In Hobbes, freedom of choice requires nonfrustration: the option you prefer must be accessible. In Berlin, it requires noninterference: every option, preferred or unpreferred, must be ...accessible—every door must be open. But Berlin’s argument against Hobbes suggests a parallel argument that freedom requires something stronger still: that each option be accessible and that no one have the power to block access; the doors should be open, and there should be no powerful doorkeepers. This is freedom as nondomination. The claim is that freedom as noninterference is an unstable alternative between freedom as nonfrustration and freedom as nondomination.
What has been the contribution of African intellectuals to postcolonial and decolonial scholarship? This question arises because there is emphasis on privileging works of Diasporic scholars from the ...Middle East and South Asia for postcolonialism and Diasporic scholars from South America for decoloniality/decolonisation. This article contributes to the complex politics of knowledge in Africa through centring often-ignored contributions of African intellectuals to the decolonisation of knowledge and politics. Conceptually and theoretically, what is introduced are issues of how epistemology framed ontology, how the cognitive empire invaded the mental universe of Africans, and how the quest for epistemic freedom informs resurgent and insurgent decolonisation of the twenty-first century. Thus, the article performs four key tasks: (1) it explains how epistemology frames ontology as its entry into the topical politics of knowledge; (2) it introduces and defines the concepts of the cognitive empire and epistemic freedom as they enable a deeper understanding of the complex politics of knowledge; (3) it historicises African struggles for decolonisation as reflected in African decolonial scholarship and the quests for epistemic freedom; and (4) it makes sense of resurgent and insurgent decolonisation of the twenty-first century as embodied by the Rhodes Must Fall movements in South Africa.
License to harass Nielsen, Laura Beth; Nielsen, Laura Beth
2004., 20090110, 2009, 2004, 2004-01-01
eBook
Offensive street speech--racist and sexist remarks that can make its targets feel both psychologically and physically threatened--is surprisingly common in our society. Many argue that this speech is ...so detestable that it should be banned under law. But is this an area covered by the First Amendment right to free speech? Or should it be banned? In this elegantly written book, Laura Beth Nielsen pursues the answers by probing the legal consciousness of ordinary citizens. Using a combination of field observations and in-depth, semistructured interviews, she surveys one hundred men and women, some of whom are routine targets of offensive speech, about how such speech affects their lives. Drawing on these interviews as well as an interdisciplinary body of scholarship, Nielsen argues that racist and sexist speech creates, reproduces, and reinforces existing systems of hierarchy in public places. The law works to normalize and justify offensive public interactions, she concludes, offering, in essence, a "license to harass." Nielsen relates the results of her interviews to statistical surveys that measure the impact of offensive speech on the public. Rather than arguing whether law is the appropriate remedy for offensive speech, she allows that the benefits to democracy, to community, and to society of allowing such speech may very well outweigh the burdens imposed. Nonetheless, these burdens, and the stories of the people who bear them, should not remain invisible and outside the debate.
Elites face a daunting coordination problem when contemplating a coup. Citizens, who desire political reform, face a similar coordination problem when contemplating protest. Since elites and citizens ...interact with the same leadership, these coordination problems are invariably linked. We develop a model which exploits this link to isolate an informational mechanism connecting popular protests and coups. Protests aggregate citizen information and provide elites with a public signal which helps them coordinate in a coup. We show that elites “overreact” to protest as a consequence of its publicity, and we provide a microfounded explanation as to why elites use protests to facilitate coordination. Our model also suggests that protests in countries with media freedom better facilitate elite coordination. To test this, we examine how media freedom affects the relationship between protests and coups. The empirical analysis shows the effect of protests on coups is exacerbated in countries where media is free.
One of the frequent questions by users of the mixed model function lmer of the lme4 package has been: How can I get p values for the F and t tests for objects returned by lmer? The lmerTest package ...extends the 'lmerMod' class of the lme4 package, by overloading the anova and summary functions by providing p values for tests for fixed effects. We have implemented the Satterthwaite's method for approximating degrees of freedom for the t and F tests. We have also implemented the construction of Type I - III ANOVA tables. Furthermore, one may also obtain the summary as well as the anova table using the Kenward-Roger approximation for denominator degrees of freedom (based on the KRmodcomp function from the pbkrtest package). Some other convenient mixed model analysis tools such as a step method, that performs backward elimination of nonsignificant effects - both random and fixed, calculation of population means and multiple comparison tests together with plot facilities are provided by the package as well.
It is fruitless to interpret Constant's modern liberty from the binary perspective of either the negative/positive freedom opposition or the liberal/republican freedom opposition. Both oppositional ...perspectives reduce the relationally complex nature of modern liberty to one or another component of the relation. Such reduction inevitably results in an incomplete and, therefore, inadequate interpretation of Constant's modern liberty. Consequently, either of these binary frames of interpretation obscures rather than illuminates the full nature of Constant's modern liberty. Boxed into their irreconcilably opposed alternatives, both binary perspectives fail to appreciate that Constant's conception of modern liberty is a complex achievement irreducible without loss to either liberal negative liberty as non-interference or republican freedom as non-domination. Nor does combining liberal negative freedom and positive freedom (in the sense of ancient liberty), as Holmes well establishes, adequately tells the whole story of Constant's modern liberty. As a complex achievement, Constant's conception of modern liberty, I shall argue, blends negative freedom as associated with neo-Roman republican freedom as non-subjection to arbitrary power, negative freedom as non-interference, associated with the liberal tradition, positive freedom in the sense of inner self-development, and positive freedom as collective self-government or civic republican freedom.
In a well-reasoned and thought-provoking polemic, respected political theorist Nadia Urbinati explores a profound shift in the ideology of individualism, from the ethical nineteenth-century standard, ...in which each person cooperates with others as equals for the betterment of their lives and the community, to the contemporary "I don't give a damn" maxim. Identifying this "tyranny of the moderns" as the most radical risk that modern democracy currently faces, the author examines the critical necessity of reestablishing the role of the individual citizen as a free and equal agent of democratic society.
Democracy off balance Braun, Stefan
Democracy off balance,
c2004, 20040427, 2004, 2014, 2004-01-01
eBook
Freedom of expression on disturbing matters of society, history, and governance is becoming ever more contested in Canada. The idea that official meanings and histories can legally substitute for ...publicly constructed ones - for fear of what an uncensored public might themselves construct - is gaining widespread acceptance. Public invocation of hate propaganda law, its language, and its moral authority in otherwise ordinary discursive contexts, has been crucial to, and symbolic of, this trend.
Democracy Off Balanceoffers an unsettling analysis of hate censorship and hate censors as a complex paradox of modern democratic discourse. Stefan Braun argues against the supposed public interest served by the hate speech laws and dissects the paradoxical forces - the politically self-contradictory thinking and the socially self-defeating assumptions - that drive hate censorship in Canada today.
Braun draws on censors' own terms of social and political reference to show how they undermine their own causes with hate censorship and uncovers how hate speech law subtly impacts far beyond its strict legal confines to condition and corrode public discourse. He brings together the debate and the debaters in a multidimensional approach that challenges traditional ways of seeing the legal boundaries of freedom of expression.Democracy Off Balanceis a timely and absorbing exploration of a highly controversial topic.
"Freedom of Information in a Post 9-11 World" is, to date, the first international scholarly examination of the impact of the terrorist attack on the United States in terms of how it may alter ...academic and corporate research, as well as the sharing of information generated by that research, by international colleagues in technological fields. The collection of essays brings together a widely varied panel of communications experts from different backgrounds and cultures to focus their expertise on the ramifications of this world-changing event. Drawing upon the related but separate disciplines of law, interpersonal communication, semiotics, rhetoric, management, information sciences, and education, the collection adds new insight to the potential future challenges high-tech professionals and academics will face in a global community that now seems much less communal than it did prior to September 11, 2001.
CHAPTER 1 Freedom of Information in a Post-9-11 World: Introduction Charles H. Sides
CHAPTER 2 Information Law since September 11: The USA PATRIOT Act and Other Government Limitations of Expression Rights George F. Bohrer, Jr.
CHAPTER 3 Freedom in Internet Mediated Communication (IMC): Does This Foster True or Untrue Relationships? James Poon Teng Fatt
CHAPTER 4 The New Challenges for Intercultural Encounters Post 9-11 John Chetro-Szivos
CHAPTER 5 What Should We Teach to Our Students in the Age of the Internet? Fumiko Yoshimura
CHAPTER 6 Communal "Intelligence" and the Disarming of Dangerous Information Robert Carr
CHAPTER 7 The Open Society and Its Enemies: A Reappraisal Michael Ben-Chaim
CHAPTER 8 9-11 Communicative Grammar Dorota Zielinska
CHAPTER 9 Accessible Information and International Business David Dobrin
Meet the Contributors
Index
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