young people from disadvantaged backgrounds are far less likely to be informed and to vote.

But politics is about who shows up. The fossil fuel interests that are threatened show up. Nerds like Urban, vaguely repulsed by politics, do not.

So perhaps a simpler way of putting the conclusion is that the Republican Party is motivated by a general philosophy while Democrats are motivated by specific policies they want to achieve.

The right-wing base has a coherent position on climate change: It's a hoax, so we shouldn't do anything about it. The left-wing base has a coherent position: It's happening, so we should do something about it. The "centrist" position, shared by conservative Democrats and the few remaining moderate Republicans, is that it's happening but we shouldn't do anything about it. That's not centrist in any meaningful ideological sense; instead, like most areas of overlap between the parties, it is corporatist.

What's really being measured is heterogeneity of opinion, not centrism.

There are two broad narratives about politics that can be glimpsed between the lines here. Both are, in the argot of the day, problematic.

A voter with one extreme conservative opinion (round up and expel all illegal immigrants immediately) and one extreme liberal opinion (institute a 100 percent tax on wealth over a million dollars) will be marked, for the purposes of polling, as a moderate.

sovereign wealth funds

a divorce from Wall Street, could help Democrats win back sizable segments of working class whites

For much of the 20th century this was how the left conceived the first stage of an economy beyond capitalism. The force would be applied by the working class, either at the ballot box or on the barricades. The lever would be the state. The opportunity would come through frequent episodes of economic collapse. Instead over the past 25 years it has been the left’s project that has collapsed. The market destroyed the plan; individualism replaced collectivism and solidarity; the hugely expanded workforce of the world looks like a “proletariat”, but no longer thinks or behaves as it once did.

The internet has become the nervous system of the 21st century, wiring together devices that we carry, devices that are in our bodies, devices that our bodies are in. It is woven into the fabric of government service delivery, of war-fighting systems, of activist groups, of major corporations and teenagers’ social groups and the commerce of street-market hawkers.

It’s the nature of Twitter to not research further, we all know, but if that nature is influencing the way we run museums, school lectures, and conferences, the future might be more bleak than any of us dared to predict.

Most people reading this will already be fairly tolerant. But there is a step beyond thinking of yourself as x but tolerating y: not even to consider yourself an x. The more labels you have for yourself, the dumber they make you.

The data show that in some circumstances in which a woman may choose to end a pregnancy, majorities of Americans — Democrats and Republicans — are on the same side, sometimes supporting the legality of the procedure and sometimes not.

Gridlock

inspirational organizational

The children who thought that having a black president, despite the fact that he was, on domestic policy, worse than EVERY other democratic nominee, are why the US is so fucked right now.

“Honestly,” said Wiener, “it is perplexing to me why people are so insistent that local communities should not have control. The behavior we see on (our) street is a very localized issue. We should be able to address it.

There were actual politics at stake, and it would’ve been an ridiculously dangerous move to substitute identity affinities for political analysis.

"We provide half a billion dollars (annually) to the District. One would think they would be much more compliant with the wishes of Congress," Rep. Andy Harris, a Maryland Republican and one of the most vocal pot opponents, said in an interview Thursday.

At a World Cancer Day symposium, Shripad Naik, Minister of State for AYUSH, asked scientists to look to traditional Indian medicines to treat the disease.

After 2004, I believed the story that the protesters in Ukraine and elsewhere were mobilized through text messaging and blogs.

We were supposed to be saving the world by helping to promote democracy, but it seemed clear to me that many people, even in countries like Belarus or Moldova, or in the Caucasus, who could have been working on interesting projects with new media on their own, would eventually be spoiled by us.

If you’re trying to figure out how a non-neoliberal regime can function in the twenty-first century and still be constructive towards both environment and technology, you have to tackle these kinds of questions. There’s no avoiding them.

It’s primarily from data and not their algorithms that powerful companies currently derive their advantages, and the only way to curb that power is to take the data completely out of the market realm, so that no company can own them. Data would accrue to citizens, and could be shared at various social levels. Companies wanting to use them would have to pay some kind of licensing fee, and only be able to access attributes of the information, not the entirety of it.

But if you turn data into a money-printing machine for citizens, whereby we all become entrepreneurs, that will extend the financialization of everyday life to the most extreme level, driving people to obsess about monetizing their thoughts, emotions, facts, ideas—because they know that, if these can only be articulated, perhaps they will find a buyer on the open market. This would produce a human landscape worse even than the current neoliberal subjectivity. I think there are only three options. We can keep these things as they are, with Google and Facebook centralizing everything and collecting all the data, on the grounds that they have the best algorithms and generate the best predictions, and so on. We can change the status of data to let citizens own and sell them. Or citizens can own their own data but not sell them, to enable a more communal planning of their lives. That’s the option I prefer.

On the one hand, we can foresee these companies extending their reach ever further into everyday life, to a point where it would become difficult to even articulate why you would want a different model, since our use of these technologies and the politics embedded in them also permits or restricts our ways of thinking about how to live.

When we get to the point where someone sees the mere existence of a political conflict that requires us to criticize allies as a no-win scenario, something has gone very wrong. For the actual work of politics– convincing people to come over to our side in order to make the world a more just and equitable place– those politics have utterly failed. We have been talking about privilege theory for 30 years. We’ve been talking about intersectionality for 25 years. We’ve been getting into cyclical, vicious Twitter frenzies for a half decade. This is not working. And I doubt hardly anyone actually believes that this is working. They’re just having too much fun to stop.

Perhaps a belief endures in these women that sidling up to men with power, rather than organising for it collectively, will yield individual gains.

The recognition of feminism is that women exist at a social disadvantage to a history that privileges and resources men at their expense.

Of course, the radical feminist position that masculinity is natural and healthy, and femininity artificial and harmful, is also inherently sexist

In contrast, she mentions and quotes a total of four trans women (zero from books), and two of them are quoted to supporting the radical feminist position.

frequently providing physical descriptions

In addition to broad economic trends affecting domestic politics evenly, Fisher also notes the uneven distribution of effects stemming from intellectual property rights (1999, Sect. II. C.). The positive effects of intellectual property rights accrue strongl y to a small number of rights - holders (the paper assumes that there are no significant negative effects to rights - holders); for this reason, rights - holders have significant motive (and potentially greater means) to overcome the significant barriers to acti ve political lobbying.

Let's rethink the idea of the state: it must be a catalyst for big, bold ideas

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The formula is simple: divide the population by the number of congressional or legislative districts and use the existing geo-political boundaries to come as close to the required number as possible.

The federal government already spends enough on student aid to cover tuition for every public college student in America. Maybe it's time to try.

larger fight over limiting the filibuster and restricting how far the minority party can go to thwart a president’s agenda.

powers of persuasion most of all enhanced by a knowledge

The political speaker will also appeal to the interest of his hearers, and this involves a knowledge of what is good. Definition and analysis of things "good."

In urging his hearers to take or to avoid a course of action, the political orator must show that he has an eye to their happiness.

we should know the moral qualities characteristic of each form of government, for the special moral character of each is bound to provide us with our most effective means of persuasion in dealing with it

Hence rhetoric may be regarded as an offshoot of dialectic, and also of ethical (or political) studies.

urging all his fellow-countrymen to be nobler and juster leaders of the Hellenes

Neither will he be the friend of any one who is greatly his inferior, for the tyrant will despise him, and will never seriously regard him as a friend.

I answer, Socrates, that rhetoric is the art of persuasion in courts of law and other assemblies, as I was just now saying, and about the just and unjust.