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mmunity is being too harsh on a given comment you can use one of your tokens to promote a comment making it much more visible think the community is voting up a really stupid comment then go ahead and spend one of your tokens sinking its visibility as a trusted user you have the last word once you ve promoted a comment all voting on it ceases and there s more as a trusted user any comment you make on the site will come with a trusted user seal of approval and receive high visibility setting by default trusted users are allowed to put images into their comments and they re allowed to edit their comments after they ve posted them can i become a permanent trusted user you can t every monday morning the system starts compiling data on the following week s trusted users from scratch i have a great idea for improving the system where can i send it community powered comments is very much a work in progress and we expect it to generate lots of debate and not a few hiccups if you want to contribute an idea or better yet code a fix in php we d love to have it contact us on caracaschronicles at fastmail dot fm comments are now disabled on this site please comment on the new site by quico december 10 2009 caracas chronicles 2 0 sneak preview quico and juan cristóbal say the new software platform for caracas chronicles is finally here after several months of intense work the site is now presentable enough for everyone to look at check it out for now the new site is at esferapublica com which we hope will be the url of the new spanish version of caracas chronicles over the next few weeks we ll be posting in parallel here and in the new site early next year once we ve brought over the archive we re going to put this old blogger site to sleep at the heart of the new site is an innovative system for managing the comments section that we hope can solve the age old problem of ceaseless flame wars in venezuela s political cyberspace the idea basically is that juan and quico don t get to decide which comments get top billing and which comments get hidden you do with this new system the community collectively gets to decide which comments get top billing by voting the system asks you to vote not just on whether you agree with a given comment but also on whether it helps drive debate forward read all the details in the new system s faq remember you don t have to create an account to comment on the new site but we strongly encourage you to do so anyway it s free and it only takes a minute or two by logging on you allow the system to track your reputation within the community and the better your reputation is the more impact you ll have on the way the forum works the more visible your comments will be and the more weight the system will place on your opinions and if you re among the top 10 of commentators in any given week the system gives you a whole set of additional goodies regular users don t get early next year we ll be launching caracas chronicles 2 0 in full which will include a spanish version this will open up cc to a whole new cast of characters but hopefully the new software will steer the conversation away from the troll wasteland you find in places like aporrea or noticias24 we look forward to your feedback but not here as of today the old comments platform on this site will be disabled please comment on the new site by quico december 9 2009 mental health view from quico s window northeasternnnnn taken 10 a m i m actually a recent enough immigrant to quebec to get excited by this kind of thing by quico subverting chavismo s discursive standard quico says judging from the reaction rather a lot of you misinterpreted my last post as some kind of woolly call to hold a nice reasonable debate with chavismo i want to be quite clear about my position here no critical engagement with chavismo is possible and actually that s the crux of my problem with the regime it s easy to mistake that for a rather shrill impetuous stance a kind of misplaced haughtiness masquerading as high principle but lets be clear about this it s not that i reject a debate with the people i oppose it s that i oppose people who reject debate obviously a lot hinges on how you understand chavismo how you interpret its discursive essence some people see chávez s tendency to respond to any and every criticism with an ad hominem attack as a kind of curiosity one trait in a broader political philosophy over the years though i ve come to see it as the lynchpin of the intellectual edifice that is chavismo a defining trait and organizing principle at the center of a strategy for crafting a totalizing worldview for chávez and for the cult like political movement he has created around himself the world is neatly divided between two sides the good and the bad the key thing to grasp and i think there s a nearly limitless documentary evidence to illustrate this is that for chavismo the things that bad people believe are bad by virtue of the identity of the person believing them escualidos are not evil because they re wrong they re wrong because they re evil take to choose one example out of a zillion simply because the clip is conveniently in english this interaction between chávez and a foxnews journalist at this year s un general assembly meeting notice what happens here chávez is asked a question that through its own content suggests that the questioner does not share his views the question in chávez s hands becomes merely a mechanism for identifying the questioner as a dissenter that chavez will not in engage with its substance goes almost without saying instead the journalist expression of dissent serves as a springboard for an attack on him on his motives and his affiliations all by way of explaining apparently self evident to chávez that his identity as a journalist for a conservative provides all the evidence anybody could need of the evil that lurks in his heart and exempts chávez from any duty to account for his actions you don t have to be a fan of foxnews to grasp the dire consequences of extending this mode of reasoning to every single interaction with a dissenting view a leader engages in the dirty little secret is that within the ideology chávez has stamped on his movement the sorting mechanism that allows you to determine whether any thought book argument documentary bank mural film newspaper foreign leader tv channel multilateral institution or person is good or bad is conveniently enough whether he will submit to chávez with unquestioning loyalty in fact from the totalizing standpoint chavista discursive standards creates failing to snap unthinkingly into line is prima facie evidence that you belong to the evil camp and immediately voids your right to hold chávez to critical scrutiny to take chavismo s worldview seriously is to see dissent itself as intrinsically evil how evil evil enough to imperil the possibility of life on this planet that evil this absolute sorting of the world into good and evil according to the single totalizing criterion of loyalty to the boss seems to me both irreducibly authoritarian and absolutely central to the chavista system for organizing reality and making sense of the world manicheanism is not an aspect of chavismo it is chavismo that there is no serious possibility of a frank and open exchange of views with people who hold on to such an ideology seems to me perfectly self evident it s definitional actually because within the worldview chavismo espouses the willingness to treat an idea that chávez personally rejects as potentially valid is wholly incompatible with revolutionary principle but real debate genuine free and open debate can t accept such arbitrary exclusions if you begin by sectioning off whole provinces of reality and declaring them out of bounds before you ve critically engage them what you are doing is not debating it may look and feel like a debate but it s not the hopelessly flattened discursive standards chavismo espouses chavista good dissident evil is not one we could engage through the practice of public reasoning even if we were minded to instead the habits of mind chavista ideology is built on are precisely that which we need to subvert through the practice of public reasoning when we hold the government to account when we point out the absurdities of its exchange rate regime when we rail against the injustice of its repressive actions when we demand a justification of its spending priorities we are doing it not to engage chavismo but to subvert it because when you are facing a totalizing ideology demanding an explanation is in itself a subversive act when we cultivate the habits of mind that allow people to think critically about the actions of those in power to question them and demand they account for their decisions we re keeping alive the possibility of democracy for future generations because we re keeping alive the modes of interaction that we will need to sustain a discursive democracy at some point down the line the question for me is how we can exploit the particular characteristics of the internet to carry out this kind of subversive work i think there s a ton to be done in this regard and personally i intend to do it by quico december 8 2009 dictatorship means never having to say the reason is quico says one thing all critics of the chávez regime seem to agree on is that democracy in venezuela is pretty much dead but what exactly do we mean by that when we talk about democracy we re usually talking about two separate but related ideas on the one hand you have the institutions of democracy we mean parliaments and banking regulations election day rules and procedures habeas corpus and constitutional principles of due process decentralization and all that when we say that venezuelan democracy has died we mean that none of these institutional mechanisms is operating the way the constitution says they ought to this alarming as it is is not all there is there s another level where democracy has been dying a much more intimate level that manifests itself in the ways we communicate when political matters are at stake i call it the discursive level in that it concerns itself with the kinds of arguments people in the political sphere find compelling at any given time it s about the habits of thought of our political actors this distinction is not trivial one thing is the national assembly and another is the quality and style of the debates that are held within its chambers the question from a discursive point of view is what constitutes a powerful reason to act in the eyes of its members alongside any abstract principle and any formal institution there are the tacit rules actual people use to apply them the world political systems are democratic to the extent that they maintain possibility of holding reasoned debates in the public sphere that tend to generate consensual understandings on the contrary they are authoritarian to the degree that appeals to straight out authority jefe es jefe are enough to secure compliance from political decision makers venezuelan intellectuals tend not to distinguish clearly enough between these two levels the institutional and the discursive we tend to be much clearer more explicit and more eloquent talking about what has gone wrong institutionally than what has gone wrong discursively but if our institutional democracy has died it s because the discursive habits of mind that support it have been hunted to extinction chavista discourse was dictatorial long before chavista government in venezuela a return to democracy will entail much more than a return to institutional democracy it will mean focusing on the discursive realm as well on re establishing a certain set of unwritten rules and expectations about what is normal behavior in the public sphere these rules which habermas calls discursive standards are the criteria people use to decide if an argument is persuasive or not when the rules of engagement in the public sphere are democratic what you get is what amartya sen calls government by discussion discursive democracy is what you get when the main question asked of a given political argument is does that position make sense discursive authoritarianism is what you get when the main question asked of a given political argument is who put that argument forward an escualido booooo a chaburro hisssss democracy in venezuela has collapsed in the face of a full frontal attack not just at the institutional level but also in that deeper discursive sphere so subverting chavista hegemony requires liquidating the discursive standards that sustain its power bringing discursive democracy back to life means putting in place policies hashed out in real debates where ideas are grappled with confronted and crafted into consensual roads forward by people more interested in the content of a position than the identity of the one expressing it this is not an easy thing to do building a discursive democracy runs counter to some very old habits throw yourself into a genuine discussion and suddenly you ve made yourself vulnerable in a genuine discussion you go in without any guarantee that you ll come out on the winning side discussion requires humility flexibility a willingness to learn and an acceptance that you may be called on to alter your positions in the light of what the other side says this may be one of the reasons true architects of democracy have to some degree possessed a healthy dose of greatness dictators will not subject themselves to genuine debate because genuine debate is risky unpredictable dangerous a dictator will join no communicative interaction in which he and it s usually a he isn t it is not guaranteed the upper hand from the start this is why chávez simply refuses to be questioned by journalists who will throw anything but the softest of soft balls at him the sad fact is that unless the opposition shows it s better than chávez at engaging with ideas doing away with hugo chávez will do almost nothing to re establish democracy in this deeper sense if we fail to enshrine genuinely democratic discursive standards the return to institutional democracy will be as shallow fleeting and incomplete as the system we had until 1998 more than an adherence to constitutional standards more than respect for the forms of the democratic game what venezuela s democratic movement needs to develop is the frame of mind needed to engage with an opponent even chavista ones in genuine debate in the understanding that the power of the strongest argument will carry the day that s the habit of mind that creates the social underpinning of democratic government without that attitudinal bedrock that basic predisposition to accept discussion as the arena where decisions are made there is no possibility of democracy faced with a government that experiences debate as a threat merely creating spaces for genuine debate constitutes a subversive act as long as venezuelans sustain spaces where matter...
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