Mediaboss Marketing

China is a political force to be reckoned with. Photo: AFP

Politics Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalisation of Democracy FRANCIS FUKUYAMA Profile, $49.99

On the eve of the collapse of the Soviet empire, the American political scientist Francis Fukuyama pronounced the global victory of the idea of American-style "liberal democracy". Nearly three decades later, things look grim for his "end of history" thesis, though close readers of his new book will surely conclude that although his thinking has since become guarded by qualification, and by convolution, his old story of American triumph hasn't fundamentally changed.

Political Order and Political Decay is the second volume of Fukuyama's investigation of the origins, evolution and decay of political institutions. Its lengthy argument can be summarised in a single sentence: without the prior establishment of a well-armed and functional territorial state, and without an independent judiciary responsible for overseeing the rule of law that robust state power then makes possible, modern liberal democracy cannot happen. No state, no rule of law, no democracy is the complex algorithm that structures the book, in support of his view that liberal democracy centred on free elections remains the world's No. 1 political preference.

Political order and Political Decay by Francis Fukuyama Photo: Jason Steger

Fukuyama admits of specific troubles in the house of democracy, but they are seen as remediable (how they're to be fixed, he doesn't say). The bigger historical picture is different, and the future bright. His unaltered conviction is that liberal democracy has the winds of long-term evolutionary trends in its sails. Long term is important to Fukuyama, above all because the modern territorial state has become the indispensable kingpin of political order. If there is no state, there can be no rule of law, or liberal democracy.

Advertisement

Fukuyama's point can be read as a backdoor critique of the farcical American-led failure to build functioning states in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya. It's also a sobering reminder that liberal democracy can't be built by liberal democratic means. It requires the establishment of political order through the state, followed by the imposition of legal restraints on state power. Only then can free elections take root and flourish among people living inside territorial states.

Fukuyama reminds his readers that liberal democracy is the offspring of the modern territorial state. The end result proved advantageous in several ways: it reduced civil wars; legalised and legitimated social divisions; enabled the growth of civil society, and facilitated the grand-scale enfranchisement of peoples for whose welfare it provided. And in international affairs, fixed state boundaries provided room for manoeuvre for any given liberal democracy.

Liberal democracy in state form has certainly had downsides. In the violent business of state building, peoples who lacked the capacity to become a modern state were typically left behind, as "stateless people" and "asylum seekers"; or they became the raw material of colonisation, or victims of forcible removal and outright annihilation.

Read more here:
Francis Fukuyama sticks to his guns on liberal democracy

Access to information today is supposed to be for everyone. So-called data democracy labels have been ascribed to every vendors presentation layer in an effort to bring more users into contact with actionable business stats of all kinds. This is where data vizualisation comes in as a route to representing abstract data sets as (usually) multi-colored images and graphical representationsdesigned to help humans find and then interpret patterns and trends held inside the business or scientific data in question.

The first law of information democracy states:

As the number of workflow-engaged stakeholders interacting with data vizualisation tools increases (within agreed policy access limitations), the natural propensity increases for actionable insights to be a) taken away and acted upon and b) further fed back into the analytics engine itself.

On paper (or, on screen, obviously) this technology proposition appears to hold water. Giving a wider number of workers access to data vizualisation streams is indeed democratic, but is a little data vizualisation knowledge a dangerous thing?

CEO of data-driven Business Intelligence (BI) tools vendor Looker Frank Bien thinks it might be his firm produces a piece of software for data scientists that is intended to help make tangible sense of the data crucial for growing enterprises through a browser. He says that wider data literacynot visualizationshould be our next enterprise information imperative.

A little data vizualisation is a dangerous thing

Lookers Bien suggests that the new data visualization tools have created a false expectation in the data marketplace. They provide a great way to engage employees with data in a visceral way, but once business users have it, the depth they can explore the data is limited. What this ultimately means is that these users slow down the query process and they make it a challenge to answer complex questions.

The promise of self-service BI and moving data exploration out of IT and into the hands of business users is only partly addressed but this has done more to whet the appetite than to address the real need. Furthermore, the proliferation of visualization tools impedes an organizations ability to make decisions based on reliable metrics, because it leads to a lag in relevance of the data. We are on the cusp of a renaissance in BI in which modern data tools unlock the true business value of data and enable all knowledge workers to explore and engage directly with the data, stated Bien.

Data visualizationwithout education is myopia

The solution he says is to increase data literacy, not improve data visualization. Data literacy is an increasingly strategic focus for organizations of all sizes and a vital driver of business success.

More here:
Debunking The First Law Of Data Democracy

Swazilands absolute Monarch, King Mswati III, wants citizens to protect the country from pro-democracy groups he blames for tarnishing the image of the Southern African kingdom abroad.

In his speech at the opening of parliament, King Mswati said activities of the groups have deprived the country of good opportunities and benefits that could help improve the living conditions of Swazis.

Denial

But, Wandile Dludlu, the national coordinator for the Swaziland United Democratic Front (SUDF), a pro-democracy group, says the kings accusations are unfortunate and misplaced.

He says the international community is aware that state security agencies intimidate, harass and abuse the rights of citizens critical of the king and his administration.

We are not surprised by the utterances of his majesty. We live in a global village and it is not possible to keep hiding the shenanigans of his majesty, said Dludlu. He is denying the reality that he is the cause of the main problem that continues to pain the country negatively out there. By refusing to democratize, respect human rights, [and] respect the rule of law, these are the things that cast negatively about the country out there.

Pro-democracy supporters worry that the kings latest pronouncement enables security agencies, including the police, to violently crack down on their activities including meetings and protests. Dludlu said he agrees with the concerns of pro-democracy supporters.

His majesty is taking a more tougher stance on demonstrations on dissidents as he calls us," he said. "Going forward, we will continue to do our best to mobilize Swazis to continue protesting. We are making a call because these utterances are educative enough for the world to see what type of a leader and leadership is in Swaziland.

He said there is a need for the international community to pressure the king to create the enabling environment to ensure the administration respects human rights and the rule of law.

In our view his majesty will continue to posture so bad as he does if many governments in the world continue to treat him with white gloves, continue to trade with Swaziland without taking a good look at the human rights record of Swaziland, said Dludlu.

Go here to see the original:
Swaziland Pro-democracy Group Rejects Kings Criticisms

Britain has an enduring moral responsibility to ensure that Hong Kong is democratic, stable and prosperous, and diplomats should do more to uphold the treaty that governed the former territorys return to China 18 years ago, a Parliament committee says.

But a new report issued Friday by the British Parliaments Foreign Affairs Committee stops short of saying what will, or can, be done.

The U.K. can and should take a clearer position on the overall pace and degree of democratic reform, the report says. The specific details of constitutional reform are for the governments of China and Hong Kong to decide together with the people of Hong Kong.

The report is the conclusion of the panels seven-month inquiry on the state of the Sino-British Joint Declaration, the treaty under which Hong Kong reverted to Chinese rule in 1997 under a framework known as one country, two systems. That framework supposedly ensures the territory of 7 million a substantial degree of autonomy for 50 years from Communist rulers in Beijing.

Hong Kong is home to 250,000 British citizens and 3.4 million British (overseas) nationals, who have British passports but no right to work or reside permanently in Britain.

The committees inquiry, which began in July, happened to coincide with the most tumultuous period in Hong Kong since the treaty was signed in 1984 and registered with the United Nations. Chinese authorities sought to obstruct the committees work, even prohibiting its members from visiting Hong Kong during last years massive pro-democracy street protests.

In August, the standing committee of Chinas legislature, the National People's Congress, set a framework for future elections for Hong Kongs chief executive, in effect limiting the choice of candidates to two or three approved by a nominating committee expected to be composed largely of people regarded as pro-Beijing.

That framework touched off the unprecedented demonstrations that lasted 10 weeks and saw thousands of participants clogging major thoroughfares and surrounding government headquarters. The sit-ins ended in mid-December after police, acting on a court order, cleared the streets.

The British parliamentary committee reviewed testimony from nearly 700 people and civic groups in Hong Kong and concluded in its 70-page report that there are real concerns about Beijing eroding freedom of the press and of assembly in the territory.

Furthermore, the report says that Beijings election framework doesnt offer genuine choice in any meaningful sense of the phrase, nor do we consider [it] consistent with the principle that Hong Kong should enjoy a high degree of autonomy.

Read more:
Britain has enduring responsibility for democracy in Hong Kong, report says

Moshe Feiglin: No Conflict Between Judaism and Democracy
In this brief interview on I24 TV, Moshe Feiglin explains why Israel must be Jewish and democratic.

By:

Here is the original post:
Moshe Feiglin: No Conflict Between Judaism and Democracy - Video