The most common form of sortition is juries. Recently in the United States anonymous juries have started appearing. The media do not like them, as they believe it fosters secrecy in the court system and violates the principle of being tried by your peers. But is there a role for anonymous sortition in politics?
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Hardt and Negri
on Liberalism;
The arguments of Madison, who thought representation the key to breaking apart any monarchy of power, now seem merely like mystifications; Montesquieu, who advocated radical division of constitutional powers, has been silenced by the unity of the system; and Jeffersonian free expression has been monopolized by corporate media. The political lexicon of modern liberalism is a cold bloodless cadaver.(more)
Newspapers, magazines and other centralised media earns its trust quotient through the audience knowing there is a paid, professional and expert editors. With new emergant media, such as Wikis, Chris Anderson argues we give up microscale errors for macroscale efficiency. (more)
A
deliberation poll
is an opinion poll for consensus decision making. An
advocate on metafilter
of this technique essentially described it to be used in the same manner as the
Ratification model
which
has
been
proposed
on South Sea Republic.
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Interesting comment
on Slashdot in response to Canada trying to pass legislation
which would require ISPs to have interception capability (ie snooping) with any new technology deployed. The Bill would also require ISPs to hand over subscriber information when asked without judicial oversight.
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Steven Pearlstein has an article in the Washington Post titled,
"Aid Recipients Might Have the Best Ideas About Allocation"
which covers alternate methods to allocate aid funding to needy states. The article challenges the orthodoxy that a small group of specialists are the best to determine what to do with donor money. Instead, GlobalGiving is using technology and the "wisdom of the crowds" to produce outcomes that are more efficient. This methodology has political implications, especially for models which incorporate ratification and
sortition
.
(more)
