This piece began as a lengthy comment responding to Ken Parish’s post on my proposal for a third ‘people’s chamber’ chosen by lottery. I posted it on Substack a few weeks ago, but thought it might be a worthwhile post here. I don’t support citizens’ juries as some kind of ‘hac...
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You might have seen the picture above. It’s the Tacoma Narrows bridge which collapsed a few weeks after being built. Why? Well what you can see here is the perturbations from the wind being amplified by the suspension system on the bridge - in the way that feedback amplifies w...
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In the pretty likely event of a hung parliament after the next Australian election, the cross-bench becomes kingmaker. I’m hoping — and expecting — the crossbench to seek greater use of citizen assemblies in governing Australia. But what comes next is crucial. Some think it wo...
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The Gregorian revolution gave rise to a form of organisation that was gradually stamped out all over the Western world and then to its followers. Constitutional monarchy: A pyramid with a chief executive at the top with the rest of the pyramid made up of checks and balances on...
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Posted in Philosophy, Innovation, Best From Elsewhere, Ethics, Cultural Critique, Death and taxes, Bullshit, Employment, Sortition and citizens’ juries, Isegoria, Coronavirus crisis, Criminal law
William Hague has caught the bug for democratic lottery. And he writes about it well. This simple sentence is a nice little microcosm. “Social media companies are poisoning the democratic world with the addictive spread of narrow and intemperate opinions.” Hear hear. Writing a...
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https://youtu.be/6uPex480hRU Above is the video of a presentation I made at NESTA in London on 15th November with discussants Claire Mellior and Martin Wolf. I reproduce (AI generated) timestamps in the shownotes of the video below. 00:00 - Introduction and Overview The talk b...
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aupVJkTnIqY This is one of the best podcast interviews we’ve done. We discuss Peter Heather’s marvellous book “Christendom: the triumph of a Religion”. It covers the thousand years from the time Christianity becomes embedded in the Roman Empire,...
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https://youtu.be/aBTFQ6wwlq8 The more I've thought about sortition or as I call it "representation by sampling" the more profound I find the ways it differs from representation by election. The latter is inherently competitive and performative and both these things tend to und...
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https://youtu.be/DxcE_PC5rgc A while back I condensed a bunch of things I have been thinking about into four ideas which I explored with Peyton Bowman in these two discussions . In discussions with philosopher and school teacher Martin Turkis, it occurred to me it would be int...
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One of my favourite podcasts with journalist, scholar and gentleman Hugh Pope. Hugh has just brought to publication a book written by his father in 1990. But being well ahead of its time, the book was unpublishable. It pursued Aristotle's point that elections installed a gover...
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One way to get beneath the surface of what's going on is to read people who were writing about issues, as they emerged rather than in more modern times when they’d become the norm and become infused in our commonsense. I was browsing in one of the few remaining second-hand boo...
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From this week's Substack of mine. Thomas B. Edsall has an important writeup of research into reducing political polarisation. But to me it seems to be heading in an unhelpfully scientistic direction. Virtually all the researchers quoted examine the causal pathways leading to...
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Cross posted from Quillette from 16 Feb 2019, but now behind a paywall. When a conversation is not a conversation: party political discourse in the early 21st century I It looks like liberal democracy is falling apart. The chaos of Donald Trump was unimaginable just a decade a...
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https://youtu.be/ftssK9b8WFI Finding a formatting mess when I looked this up on Troppo , I've reposted it here for the record. I'm a bit embarrassed by my wooden speaking style. Here’s the David Solomon Lecture I’ll be giving at the Brisbane Museum of Modern Art in an hour’s t...
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As part of my recent fascination with competitive and ‘de-competitive’ merit selection, I’ve been looking at the origins of both parliamentary and presidential elections. Intriguingly though we now associate elections with competition between candidates, in both the British pa...
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https://youtu.be/gYKPWkvTRIg I What is it with James Burnham? I associate him — via Curtis Yarvin — with the alt-right. And Burnham is the founding text of what I call the Alt-centre (of which I am the founder and which I'm hoping to parlay into world domination if only I can...
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I use Troppo to make various notes for file as it were for reference in future. And on wanting to record something I found that I hadn't reproduced this post — which was originally at The Mandarin — here. So here it is, with some notes to file below. Part one. Part two is here...
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If we want politicians to actually represent their constituents, we need to free them from the pressure of toeing the party line. A week or so ago someone tweeted this to me. It was a response to my Crikey! article of February last year. I had forgotten I'd written such a conc...
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This is a piece I did for Crikey I'd forgotten I'd written and hadn't put it up here. So now I have. The article was spotted by someone who has been exposing just how much damage opening up Congressional committee deliberations to the public has done. It's a very interesting t...
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFtN1nIHXSY I really enjoyed this conversation with my friend Peyton Bowman which celebrates the possibility that Australia might be able to show the world how to push back against the Trumpian madness. We tried to turn Peyton's lack of inside k...
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3JlLFKUF_eA This video discussion, audio downloadable here, discusses the issues raised in this post. I've previously expressed some dissatisfaction with what I might call a 'one dimensional' understanding of the idea of liberty. This post explo...
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This post began as a long tweet thread in response to Tim Dean's asking for my views on New Zealand's tilt toward proportional representation (PR). I've expanded it a little here, but it's still a short post. In any event it tries to crystalise something I think is important i...
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https://twitter.com/InfiniteL88ps/status/1475453302653349890 Hi All. Just to let you know of a podcast I did with Jim O'Shaugnessey's program "Infinite loops". You can download it from this link . I've also done another one with Bernard Keane (who was an excellent discussant)....
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https://youtu.be/cRhlvHQ0MWY Here's a podcast I did a few weeks ago which has garnered more reaction from people than any I’ve done before. That may just be because (as it turned out) I played cat and mouse with the listener by the podcast talking to an essay I'd written that...
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[caption id="attachment_35644" align="alignleft" width="1163"] For anyone who’s interested I recommend David Cayley’s series of CBC radio documentaries on Illich. (He’s the best broadcaster I’ve come across). The first series of five programs focuses on Illich’s social thought...
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Posted in Philosophy, History, Education, Economics and public policy, Health, Political theory, Innovation, Ethics, Cultural Critique, Democracy, Sortition and citizens’ juries
I've recently completed an essay and like quite a few of my essays, it's not been 'optimised' for publication in a magazine, so I may not try to publish it. But in case any folks here think it's of interest, they need only put their email in comments below or email me and I'll...
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As Troppodillians may know, I occasionally use the comments section of Troppo to minute notes to myself — often references — to which I may wish to return some day. So I can use this thread in that way, I'm reproducing something I first published a while back on the Mandarin....
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It's here, the booklet I am sure you have all been waiting for. The one which Gigi Foster and Michael Baker slaved over for 10 months . It is also on Kindle . It is dedicated to all the victims of the Panic, in poor countries and rich countries. They include our children, the...
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Posted in Politics - national, Politics - international, Life, Philosophy, Print media, History, Humour, Education, Literature, Society, Religion, Theatre, IT and Internet, Economics and public policy, Terror, Science, Journalism, Media, Libertarian Musings, Health, Political theory, Law, Dance, Review, Bargains, Travel, WOW! - Amazing, Social, Parenting, Ethics, Medical, Public and Private Goods, Death and taxes, Inequality, Social Policy, Democracy, Employment, Sortition and citizens’ juries, Isegoria, Coronavirus crisis
Dear Troppodillians, lend me your critical eye. I ask you to consider the system of citizen-jury appointments I have in mind, and tell me how the vested interests would try to game it, ie why it would not work and whether the system can be improved. Bear with me as I describe...
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Posted in Politics - national, History, Society, Theatre, Libertarian Musings, Political theory, Law, Business, Social, Cultural Critique, Democracy, Sortition and citizens’ juries
As I struggle with my ninety-fifth year, I would like to beg forgiveness from the true believers in sortition. Near forty years ago, in 1985, I published a book Is Democracy Possible? with the subtitle The Alternative to Parliamentary Democracy. The sortitionists believed that...
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0NCNUoY0UJA&t=20s A few weeks back I was rather taken aback to receive an email which I took to be a hoax: Hi Nicholas We would like to invite you on the Greatest Music of All Time podcast. The episodes are a good opportunity to promote upcoming...
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Back in the day, (which is to say for most of the 20th century until things began changing in the 1980s, each of the major political parties had a few percentage points of the population as members. In addition to the intrinsic rewards of being part of one’s country’s social a...
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Another post from John Burnheim who wrote this following up on having received some questions from some Spaniards. (Reminding me of the title of John Lennon's book, or perhaps it was just a joke of his somewhere: A Spaniard in the works) NG Demarchy is not a comprehensive plan...
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Published in and edited form in The Conversation . Martin Wolf has a crisp face-to-camera opinion piece in which he points out that populism in government hasn’t lined up neatly against relative success in keeping populations safe from COVID. Thus in the Anglosphere, Donald’s...
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[caption id="attachment_34260" align="alignright" width="352"] Source: Sortition in the History of Democracy , Slide 3[/caption] A lottery is a defensible way of making a decision when, and to the extent that, it is important that bad reasons be kept out of the decision. Peter...
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https://youtu.be/w5WsRmgqe_M Early this year I published an essay in the Griffith Review critiquing what I called the competition delusion. I was passing by more common critiques of competition, which for instance argue that competition isn't necessarily a great idea in numero...
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Scrap attempts to reforming politics as a whole. From a practical point of view attempts to do so by legal constitutional change have no possibility of succeeding from a theoretical point of view, it is folly to assume that if we agree broadly about principle and are motivated...
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[caption id="attachment_33674" align="aligncenter" width="3840"] Not sure Winston ever said that, but it sounds like the kind of thing he might have said. Quote investigator doesn't tell me sadly. Grateful for any others' researches in comments below.[/caption] The subject of...
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This is now the whole article. Comments have been closed on the previous post . Part One To command nature, we must obey it Francis Bacon, 1624 The commitments that bind us to the social body are obligatory only because they are mutual; and their nature is such that, in fulfil...
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The Griffith Review has just published a substantial essay of mine that I've been working on for some time. I reproduce the introductory section below after which you'll have to hightail it to their website to finish. But it would be good to see you back here for comments whic...
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https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1225553117929988097?s=20 If you know anything about the latest State of the Union Address, you know that after Donald Trump had handed Nancy Pelosi his speech as if she were his secretary when she held out her hand to him to shake han...
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Are you pro-choice or pro-life? Language like this shows us how fundamental framing has become to political combat. Political debate isn’t just ‘dumbed down’ or simplified. There’s a geography to the ground on which it’s fought and those with an eye to victory head for the hig...
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[caption id="attachment_33274" align="alignright" width="278"] In good bookstores everywhere – at a very reasonable price[/caption] Cross-posted from the Lowy Institute Blog . Instead of munching popcorn at the political theatre, citizens’ assemblies would give the community a...
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From around January this year I've tried to get the column below published – in the Guardian UK where my previous column was published. Unfortunately, and even after endless cajoling via the Guardian at this end, I couldn't get a reply which is piss poor but there you go. Mart...
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Politics is about constructing those public goods that are necessary for communities, are a minimum to deal with problems that threaten life itself. In our present situation, the most serious problems are all posed on a global scale, as a result of the scale of our management...
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[caption id="attachment_32524" align="aligncenter" width="1212"] When Ghandi was asked what he thought of Western Civilisation he said it would be a good idea. Ditto democracy.[/caption] In a recent paper , James Fishkin identifies some potential shortcomings of citizen's cham...
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There's a spectre haunting Europe … and the rest of the Western world. We have elaborate 'diversity' programs in good upper-middle-class places to prevent discrimination against all manner of minorities (and majorities like women). It's a fine thing. But there's a diversity ch...
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWHgoT2LfnE&feature=youtu.be I was a little crestfallen when, after my public lecture on democracy and sortition at King's College London was filmed with a few to producing a video and the contractors informed us that the recording was hopelessl...
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For some time now we've been 'proving up' citizens’ juries as a means of consulting the people, but generally within the context of governments being in charge. As a result they've been mostly relatively innocuous. For instance the first two in South Australia were focused on...
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Below is a spirited exchange between me and Barry Jones on deliberative democracy which I reproduce with his permission. He won't be participating in any online debate because as he puts it I … confess to being a total abstainer where social media is concerned. I don’t want to...
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