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The Noise Of Democracy
The Noise Of Democracy Blue Meanies 2006 Thick Records Released on: 2007-01-11 Auto-generated by YouTube.
By: Blue Meanies - Topic
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The Noise Of Democracy - Video
Student leaders of Hong Kongs pro-democracy protests said Friday they might stay on the streets until next June if their attempt to seek talks with authorities in Beijing fails to resolve their political impasse.
The Hong Kong Federation of Students, a leading protest group, backed off earlier plans to send a delegation to the Chinese capital to seek a direct dialogue with top Communist Party leaders during the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit taking place in coming days. Such a move while more than a dozen world leaders -- including President Obama -- are in Beijing could have been regarded as highly provocative.
The student group has instead reached out to former Hong Kong leader Tung Chee-Hwa, asking him to arrange a meeting between students and a senior Chinese official either in Hong Kong or Beijing to discuss the framework for the semi-autonomous territorys 2017 election.
Alex Chow, secretary-general of the federation, said a one-time dialogue can hardly solve the problem, and that the pro-democracy Occupy Central movement might persist until June 2015. Thats when Hong Kongs Legislative Council is expected to vote on the Hong Kong government's proposal for how the 2017 chief executive election should work. The proposal, which will be put forth by chief executive Leung Chun-Ying, is likely to echo an August decision that drove thousands of protesters to the streets.
Everyone agreed we wont retreat for no reason before the legislature takes a vote on the political reform bill, said Chow. Twenty-six of the city's 27 lawmakers from the so-called pan-democrats group have said they will veto any proposal for the 2017 chief executive election that does not meet international standards for universal suffrage.
In order for a reform proposal to be passed in the legislature, it has to have the support of two-thirds of the city's 70 lawmakers.
Protesters in Hong Kong, a former British territory that returned to Chinese rule in 1997 under a framework known as one country, two systems, took to the streets in late September after the Standing Committee of Chinas National People's Congress laid down a tougher-than-expected framework for Hong Kongs 2017 election for chief executive. The panel essentially decreed that only two or three candidates would be allowed and all must pass muster with a screening committee.
A two-hour dialogue between protest leaders and five Hong Kong government officials last month yielded little common ground. The session was the first of what was expected to be several rounds of talks aimed at resolving the political crisis, but a second round has yet to be scheduled.
In an open letter to Tung, who was chief executive from 1997 to 2005, the student group appealed to him to "demonstrate the statesmanship" to help the demands of Hong Kongers be heard.
The group urged Tung to respond by Sunday. Otherwise, they said they would head to Beijing directly to seek talks after APEC.
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Hong Kong student leaders say they may stay on the streets until June
You have to grudgingly admire the black-hat political hackers who have pwned the American electoral system. First, entrench a two-party dichotomy; second, gerrymander districts into tortuous shapes; third, cultivate an electorate so polarized that no matter how much voters dislike their incumbent, they hate the alternative worse; fourth, profit! Its elegant, horrifying brilliance.
The whole point of democracy is to make it easy to throw bad governments out. (Putting good governments in would be a nice bonus, but tends to be a crap shoot.) I think its safe to say that American democracy has gotten stunningly bad at that. On Tuesday, despite an appalling 14% approval rating, across 435 Congressional districts, only twelve saw incumbents lose. Twelve. Because gerrymandering to protect incumbents has left only about 50 of 435 House seats in play in any election.
(To those of you in the rest of the world; I sympathize. Im not even American myself. Bear with me.)
Technology may be to blame for this, to some extent. The age of social media has probably made political polarization worse by aggravating filter-bubble confirmation bias. And as Ive been arguing for years, tech-driven social changes has made polling a whole lot less reliable, which doesnt affect the results, but can make them much more shocking.
On the other hand, tech has a role to play in making democracy more robust. In particular, I give you end-to-end auditable voting systems like Punchscan and Scantegrity, which use cryptography to allow voters to confirm that their vote was in fact counted, without anyone being able to track individual votes back to voters. These dont directly defend against ballot-box stuffing, but theyre a start, and in the age of hackable voting machines, really should be rolled out forthwith.
(But we should not move to online votingthe applause at Black Hat when Dan Geer declared this sounded very nearly unanimous, which tells you a lotand we should always have a physical paper trail for ballots. That makes it much harder to hack a recount.)
In a sane world, technology would fight gerrymanding, too. Instead of districts being drawn by hand, their boundaries should be set algorithmically, using only geographic contiguity and population counts as factors, not voting predilections. Of course the political hackers who have seized control of the system will never allow that to happen. It will have to be forced on them. But vulnerable systems have to be patched somehow if you want them to keep running.
Algorithmically defined districts would have another huge advantage: they would make it easy to create new virtual districts not tied to the tyranny of geography. Back when modern democracies were invented, that was the only viable option, but in our hyperconnected today, wouldnt it make as much senseif not moreto allow voters to register for online constituencies, instead of the one in which they happen to physically live?
Imagine a world in which any subculture or movement able to muster enough people could send its own post-geographical representative to their Parliament or Congress. That body would become enormously more representativeand less defined by two or three dominant parties.
Technology could obviously make direct democracy easier, too. But it wouldnt make it any better. Direct democracy, ie rule by referendums and popular ballots, is actually pretty awful. I realize thats an unpopular statement, at least in San Francisco, in an era when direct democracy recently legalized marijuana and helped bring in same-sex marriage (both of which I strongly support.) But even the American president is elected indirectly. Theres a reason for that. Direct democracy is not a scalable, sustainable solution, and it never will be.
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Disrupting Democracy
Goundamani epic troll about visay #39;s communism
Goundamani epic troll about visay #39;s communism. Aduthavan Story thirudiputtu,scenes lam thirudiputtu UN Thatula irukura idly unakae sontham kedaiyathunu Vadai...
By: Vijaymama HatersSangam
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Goundamani epic troll about visay's communism - Video
A quarter-century since the fall of Berlin Wall, recent events in Ukraine are evidence enough that conflict between Russia and the West didnt disappear with the end of the Cold War. But that isnt the only way that the optimism of 1989 has been disappointed. The early 1990s were filled with hope that the economies of Eastern Europe and Central Asia would boom once they were freed from the shackles of state control. In fact, the economic performance of the former Eastern bloc has been pretty grimfor some countries, worse than under communism. Thats a lesson in the messiness of change, but it also highlights why economic growth isonly a partial measure of progress.
According to World Bank figures, the low and middle-income countries of Eastern Europe and Central Asia as a region have increased their average GDP per capita 43 percent since 1990.Thats slightly better than Sub-Saharan Africa but worse than South and East Asia, Latin America, or the Middle East and North Africa. For 25 countries in the former Eastern bloc, the per-capita GDPs of 13 (containing most of the regions population) have expanded more slowly since 1990 than the global average. Of the 165 countries for which the World Bank has data, Russias GDP per capita (measured in purchasing power parity) was 33rd highest in 1990 and 42nd highest in 2013. Ukraine dropped from 55th to 93rd.Bulgaria and Latvia dropped one spot, Romania four, and Hungary eight. Poland did manage to climb 16 spots, to 45th richest, but it was very much in the minority.While Albania, Poland, Belarus, and Armenia have more than doubled their income per capita since 1990, six countries in the region are poorer than they were that year, including Ukraine and Georgia.
It isnt just compared with countries in the rest of the world that growth rates across much of the former communist bloc are disappointingits compared with their performance under communism. The Maddison project has historical data for 46 economies covering 1939, 1989, and 2010.That includes Bulgaria, Hungary, the former Yugoslavia and its successor states, and the former USSR and its successor states.In 1939, Bulgaria was the 36th richest of the 46 countries.It climbed to 31st richest by 1989 and reached 30th richest by 2010.The USSR was in 27th place in 1939.It reached 26th place by 1989, before the successor states as a group fell back to 34th by 2010.
From 1939 to 1989, the average growth rate in Bulgaria outstripped the U.S. and average growth in the former USSR outpaced Holland.Similarly, Yugoslavia and successor states got relatively richer under communism and poorer again after 1989. Hungary was a partial exception in that it got relatively poorer under communism, but it also kept dropping down the income rankings thereafter.
Alfred Bonnes Studies in Economic Development, a textbook on economic growth published in 1957, suggested that the Soviet model was seen by some leaders as one to emulate on the grounds of its success: The price paid does not frighten political leaders in underdeveloped countries whose choice for improvement of marginal conditions of human existence is very limited. Slower regional growth in the 1970s and 1980s, followed by the Soviet Unions collapse, has made a lot of people forget that communist economies once performed pretty well.
This reflects changing theories on the driving force behind economic growth.In the post-World War II years, high investment was seen as the secret to economic expansionand the countries of Eastern Europe fit the model well. In the period after 1980, when economists favored openness, liberalization, and deregulation as drivers of growth, the idea that communism could be anything but an economic catastrophe became anathema.
The trouble for such theories is that as a group, post-Communist countries have performed badlyand some of the countries that have adopted the most liberal policies have seen the weakest growth. Its true thatPoland introduced stronger reforms than nearly all other former communist states and has since fared much better in economic performance. But Georgia has also been a darling of the international community for the strength of its reform program; the World Banks Doing Business report, which purports to measure the quality of regulation surrounding starting and operating a business, suggests Georgias regulatory environment is better than Canadas, Taiwans, or that of the Netherlands.Yet the country (wracked by Russian interventionism) remains poorer than it was at independence.
Sluggish economic growth is only one of many problems that plague post-communist societies. In 1988, the top fifth of Russias population controlled 34 percent of the countrys income. The most recent number is a 47 percent share. The countrys life expectancy has only recently recovered its level in the last years of communism. If the past 75 years of Eastern Europes history have a lesson for growth theory, its that self-declared socialist states have no monopoly on inefficiency, inequity, and corruption.
Even so, for all the economic problems of Eastern Europe and Central Asia today, it would be a ludicrous obscenity to suggest reviving the communist model of the former USSR.Thats because of the immense human cost it carried: the millions who died in Stalins purges and famines, the gulags and the security states, the denial of basic rights and freedoms. GDP growth rates alone are an incredibly partial measure of human progress. Thats why, for all the failed reforms and failures of reform, there is no going back.
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Did the Fall of the Berlin Wall Hurt Economic Growth?