The sheer scale of this Data Disaster is beyond precedent. I don't think anywhere in the world has there been such a major breach of personal data protection. Britain is now, officially, the most incompetent protector of sensitive personal data on the planet.
Well, it's always good to be number one at something.
The good news of course, is that this has completely skuppered their naive and dangerous plans for massive centralised databases filled with even more sensitive and valuable personal data than that which they have owned up to losing today - their "National Identity Database".
The polls will, no doubt, reflect that immediately. Asked the question: "Do you trust the government to protect the masses of personal data they wish to store about you?" I would now bet that the "Yes" vote would be somewhat less than 10%. And they'll be made up largely of those who don't yet know about the Datastrophe.
Jane Kennedy had the miserable duty of appearing before the Jeremy to defend the indefensible on behalf of the Government. Obviously the mistress of understatement, she accepted that "we need to demonstrate that we can be trusted".
The very first thing they will have to do in order to have even a 1% chance of rebuilding trust is to listen to the 'king experts who have been warning them for YEARS that this kind of disaster is inevitable once you hold massive centralised databases filled with sensitive and valuable personal data to which thousands of people require regular access.
This, as I've said elsewhere, is what (probably) the world's best known expert in this field - Bruce Schneier - tells us about how we can protect massive centralised databases filled with sensitive and valuable personal data to which thousands of people require regular access.
As they obviously didn't hear me last time, you'll pardon me if I shout:
"AS COMPUTER SCIENTISTS, WE DO NOT KNOW HOW TO KEEP A DATABASE OF THIS MAGNITUDE SECURE, WHETHER FROM OUTSIDE HACKERS OR THE THOUSANDS OF INSIDERS AUTHORIZED TO ACCESS IT" (EMPHASIS ADDED - sorry - emphasis added)
Got that? WE DO NOT KNOW
We might think about starting to trust you ever again when you stop pretending you are capable of doing something that the world's leading experts tell us can not be done. It makes you sound as ridiculous as Thabo Mbeki telling his South African AIDS riddled citizens that their illness has nothing to do with HIV
And let me make this plain. The consensus on this issue, amongst those experts who qualify and are taken seriously by the global Crypto and Security community, is much greater than the alleged consensus on Global Warming. It's even greater than the consensus on the link between HIV and AIDS. It is a true consensus. There is zero dissent.
Only those with political or commercial interests claim that such protection is possible.
Got that? Only those with political or commercial interests claim that such protection is possible.
So, if you're genuinely not heading down the American Police State path, and you REALLY want to begin to rebuild our trust, you will have to begin by apologising for your previous intransigence and publicly accepting what the recognised independent experts have been consistently telling us for a very long time. Meanwhile...
You are not Tesco's.
Yes, they can tell us our shopping habits and put them together with our name and address (if we're a card holder, or pay regularly by credit card) and even that relatively trivial level of detail can provide a lot of personal information people probably wouldn't be at all comfortable with if they understood it. For example - Ladies - you do realise that they know when most of you are having your period? You might not care, but if they were inclined, and if they were allowed to, which fortunately, to date, they are not, they could sell that information to the highest bidder. A Tampon manufacturer is likely to win. If and when you start getting relevant monthly SPAM, you might wanna start thinking about that.
Fortunately, though even Tesco's limited dataset is valuable to someone somewhere, it is not, yet at least, so valuable that it is likely to become a magnet to those who know how to exploit data for commercial purposes and are prepared to exercise "unconventional" means to get at it. Do you know what a single "clean" set of bank account details was fetching on the black market yesterday? (Before this disclosure) £400 quid.
Boy are they going to be pissed at you. You assholes have just flooded the market with about £10 BILLION POUNDS WORTH of virginal bank details - which is bound to depress the market price considerably. It might already - given the fuss and high profile - have reduced in value to only a Billion or two. And you really don't think it's going to get into the wrong hands??
If you are thinking like that you still don't get it. There are no right hands for such data to be sitting in. You've just proved - if anyone still doubted it - that this most certainly includes you.
Let me ram the point firmly home. You're stuffed mate. There is no conceivable "happy ending" to this for you. This is your CJD moment. All you can hope for now is that the long term effects are minimal. Even if the disks are found tomorrow morning, and even if they are apparently in a safe place, still on government "controlled" premises, you will still be stuffed, because, like the rest of the world, you cannot prove a negative. You cannot prove that - in the 3 weeks they've already been missing - the disks have not been removed by a skilled attacker, copied, and returned as though innocently mislaid. Your security chappies do this kind of thing all the time. They're not alone.
So even if Darling can rush into the House tomorrow afternoon clutching the disks in his sweaty hands (which would be a bloody stupid thing to do - but within the range of political grandstanding tradition) we will not know for years whether or not this data has been released into the wild. Partly this is because the clever attackers will not try the smash and grab that everybody seems to expect.
Nobody's going to find hundreds or thousands of pounds has gone missing from their accounts. Too obvious. Too traceable. Too easily spotted. Even by the banks. No. They'll set up small random withdrawals from their millions of hijacked accounts to hundreds or thousands of different recipient accounts. These withdrawals will be typical of the account (to whose records they have gained access for computerised analysis). How many victims are ever going to notice £3.72 this month, £2.18 next month and so on? How many are going to do anything about it? (In fact the only evidence we might ever get to see is that fall in the black market price.)
Tesco's data - and even the 25 Million sets of personal data you've just lost - is not a patch on what you bumbling amateurs are storing elsewhere. Tesco's can't connect their information with any other of our personal data because they don't have access to it. This limits, significantly, the risk we run by letting Tesco hold a small amount of our personal data - but it's still non zero as hinted above.
You, on other hand, CAN connect THEIR data to all the other data sets you have access to, because you've recently given yourself the authority to do that kind of thing without, as I recall, the permission of the British People; but then, as the law stands, you don't actually need our permission, do you. So that's alright then.
So if the limited details...
"children's names, addresses, dates of birth, NI numbers and where relevant bank and building society account details"
are worth a few hundred quid per set, what's the market value of a set including tax details, medical history, criminal record, credit records, child benefit records, telephone records, known associations, club memberships, mobile phone records and internet surfing history, to mention but a few? £1,000? £10,000? Pick a number. Now multiply it by the 60 Million sets you retards are talking about storing and you'll realise we're talking figures in excess of American Defence Spending.
Do you understand what that means? It means that it's worth someone spending something close to what the Americans spend on their super inflated military budget in order to get access to data of that quantity and quality. The Americans, of course, will probably be your first customer. And - if you hadn't guessed - we don't trust you to resist the sale.
We may not need to match the attackers budget in full, because, like we do with military defence, we share some of the costs with our allies, but think of it like this: If America ever became our sworn enemy, how much would we have to spend to defend ourselves against them?
Quite.
Neither can we afford what it would cost - in either economic terms or those of civil liberties and privacy - to defend your proposed massive centralised databases filled with sensitive and valuable personal data to which thousands of people will require regular access. It's a non starter. Learn that lesson, and there is a small chance that your citizens might stop laughing in disbelief at your ludicrous posturing.
And, if you still want an ID card after that, you're going to have to adopt one WITHOUT A MASSIVE CENTRALISED DATABASE FILLED WITH SENSITIVE AND VALUABLE PERSONAL DATA TO WHICH THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE REQUIRE REGULAR ACCESS.
Such as the one I've been trying to tell you about, since 2002, here.
Is that clear?
Good. Now don't do it again!
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10 comments:
"The problem with democracy is the poor quality of the raw material." You start from the (understood) premise that Libertarianism is an inherently good thing. In reality, it's an inherently dangerous political situation - much like Iraq in 1953 (?) just after they'd kicked the Brits out. They'd got a transient kind of "freedom", but the years of Saddam' rule were inevitable and inherent within the situation. They'd have been better off under the Brits. Hillaire Belloc's comment "...Always keep a hold of nurse, for fear of finding something worse" was a remarkably farsighted one. I think you're tactically right... but strategically wrong.
"The problem with democracy is the poor quality of the raw material."
...is a very powerful argument. It is also the classic argument of the meritocrat, autocrat, elitist, platonist, monarchist and all the other ists who oppose democracy.
My full response is going to form part 5 of my eagerly awaited rewritten Chapter 7 - which is evidently morphing into a separate book - and I've only completed part 2 so far. I'm sure you're all gagging to learn that 3 and 4 are well advanced.
Here, however, is a partial response to your argument:
The implications of the charge - that "We The People" aren't up to the job of managing society - is that the alternatives (existing and previous political leaders and systems) are or ever have been better suited to the task.
Yet one thing which is blindingly obvious from any detailed study of human history is that 99% of these political alternatives have been prejudiced, incompetent, ill informed, brutal, deceiptful, corrupt, self-serving megalomaniacs. Examine most of the political disasters in history and it is genuinely difficult to imagine how We The People could possibly have made the situation worse.
One area, in particular, deserves attention. I've mentioned elsewhere that King George II was the last British Monarch to lead his troops into battle. Since then, We The People have become a thousand times more likely to die in battle than are our glorious leaders. One consequence we can confidently anticipate when We The People take charge is that we'll be a thousand times less likely to declare wars in the first place. That alone, is enough, in my view, to justify the immediate implementation of Democracy.
Nevertheless, your point, though aimed unfairly at Democracy is valid for ALL political systems. Humanity has abysmally failed to evolve socially or biologically at anything like the pace of our technological evolution. Our conflict avoidance mechanisms are medieval. Our decision making processes are irrational, corrupt and largely opaque. It is no surprise to the objective observer that our world is in such a collossal mess.
Democracy is not the answer. But it is part of the answer. It needs to be improved to the form I call "Consensual Democracy" which, amongst other things, recognises the vital importance of Dissent. See my "Democratic Cannibals" for more insight into that line of argument.
Hope, that'll do for now.
I meant to ask: why this comment on this post (instead of one of the posts where Democracy is the main issue)? Was that deliberate or a blogging glitch?
I was sent a link to this specific page my a mutual friend - My name's Ron, but that got hijacked by my having previously owned a blog that was based on the same server; we've met at the Tobacco Factory.
The suggestion that "democracy's the worst form of government.. except for all the others" is a great cliche/Churchillian quote, but not actually very accurate. Humanity in its current form has been around for around 65,000 years. Democracy (in its current form) far less than even 1% of that time. It's convenient, for example for Americans to talk about having a "democracy" dating back to 1776... but it' also wildly inaccurate. Fewer than 10% of the population were entitled to vote in the USA's first elections. (Which means it was even less "democratic" than South Africa was under apartheid) If longevity is a requirement of success... then the jury is still out on Democracy as a form of government. It's hard to deny the underlying idea of Marx's "Stage Theory"- that political/social interaction undergoes a form of evolutionary change; The longevity of each "stage" seems to be less than any that preceded it... but at each stage, the people of the time behave as if/believe that they've reached some imagined peak of human achievement. It's almost certainly no more true in 2007 than it was in 1807, 1507 or 1007. Democracy just happens to be the system we've (mostly) got a ramshackle version of at the moment.
"Democracy (in its current form) far less than even 1% of that time. It's convenient, for example for Americans to talk about having a "democracy" dating back to 1776... but it' also wildly inaccurate. Fewer than 10% of the population were entitled to vote in the USA's first elections."
You're quite right about being "wildly inaccurate" but for the wrong reasons. There are two fundamental but hidden errors revealed in that passage. First is that the American system was ever supposed to be a Democracy. It was not. It was purposefully designed to be an anti-democracy because "the founding fathers" feared "tyranny of the majority". This is still very much the position, for example, of Ron Paul and his growing band of right wing libertarian supporters. These are what I call the honest and, generally, honourable anti-democrats.
Those Americans who assert that they are a Democracy can be divided into two groups. First is the small group of deceiptful control freaks who realise that "Democracy" has the moral high ground and use the name to legitimise their abuse of the political process. They are fully aware that they do not operate anything remotely democratic. These are the dishonest anti-democrats. They are, of course, not confined to America.
The second group is much larger: probably 80-90% or so of the population, who are essentially naive and ignorant. They've been conditioned to believe they live in the world's greatest Democracy and they've swallowed it without too much thought or question.
The Second fundamental error, however, is revealed when you talk about entitlement to participate in elections. Do not confuse Suffrage with Democracy.
The only elections Democracy may occasionally require are for people to implement policy. NOT to decide it. So electing your Police chief or County Sheriff - to implement laws democratically arrived at - is Democratically acceptable. Electing a politician to make those laws in the first place is not merely undemocratic, it is anti-democratic.
Democracy is nothing to do with delegating decision making powers. It is about We The People making ALL the important decisions (and deciding what IS important). Many believe that this is impractical or even undesirable, and honest anti-democrats do make those arguments. Dishonest anti-democrats prefer to pretend that what we already have IS Democracy.
This may be the first time you've read that line of argument. If so, think about what that reveals about the successful meme management of the dishonest anti-democrats who have managed to persuade not just you, and not just 80%+ of the American population but a similar proportion of, at least, the "western world" that Democracy is chiefly about electing your own (short to medium term) dictators. Then read Chapter 7 parts 1 & 2 for my full take on that.
The most cogent and honest anti-democrats are the right wing libertarians, and, although you'll see that I've challenged their anti-collectivism in part 2, I'll be tackling their deeper philosophical views head on in part 3 of that chapter. But any reasonable argument against Democracy must begin with an accurate description of what it is, and electing dictators, it aint.
"99% of these political alternatives have been prejudiced, incompetent, ill informed, brutal, deceiptful, corrupt, self-serving megalomaniacs. Examine most of the political disasters in history and it is genuinely difficult to imagine how We The People could possibly have made the situation worse."
In MY world, the "worst political disasters in history" took place during the 20th century, not under Monarchies or Feudal governments. WW's 1 & 2 for example. Viet Nam... Iraq. We've witnessed the march of history towards a higher and higher proportion of civilian casualties in wars - casualties largely inflicted by democracies. Find me a non-democratic leader who was more "ill informed, brutal, deceitful, corrupt, self-serving and megalomaniacal" than the 21st century's very own Bush administration, and I'll be impressed. (Note that I don't find mere rhetorical assertion particularly impressive, no matter how "ringing" it might sound.)
For me, "politics" is a LOT more than elections and political figures (elected or otherwise) It's how "the isolated individuals who comprise the citizenry" collectively counterbalance the various greater powers arraigned against them in the marketplace.
There are some things - like death - that the marketplace can't fix. Your environment being wrecked by pollution for example (as in groundwater being polluted and rendered unpotable by oil exploration and extraction) "The market" is like a supertanker... you turn the wheel full over... and wait months for something to happen. "Months" is a LONG time to hold your breath, or make do without water, or... It's not good enough. Politics offers a way to steer, as opposed to the market's mere ability to apply brakes and accelerate. That's why I dropped my Anarchistic beliefs in my mid twenties - which were a couple of so decades back.
I'm interested in group activity - it's a very under-explored area of psychology. (Don't snigger at the idea of psychology being merely a "soft" science. When chemistry and physics were as young as the study of psychology is now, Phlogiston was still a yet-to-be discovered marvel.) "The Market" is a fascinating thing: clearly it cannot possibly exist without human participation... yet it displays "behaviour" that acts as if independent of humanity. It obeys rules, it evolves... it's slowly changed from "a convenient tool" into what amounts to our master. Ownership is increasingly divorced from control (Most corporations are owned at second - or third - hand through proxies. (If you've got a pension fund, have you any idea what stocks and shares your fund is invested in?) If the owners down exert control... then who does? A new class of "Managers", the parameters of whose control is somewhat limited: they're forced (in some cases by LAW!) to base their decisions entirely on profitability. It's assumed that you - the proxy owner - WANT that to be the case. But it means that they (the managerial class) serve the market itself... and NOT the owners. and THAT is both interesting... and very dangerous. Entities like "The Market", like "Democracy" behave as if they have a life of their own. They evolve... and they (through the employment of humans) they serve their own interests.
I can't take issue with any of the above. Of course I agree that it would be difficult to find a non-democratic leader who was more "ill informed, brutal, deceitful, corrupt, self-serving and megalomaniacal" than the 21st century's very own Bush administration but I would also re-emphasise that Bush is not a democratic leader himself. But we seem to have veered off that point.
And I'm going to resist the temptation to veer off in pursuit. We started this diatribe on the issue of the viability of Democracy and now you're talking more about Economics. I am quite happy to do that but not here, even though I do recognise the deep connection. Indeed, dealing with the philosophy of the American Libertarian Right requires us to dig into economics from Ludwig Von Mises through Ayn Rand to Milton Friedman. But not today!
"Democracy is nothing to do with delegating decision making powers. It is about We The People making ALL the important decisions (and deciding what IS important). Many believe that this is impractical or even undesirable, and honest anti-democrats do make those arguments. Dishonest anti-democrats prefer to pretend that what we already have IS Democracy."
If you're going to insist on that specific interpretation of "Democracy", then I repeat... the raw material of decision-maker just isn't up to the job. I could also point out that democracy -"demos-craticos" - doesn't have anything at ALL to do with "rule by the people", that would be either "demos ethnos" (rule of what Hitler called the "Volk") or maybe "democ ochlos" - mob rule. American democracy of the late 18th century comes pretty close to the original Greek meaning. If you were a woman, you couldn't vote. If you were young, you couldn't vote, if you were a slave, you couldn't vote; if you were a prisoner, you couldn't vote; if you were poor you couldn't vote. That left an "elite" of about 10% of the population - all mature, all male, and (unsurprisingly) all somewhat keen on maintaining their grip on power. It's curious that you should arbitrarily decide that the people who gave democracy its name were wrong to do so, and that YOUR definition is the only correct one.
But to return to our muttons: you propose a system in which there is close to 100% sufferage, and the views of all carry equal weight. I've known quite a lot of MPs down the years; Dawn Primarolo, before she took up politics full time, was my first wife's secretary. Don Foster (Lib Dem MP for Bath) was a colleague of my first wife. After we divorced, she moved to Huntingdon and designed electoral materials for John Major. I knew the "terrible three" - William Waldegrave, John Paton and Chris "Fat Pang" Patten. The fact that "these are MP's I've known to chat to" makes them a fairly random group. I'd have to guess at their intelligence, but I'd be quite wiling to bet SERIOUS money that every one of them (even Dawn) has a significantly above-average IQ. Not necessarily "Genius", but certainly better than a mere 100 points. Speaking for myself, I just don't have enough hours in the day to develop any kind of expertise in everything that a legal system needs to concern itself with. Nor do I have sufficient interest to want to do so. I'm happy to delegate. My IQ's been measured enough times over the years by enough independent groups to be able to modestly claim, that mine also is significantly above average.
The problem I perceive is with the (almost inevitable) rise of political parties, requiring one to vote for a raft of policies (not all of which one agrees with) Isn't there somewhere in SE Asia that bans political parties?
Let's say that we DO adopt a kind of Swiss "weekly referendum" model. Within days of the new system beginning, we'd be knee deep in propaganda from interested parties trying to sway our votes, telling us for example that pollution is GOOD for us... (I said before that you can't reasonably expect to divorce politics from economics) The US electoral process has already been refined to the point where parties target potential supporters with precision and divert the process onto side issues. You may have noticed an attempt to introduce the same methodology right here in the UK. (Identify and ignore the opposition's voters, and your own "instinctive" supporters, concentrate on the floating voters. Use focus groups to find out what they're worried about. Make THOSE issues what the election is about. Use your vast database to identify "floaters" who will support your take on those issues, and PESTER THEM TO VOTE.
I note with despair that the only serious investment in psychological research is being made by American political parties... who are selling the results (and the software it generates) to U.K. political parties. (who, thank God, made a complete dog's breakfast of administering the new system, because it was never going to really work in the UK)
Humans - as I've posted before (or was it off-forum, if so, apologies!) are not essentially rational creatures. They're hard wired to be small-c conservatives who are more likely to burn you at the stake for inventing something new than they are to adopt it. They're "pack animals"... If you want a democracy that works... you're going to need a different species. Google the PEW institute and the University of Maryland if you don't see why. Their research shows (for example) that the more Fox News an American watches the more likely they are to get simple factual questions about current affairs WRONG. Fox News sums up what a truly "Free Society" looks like. If "WE the people" want our supply of information to be unashamedly slanted - while purporting at full volume that it's "fair and balanced"... then that's what "we the people" should HAVE.
If you're going to insist on that specific interpretation of "Democracy"
Mine is not an interpretation, it's a description of what they tried to set up in Athens Demos Kratos does indeed not mean People Rule, it means People Power.
American democracy of the late 18th century
was - as I said in my first response - NOT a democracy. This is not my deranged opinion. This was the founders' conscious choice.
...comes pretty close to the original Greek meaning. If you were a woman, you couldn't vote. If you were young, you couldn't vote, if you were a slave, you couldn't vote; if you were a prisoner, you couldn't vote; if you were poor you couldn't vote. That left an "elite" of about 10% of the population - all mature, all male, and (unsurprisingly) all somewhat keen on maintaining their grip on power.
This is an anachronistic and gross distortion. The Athenians concept was simple. Power should be shared equally amongst all Citizens. Their failure was in the definition of citizens, which did indeed exclude women and slaves. But this patriarchal mindset was universal and had nothing to do with democracy; it is a specifically male failure, not a democratic failure. Indeed it persisted almost universally right up until the 20th century. And one of the most potent arguments against democracy is that the most democratic nation in the world - Switzerland - was the last (in the West) to enfranchise its Women for reasons which echo your later point: that citizens are "hard wired to be small-c conservatives".
I also have no difficulty conceding that Democracy would not have outlawed racism, sexism, capital punishment, corporal punishment and a host of other primitive primate behaviours; at least not so rapidly as they were. I do not argue that Democracy is yet a progressive force or that it ever necessarily will be.
Prisoners in Athens, of course, wouldn't have been able to participate because they would obviously not have been able to attend the assembly but "the poor" were quite explicitly INcluded. The Athenians introduced the concept of payment to attend political debates and for Jury service precisely to ensure that the poor could participate.
And, as for "maintaining their grip on power" the Athenians went to extraordinary lengths to make it impossible for any individual or group to maintain a grip on power. Democracy was established, primarily, to make tyranny, from any direction, impossible. They were, for example, far sighted enough to recognise the inherent corruptability of elections, which would favour the rich who could manipulate the electorate in precisely the ways you imply are common today.
To counter that they introduced selection by lot. You could volunteer or be nominated to go into the selection pool but no amount of campaigning would get you selected. They also rotated their equivalents of "Cabinet" and "Speaker" on a (roughly) monthly basis and limited selection to twice in a lifetime. It was considered a civic duty - but not compulsory; moral rather than mandatory - to participate in the process - to the extent that we get our word "idiot" from Athens, where it meant someone who chose not to participate in the Democratic process.
They were also flexible enough to recognise random selection could present problems. They had two means of dealing with this. First was to allow the random selection but to oversee the result and correct obvious failures. One of the duties of the "Council of 500" was to weed out those who had been randomly selected for, say, policing duties or tax collection, and were clearly not fit for purpose. Second, for the vital post of military leader, they conceded that elections were necessary so that knowledge of the merits of the individuals could inform the choice.
you propose a system in which there is close to 100% sufferage, and the views of all carry equal weight.
No, not the views, just the votes. Everyone should have equal opportunity to present their view, but the merit of any given "views" is a peer review process.
The problem I perceive is with the (almost inevitable) rise of political parties, requiring one to vote for a raft of policies (not all of which one agrees with)
That will only (continue to) apply if we stick with the established paradigm. Certainly if we continue to think in terms of elections - of decision makers - then your complaint is valid and Parties are an inevitable consequence of such elections. Given that you appear to be supporting that process more generally, I am somewhat confused at your complaint.
I imagine there will always be political groupings, but, in a Democracy, they will tend to be single issue groups, which have been around for a while already. They may become the dominant debate shapers but only on the issue for which they have formed and developed their interest or expertise.
Your wider fears of vested interests and corrupt mass media exerting undue influence are still legitimate, but becoming less so by the day for the simple and obvious reason we are demonstrating here and now. We're on the web. Not only can we say what we want without hindrance, which would also be true in a pub or the Tobacco Factory, but there only a handful of other people could hear what we have to say. Here it could be literally dozens!
Trying to force an idea down people's throats is trivial when the medium is television and you are dealing with a passive audience. On the web, it's like trying to herd cats. It can't be done. Only "informed consent" works on the web. If they like your stuff, you can be an instant hero. Otherwise zero. It's very egalitarian, very democratic and very meritocratic - none of which - significantly - are in conflict with each other.
The only thing that works on the web is the only thing that ought to work - peer review. That's why the buzz is all about "Social Networking" and why the traditional politicians are so desperate to get themselves "friends" on facebook and the like. It's quite fascinating to watch which ones are succeeding and which ones are failing miserably. The mainstream media would have you believe that the next Presidential race is going to be between Clinton or Obama on the "Democrat" side and Giuliani or Edwards on the Republican side.
These are the "official" approval ratings according to the Washington Post at the beginning of November (they haven't yet produced their December update):
Barack Obama 51%
Hillary Clinton 50
Rudy Giuliani 50
John Edwards 49
John McCain 43
Fred Thompson 33
Mitt Romney 28
Mike Huckabee 21
Now compare that to the league table we get for googling their names and "president"
John McCain 1.75 Million
*Ron Paul 1.74
Fred Thompson 1.7
*Joe Biden 1.68
*Tom Tancredo 1.66
Hillary Clinton 1.65
*Bill Richardson 1.63
John Edwards 1.62
*Dennis Kucinich 1.61
Mitt Romney 1.61
*Chris Dodd 1.6
Barack Obama 1.55
Rudy Giuliani 1.54
Mike Huckabee 1.51
*Duncan Hunter 1.51
*Mike Gravel 1.36
Notice that 5 of the top 9 (the ones with asterisks) don't even get mentioned by the WP. What is surprising, though, is that, with the exception of Mike Gravel, all the rest fall within a relatively narrow band which actually suggests a limitation with the google indexing algorithm, so I put it in a more specific search string: I googled "candidates name for president". This time, I'll publish the results, beauty contest style, in reverse order:
Bottom of the league of web active support seems to be Tom Tancredo with a humble 36,500 sites prepared to put his name together with "for president". Here's the whole table:
Tom Tancredo 36,500
Joe Biden 47,100
Duncan Hunter 64,100
Chris Dodd 65,400
Mike Gravel 67,500
Bill Richardson 83,600
Rudy Giuliani 96,000
Mitt Romney 115,000
Barack Obama 120,000
John McCain 125,000
Dennis Kucinich 161,000
Mike Huckabee 180,000
Hillary Clinton 214,000
Fred Thompson 215,000
John Edwards 298,000
and finally by an astronomical margin we have the clear web favourite:
Ron Paul with 712,000
We can see how the lack of interest justifies the Post's exclusion of Tancredo, Biden and Richardson, maybe even Kucinich. But how in the world can they justify the exclusion of Ron Paul?
More important is the point I wish to make about the growing power of the web. If my hypothesis is valid, it should be able to make testable predictions, so here's mine. The next president of the United States will be Ron Paul. If that happens there will some enormous consequences for the whole world. First and foremost it will establish the web as the new focal point for political power and organisation. If web activists do indeed manage to defeat the vested interests represented by all the other candidates this is - ironically - going to represent a major victory for "We The People".
Ironic because Ron Paul is NOT A DEMOCRAT. He is one of what I have previously called the honest anti-democrats. Nevertheless, given that all the others are what I would call dishonest anti-democrats who prefer to pretend to be democrats and given that he is a Libertarian, he would, were I American (which, thank the lord, I'm not sir) be my preferred choice.
Mind you I have severe doubts about whether he would be allowed to succeed. If it looks like he might, I would not be remotely surprised to see him assassinated. He represents far too much of a threat to the vested interests, particularly the military-industrial complex.
But the power of the web will still have made its mark. Your concern about the vested interests trying to bury us in propaganda comes from the old paradigm. Such tactics do not work - can not work - on the web. And godnose they've tried!
Have you seen how they've attempted to create their propaganda on the web? It's embarrassing. Control freaks can't cope with feedback or challenge. So, for example, they'll set up their websites to promote their message. But, unlike every other message promoter on the web, which invites participation and feedback, they have to block it, because, on the few naive occasions when they've tried it, they have been swamped with so much hostile and well informed counter-argument that their own message has effectively been destroyed.
But as soon as you remove the interactivity, the web site is as good as dead. No-one's interested if all you're offering is a message that no-one can respond to. They try vetting members and "moderating" and controlling what is actually published but the trolls are much cleverer than they are so the results can be even more deeply subversive of their message than even an open board was.
In short, this is OUR medium, not theirs. It is this medium which makes Democracy, in something close to its original form, finally possible and practical. Still needs a lot of tweaks. We're working on that. But it's getting there. It provides the platform for debate. It has yet to evolve the filtration methods and dissent amplification techniques required, but we're working on that too.
Humans are not essentially rational creatures. They're hard wired to be small-c conservatives who are more likely to burn you at the stake for inventing something new than they are to adopt it. They're "pack animals"... If you want a democracy that works... you're going to need a different species.
I don't disagree with your basic observation. Most humans are mostly irrational. This must be true or else we wouldn't still have a large majority believing in fairies and gods. However, this does not constitute an objection to democracy. It is the Platonist objection and I've tackled that head on here.
Most tellingly though, the Platonists have been in the ascendant - using that argument as justification for their hold on power - for in excess of 2,500 years. Look around you to see the results. Have we been led by beings more rational than the rest of us? Clearly not. So the objection "Humans are not rational" is as much an objection to letting small groups of humans control the rest of us as it is to sharing that control equally.
The fundamental flaw with the Platonist approach is the belief that not only are some humans more rational than others (which is a highly subjective and contentious starting point), and thus better fitted to be controllers rather than controlled, but that such people will be capable of finding rational solutions to human problems which can be imposed on all humans, whether rational or not and whether they agree or not. This is, itself, a deeply irrational concept and is the root of most human conflict.
In contrast, the Consensual Democracy I am labouring to describe is predicated on our (roughly) equal desire to Survive and dedicated to avoiding conflict in deciding how best to Survive. Conflict is our greatest problem, not simply because it can be inherently destructive when it escalates to War, but because it prevents our attempts at solving all the other problems which threaten us - like Global Warming, Pollution, over-exploitation of the Earth's resources and so on. Conflict avoidance is, therefore, our greatest priority (or should be).
Consensual Democracy accepts that even if we cannot always find rational solutions to our problems, we can, nevertheless, find rational ways to make decisions which minimise conflict. That is my goal.
this discussion continues on the forum relevant to my Chapter discussing Leadership (Chap 7 part 2) and can be found here.
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