by jpitney | Apr 13, 2022 | Congress, Debate, Deliberation, House of Representatives, Senate
Kevin Kosar at The Hill: . The citizen who dares to turn on C-SPAN 2 to watch our national representative democracy at work is all but certain to be disappointed. John Q. and Jane Q. Public will see committee hearings wherein legislators are bickering with one another...
by jpitney | Apr 9, 2022 | Civility, Deliberation
Arthur Brooks at The Atlantic: If we want any chance at persuasion, we must offer [our values] happily. A weapon is an ugly thing, designed to frighten and coerce. A gift is something we believe to be good for the recipient, who, we hope, may accept it voluntarily,...
by jpitney | Apr 8, 2022 | Deliberation, Higher Education
Jon Shields at NY Times: Like other conservative professors who are advocates of free speech on campus, I once opposed efforts to create a classroom climate in which students are protected from speech they find emotionally upsetting, ranging from “microaggressions” to...
by jpitney | Mar 31, 2022 | Congress, Deliberation, House of Representatives
Don Wolfensberger at The Hill: The House Rules Committee is to be commended on holding a day-long hearing March 17 on proxy floor voting and remote committee proceedings — two emergency pandemic procedures initiated in the last Congress. All told, 16 House members...
by jpitney | Mar 28, 2022 | Civility, Deliberation, Education, Local Government
Jonathan E. Collins and Julian Bessinger have a Brookings article titled ” The case for participatory democracy during educational crisis.” In 2010, an organization called Everyday Democracy (ED) organized the Strong Start for Children (SSFC)...
by jpitney | Mar 27, 2022 | Deliberation, Polarization, Social Media
Nathan Gardels at Noema: The splinternet has predictably evolved into wars among platforms armed with predisposed views of reality that resist external checks on perceptions. As Claire Webb writes in Noema, epistemes or paradigms determine how information is...
