Democratic Education in an Era of Town Hall Protests

One central aspect of a healthy democracy is the practice of democratic dissent. For the first time in many years, dissent is being widely practiced in town hall meetings and on street corners across the United States. Despite this presence, dissent is often suppressed or omitted in the prescribed, tested, hidden, and external curriculum of US schools. This article calls for a realignment of these aspects of curriculum with both a guiding vision of ideal democracy and a realistic interpretation of democracy as it is currently invoked in order to maximize this historic moment and work toward more robust democracy as a whole. This article will define dissent, show why it matters for healthy democracy, describe its role in the conscious social reproduction of citizens, reveal implications of the current more consensus-oriented forms of democracy portrayed in US schools, and call for new work on consensus and dissent in schools given changes in the present environment

Voluntary Contributions by Consent or Dissent

We study games where voluntary contributions can be adjusted until a steady state is found. In consent games contributions start at zero and can be increased by consent, and in dissent games contributions start high and can be decreased by dissent. Equilibrium analysis predicts free riding in consent games but, in contrast, as much as socially efficient outcomes in dissent games. In our experiment, inexperienced subjects contribute high in consent games and low in dissent games, but behavior converges toward equilibrium predictions over time and eventually experienced subjects contribute as predicted: low in consent games and high in dissent games. Observed deviations from equilibrium in consent games are best explained by level-k reasoning, and those in dissent games are best explained by hierarchical reasoning formalized as nested logit equilibrium.public good, contribution game, bounded rationality, mechanism

The Dissent Voting Behaviour of Bank of England MPC Members

I examine the propensity of Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee (BoEMPC) members to cast dissenting votes. In particular, I compare the type and frequency of dissenting votes cast by socalled insiders (members of the committee chosen from within the ranks of bank staff) and outsiders (committee members chosen from outside the ranks of bank staff). Significant differences in the dissent voting behaviour associated with these groups is evidenced. Outsiders are significantly more likely to dissent than insiders; however, whereas outsiders tend to dissent on the side of monetary ease, insiders do so on the side of monetary tightness. I also seek to rationalise why such differences might arise, and in particular, why BoEMPC members might be incentivised to dissent. Amongst other factors, the impact of career backgrounds on dissent voting is examined. Estimates from logit analysis suggest that the effect of career backgrounds is negligible.Monetary Policy Committee, insiders, outsiders, dissent voting, career backgrounds, appointment procedures

A Commander’s Power, A Civilian’s Reason: Justice Jackson’s Korematsu Dissent

Barrett examines the dissent opinion of Supreme Court Justice Robert Houghwout Jackson in Korematsu v. United States, which centered on the internment of Japanese Americans during WWII. Although the dissent has been criticized as incoherent, it contains strong legal implications within its complexity

The Value of Dissent

This essay reviews Dissent, Injustice, and the Meanings of America by Steven H. Shiffrin (1999). Theorizing about the freedom of speech has been a central enterprise of contemporary legal scholarship. The important contributions to the debate are simply far too numerous to categorize. One ambition of this theorizing is the production of a comprehensive theory of the freedom of expression, a set of consistent normative principles that would explain and justify First Amendment doctrine. Despite an outpouring of scholarly effort, the consensus is that free speech theory has failed to realize this imperial ambition. Rather than searching for the global theory of the First Amendment, constitutional scholars are content to aim for a local theory; offering partial conceptualizations, local theories explain, justify, or critique some portion of free speech doctrine without attempts at global synthesis. Steven Shiffrin\u27s Dissent, Injustice, and the Meanings of America (hereinafter Dissent) stands squarely in the tradition of modest, localized theorizing about the freedom of speech. Rather than attempting to integrate all of free speech doctrine, he focuses on one free speech value: the value of dissent and its contribution to the illumination of particular First Amendment problems. This compact, densely argued, and brilliantly insightful book leaves free speech theory far the richer. Shiffrin has important things to say about flag burning, advertising, and racist speech. Moreover, Dissent addresses a topic that is all too often neglected by free speech theorists: the methods by which institutions other than courts, such as schools and the media, can promote the values of free speech. Throughout, Dissent never loses sight of its central thesis: The value of dissent is essential to understanding the freedom of speech. Part I of this review provides a brief exposition of some of Shiffin\u27s main points in Dissent. In part II, the author offers a critical analysis of Dissent’s central theory that the promotion and protection of dissent are central functions of the freedom of speech. In order to clarify Shiffrin\u27s central claims, he compares his analysis with John Stuart Mill\u27s famous defense of the liberty of expression in his essay On Liberty. Part III concludes with some observations about the lessons to be learned from Shiffrin\u27s successes and failures

Seeking Anonymity in an Internet Panopticon

Obtaining and maintaining anonymity on the Internet is challenging. The state of the art in deployed tools, such as Tor, uses onion routing (OR) to relay encrypted connections on a detour passing through randomly chosen relays scattered around the Internet. Unfortunately, OR is known to be vulnerable at least in principle to several classes of attacks for which no solution is known or believed to be forthcoming soon. Current approaches to anonymity also appear unable to offer accurate, principled measurement of the level or quality of anonymity a user might obtain. Toward this end, we offer a high-level view of the Dissent project, the first systematic effort to build a practical anonymity system based purely on foundations that offer measurable and formally provable anonymity properties. Dissent builds on two key pre-existing primitives - verifiable shuffles and dining cryptographers - but for the first time shows how to scale such techniques to offer measurable anonymity guarantees to thousands of participants. Further, Dissent represents the first anonymity system designed from the ground up to incorporate some systematic countermeasure for each of the major classes of known vulnerabilities in existing approaches, including global traffic analysis, active attacks, and intersection attacks. Finally, because no anonymity protocol alone can address risks such as software exploits or accidental self-identification, we introduce WiNon, an experimental operating system architecture to harden the uses of anonymity tools such as Tor and Dissent against such attacks.Comment: 8 pages, 10 figure

Maximum Individual & Vicinity-Average Dose for a Geologic Repository Containing Radioactive Waste

Explains the basis for his strong dissent to an NAS report on Yucca Mountain

Representing Network Trust and Using It to Improve Anonymous Communication

Motivated by the effectiveness of correlation attacks against Tor, the censorship arms race, and observations of malicious relays in Tor, we propose that Tor users capture their trust in network elements using probability distributions over the sets of elements observed by network adversaries. We present a modular system that allows users to efficiently and conveniently create such distributions and use them to improve their security. The major components of this system are (i) an ontology of network-element types that represents the main threats to and vulnerabilities of anonymous communication over Tor, (ii) a formal language that allows users to naturally express trust beliefs about network elements, and (iii) a conversion procedure that takes the ontology, public information about the network, and user beliefs written in the trust language and produce a Bayesian Belief Network that represents the probability distribution in a way that is concise and easily sampleable. We also present preliminary experimental results that show the distribution produced by our system can improve security when employed by users; further improvement is seen when the system is employed by both users and services.Comment: 24 pages; talk to be presented at HotPETs 201

Diversity, Tenure, and Dissent

Although academics have long recognized that institutions such as opinion-assignment procedures and voting order might influence the propensity to dissent, empirical studies have failed to consider the impact of collegiality and personal relationships on dissent rates. Thus, in this short Essay, I empirically test whether some of the judges’ assertions are consistent with the data. I test whether various measures of diversity are associated with dissent rates in state supreme courts. I find that diversity in many areas—gender, race, age, religion, home state, and political affiliation—is associated with higher levels of dissent. In contrast, diversity in the jobs that judges had before taking the bench is associated with lower dissent rates. I also test whether the length of time judges have served on the court is associated with dissent rates. Presumably, judges that have served on a court together for many years would have stronger friendships than newer judges, and thus may be more collegial and less likely to dissent. However, my empirical analysis finds the opposite: the greater the number of judges with lengthy tenures on the court, the higher the dissent rate