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Re:And the bells go off!
Dwyn Red Flags 052505
Hi Dwyn,
Yes, I knew about this—that's actually how I found MLE in the first place. I'm sorry that you didn't know and that this was a concern for you. I wasn't really aware that the material you were writing was stuff you felt was personal—certainly not until our most recent conversation, which, even so, was very vague. Anyway, you can see why I was motivated to have you look at that other message I'd sent to my other friend earlier, in the context of the privacy issue here.
Still, I'm not quite sure I understand your confusion. If MLE is freely accessible to anyone who wants to have a free membership, and every post you write is visible to all members of MLE, how is that different from your posts being accessible to Google users? To me, it seems that the latter only increases the chances that your messages may additionally be seen by people who weren't interested in seeing them, and so won't bother reading them anyway.
Anyway, if you do find you've posted some messages that you do not want to be publicly available, just drop a message to Dan Yuen ("contact us"') and give him the message numbers and ask him to delete them for you. He's always been very helpful to me that way.
By the way, I got your reply and had no trouble getting your drift. At the same time, I do want to remind you of the site policies, to caution you very carefully and point out that the policies are enforced, if inconsistently. I recently lost contact with a valued friend who was ejected from here. His codes were broken and he was discovered and all of the messages he had posted were removed. Just so your choices are fully informed.
Auf Wiedersehen!
# 52511
And the bells go off! dwyn hart
Out of curiosity I went to google.com and typed in my name and almost went into shock. My last comments were there. I didn't know our messeges went out of the community. Now I don't even feel safe anymore. I didn't know anyone else could see these messages. Did anyone else know? Is it still ok to chat? Curiosity killed the cat, or the dwyn in this case. Oh, my gosh. This is scary. I have to try some other searches. bye.
Language pair: English; German
Category: Opinions
Post date: May 24, 2005
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Language pair: English; All
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Mark S.
May 25, 2005
# Msgs: 1
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Re:To whom it may concern.
Hi Dwyn,
We've missed you on the site. I just figured you were having a great time living life in real space.
I thought I'd send a comment in response to your post, not because I feel it's needed, but because, as often happens, I find myself delighted by the way you think. The way you own your place in the world is beautiful and rare, and I want to make sure you know about that, just in case you hadn't noticed it.
Your message touched me in a tender place because I have often had those questions running through my mind. As a graduate student, I find that life can get overwhelming sometimes. When I and the people around me are all feeling like we don't know how we're going to take care of ourselves, we can get kind of defensive and self-absorbed. We may lose our sense of priorities and fail to be there for someone who really needs us. Or we just don’t do a very good job of communicating, and the most important parts of the message may get lost in the scuffle.
Just the other week, a cousin of mine passed a way. It was a big shock to all of us, and it was a really hard time. I got confused about the logistics of the memorial service, and I came home from school one afternoon to an aggravated message from my Aunt wanting to know why I hadn't been there. I got really angry, because I was trying to figure out why nobody had cared enough to make sure I knew when I was supposed to be there and where I was supposed to go. It was pretty messy. It turned out I'd got an e-mail message and I'd misread it, and everybody assumed I knew what was going on, and I was waiting for someone to get back to me with the details. Nobody ever did, because they all thought I had them. It was really awful.
What I think about after all of that, is the old cliché about the glass being half-full or half-empty. The part people never talk about is that the glass is never all full or all empty. It's always somewhere in between, and I guess it's always going to end up being up to me to decide how I want to call it.
Anyway, as one of the people who take you seriously, I wanted to thank you for reaching out and to remind you that there's someone here who cares in Sacramento. Please let me know if you need to talk or anything. Perhaps a comment I made in my message number 48208 may be of some value to you.
I also wanted to let you know that I worry a little, because I have a hunch you may have a tendency to be pretty hard on yourself. My guess is you'll probably be a whole lot better off to risk erring in the other direction. Be good to you. I know you deserve it.
Hugs,
Mark
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Language pair: English; All
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Mark S.
May 22, 2005
# Msgs: 1
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Re:One European language?
> Many European accounts point out that the
> cost of translating all the European laws
> into some 20 languages is growing fast,
> since skilled translator are scarce both
> for some Easter Europe languages and for
> regional ones such as catalan.
If there are more than 20 workers per
language, each of them could pick one
foreign language and study it until they
have sufficient reading (and perhaps
listening) capability in it. After that
all participant groups could read all
languages through their in-group
translators, and write in their mother
tongue. Then third-party translators would
be needed very rarely, and the read-only
capability in foreign language could be
gained much faster than full language
skills. It could even be made
a prerequisite for the job.
Puti
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Language pair: French; English
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Juha-Petri T.
May 16, 2005
# Msgs: 2
Latest: May 16, 2005
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Re:Re:Re:One European language?
Wow. Arnaud, you have left me with nothing to say.
And that's really saying something!
:-)
Beautiful analysis. I'm eager to see how things pan out.
Mark S.
Sac, CA USA
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Language pair: French; English
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Mark S.
May 16, 2005
# Msgs: 2
Latest: May 16, 2005
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Re:Mùsica y pirateria.
jejeje!
Anoche, mi novia y yo fuimos a ver el musical, Los Piratas de Penzance, y despué de eso, lo ví a tu mensaje, y creíe que quisiste discutir las obras de Gilbert y Sullivan :-)
jejejejeje...
Mark
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Language pair: Spanish; English
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Mark S.
May 7, 2005
# Msgs: 1
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Democratic Legitimacy part 4 of 4
Now does this mean that the same process, that mapped out for the ratification of the EU constitution, will have democratic validity? Europeans will know far better than I would. There are obviously a great many differences between Europe and the U.S. Not the least of which is, it may not be safe to assume that Europe intends to form a Federal Republic such as our own. From what I can tell so far, this is, at the very least, a highly controversial issue over there, just as our own relationship to NATO is often a topic of heated debate.
But ultimately, the question of democratic legitimacy is an issue of perception of the people of EU member nations. My gut reaction is that I don't expect that the differences between us are such that the question of constitutional legitimacy will be very different. I look forward to hearing about why I might be wrong there, or certainly why I might be right, if that be the case.
Well, thanks for listening. tomorrow I think I'll probably take a look at an argument that the current constitution fails to abide by the guidelines of the Laeken Declaration—that'll take a little further research, since I've never heard of the Laeken Declaration before this document, so if that isn't ready yet, I'll work instead on a 14-point critical summer, which will be very interesting, because it actually includes some of the most compelling concerns I've seen so far. Stay tuned!
And help me out here, folks—I won't learn anything at all if nobody tears my thinking apart!
Looking forward,
Mark
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Language pair: English; All
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Mark S.
April 23, 2005
# Msgs: 10
Latest: April 23, 2005
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Democratic Legitimacy part 2 of 4
Democratic Legitimacy part 2 of 4
Well, the representatives of our Constitutional Congress played a dirty trick on us. They made a command decision to overturn their commission and choose a job that they felt would more effectively accomplish the goals they were sent to achieve.
Does this mean that our constitution does not have "democratic legitimacy?" That's a very interesting question. I guess first we have to know what "democratic legitimacy" is. There are probably a million definitions of it, and certainly people on all sides of this issue will offer varying ones. I would like to submit a practical definition to work with for this discussion: A government derives it's power from the faith and trust of its citizens, and I would argue that this would be the key measure of democratic legitimacy. When Hitler marched into many European countries, perhaps the biggest reason for our International outrage, was that the offended nations' sovereignty was trampled. For those nations who were, at that time, democratic states, the issue was one of democratic legitimacy. The people of such countries were not willing to accept Nazi rule. This was not, for them, a democratically legitimate government.
The United States faced a related, if quite dissimilar national crisis in 2000, when the Bush / Gore election was so close that one candidate one the popular vote, and the other won the electoral vote, and the margin of error in awarding the electoral votes was much larger than the differences between the candidates in the closest races. Nobody ever really knew who won the election, which finally had to be decided in the Supreme Court. What this means is that the Supreme Court, not the voters, chose our president in 2000. For many voters (admittedly, most of whom were Gore supporters) this cast a significant doubt on Bush's legitimacy as President of the United States. Thankfully we weathered that storm, and we're still here, rather beaten and bruised by the Supreme Court's decision, but we're still here, and we're still a free, legitimate democracy, with all of our problems.
(Cont'd: Democratic Legitimacy part 3 of 4)
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Language pair: English; All
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Mark S.
April 23, 2005
# Msgs: 10
Latest: April 23, 2005
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Democratic Legitimacy part 3 of 4
So I guess what my conclusion is here, my opinion, is that there may be a couple of ways to read Dr. S's claim that the EU Constitution would lack Democratic Legitimacy. One might be that in his opinion, it would not be democratically legitimate, that he expects to see more involvement of the citizens of EU member nations in order to agree that the Constitution would be a valid reflection of the democratic values of the EU. The other way to read him might be that he expects that the people of the EU will not agree that this process of development is democratically legitimate. I guess what I see as important to notice here is that Democratic Legitmacy is not an objective characteristic like red hair or number of words, or whether or not the constitution addresses matters of security. Legitimacy is a social value, and is strictly a matter of perception on the part of a huge body of people. The constitution will be legitimate of the people of the member states find it legitimate, and it won't be if they don't.
So if Dr. S feels that the constitution is not democratically legitimate, he's got a very difficult argument to make. The U. S. Constitution was written by public representatives acting outside of their commission on behalf of the people of the states. We find our constitution to be legitimate because, even though our representatives chose not to follow our instructions in doing their work, each individual state did subsequently ratify the constitution, through votes by duly elected representatives of the people. It is true that the people of the states never voted on the constitution, but the individuals who all agreed to accept the constitution were all elected representatives of the people. This was a valid democratic process under the values of our republic. So while we've had a few constitutional crises, we have weathered them all (so far), and this is, I think, a great testament to the democratic validity of our constitution.
(Cont'd: Democratic Legitimacy part 4 of 4)
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Language pair: English; All
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Mark S.
April 23, 2005
# Msgs: 10
Latest: April 23, 2005
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Democratic Legitimacy part 1 of 4
Hi!
I've dug up some information as to why voices who favor the EU constitution think it’s a good thing, and shared with you some of my response (obviously from a purely American viepoint—I could hardly offer any other) to what I found.
The next stage of my research into this brings me to a couple of sites who are working Internationally to oppose the ratification of the Constitution. Here are some of the ideas I found:
Professor Karl Albrecht Schachtschneider of Germany advocates denial of ratification on the grounds that the people of the member nations were not consulted in its development. This brings up a very interesting issue of precisely what it is we mean by democracy.
Skip this paragraph if I've already said this—I don't recall as I write, but when we talk about democracy, we usually mean it in a very general sense in which a republic is a specific form of democracy. If we want to talk about democracy in the narrowest sense of the term, we would refer to a form of government that would be prohibitively difficult to practice. In such a state, every citizen would be a member of the legislature, and would have to be a full-time politician in addition to all of their personal responsibilities and duties. Since most of this are not willing to invest that much of a commitment in our political processes, we are delighted to elect representatives to attend to our political needs for us so that we can give our personal lives their due attention. Therefore, as far as I know, not a single "democracy" in the world is a true democracy, but a republic of some form, where the people delegate the bulk of their democratic authority to an elected representative.
Now I won't try to argue that Professor Schachtschneider is assuming that the EU should be a true democracy; I'm sure that's not his intent, but as I read his arguments, it seems clear that his vision of European democracy is much closer to that end of the spectrum than, for example, that of my own country, whose constitution was developed in very much the same fashion in which yours seems to be emerging. We called a second Constitutional Congress (I think I've mentioned already that our present constitution was our second effort), and interestingly, the representatives were sent to Philadelphia with a commission to "revise the articles of confederation." I had mentioned before that the Articles of Confederation was our first "constitution," and was failing because it didn't give the central government enough power to do its job of fostering cohesiveness and cooperation among the states.
(Cont'd: Democratic Legitimacy part 2 of 4)
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Language pair: English; All
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Mark S.
April 23, 2005
# Msgs: 10
Latest: April 23, 2005
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Democratic Legitimacy part 1 of 4
Democratic Legitimacy part 2 of 4
Well, the representatives of our Constitutional Congress played a dirty trick on us. They made a command decision to overturn their commission and choose a job that they felt would more effectively accomplish the goals they were sent to achieve.
Does this mean that our constitution does not have "democratic legitimacy?" That's a very interesting question. I guess first we have to know what "democratic legitimacy" is. There are probably a million definitions of it, and certainly people on all sides of this issue will offer varying ones. I would like to submit a practical definition to work with for this discussion: A government derives it's power from the faith and trust of its citizens, and I would argue that this would be the key measure of democratic legitimacy. When Hitler marched into many European countries, perhaps the biggest reason for our International outrage, was that the offended nations' sovereignty was trampled. For those nations who were, at that time, democratic states, the issue was one of democratic legitimacy. The people of such countries were not willing to accept Nazi rule. This was not, for them, a democratically legitimate government.
The United States faced a related, if quite dissimilar national crisis in 2000, when the Bush / Gore election was so close that one candidate one the popular vote, and the other won the electoral vote, and the margin of error in awarding the electoral votes was much larger than the differences between the candidates in the closest races. Nobody ever really knew who won the election, which finally had to be decided in the Supreme Court. What this means is that the Supreme Court, not the voters, chose our president in 2000. For many voters (admittedly, most of whom were Gore supporters) this cast a significant doubt on Bush's legitimacy as President of the United States. Thankfully we weathered that storm, and we're still here, rather beaten and bruised by the Supreme Court's decision, but we're still here, and we're still a free, legitimate democracy, with all of our problems.
(Cont'd: Democratic Legitimacy part 3 of 4)
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Language pair: English; All
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Mark S.
April 23, 2005
# Msgs: 10
Latest: April 23, 2005
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