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Democracy of Depth - The Citizens' Assembly

A Vision of a "Democracy of Depth" The Practice of the Citizens' Assembly At a recent Scentist Rebellion discussion, we were talking about other revolutions, incl the Arab Spring, and about the Tunisian man who set himself on fire and caused a wave of rebellions across the region. Yet, according to this article https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2020/dec/16/he-ruined-us-10-years-on-tunisians-curse-man-who-sparked-arab-spring the reaction is now mixed. (I hope you can feel where the scepticism for revolutionary change comes from: there is a risk of societal collapse, we've seen it many times.) There is an insightful quote from Hichem Amri, a local social activist, who says "the city is so far unimpressed by the system... [there is] a feeling that he democracy as it is practised works only for an elite in Tunis and along the coast, without reaching far enough inland into communities such as Sidi Bouzid to give people a say over the forces that shape th
I just read an article about Paul Krugramn's conversion to a more moderate Globalisation attitude.     https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/10/22/economists-globalization-trade-paul-krugman-china/ Mainly this is about the effect on (US) employment from cheap Chinese Labour. Not mentioned, however, are the twin effects on Global Ecology (Climate Change, Pollution, Species Collapse) and the consumer's powerlessness to influence the economy. I want to stay with the second idea. This itself has two strands - the assault by low-quality goods, and the assault by low-quality information. I think we are all familiar with the perils of sub-contracting. The loss of specialist knowledge, fall in quality, the distance between supplier and end-user, most importantly the lack of trust in products, the production methods, the source, etc. Similarly the same things could be said about Information - or Fake News. How can Democracy function in these conditions? How can it defend itself?