Flamewars Re: [IRPCoalition] [governance] RE: [bestbits] Time-sensitive: 24 hour sign on period for ITU Plenipot joint recommendations

[David Golumbia]

requests to end discussion about the nature of democracy in the name of
democracy (or some successor form of meaningfully representative and
human-rights-preserving form of governance) are more than a little ironic,
given the centrality of discussion and debate to the justification for
"free speech" that is supposed to be one of the most important pillars of
democratic governance.

"neoliberal" IS a distressing repurposing of the word liberal and all it
stands for, but this repurposing was done by the architects of
neoliberalism, on purpose. (it refers to "liberalism" in the utilitarian
constructions of writers like JS Mill, and to a lesser extent Locke and
some others). it is not meant to refer to "liberal" politics today (UK
Labour party, US Democratic party), or to a generally "liberal" outlook as
that has come to be understood. It has a thick, thorough, detailed body of
research explaining its history and its ideas, in particular in the work of
Philip Mirowski, Dieter Plehwe, Jedidiah Purdy, David Harvey, and others
(to say nothing of the work of those who coined the term and its
surrounding concepts, like FA Hayek, L. von Mises, M. Friedman, and quite a
few others). The doctrine they describe in these works is of great concern
when one looks at the rhetoric and policy suggestions surrounding many of
the ideas of MSism. I will be happy to provide more detailed references
off-list (or on-list, if anybody wants that).

Distinctions between those who "do something" and those who "just want to
talk"--those who have a "stake" (when we are talking about governance that
affects everyone, implicitly and explicitly) and those who don't--are
themselves a troubling part of the kinds of politics people like Mirowski
analyze at great length, and they have a deep and disturbing political
history. They are also rampant in discussions of technology today,
especially among those in the industry. I believe they are deeply
pernicious.



On Fri, Oct 24, 2014 at 10:46 AM, Suresh Ramasubramanian <suresh at hserus.net>
wrote:

>   I am absolutely glad to not continue a discussion on these lines. On
> the ground and reasoned policy discussions on this list get increasingly
> rare when terms like neo liberal are bandied around, a distressing
> repurposing of the word liberal and all that it stands for, but I digress..
>
> On 24 October 2014 10:30:01 am chaals at yandex-team.ru wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> This by now pretty unedifying discussion about the finer theoretical
>> points of different approaches to democracy seems to have outlived its
>> usefulness to this group.
>>
>> It takes a certain kind of stubbornness not to recognise that there are
>> extremely serious limitations to the capacity of a "multi-stakeholder
>> approach" to be guaranteed to represent all the people. But then, that
>> pretty much follows from Arrow's theorem, along with the fact that there
>> are equally problems any other approach.
>>
>> We could argue about whether the model chosen for this group is the right
>> one, if there were some alternative proposal. Otherwise, I'd love to see
>> discussions related to some concrete proposal related to ensuring or
>> improving the way that Internet governance supports improved Human Rights.
>>
>> (Yes, this is also what a "neo-liberal" would reply if they wanted to
>> shut down a discussion they found uncomfortable. Unfortunately, there is no
>> a priori way to determine whether my motivation is to spend my time doing
>> useful stuff, or to use any rhetorical trick available to further my hidden
>> agenda. So I'll just go with calling it like I see it).
>>
>> cheers
>>
>> --
>> Charles McCathie Nevile - web standards - CTO Office, Yandex
>> chaals at yandex-team.ru - - - Find more at http://yandex.com
>>
>>
>
> ____________________________________________________________
> You received this message as a subscriber on the list:
>      governance at lists.igcaucus.org
> To be removed from the list, visit:
>      http://www.igcaucus.org/unsubscribing
>
> For all other list information and functions, see:
>      http://lists.igcaucus.org/info/governance
> To edit your profile and to find the IGC's charter, see:
>      http://www.igcaucus.org/
>
> Translate this email: http://translate.google.com/translate_t
>
>


-- 
David Golumbia
dgolumbia at gmail.com
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.igcaucus.org/pipermail/governance/attachments/20141024/dc36502f/attachment.htm>
-------------- next part --------------
____________________________________________________________
You received this message as a subscriber on the list:
     governance at lists.igcaucus.org
To be removed from the list, visit:
     http://www.igcaucus.org/unsubscribing

For all other list information and functions, see:
     http://lists.igcaucus.org/info/governance
To edit your profile and to find the IGC's charter, see:
     http://www.igcaucus.org/

Translate this email: http://translate.google.com/translate_t