Slashdot Mirror

The best summary of climate change "skeptics" and their various bogus motivations and conflicts is, as usual, from http://sourcewatch.org/

http://sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Climate_cha nge_controversy

When evidence/source/authority is at issue, go to Sourcewatch first.
    http://openpolitics.ca/evidence/source/authority

...a "lawful justification or excuse." It's hard to argue that it isn't, given that politicians make laws and political parties choose who gets to run for office. This fellow Crookes is apparently still very much involved with the Green Parties of BC and of Canada, and has very often stated his opinion of his critics to them apparently. If he left the political scene entirely, and stayed away, he'd probably have more rights than otherwise. If he remains, though, it's hard to imagine his critics leaving off at all.

His critics basically accuse the guy and his allies of entirely subverting the party's constitution and internal officer responsibilities, including firing people the elected officers wanted to keep.
  http://openpolitics.ca/GPC+Council+Crisis

These are very serious allegations since Canadian parties get tax money and since members expect parties to behave according to their constitutions. By never responding to these claims in detail, and continuing to associate with all the same people, this guy Crookes could be said to have failed to acknowledge any criticism, and to have given up even his chance to respond.

This blog entry by current Green candidate Chris Tindal explains some of the issues involved:
    http://www.christindal.ca/2006/08/07/the-silliness -of-suing-a-wiki/

What's particularly oppressive about suing these reporters is that the comments they report were not that original. An Ottawa Citizen article quotes former leader Joan Russow and former chair Gretchen Schwarz as saying that the party "sold out" to him and was "bought" by him. http://www.egyptiangreens.com/docs/general/index.p hp?eh=newhit&subjectid=5135&subcategoryid=270&cate goryid=37

The harsh and negative opinion of Crookes was shared by the majority in the party itself. After Crookes left, most of his allies were fired apparently. Some of his harshest critics were elected to officer posts even after they resigned in the Crookes era. So this is not a fringe group complaining, it's central people in the party. The idea that he could silence them all is ridiculous.

As for "exposing him to hatred, contempt or ridicule, or that is designed to insult the person" politics in Canada is not that different from the US. As long as someone's actively involved in trying to take power they get pretty much abused non-stop with "attack ads" and that sort of thing. There's no chance that any degree of venom in politics constitutes a crime, though people can and do get sued when they lie or make outrageous claims.

However, the outrageousness of this situation seems to be the consequences of Mr. Crookes winning: total lack of anonymity and BC libel standards to apply to the entire Internet no matter how vital the public interest of the subject matter. Basically a gigantic chilll descending on politics itself.

It's still relatively easy to find lots of links relevant to Wayne Crookes and the "gang of Crookes" controversy. Here's one account by Chris Tindal:
http://www.christindal.ca/2006/08/07/the-silliness -of-suing-a-wiki/

And here's the original account of the party internal events which may disappear anytime. Crookes is only directly mentioned in a small part of it but possibly because of his central financial role is implicitly understood by many people to be implicated in all of it:
http://openpolitics.ca/GPC+Council+Crisis

A lawyer named Rob Hyndman admits being chilled and deleting a comment he calls "very well argued, and passionately made, and in a world that made sense would in unedited form clearly be legitimate and necessary political commentary":
http://www.robhyndman.com/2007/04/21/comment-edite d-because-of-libel-chill/

(if anyone can dig the original out of a cache and post it here outside of Canada that might be useful)

For those of you who still don't understand why BC libel is not US libel, here's what Dan Burnett, a lawyer now involved in the cases, says about it:
http://www.lawyersweekly.ca/index.php?section=arti cle&articleid=371&rssid=4

And here are a pile more links from blog aggregators. Find more using
http://technorati.com/search/Wayne+Crookes
http://technorati.com/search/gang+of+Crookes
and similar searches on digg, deli.cio.us and so on. Plus the WTF entries.

This seems to be a complete version of the original Wikipedia article
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wayne_Cr ookes&oldid=99714811

Here's a copy of an Ottawa Citizen article proving that major party figures said Crookes "bought" the party and that it had "sold out" to him. Amusing:
http://www.egyptiangreens.com/docs/general/index.p hp?eh=newhit&subjectid=5135&subcategoryid=270&cate goryid=37

Other links on the relevant matters from the blogs include

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/open_politics
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/online_journalism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/radical_transparency

articles
http://medlibrary.org/medwiki/Talk:Wayne_Crookes (really interesting)
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wayne_Cr ookes&oldid=85159885
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wayne_Cr ookes&oldid=99714811
http://209.85.165.104/search?q=cache:BShgcqxTpzsJ: openpolitics.ca/Gang%2Bof%2BCrookes%3FPHPSESSID%3D b13d6821b09286ced373730fb33468a6+openpolitics.ca+g

The UN's own local government agency, ICLEI, has settled on a Triple Bottom Line standard for accounting for local government operations. There are other entities working on management approaches to do exactly what you suggest, "to make really interesting correlations between education, poverty and the environment." The problems include the general lack of transparency in the developing world, an oral culture used to command hierarchies rather than bureaucracies operating by written rules, and no real appreciation of the role that process quality and personal integrity plays in holding the whole system together. However, there have generally been very good results in the developed world from transparency projects like Baltimore CitiStat. As you suggest, finding "high concentrations of outbreaks" of public health problems and their correlation to other problems was one of the goals. The project eventually saved more money than it cost.

Which suggests the other problem in developing countries: because they don't deal with the problem downstream, i.e. just let people die, they don't see the medical or social services costs that developed nations do, so the whole rationale for the project may fall apart due to up-front costs. It might cost only a dollar to save a life, but it costs nothing to let them die, unlike in the developed world where they'll die slowly and take up hospital beds and government medical resources. (Oh the USA is a developing nation from this perspective due to private healthcare).

Thankfully you've got openpolitics.ca there though. If it's an under-reported story on some dirtbag doing something sleazy in a political party, you'll probably find it fully covered there with original sources.

Doing it for the budget would be easier than that.

Threaded media are useless for political debate, for exactly the reason you suggest: any worthwhile question will be crapflooded by those who consider it against their interests to discuss.

The kind of post-by-post deletion or moderation you have to do for a debate thread necessarily becomes censorship when you have to decide if a post that contains a few relevant sentences and a few irrelevant, can be retained or not.

Accordingly, you need third person statements and the kind of contract that prevails in a wiki: version control is sacred and attribution is strict, but no one has sole control of any sequence of words that will appear to the reader, that's only collective.

In other words: absolutely no one other than the administrators who create the buttons, frames, form prompts, has sole control of even so much as a full sentence on any topic/issue page, even if they created it and solely authored it. All they have a right to is accurate attribution and quoting, just as they would if a third party journalist had written a story about the topic.

So the wags who say "impossible" are correct that it's impossible with slash or civicspace or yahoogroups or opengroups or newsgroups or mailing lists. If it is possible at all (not saying it is) it would have to be on a wiki base. And that's borne out by all the good meaty political stuff that's on wikis now: dkosopedia, sourcewatch, wikocracy, anarchopedia, openpolitics, Living Platform, consumerium. And quasi political wikiscience like embodimentwiki and administrative gurudom like let.sysops.be.

Threaded media are useless for political debate, for exactly the reason you suggest: any worthwhile question will be crapflooded by those who consider it against their interests to discuss.

The kind of post-by-post deletion or moderation you have to do for a debate thread necessarily becomes censorship when you have to decide if a post that contains a few relevant sentences and a few irrelevant, can be retained or not.

Accordingly, you need third person statements and the kind of contract that prevails in a wiki: version control is sacred and attribution is strict, but no one has sole control of any sequence of words that will appear to the reader, that's only collective.

In other words: absolutely no one other than the administrators who create the buttons, frames, form prompts, has sole control of even so much as a full sentence on any topic/issue page, even if they created it and solely authored it. All they have a right to is accurate attribution and quoting, just as they would if a third party journalist had written a story about the topic.

So the wags who say "impossible" are correct that it's impossible with slash or civicspace or yahoogroups or opengroups or newsgroups or mailing lists. If it is possible at all (not saying it is) it would have to be on a wiki base. And that's borne out by all the good meaty political stuff that's on wikis now: dkosopedia, sourcewatch, wikocracy, anarchopedia, openpolitics, Living Platform, consumerium. And quasi political wikiscience like embodimentwiki and administrative gurudom like let.sysops.be.

If you want to shift the debate at issue on the fly, look at debatepoint.com, it lets you shift the point under debate as a basic function. However, issues tend to stabilize based on certain principles people think are important and persistent briefings on issues are important.

So once you have gone over the issues a few times you may discover you have to stabilize them into something like an openpolitics.ca type issue statement. If you want to do this on American issues right now try looking at the FrameShop methods from dkosopedia. Looks like it's based on the George Lakoff model. The issue organizing is from work dating back to the 1970s.

However, there are asshats there too. For instance, people just trying to enforce neutral naming conventions have actually been blocked by jerks who think they "own" pages or issues and can control their presentation. How such people are mistakenly given sysop powers on a political site, hard to say, but all such sites have growing pains.

There are also pretty serious biases just because of American media and the people who participate in English. It's hard to find a single political service in America where you can question Zionist occupation of Palestine without some form of harassment and exclusion by technical means. In Arabic of course it would be the other way around. Probably you have to debate in French to get anything like a neutral treatment of that issue, and the French would have strong feelings on things like Algeria and Lebanon. In any political site the systemic biases of who participates are going to rule what is said. Any "majority rule" system like rankings will drive off any minority however outspoken. So most of what is done on commercial sites and in software like slash just doesn't cut it.

Neutral point of view ideology just won't work in politics. NPOV is about moderating out extreme opinions and leaving only what can be stated in some mutually agreed terms. There's no way a political debate could work that way, you need contrast and dialectic tension between the extreme positions.

Accordingly a Multiple Point of View (MPOV) convention like metaweb.com or openpolitics.ca or some of the pages at dkosopedia.com use, is required. There can be a neutral issue statement but after that everything is a "position" that can be stated the way its supporters want it stated.

A political party needs a sympathetic point of view convention something like wikinfo.org uses.

NPOV is made into a religion by some of the Wikipedia cultists, who refer to Jimmy Wales as their "GodKing". It sounds like they're joking, but they are not. NPOV always tends to a dictatorship of the most powerful administrator.

Neutral point of view ideology just won't work in politics. NPOV is about moderating out extreme opinions and leaving only what can be stated in some mutually agreed terms. There's no way a political debate could work that way, you need contrast and dialectic tension between the extreme positions.

Accordingly a Multiple Point of View (MPOV) convention like metaweb.com or openpolitics.ca or some of the pages at dkosopedia.com use, is required. There can be a neutral issue statement but after that everything is a "position" that can be stated the way its supporters want it stated.

A political party needs a sympathetic point of view convention something like wikinfo.org uses.

NPOV is made into a religion by some of the Wikipedia cultists, who refer to Jimmy Wales as their "GodKing". It sounds like they're joking, but they are not. NPOV always tends to a dictatorship of the most powerful administrator.

"a political search engine"

e.g. the "open politics web" which defines some conventions making it easy to reliably search, for instance by requiring people to use a single version of their name with underscores as spaces.

"Wikipedia and dictionary of political terms"

e.g. the "list of policy terms" most of which cite Wikipedia and add information critical to poltical purposes

"and thoughts through the ages."

e.g. this "list of political thinkers with summaries of what many of them have to say

"I'm certain others could think of other tools that would help people understand politics, and understanding is the first part of any discussion."

Follow the links as above.

As for the virulence of debate:

  "It's all trolling, really." - Hayley Easto, a founder of openpolitics.ca and free speech defender

"a political search engine"

e.g. the "open politics web" which defines some conventions making it easy to reliably search, for instance by requiring people to use a single version of their name with underscores as spaces.

"Wikipedia and dictionary of political terms"

e.g. the "list of policy terms" most of which cite Wikipedia and add information critical to poltical purposes

"and thoughts through the ages."

e.g. this "list of political thinkers with summaries of what many of them have to say

"I'm certain others could think of other tools that would help people understand politics, and understanding is the first part of any discussion."

Follow the links as above.

As for the virulence of debate:

  "It's all trolling, really." - Hayley Easto, a founder of openpolitics.ca and free speech defender

"a political search engine"

e.g. the "open politics web" which defines some conventions making it easy to reliably search, for instance by requiring people to use a single version of their name with underscores as spaces.

"Wikipedia and dictionary of political terms"

e.g. the "list of policy terms" most of which cite Wikipedia and add information critical to poltical purposes

"and thoughts through the ages."

e.g. this "list of political thinkers with summaries of what many of them have to say

"I'm certain others could think of other tools that would help people understand politics, and understanding is the first part of any discussion."

Follow the links as above.

As for the virulence of debate:

  "It's all trolling, really." - Hayley Easto, a founder of openpolitics.ca and free speech defender

It's a GREAT idea precisely "because it provides two nurturing pools for partisan extremism to let people gear up for battle before going all out in the "non-partisan" forum. People can argue with a "public" face and then bad mouth in the "private" partisan forum."

This is exactly what political parties do. And there is no real democracy in the world that doesn't have them. They must therefore be necessary for democracy.

Quite possibly, they are training camps so that each side can identify wing nuts and people who will fail to convince the public or be easily caught out by the opponents, and steer the wing nuts into things like recruiting or stirring up the base - not running for office or publicly debating on TV or the other nonpartisan forums. Woops except FOX "News"!

See some intelligent definition of the idea of a faction, which is similar to this idea but more general. Factions needn't match one to one to parties - a large party is a "big tent" with many factions.

Think of it this way: someone presents a detailed Marxist economic argument about the trade deficit. Obviously the Republicans all think he is a troll. The Democrats don't know, and if they hold a vote on it they can't possibly be informed enough about such a specialized type of analysis. It would take a formally recognized faction of Marxists, maybe even Marxist economists, to declare whether the argument was acceptable within a Marxist mode or not. Without formal differentiation of factions, you just can't hold legitimate debates because you have no way of differentiating epistemic modes.

There is a detailed discussion of this in the United Nations University Millenium Project report, 1993, where they are called "epistemic filters". Anyone find a URL?

It proposes that you can most readily get (for instance) Shia fundamentalist clerics into dialogue with Marxist feminists by giving them a system that can filter out definitions and links each opposes ideologically, but using the same fact database. Eventually they can negotiate "neutral" epistemics and so come to agreements.

Interestingly, there is no credit on the text in the UN document, only a long list of contributors at the end. Some of whom are slightly famous.

You mean something like this? The openpolitics.ca "issue challenge" is more or less exactly what you're talking about. I think. Though it relies inherently on wiki versioning, not threaded media. Probably wise, as there's no value in reading through a lot of refuted points.

It's obviously quite important in any debate that each side has about the same resources and notice to get their arguments together. So focusing on an issue at a known pre-announced time and having it end (and perhaps also be judged) also at a pre-known time is pretty important to overall fairness.

There is only one ruleset for moderation specifically of political debate, and it specifies pretty clearly you have to use wikis, not threaded media:

"open politics in force"

The reason is obvious: threaded discussions dilute into dissension with no way to hide things proven to be wrong or mis-spoken, while wikis allow only the consensus to be visible, with the discredited or withdrawn positions off the topic page.

You might also want to look into Wikipedia's Arbitration Committee (ArbCom) and the politics around that, which is severe. Their rules are somewhat less strict and allow for things like removing stuff because no one likes the author, however. You could not ever tolerate that in a political setting. Casual bullying, equivalent to gagging someone and throwing them out of the town hall, goes on all the time in politicsal forums.

It's a lot tougher than you think. Politics necessarily admits ad hominem to a degree, rhetoric and metaphor, and you need appeals mechanisms and some way to genuinely punish systems administrators who do not follow the rules strictly. Expect to be removing sysop powers extremely often under this regime.

Think about it: How many people are qualified to be judges? Speaker of the House? Not many. Don't expect your chief moderator to be anyone with less skill.

If you do some web searches on "open politics" and "political wiki" and even "troll-friendly" and "sysop vandalism" you'll find out a lot about politics via the web.