Category Archives: Weekly assignment

I really enjoyed reading my classmates’ blogs and I think that they all have their own qualities. But  in order to accomplish my last assignement I needed to pick my favourite post. As usual, it was hard for me to choose and I have more than one finalist…

The first post I really liked is Tehminah’s post about the role of the Arab League. I liked it because she took a critical stance on the issue and tried to debate collectively about it by proposing some personal theories. She opened the way for an interesting dialogue that continued both on the blogs and in real life, which I think is a major achievement.

The second one has been written by Marguerite and is about Obama’s stance on the middle east situation. It is one amongst her many posts I liked. I like the way she manages to do many things at the same time.

1) provide an information about the news

2) take a stance on it

3) writing it with style and a good sense of humour.

I really like her sense of humour throughout the whole blog and it is something I wish I could do and that is hard when you are writing in another language!

It is pretty hard to judge your own writing and when it comes to compare all the posts, whether they are assignments or thoughts about readings or about the news, they all are very different.

From my blog I think I have two posts that are equally my favourites. The first one is my definition of democracy. I like it because it reflects the complexity of the issue of defining democracy while being still understandable for everyone. It required a strong effort of synthetization and simplification, which I usually tend to find very hard to do. It flows pretty naturally and I take a personal stance on what  democracy is for me.

The second post I like the most is about Libya and the international intervention. I like it because I have a strong opinion on the issue and it is the result of several weeks of reading the news and thinking about the pros and cons of an international intervention. It also appeared to me that a lot of courses I have been taking this year helped me construct my thoughts, such as my course about ethics in world politics, several courses about democracy and my history course about the middle east.  Therefore I like it even more because it tells me that I am actually integrating and applying the knowledges of this year to my analysis of the world and I think that is one of the major goal of university.

Those two posts are the bests in my perspective and they might not be the bests for the readers of my blog. However, I think that they are both pretty good food for thought as they provide a personal opinion backed up by arguments on topics that are controversial anyways! I hope you enjoyed them too and thank you for reading them as well as the others.

All the fallacies I found come from the article I talked about in my previous post .

First, in this comment, the author writes: “If the “responsibility to protect” is a sacred principle, shouldn’t it be applied everywhere?” and concludes that the intervention in Libya is not justified because it has not been done in the rest of the Middle East.

• According to my incomplete notes, it seems to me that this can be qualified as a “red herring“, as it is a rhetorical strategy that totally distracts the reader from the real problem.

She also writes,”What’s certain is that, as despotic as he is, Moammar Gadhafi wouldn’t have stayed in power for more than 40 years if he hadn’t been able to forge strong alliances with at least a good part of the country.” Which seems to be a double one :

• because Kadhafi has been in power for 40 years he must be supported by a majority. This seems to be the logical fallacy, “affirming the consequent“. (But I wait for the slides to confirm my diagnosis because my notes are not very explanatory)
• because Kadhafi is supported by a majority he is legitimate be in power and the west should not intervene.This seems to be the “Ad populum” rhetorical fallacy: advancing a logical claim through an appeal to popular opinion.

This first article in The New Republic, talks about a fourth wave of democratization in the Middle East. One factor identified for the democratization process is that “democracy enjoys broad popular support in the Middle East”. In his opinion, their is a powerful ideology behind the uprising. To support his argument he uses mainly two sources:

1) The Casablanca Call for Democracy and Human Rights, that was approved two months before the start of the uprising by 2,200 Arab intelectualls

2) World Values Survey and other opinion polls conducted over the last past decade in Algeria, Iraq, Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Palestine and Kuwait. They show that between 80 and 90 percent of the people want their countries to be ruled by democratic systems.

I think that these evidences are definitely a sign that there is a strong popular support for democracy, however they do not tell us why the uprising happened at that moment and not anytime during the last decade. I don’t think that the Casablanca Call, signed only by “intellectuals” could have had enough power to push the people in the streets.

The second factor he mentions, is “the vulnerability of autocratic regimes caused by the rapid growth of new communications technologies and social network”. The evidences here are events and not statistics.

1) Without the Internet, the corruption of Ben Ali and his cronies would not have inflamed public opinion the way it did, leading to the sudden eruption of outrage following the death of Mohamed Bouazizi.

2) And before the Internet, the murder in Alexandria by two police officers of Khaled Sa’id, a young blogger who had posted a video of them sharing the spoils of a drug bust, would have received little attention. But in this new age a half-million Egyptians joined the “We Are All Khaled Sa’id” Facebook page, and it was this page that initiated the January 25 revolution.

In his opinion social networks and internet have been key factors. He even directly says that the facebook page “initiated the January 25 revolution”. The evidence is relatively weak again. I think that it is undeniable that it played an important role, as a tool to organize the movement, but it does not make it a “cause” of the revolution.

This second article, argues against the first one and the role of social media. “To suggest that they are is to ignore what fueled popular anger in the first place: pervasive government corruption and repression, chronic unemployment (especially among the educated young), economic hopelessness and rising food prices.”

The author explicitly mentions 5 factors that explain the uprising but he provides no evidence to support his argument. His article explains mainly why it was not the social media that was the cause of the protests. Therefore, even if his arguments are convincing they do not provide any explanation for why the popular protests happened.

Posts about Wisconsin

I chose two posts about what happens in Wisconsin in order to compare how they deal with the same information.

From The Daily Beast, a post that I like

I really like this post mostly because of the format. There is a summary in bold at the top that put the post in context and announces the clear stance taken by the author. In addition to a very well structured text in paragraphs there is a good picture that illustrates the topic and makes it look less heavy to read. Every quote is referenced and linked to the original source.

I also like the content because there is a strong argument that is made and that is what I expect of a blog. If I only want the journalistic content I go to a Newspaper’s website. The opinion is underlined in a excerpt so that the reader knows immediately what her point is and can decide to skip the post if not interested.

The only default is that I found it a little bit too repetitive. I know that repeating makes the argument stronger but in that case I wish the author had explored other arguments that the one summarized in the first paragraph :

“The last time I checked, you can’t just leave your job when the going gets tough.If the rest of us did that, we’d be fired.”

From the Think Progress, a post that I don’t like

I don’t like this post mainly because it does not make an argument. It does more the job of a journalist (and the author is one) by telling in details what is happening in Wisconsin. In that perspective the author makes a good job by having a lot of references and giving precise information. It could be valuable for someone who wishes to have more details, for example as a link to a first post which would say “if you want to know more”.

However, it is too long and it does not make any strong argument which is pretty surprising for a blog that is called “think progress” and which subtitle says “social and economic justice”. I was a expecting a strong leftist argument that would take a strong stance for the democrats! I was wrong.

One of the central aspect of assessing democracy in South America, and maybe in other parts of the world, is to scrutinize the role of the military. For example, in the case of Chile, after the 1989-90 transition, the military sought for a tutelary role according to Peter H. Smith, and even in 2009 he classifies Chile as being in the “conditional military subordination”, which he describes as :

“abstention by the armed forces from overt intervention in political questions, while reserving the “right” to intervene for protection of national interests and security”

He also places Bolivia, Brazil and Paraguay in this category. This shows us that the military played and still play a non negligible role in those countries even after their transition to “democracy” as defined by different datasets. This role and the prerogatives granted to the military can influence the quality of the democracy in those states and it is therefore important to see if the measures catch this aspect.

What I want to discuss is then which measures do take the role of the military into account, which indicators do they use, how those indicators actually measure properly the constraints caused by the military, etc.

As we are writing blogs I thought it could be interesting to look at how we measure website’s popularity. I did not imagine that it actually existed a lot of different ways to measure how popular a website or a blog is. I was being pretty naive because when I think about it now it is the core of business on the internet today. Measuring how many visitors or viewers a website has help measure the value of that website and the money that can be paid by advertisers.

Only on this website, they list 15 ways of measuring popularity!

The most popular “traffic ranking” today is called Alexa .

They do pretty interesting stats like measuring the number of people affected by the Internet Blackout in Egypt.

In order to measure the popularity of a website they measure what they call the Traffic rank:

What is Traffic Rank?

The traffic rank is based on three months of aggregated historical traffic data from millions of Alexa Toolbar users and data obtained from other, diverse traffic data sources, and is a combined measure of page views and users (reach). As a first step, Alexa computes the reach and number of page views for all sites on the Web on a daily basis. The main Alexa traffic rank is based on a value derived from these two quantities averaged over time (so that the rank of a site reflects both the number of users who visit that site as well as the number of pages on the site viewed by those users). The three-month change is determined by comparing the site’s current rank with its rank from three months ago. For example, on July 1, the three-month change would show the difference between the rank based on traffic during the first quarter of the year and the rank based on traffic during the second quarter.

Their method seems pretty good but there is a major bias as it measures only the traffic of people having the Alexa toolbar. However, they explain that they correct for potential biases like that one.

Another way of measuring a website popularity can be to measure how many comments it has. However, this is not very reliable as we can assume that most of the people have a “passive” behavior and view the website without writing anything. Furthermore, depending on the nature of the website, comments are not a relevant way to measure the number of viewers. Same with subscribers, someone can subscribed to a blog and never read it or read it everyday without being subscribed.

Even though it does not really measures what we want, so it is not really “valid”, it can measure something else, which is the interactivity of a website, or a blog, which a normal traffic ranking probably does not distinguish. This can be very interesting as well!

I decided to choose “South America Sur” because my mother comes from Argentina, I’ve been traveling in Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Chile and Uruguay and I have a special interest for this region. I also had a very interesting course last term taught by Maxwell Cameron about Democracy in Latin America and therefore I already have some background knowledges about the region, which I think can help me assess the measurements.

If I had to describe democracy to someone I care about but who has no background in political science I would probably try to simplify the complexity of the debate (so that he/she still wants to talk to me after that discussion). It would probably look like this:

– “What is democracy, anyway?”

– Well, there is no single definition of democracy. It depends who defines it : a politician, a journalist, a lawyer, an economist, a social scientist, a philosopher, a citizen from Canada, a  citizen from Iran, or a political scientist, etc. And it also depends what is the context of the definition, which epoch, which region and why you are defining it: to decide what the institutions should look like, to have a deep philosophical debate, to judge if you consider something democratic, to measure how democratic a country or an institution is, etc.

– What?! But there must be some common definition because everyone talks about it all the time! It’s common sense! Some countries are democratic and some others are not!

– I’m going to answer all those very important questions you just mentioned, but step by step, please don’t run away. However, I have to warn you that this is my take on the issue and not a universal truth.

First, there are some minimal conditions for something to be described as democratic but not everyone agrees on what that is. I personally have a very demanding vision of democracy. It means that I don’t think that democracy is only about how having free and fair elections. By the way, by free and fair I mean that there is an open competition and that the decision is taken by a majority. So, legitimate elections is certainly a necessary condition but not a sufficient one. Once the government ( which can be a president, or a parliament, or a group of people) is elected, I think that there should be a written contract about what this government is allowed to do or not. Same for the legislative power, there needs to be some limitations. Usually those limitations are written in the constitution. That’s what we call checks and balances. When different bodies of the power control each other. But it is also important that nobody else control them, neither an external power, like another country, nor the military. To summarize, not only must the bodies be democratically elected but also must they govern in a democratic fashion. Furthermore, they should be held accountable for what they are doing in order to remain in office. So it also entails regular elections.

Secondly, democracy is not only about the political regime and the way the rulers are elected. It is also about people and their individual rights. Do you think a country is democratic if you are not treated equally by the judge in a trial? Or do you think a country is democratic if you are not free to say what you think? I don’t think so, I think everything is intertwined. If there is no freedom of expression how can we be sure that a segment of the population is not excluded from the pursuit of political power? Furthermore, in a system that lets the majority decided there should be some way to protect the minority. Some inalienable rights that nobody can take away in any case. They are the substance of democracy.

– So I guess it seems pretty hard to have a democracy for you?

– You guess right, but I don’t think it’s a major problem. It is better to have an idealistic vision of it towards which we should strive for and that gives incentives, rather than a minimalist version where everyone would be able to pretend to be a a legitimate democracy and still breach human rights. So that’s my dream definition. But to tell you the truth if I have to measure it in a research I might have some troubles. So maybe I’ll have to accept to have a scale with different levels of democracy so that I can compare different countries and different periods of time. At the end my strategy would probably be to have a set of necessary conditions to decide whether or not a country is democratic and then inside the category of democratic countries I will have tools to nuance the quality of democracy. Therefore I think that in the public discourse we should have a very high standard of democracy in order to protect the people. But in the realm of research we might have to simplify reality in order to understand causal relationships and improve our knowledge of reality.