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India's Battle to Control the Democracy Narrative

theplankmag.com

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Re: India's Battle to Control the Democracy Narrative

#81

Post by 0xDEAFBEAD »

mmooss wrote: post #71
0xDEAFBEAD wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It's not really; I've never heard someone say that, in fact. Lots of disputes within democracies consist of both sides implicitly claiming their position is "more democratic". E.g. how much power should the US president have over US bureaucracies? Some say that because bureaucrats are "unelected", the president should have more control. Others say that too much executive control is authoritarian. In both cases, the…

I don't see that happening. I see lots of propaganda trying to make the same paralyzing arguments, especially the argument that 'it's all the same and you can't tell the difference'. Yes we can, pretty easily.

>Yes we can, pretty easily.

Indeed, it's quite easy! If I agree, it's brave truth-telling. If I disagree, it's propaganda.

Re: India's Battle to Control the Democracy Narrative

#82

Post by 0xDEAFBEAD »

mmooss wrote: post #70
0xDEAFBEAD wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>what do you do about election manipulation? 'Nothing' isn't an acceptable answer. I agree, and this reinforces my point about the ambiguity of the social contract. When the US constitution was written in 1787, the telegraph wasn't even invented. Now we all live in a single "global village". People from all over the world are commenting on politics in other nations in real time. Where do you draw the line for "electi…

> No one seems to know, exactly. The problem is that we've made this intellectual laziness acceptable. Nobody knows exactly? We have pretty good ideas; we know the difference between legitimate media and propaganda; we just need to encode that in English in specific rules. And before that, we need to get the people who benefit from propaganda, and therefore defend it, out of power. Look at the widespread, and effecti…

>we just need to encode that in English in specific rules.

Well, I encourage you to lead the way, fight this intellectual laziness, and propose specific rules. I suspect that you will find the task more difficult than you thought. Whatever rules you propose will be adversarially interpreted by your political opponents, and by actual propagandists. Ideally, the rules should also be simple enough for any voter to understand.

Eager to read your reply!

Re: India's Battle to Control the Democracy Narrative

#83

Post by rectang »

rayiner wrote: post #74
rectang wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The definition of democracy as "free and fair elections" alone is subject to tyranny of the majority.

The problem with any other definition of democracy is that there’s an irreconcilable bootstrapping problem. Democracy is a way to make collective decisions about governance among people who don’t agree on things. The beauty of democracy is that we can all agree on a procedural rule (majoritarian voting) separate and apart from substantive decisions. If you want to exempt certain decisions or categories of decisions f…

Well, the obvious answer is that rights, along with legislative procedures, etc, get codified in a constitution which takes a supermajority to amend. In a perfect world that constitution is approved at a constitutional convention by a supermajority of the citizenry acting through their representatives; in practice it arrives via various historical means, including outside imposition. Despite the "irreconcilable bootstrapping problem", constitutional democracies somehow exist.

But yeah yeah that's not "true democracy" because anything other than majoritarianism is a grotesque western perversion of the perfect immaculate glorious ideal of "simple majority rules on everything". Whatever.

Re: India's Battle to Control the Democracy Narrative

#84

Post by jongjong »

mmooss wrote: post #67
jongjong wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well compare things now with how they were during feudalism. Things are a bit better for the average person. The problem we have now is that the population is extremely propagandized/delusional due to powerful media, made possible by technology. But the same technologies can also create more transparency... Or the technology may cause more skepticism which is also good; e.g. As AI generates fake videos, people will a…

> compare things now with how they were during feudalism. Things are a bit better for the average person. That is really looking at the long run! :D I hope for improvement on a shorter timeline, myself. All those average people are dead. > powerful media If you include social media, I'm with you. > As AI generates fake videos, people will adapt to be more skeptical. You said, and I agree, that people have become "ext…

I've been thinking about human communication and how much it changed over time. It crazy to think that before the printing press, the most efficient form of communication was word-of-mouth. Word-of-mouth only conveys a very vague, unreliable description of reality. Communication was unreliable. People knew they could not fully trust what was communicated to them; not only because the original material may not be reliable, but people knew the message could have been distorted as it propagated through the population 'Chinese Whispers' effect.

Then with the printing press, communication became a lot more reliable; people did not have to worry about 'Chinese Whispers' anymore, they knew that what was printed likely came directly from the source...

Then photography came along. People trusted photos completely for a time. It was high-resolution evidence; wars could be started over it. Then as photo-editing tech became more powerful, people started to doubt photography but then video came along and created a new medium for reliable communication which was hard to fake. CGI never got quite to the level that it could not be distinguished from reality.

Now AI is making video unreliable... We will have no way to verify the authenticity of detailed visual communication. So we will lose trust in it.

Maybe something like blockchain will help us to get back to a certain level of communication reliability in terms of source authentication... but the resolution has been lost permanently. We will never again be sure if something really happened with quite the same level of certainty. We go back to a kind of 'printing press' level of reliability.

The resolution of the communication (the amount of detail) doesn't add to its reliability anymore. We shouldn't underestimate how much of a role video has played in creating the highly centralized over-trusting society which we have today.

Would people give governments so much power if they couldn't even agree with certainty about who said what and even who won the election?

Re: India's Battle to Control the Democracy Narrative

#85

Post by tim333 »

slake wrote: post #66

The article doesn't answer its own question. The inherent contradictions in the ratings. Romania who just 'cancelled an election' and banned the winning candidate from contesting is 40 positions above India.

The Romania actions were too recent to affect the rankings whatever you think of them.

Re: India's Battle to Control the Democracy Narrative

#88

Post by rayiner »

rectang wrote: post #83
rayiner wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with any other definition of democracy is that there’s an irreconcilable bootstrapping problem. Democracy is a way to make collective decisions about governance among people who don’t agree on things. The beauty of democracy is that we can all agree on a procedural rule (majoritarian voting) separate and apart from substantive decisions. If you want to exempt certain decisions or categories of decisions f…

Well, the obvious answer is that rights, along with legislative procedures, etc, get codified in a constitution which takes a supermajority to amend. In a perfect world that constitution is approved at a constitutional convention by a supermajority of the citizenry acting through their representatives; in practice it arrives via various historical means, including outside imposition. Despite the "irreconcilable boots…

Who decides what those “rights” are? You need a source for those rules that is respected by the governed as legitimately superseding the popular will. Constitutional democracy exists in America, for example, because Americans had shared english political norms stretching back to the Magna Carta. They could invoke the “god-given rights of Englishmen” and that’s would have purchase among the electorate.

What equivalent do you have in India (or Bangladesh or Iraq or Afghanistan)? You can try imposing the same ancient political norms that existed in Britain, and that’s what the Indian constitution did. But you can’t scream “you’re doing democracy wrong!” when Indians refuse to give much weight to those colonial impositions, as is happening.

Re: India's Battle to Control the Democracy Narrative

#89

Post by tim333 »

mrkstu wrote: post #62
Animats wrote: post #41

The Economist has a democracy index. The US dropped to "flawed democracy" after the coup attempt and has not recovered.[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist_Democracy_Index

With the police visiting grannies based on their Facebook posts, I’d say the UK should be right there next to the US.

I not sure allowing / banning hate speech is that central to democracy. The ones who get jailed are like "inciting racial hatred with Facebook posts in which he advocated an attack on a hotel in Leeds as part of the violent public disorder..." If it was the police having a go for criticizing the government I'd say it was undemocratic, but for inciting violence it seems ok. If I go on social media where you are trying to encourage arson, murder etc are the law enforcement there ok with that? (https://www.theguardian.com/politics/article/2024/aug/09/two...)

Re: India's Battle to Control the Democracy Narrative

#90

Post by rectang »

rayiner wrote: post #88
rectang wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, the obvious answer is that rights, along with legislative procedures, etc, get codified in a constitution which takes a supermajority to amend. In a perfect world that constitution is approved at a constitutional convention by a supermajority of the citizenry acting through their representatives; in practice it arrives via various historical means, including outside imposition. Despite the "irreconcilable boots…

Who decides what those “rights” are? You need a source for those rules that is respected by the governed as legitimately superseding the popular will. Constitutional democracy exists in America, for example, because Americans had shared english political norms stretching back to the Magna Carta. They could invoke the “god-given rights of Englishmen” and that’s would have purchase among the electorate. What equivalent…

Democratic backsliding isn't a concept owned by Asians: see Hungary, Brazil, Poland, the US under the Confederacy, etc. All of these countries have been "doing democracy wrong" at various times.

And no matter how gleefully you celebrate the distress of liberal westerners when minority populations are abused and human rights are violated, the essential force driving towards the liberation of minorities everywhere is not some foreign tradition, but their own humanity. Until the Muslims and Sikhs of India are killed off entirely, they have their will to survive and to seek a better life. Modi may be popular, but short of genocide he cannot take that away.

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