Being permitted to talk about politics is no substitute for being free.I don't want to give link credit to such a group, but if you search the term you will find a link to the Deliberative Democracy Consortium. One quote:
At the beginning of the 21st Century, democracy is in the midst of a particularly major shift in its development. All kinds of leaders are realizing that the traditionally distant relationship between citizens and government is inadequate for solving public problems. They are recognizing that the usual formats for decision-making often waste public resources, create unproductive conflict, and fail to tap citizen potential. They are attempting many different civic experiments -- some successful, some not -- to help citizens and governments work together more democratically and more effectively.Trying to solve a problem by exploiting the problem never works. I don't agree that there should even exist a dichotomy between the citizenry and government. I admit that this is currently not the case (although it may be in some areas on a strictly local level) but I believe that it should be.
Public deliberation can have many benefits within society. Among the most common claims are that public deliberation results in better policies, superior public education, increased public trust, and reduced conflict when policy moves to implementation.There's another quote from the same site. Note that it says nothing about protecting fundamental rights or increasing personal liberty. It's all about hoodwinking the masses into believing that further infringements are just fine because we all got to discuss them first.
I was surprised at the candor of the Wikipedia entry for "deliberative democracy."
Deliberative democracy, also sometimes called discursive democracy, is a term employed by political scientists, especially those in the field of comparative politics, to describe modern regimes in which the state regulates nearly every aspect of public and private behavior.I wonder how long it will be before someone changes it.
The most influential scholars of deliberative democracy have each described deliberative democracy in a slightly different way. Common to all definitions is the attempt to mobilize entire populations in support of the official state ideology, and the intolerance of activities which are not directed towards the goals of the state, entailing repression or state control of business, labour unions, churches or political parties. Deliberative democracy regimes or movements maintain themselves in political power by means of secret police, propaganda disseminated through the state-controlled mass media, personality cult, regulation and restriction of free discussion and criticism, single-party state, the use of mass surveillance, and widespread use of terror tactics.
An underpinning of this concept seems to be that everyone has an opinion that's worth listening to, and that everyone deserves respect. If someone is dedicated to stripping me of my rights, infringing on what little liberty I have managed to garner for myself, why should I bother listening to them? Why should I waste even a single minute listening to their reasons for why I will be better off by submitting to the mob consensus?
UPDATE: I was thinking about a follow-up to this post, but there's no point. Just go read this exchange of comments at Random Ramblings of a Republitarian.
Also, congrats to rlubensky for being the first to refer to me as a libertarian. All of you people who kept calling me a conservative were starting to get on my nerves.
It's not that I place a great emphasis on labels. I don't. I believe that most people use convenient labels as a substitute for thinking. "He said what? Oh, that means he's a so-and-so." Eyes glaze over, all thinking stops. It's just that sometimes I don't particularly appreciate a label that's used by some politicians and their supporters who I know good and well are not looking out for my best interest. Who are, in fact, whole-heartedly trying to figure out yet another way to screw us all out of a little more freedom.
