including the Supreme Court. Here, the judges will bump into colleagues of different political persuasions, put into function by the prime ministers predecessors in office.
Barking at the prime minister each and every step of the way on these and other appointments is an army of journalists, pressure groups and opposition politicians. This is the oversight McCullough overlooks. If a particularly egregious appointment is made, the Canadian people will certainly hear about it, even if the prime minister, as McCullough notes, has a hand in appointing the higher-ups at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.
Of course, the ultimate guarantor of Canadian democracy is its people, who vote in wonderful things called free and fair elections every four years (or so). If the voters dont like the actions taken by a prime minister or his or her government including its appointments (just ask former prime minister Stephen Harper aboutMike Duffy) they can show that government the door. Indeed, this is what brought Justin Trudeau and his Liberal Party to power after nearly 10 years of Harper and his Conservatives.
And it will be what replaces Trudeau when the time comes.
While the fact that a Canadian prime minister can govern a majority of the legislature with a minority of the popular vote is a curse to some, its a blessing for me. It gives a strong mandate to those in power, and clear accountability when those in power fail to deliver. There is none of the finger-pointing of messy coalition governments like those in Israel, say, or any of the blame-shifting routinely visited upon the U.S. Congress by its occupants. A pox by voters put on both the House of Representatives and the Senate is a large reason why an outsider such as Donald Trump was elected president of the United States.
Put simply, the civil society that a legislature sits atop matters, as much as it matters the intention of the man or the woman at the pinnacle of power.
A country such asCanada, a federation with no history of military insurrection or populist coups, a country not riven with strict religious divides, can tolerate a highly centralized federal government elected freely and fairly through first-past-the-post pluralities that fall short of an overall majority vote.
Turkey, a country with a vastly different history and civil society, cannot. That is why Western democrats are worried. And why Canadas democracy is worth celebrating.
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Canada's democracy is the worst, except for all others - The ... - Washington Post