executors of my father’s will

This huge spread reflects the difference between two groups of people giving different answers to a highly innocuous question: ‘Is it more important for a child to be considerate or well-mannered?’ The answers sound almost identical, but social psychologists know that ‘considerate’ taps other-directed emotions while ‘well-mannered’ is about respect for authority. People’s answer to this question matters for Trump support because it taps into a cultural worldview sometimes known as Right-Wing Authoritarianism (RWA). Rather than RWA, which is a loaded term, I would prefer to characterise this as the difference between those who prefer order and those who seek novelty. Social psychologist Karen Stenner presciently wrote that diversity and difference tends to alarm right-wing authoritarians, who seek order and stability. This, and not class, is what cuts the electoral pie in many western countries these days. Income and material circumstances, as a recent review of research on immigration attitudes suggests, is not especially important for understanding right-wing populism.

nt colonies teach us self-organization stems from an adaptation that compresses information about the environment. Our economy and political system are similar forms of information compression

The problem is that political competition can also falter. When it does, politicians have less incentive to promise fair outcomes.

The Geopolitics of Japan: An Island Power Adrift

The Geopolitics of France: Maintaining Its Influence in a Changing Europe

He watched an hour-long lecture by Dr. Joy DeGruy on what she called “Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome.” He listened to the work of Tim Wise, an activist who speaks on college campuses and with corporations on fighting racism. He watched Morgan Freeman’s National Geographic series, The Story of Us. He watched Noam Chomsky’s documentary on American wealth distribution, Requiem for the American Dream. He watched Ava DuVernay’s examination of incarceration, the Netflix documentary, 13th. “13th turned the light bulb on,” Stills says.

Living in a media ghetto means less that my views are shaped and improved, much less challenged, than that they are hardened and made more extreme;

Thanks, SM. I, too, want to emphasise that there are excellent philosophers who are outside the academic system. Publishing in journals, working in a university, etc., is only one way to philosophise; it has many advantages, most obviously that of providing a social and material infrastructure for enquiry. But there are other ways to philosophise, too!

Saying what makes a good philosopher is complex and always arouses disagreement, not least since the characteristics of a good philosopher depend a lot on what one considers to be the aims of philosophising, and those are highly plural. The ancient Indian philosophies regarded metaphysical theorising as crucial to the ‘liberation’ of humans from the ‘wheel of suffering’, a conviction largely rejected by classical Chinese philosophers, for whom abstract theory was a distraction from the spontaneity characteristic of a properly ‘harmonious’ life, something apt to be threatened by self-indulgent ‘cleverness’. Within modern academic philosophy, one finds many different conceptions of the aims of philosophy, ranging from the modest to the momentous. Common candidates may include advancing social justice, enhancing scientific enquiry, informing public policy, or the solution of local intellectual problems or, at the other end, the development of ‘big picture’ accounts of life, the universe, and everything.

Second, success in being good at philosophy often requires a very different set of epistemic, practical, and interpersonal competences, many of which are often classified as vices. ‘Playing the game’, in terms of institutional and disciplinary politics, typically rewards traits such as aggressive ambition, insincerity, and self-interestedness. Not always, for sure, but to play that game is to step into an arena with ever-finer lines between legitimate self-interest, pragmatic acquiescence, and more Machiavellian traits.

A person can be good at this thing called philosophy without also being good at this thing called academic philosophy, which is one historically recent, institutionalised form taken by philosophy. Think of how differently philosophy is conceived and practiced in a medieval Christian monastery, a Zen Buddhist temple, or a 21st century British university.

Some children have it bad. Some are miraculously unaffected. But millions of seven- to 15-year-olds are hooked, especially boys, and it is time someone had the guts to stand up, cross the room and just say no to Nintendo. It is time to garrotte the Game Boy and paralyse the PlayStation, and it is about time, as a society, that we admitted the catastrophic effect these blasted gizmos are having on the literacy and the prospects of young males.

As Trump Moves to End Trade War With China, Business Asks: Was It Worth It?

America the Cowardly Bully

Mr. Fiske’s Florida Congressional Committee is one of a string of political action committees with anodyne names — NorPac in New Jersey, To Protect Our Heritage PAC outside Chicago, the Maryland Association for Concerned Citizens outside Baltimore, among others — that operate independently of Aipac but whose missions and membership align with it.

In a 2011 Reddit IAmA, Jennings recalled how in 2004 the Democratic politicians Chuck Schumer and Harry Reid unsuccessfully asked Jennings to run for the United States Senate from Utah. Jennings commented, "That was when I realized the Democratic Party was f@#$ed in '04."[19]

What is the simplest way to differentiate between a conservative and a liberal?

too individualistic, devoid of the community feeling that should bind Chris� thms together.

it arises from a flawed pattern of reasoning rather than values

o one, or almost no one, fads to beheve 1n climate chan~Je out of sincere ignorance. Ttiey •choose-to d1sbeheve either for material gain or 1ust to be dicks.

To doubt Blum was to doubt the traditional edu-cational system and therefore the entire society. Nobody wanted to do it.

“You cannot look at ‘web 3.0’ without looking at blockchain or without looking at AI (Artificial Intelligence),” he said. “So, our hope is that through this discussion of these various digital domains, the business models, the opportunities and the risks and the unintended consequences in terms of human rights, in terms of privacy, in terms of subversion of democracy, we are able to come out with some common principles...of strengthening cooperation across borders.”

It was like making the court jester king

nail-adorned jewels she gave to the heroes:

’Mid hall-building holders. The highly-famed queen, 55 Peace-tie of peoples, oft passed through the building, Cheered the young troopers; she oft tendered a hero A beautiful ring-band, ere she went to her sitting

In October 2017, Facebook also expanded its work with a Washington-based consultant, Definers Public Affairs, that had originally been hired to monitor press coverage of the company. Founded by veterans of Republican presidential politics, Definers specialized in applying political campaign tactics to corporate public relations — an approach long employed in Washington by big telecommunications firms and activist hedge fund managers, but less common in tech.

Immediately many people will object that this is too hard, too implausible, contradictory to human nature, politically impossible, uneconomical, and so on. Yeah yeah. Here we see the shift from cruel optimism to stupid pessimism, or call it fashionable pessimism, or simply cynicism. It’s very easy to object to the utopian turn by invoking some poorly-defined but seemingly omnipresent reality principle. Well-off people do this all the time.

Politicians, she believes, “owe us an answer,” and so she, in her own very Terry Gross way will “keep asking and re-asking and asking, and maybe I’ll ask it in separate ways, and maybe I’ll point out that they haven’t yet answered the question.”

Entscheidend ist, dass sie Herren des Verfahrens bleiben - und eine Vision für das neue Maschinenzeitalter entwickeln.

Choice. The Democratic Party stands behind the right of every woman to choose, consistent with Roe v. Wade, and regardless of ability to pay. President Clinton took executive action to make sure that the right to make such decisions is protected for all Americans. Over the last four years, we have taken action to end the gag rule and ensure safety at family planning and women's health clinics. We believe it is a fundamental constitutional liberty that individual Americans -- not government -- can best take responsibility for making the most difficult and intensely personal decisions regarding reproduction. The Democratic Party is a party of inclusion. We respect the individual conscience of each American on this difficult issue, and we welcome all our members to participate at every level of our party. Our goal is to make abortion less necessary and more rare, not more difficult and more dangerous. We support contraceptive research, family planning, comprehensive family life education, and policies that support healthy childbearing. For four years in a row, we have increased support for family planning. The abortion rate is dropping. Now we must continue to support efforts to reduce unintended pregnancies, and we call on all Americans to take personal responsibility to meet this important goal.

Now an impoverished Marxist cultural critique suggests that such encounters between people, qua humans with richly diverse lives, are the very opposite of — or further, directly opposed by — the alienated encounters underwritten, if not compelled, by money. You see this kind of argument when people say “the ‘sharing economy’ is an oxymoron that has nothing to do with sharing because people are lending their underutilized resources for financial recompense.” However, what has always seemed to me most interesting about many ‘sharing economy’ platforms is not that they are spaces outside of commercialism, but rather ways of affording a re-embedding of economic exchanges in social relations within commercialism. When I ride-share or home-share, there might be money changing hands, but the actual experience of the ‘service’ is of two people (when there are face-to-face encounters) who cannot entirely withdraw into prescribed roles of employee and customer. This is why these ‘sharing economy’ experiences tend to be awkward, in ways that I have tried to argue are in fact deconstructive of the monolithically abstract idea of capitalism.These moments underline that there can be ‘sharing’ within economies, that relations between strangers do occur at levels or in ways beyond what is covered by their monetization. Service designing, it seems to me, is precisely the pursuit of these forms of sociality that exceed commercialism even within commercial interactions. This is the quality that a well-designed service encounter will manifest, a quality that will differentiate such a service from other less-designed ways of managing or engineering services.Service designers should therefore be expertly sensitive to these emergent and sometimes even resistant socialities. Designers should understand that at the very core of their practice is all that is concealed by excessively capitalistic perspectives: the hidden labor of informal economies; the emotional and aesthetic labor provision that service interactions compel from providers without adequate recompense; the satisfiers that make care work rewarding beyond their inequitable pay scales; the moments of delight involved in the comfort of strangers. All of these, it should be clear, are political, sensitivities that acknowledge oppression and exploitation via gender, race and class.All this is why service design is never just the design of this or that service, but part of the wider project of redesigning work and generating sustainable livelihoods. For instance, service design is not tangential to current debates about the roboticization of jobs. Service design is unavoidably involved in Transition Design, toward or away from meaningful work, or rather perhaps toward or away from quality ways of organizing the resourcing of new kinds of society.

Product designers tend to aim to create tools that should be appreciated in their own right for what they help accomplish — what the philosopher of technology, Albert Borgmann calls a focal thing. These well-designed products are valued for what they enable someone skilled to do with them. The service designer is less concerned with developing a refined product, valued for its versatility or finesse, and more concerned with a material means to an end, an enabler of a service interaction. This means that those products need to be more ‘alive’ to the needs of the participants in the service. They need to be less present in their own materiality, and more automated or responsive, directing the interactions between the service co-creators.This means that service designers must have a particularly acute sense of the agency of things. All designers understand the weak forces — affordances — that the forms of things exert on users in the appropriate contexts. For service designers, these forces must be more dynamically deployed because the point is less the products themselves and more the experiences they enable but even at times direct. Compared to a product that will be used regularly, and perhaps diversely, by an owner, the touchpoints that service designers design need to be more subservient to the overall experience. They should be more sensitive to a diversity of users and use cases on the one hand, but more focused on accomplishing just this or that transition in the service journey. This means that they tend to be more animated by intention than the artifacts conventionally produced by product designers. But paradoxically, this makes them less materially present as things. A product within a service pro-duces, leads forth, by being more of a sub-ject, something underlying the process, rather than an ob-ject, something jutting out with physical presence.

To accomplish these goals, service designers make use of the same power that all designers deploy and that are particular to design compared to other expert professions but that the history of non-service design has tended to ignore or fail to comprehend. Design is always the design of things, of useful things for people. To be useful, a thing must communicate or influence or force its users to interact in particular ways. You cannot design a tool that will accept any kind of input. So though modern designing has mostly focused on the design of physical products, the nature of the decisions that a designer makes about the forms (and contexts and systems) of things are completely driven by attempts to sculpt the social practices involved in using those things. I use this metaphor of sculpting to indicate that design is a process of removing materials to create the negative space to be filled by certain kinds of interactions.Service design’s focus on people-to-people coordinated interactions therefore emphasizes the obverse of artifact design. All service design is still in every case still design of things, or in the terminology of service design, touchpoints — products and environments, but also communications and interactive screens. Service design is just more oriented toward the sequences of interactions between people that can be afforded by a network of designed things.

Service design at its best is an expertise in forming how people interact without directly instructing them as to what to do to get paid. But precisely because what service design brings to service management is an attention to these other ways of inducing certain kinds and qualities of interactions, service design should begin with an acknowledgement of its baseline power, that which it should always seek to avoid enlisting to effect a design. This then is why I insist on calling this practice Service Design and not Design for Service.

We can’t force two people to become friends, nor should we want to.

Commandez dès maintenant les objets de l'Enlysée, pour une bonne cause et sans dépenser un pognon de dingue !

E. coli, many are of metabolic enzymes. Thus, acetylation could represent a novel posttranslational mechanism of metabolic control. Yet, almost nothing is known about the regulation of these acetylations or of their metabolic outcomes.

Remember, remember, the sixth of September. In many ways, this date in 2018 is as momentous as August 15, 1947 was.

But they are actually validated by the most illiberal part of our Constitution, Article 19(2), which allows caveats to free speech on grounds like ‘public order’ and ‘decency and morality.’ Those are open to interpretation, and anything goes.

In this great democracy of ours, where the voice of the people is supposed to find expression in its politics, not one political party in the last 71 years tried to repeal 377. Parties don’t have principles, only incentives, and all of them behaved this way because they feared that voters would not approve. That tells you what every gay person in this country already knows from lived experience: our society is homophobic. Not just that, our society and the state do not give a damn about Consent.

jump-start a sputtering capitalism

alleged

Marcus Vitruvius, the classical Roman architect, defined architecture in proportion to the human body—an ideal building, as he saw it, had to reflect the ideal dimensions of a man. Today such anthropocentric design, indeed male-body centered design, seems irrelevant, perhaps even irresponsible, as the magnitude of our self-inflicted environmental disasters poses fundamental challenges to architects and designers. If the human body was the correct proportion for architecture for Vitruvius, what should the scale of design be that addresses today’s environmental challenges? Climatic change, species depletion, and oceanic pollution are worldwide problems. What is left of Vitruvius’s ideal of human reach has stretched to new global scales and millennial time frames. How can architecture conceptualize a planet on which humans have become involved in vast geological forces?

The focus on details and delight can be traced to manifestos like Steve Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think, which propose a dogmatic adherence to cognitive obviousness and celebrates frictionless interaction as the ultimate design accomplishment. Users should never have to question an interface. Instead, designers should anticipate and cater to their needs: ”It doesn’t matter how many times I have to click, as long as each click is a mindless, unambiguous choice.15”A “mindless, unambiguous choice” is not without cultural, social and political context.

But addressing problematic internal culture of design teams is not enough. As an industry we must also confront the real-world socio-political outcomes of our practice. If we accept a code of conduct as necessary, we must also accept a code of outcomes as necessary. We must create ethical frameworks to evaluate our work at all stages, especially once it is alive in the world. Our lack of ongoing critical evaluation of our profession means that design continues to reinforce a harmful status quo, creating exploitable systems at the expense of societies.

It is critical that user experience design must begin to deconstruct the outcomes of our collective body of work, especially as tech becomes more embedded and less visible or more easily ignored. Saitta writes, “All infrastructure is political; indeed, one might better say that all politics is infrastructural; we ignore it at our peril.”

Beyond better design paradigms, designers must look beyond the field, toward practices that directly criticise or oppose their work. In particular, security research and user experience design have significant practice and goal overlap and this relationship is often antagonistic. Both fields primarily focus on the systems of wide-scale interactions between users and technology, but the goals of the two fields are diametrically opposed; design is to create the best possible experience for a user, security is to create the worst possible experience for an attacker. By focusing of the outcomes of the two fields, it’s clear that security research is a form of user experience design. Design should reciprocate, and become a form of security research.

Design is inherently political, but it is not inherently good. With few exceptions, the motivations of a design project are constrained by the encompassing platform or system first, and the experiences and values of its designers second. The result is designers working in a user hostile world, where even seemingly harmless platforms or features are exploited for state or interpersonal surveillance and violence.As people living in societies, we cannot be separated from our political contexts. However, design practitioners research and implement systems based on a process of abstracting their audience through user stories. A user story is “a very high-level definition of a requirement, containing just enough information so that the developers can produce a reasonable estimate of the effort to implement it23.” In most cases, user are grouped through shared financial or biographical data, by their chosen devices, or by their technical or cognitive abilities.When designing for the digital world, user stories ultimately determine what is or is not an acceptable area of human variation. The practice empowers designers and engineers to communicate via a common problem-focused language. But practicing design that views users through a politically-naive lens leaves practitioners blind to the potential weaponisation of their design. User-storied design abstracts an individual user from a person of lived experience to a collection of designer-defined generalisations. In this approach, their political and interpersonal experiences are also generalised or discarded, creating a shaky foundation that allows for assumptions to form from the biases of the design team. This is at odds with the personal lived experience of each user, and the complex interpersonal interactions that occur within a designed digital platform.When a design transitions from theoretical to tangible, individual user problems and motivations become part of a larger interpersonal and highly political human network, affecting communities in ways that we do not yet fully understand. In Infrastructural Games and Societal Play, Eleanor Saitta writes of the rolling anticipated and unanticipated consequences of systems design: “All intentionally-created systems have a set of things the designers consider part of the scope of what the system manages, but any nontrivial system has a broader set of impacts. Often, emergence takes the form of externalities — changes that impact people or domains beyond the designed scope of the system^24.” These are no doubt challenges in an empathetically designed system, but in the context of design homogeny, these problems cascade.In a talk entitled From User Focus to Participation Design, Andie Nordgren advocates for how participatory design is a step to developing empathy for users:“If we can’t get beyond ourselves and our [platforms] – even if we are thinking about the users – it’s hard to transfer our focus to where we actually need to be when designing for participation which is with the people in relation to each other25.”Through inclusion, participatory design extends a design team’s focus beyond the hypothetical or ideal user, considering the interactions between users and other stakeholders over user stories. When implemented with the aim of engaging a diverse range of users during a project, participatory design becomes more political by forcing teams to address weaponised design opportunities during all stages of the process.

‘Mindless and unambiguous’ is only true for those who have both the cultural context to effortlessly decode an interface, and the confidence that their comprehension is solid. Not only is this dogma an unreasonable constraint, it also frequently fails.

Weaponised design – a process that allows for harm of users within the defined bounds of a designed system – is faciliated by designers who are oblivious to the politics of digital infrastructure or consider their design practice output to be apolitical.

Und hier werden Eltern die Kinder weggenommen und sie bekommen gar nichts? Nicht einmal einen Zettel?«

I am generous with what I have—I choose to be generous with what I have—precisely because we are no longer committed to one another as members of a shared social structure. Instead, the shift of responsibility for the public welfare toward private entities displaces our obligations to one another in favor of individual liberties and, I think, leaves us queasy about the notion of obligation altogether.

Actually, no, it hasn't, no matter what the Bunny's sign says. The scientific method is designed specifically to root out bias and false assumptions, including political ones. Sure, individual scientists can be political, but the scientific method is not. Its ideological agnosticism is why it works so well. In fact, the self-correcting nature of science means it is the best source of secular knowledge that humankind possesses.

Such thinking has also been gaining some traction in the West, although so far only at the political fringes. The underlying idea is that some types of services, including social networks and online search, are essential facilities akin to roads and other kinds of infrastructure and should be regulated as utilities, which in essence means capping their profits. Alternatively, important data services, such as digital identity, could be offered by governments. Evgeny Morozov, a researcher and internet activist, goes one step further, calling for the creation of public data utilities, which would pool vital digital information and ensure equal access to it.

Phil Tetlock, a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, who has studied forecasting in depth, suggests that “vague verbiage gives you political safety.”

Interactive visualization of the relations between members of Portuguese governments and companies

A case in point of the politics of difference within sociomaterial assemblages isoffered by Chasin (1995), who explores identifications across women, servants andmachines in contemporary robotics.

China in Vogue, But Vietnam Still Hun Sen’s Lifeline

“Beijing typically finds a local partner, makes that local partner accept investment plans that are detrimental to their country in the long term, and then uses the debts to either acquire the project altogether or to acquire political leverage in that country.”

With news this week that EPA's Inspector General would look into Pruitt's use of multiple email accounts, he is now facing more than a dozen probes and investigations from Congress, the White House and his agency's internal watchdog.

“We don’t want to advance something that we know will just get vetoed,” Ryan told reporters Wednesday morning.

Can civilisation prolong its life until the end of this century? “It depends on what we are prepared to do.” He fears it will be a long time before we take proportionate action to stop climatic calamity. “Standing in the way is capitalism. Can you imagine the global airline industry being dismantled when hundreds of new runways are being built right now all over the world? It’s almost as if we’re deliberately attempting to defy nature. We’re doing the reverse of what we should be doing, with everybody’s silent acquiescence, and nobody’s batting an eyelid.”

Hillman is amazed that our thinking rarely stretches beyond 2100. “This is what I find so extraordinary when scientists warn that the temperature could rise to 5C or 8C. What, and stop there? What legacies are we leaving for future generations? In the early 21st century, we did as good as nothing in response to climate change. Our children and grandchildren are going to be extraordinarily critical.”

Although Hillman has not flown for more than 20 years as part of a personal commitment to reducing carbon emissions, he is now scornful of individual action which he describes as “as good as futile”. By the same logic, says Hillman, national action is also irrelevant “because Britain’s contribution is minute. Even if the government were to go to zero carbon it would make almost no difference.” Instead, says Hillman, the world’s population must globally move to zero emissions across agriculture, air travel, shipping, heating homes – every aspect of our economy – and reduce our human population too. Can it be done without a collapse of civilisation? “I don’t think so,” says Hillman. “Can you see everyone in a democracy volunteering to give up flying? Can you see the majority of the population becoming vegan? Can you see the majority agreeing to restrict the size of their families?”

Hillman accuses all kinds of leaders – from religious leaders to scientists to politicians – of failing to honestly discuss what we must do to move to zero-carbon emissions. “I don’t think they can because society isn’t organised to enable them to do so. Political parties’ focus is on jobs and GDP, depending on the burning of fossil fuels.”

The strategy was to force vulnerable Democrats facing reelection in pro-Trump states to vote on making tax cuts for individuals permanent.

The White House says Trump has addressed the matter “directly”, which is not true, and treats it as settled.

Hoy diríamos (ontológicamente) que las políticas públicas y la planificación del desarrollo, así como gran parte de lo que se denomina diseño, son tecnologías políticas fundamentales de la modernidad y elementos clave en la constitución moderna de un solo mundo globalizado.

"it's not about the technology" because "the technology is neutral."

representation of race and gender in our culture

Rancièrecallsbringingthesetwoaspectsofrightstogetherasdissensus.Itisdissensusratherthanconsensusbecausepoliticsisalwaysacontestationoverwhoiscountedandwhatcounts.ForRancière,apoliticalsubjectinvolvesthecapacityforstagingsuchscenesofdissensus.Thus,‘politicalsubjectsarenotdefinitecollectivities.Theyaresurplusnames,namesthatsetoutaquestionoradisputeaboutwhoisincludedintheircount.’

TarletonGillespiearguesthattensionsbetweenusersandthedesignersoftheTwitteralgorithmarepartoflargerstakesinthe‘politicsofrepresentation.’Itisatensionunderscoredbyaconflictbetweenpeople’swilltoknowandbevisibletoothersandTwitter’simperativetodrawnewusersintonewconversations.Butsignificantly,Gillespienotesthatsuchalgorithmsnotonlyarebasedonassumptionsabouttheimageofapublictheyseektorepresentbutalsohelpconstructpublicsinthatimage.Thesamecouldbesaidofotherplatforms

a sly but genuine love of just how much music can shape a human being’s identity.

TheanathemaforLessigisthelossofthisfreedomincyberspace.Inrealspace,governingpeoplerequiresinducingthemtoactincertainways,butinthelastinstance,peoplehadthechoicetoactthiswayorthatway.Bycontrast,incyberspaceconductisgovernedbycode,whichtakesawaythatchoice.Incyberspace,‘iftheregulatorwantstoinduceacertainbehavior,sheneednotthreaten,orcajole,toinspirethechange.Sheneedonlychangethecode—thesoftwarethatdefinesthetermsuponwhichtheindividualgainsaccesstothesystem,orusesassetsonthesystem.’[37]Thisisbecause‘codeisanefficientmeansofregulation.Butitsperfectionmakesitsomethingdifferent.Oneobeystheselawsascodenotbecauseoneshould;oneobeystheselawsascodebecauseonecandonothingelse.Thereisnochoiceaboutwhethertoyieldtothedemandforapassword;onecompliesifonewantstoenterthesystem.Inthewellimplementedsystem,thereisnocivildisobedience.’[38]WhatLessigsuggestsisthatcyberspaceisnotonlyseparateandindependentbutconstitutesanewmodeofpower.Youconstituteyourselfasasubjectofpowerbysubmittingtocode.

First,bybringingthepoliticalsubjecttothecentreofconcern,weinterferewithdeterministanalysesoftheInternetandhyperbolicassertionsaboutitsimpactthatimaginesubjectsaspassivedatasubjects.Instead,weattendtohowpoliticalsubjectivitiesarealwaysperformedinrelationtosociotechnicalarrangementstothenthinkabouthowtheyarebroughtintobeingthroughtheInternet.[13]WealsointerferewithlibertariananalysesoftheInternetandtheirhyperbolicassertionsofsovereignsubjects.Wecontendthatifweshiftouranalysisfromhowwearebeing‘controlled’(asbothdeterministandlibertarianviewsagree)tothecomplexitiesof‘acting’—byforegroundingcitizensubjectsnotinisolationbutinrelationtothearrangementsofwhichtheyareapart—wecanidentifywaysofbeingnotsimplyobedientandsubmissivebutalsosubversive.Whileusuallyreservedforhigh-profilehacktivistsandwhistle-blowers,weask,howdosubjectsactinwaysthattransgresstheexpectationsofandgobeyondspecificconventionsandindoingsomakerightsclaimsabouthowtoconductthemselvesasdigitalcitizens

Whoever considers the nature of our government, with discernment, will see, that tho obstacles and delays will frequently stand in the way of the adoption of good measures, yet when once adopted, they are likely to be stable and permanent: It will be far more difficult to undo than to do.

Surman and Reilly (2003) focus on appropriation of networked technologies in a strategically, politically, and creatively innovative manner oriented toward social change. In this context of advocacy, effective technology appropriation includes strategic Internet use for collaboration, publishing, mobilization, and observation. Here, the delineation between the use and appropriation occurs when technology is adapted to reflect goals and culture. Camacho (2001) describes appropriation by civil society organizations at the pinnacle of a technology use ladder. In the middle of the ladder, organizations focus on adoption of conventional technology. Toward the bottom, organizations and individuals with constrained access or slow adoption rates lag behind and seek access to technology. At the pinnacle, however, pioneers and activists appropriate technology to promote causes, for instance, creating flash mobs through mass text messaging to instantaneously organize large groups of people for social protest

We first emphasize that technology is not neutral. The design of products, applications, and services embodies choices, largely made in early development stages by equipment producers and service providers, about how devices ought to be used, by whom and for what purpose. A technology’s architecture embodies power relationships between equipment makers, service providers, and users. Relationships between various stakeholders have social and economic implications

This article frames appropriation as a political process.

this is common sense.

So the logical response to Trumpism is to counter him with someone who can truly challenge the economic status quo, rather than being a mere avatar for such hopes.

Koromanti was a term commonly used to describe enslaved people from the Akan ethnic group from West Africa, one of the largest group among the enslaved in Jamaica at the time.

LET US now consider the matters which should be treated in the councils, and with which popes, cardinals, bishops, and all learned men should occupy themselves day and night, if they love Christ and His Church.

Thus he has devised a gloss which allows him in his proper person to lie and cheat and fool us all, and all this impudently and in open daylight, and nevertheless he claims to be the head of Christendom, letting the evil spirit rule him with manifest lies.

They lie and deceive, form and make covenants with us, of which they do not mean to keep one jot. And all this is done in the holy name of Christ and St. Peter.

If the Pope can make a law on the day after his election by which he takes our benefices and livings to which he has no right, the Emperor Charles should so much the more have a right to issue a law for all Germany on the day after his coronation 4 that in future no livings and benefices are to fall to Rome by virtue of the Pope’s month, but that those that have so fallen are to be freed and taken from the Romish robbers.

Therefore we, in this above enumeration, important as it is, wish to proceed with great care as is proper, and to cut off the advance of this plague and cancerous disease so it will not spread any further in the Lord's field as harmful thornbushes. We have therefore held a careful inquiry, scrutiny, discussion, strict examination, and mature deliberation with each of the brothers, the eminent cardinals of the holy Roman Church, as well as the priors and ministers general of the religious orders, besides many other professors and masters skilled in sacred theology and in civil and canon law.

Excommunications are only external penalties and they do not deprive man of the common spiritual prayers of the Church.

Indulgences are pious frauds of the faithful, and remissions of good works; and they are among the number of those things which are allowed, and not of the number of those which are advantageous.

As far as Martin himself is concerned, O good God, what have we overlooked or not done? What fatherly charity have we omitted that we might call him back from such errors? For after we had cited him, wishing to deal more kindly with him, we urged him through various conferences with our legate and through our personal letters to abandon these errors. We have even offered him safe conduct and the money necessary for the journey urging him to come without fear or any misgivings, which perfect charity should cast out, and to talk not secretly but openly and face to face after the example of our Savior and the Apostle Paul. If he had done this, we are certain he would have changed in heart, and he would have recognized his errors. He would not have found all these errors in the Roman Curia which he attacks so viciously, ascribing to it more than he should because of the empty rumors of wicked men. We would have shown him clearer than the light of day that the Roman pontiffs, our predecessors, whom he injuriously attacks beyond all decency, never erred in their canons or constitutions which he tries to assail. For, according to the prophet, neither is healing oil nor the doctor lacking in Galaad.

21. Indulgences are necessary only for public crimes, and are properly conceded only to the harsh and impatient

The IDEAT project launched by the Partit Nazzjonalista a few days ago offers a glimpse into how Maltese politics can be transformed through a digital platform which bridges the divide between the citizen and the Party that represents it. IDEAT is built around an eDemocracy framework in which ICT serves as a tool of choice in order to, not only engage and communicate with the population, but empower it to be better equipped to participate in the democratic process. Crowdsourcing is less a new idea than a new concept. It covers a wide array of tools that use the power and knowledge of crowds brought together through the Internet, especially by means of social media and other applications which primarily focus on bottom-up information flow. Citizens can take part in brainstorming, discussing, developing, and formulating ideas that used to be the limited domain of political elites. This IDEAT project seeks to explore methods to obtain active citizen input in the policymaking processes - an input which has been severely curtailed by this government. It serves to empower each and every one of us, enabling our voice and ideas to be heard. Politics for the people can be more than just casting your vote when a general election comes by.

Center for Competitive Politics

“but of their engagement I do.”

The native peoples and their land were, and to some extent continue to be, under siege.

superabundance of land and resources gave rise to a conviction that the continent’s resources were inexhaustible

moiety