note taking. posted elsewhere:
Arguing with idiots

Republics are founded in the assumption that power corrupts, not that the uneducated should show respect for their betters. If the debacle of the global warming debate can be blamed partly on successful demagoguery, recent economic disasters can be blamed squarely on incompetence at the top. The answer in both cases is more broad-based education, not more deference.

We're faced now in this country and the world at large with the combination of the an unaccountable elite and an uneducated mass. The answer is in the education of the mass, so that the inevitable elite can be as representative as possible: in flux and in check. Who watches the watchmen?

"When courts are working properly, they hold a mirror to the larger society." When courts are working properly -or not- they hold a mirror to a certain sector of society.

"Allowing citizens to participate in the formation of public opinion..."

In a republic, states do not "allow" citizens to participate, citizens authorize states to function. Citizens are constitutive. The entire discussion is backwards.

Having to point that out to the Dean of Yale Law School, what is there to say?