"Scholars of rhetoric have largely overlooked the inherent rhetoricity of family. In The Case for Single Motherhood, Katherine Mack posits family as a central concern of rhetorical studies by reflecting on how language is used by single mothers who seek to reenvision the personal, social, and political meanings of family. Drawing on intersectional and rhetorical theories, Mack demonstrates how the category of elective single motherhood emerged in response to the historically differential treatment of "unwed mothers" along racial and class lines. Through her readings of a range of self-sponsored ESM texts-guidebooks, memoirs, and interactive digital media written by and primarily for other ESMs-and from her perspective as an elective single mother herself, Mack evaluates the rhetorical power, as well as the exclusions and hierarchies, that the ESM label effects. She analyzes how ESMs envision motherhood, visions that entail their musings about who can and should mother. Ultimately, Mack offers women who are considering nonnormative paths to motherhood a way to affirm their maternal identities and paths without disparaging others'. Scholars in the fields of rhetoric and feminist rhetorical studies will find in this volume an illuminating perspective on the rhetorical power of self-sponsored texts in particular. Crafting a methodology to identify and evaluate the goals and effects of legitimacy work and selecting sources that bring academic attention to varied genres of self-sponsored writings, Mack paves the way for future rhetorical studies of motherhood and family"--
Social media platforms have transformed the political landscape by revolutionizing information dissemination, citizen engagement, and public opinion formation and change. Political discourse during the 2020 election revealed political disharmony and a deep division among Americans that was powered, in part, by social media
Social media platforms have transformed the political landscape by revolutionizing information dissemination, citizen engagement, and public opinion formation and change. Political discourse during the 2020 election revealed political disharmony and a deep division among Americans that was powered, in part, by social media
Unequal representation can result from politicians' biased perception of public opinion. Existing research has focused on the numerical accuracy with which politicians estimate preferences distributions in surveys. This method ignores politicians' broader assumptions about public preferences; e.g. regarding their crystallization, salience, malleability, and measurability in surveys. We address these assumptions in a novel two-stage research design using redistributive tax policy in Germany as a case. Interviews with parliamentarians show that voters are perceived as uninformed, disinterested, and susceptible to anti-tax mobilization by business representatives. Support for taxing the rich in polls is dismissed as superficial and irrelevant for political behavior. In a second step, we verify these assumptions in twelve focus groups with high- or low-educated citizens. They largely confirm the assumed indifference and anti-tax attitudes. An education gap in tax preferences cannot be identified. Support expressed in previous surveys tends to disappear in conversations, which aligns with politicians' experiences.
Abstract Opinion formation and information processing are affected by unconscious affective responses to stimuli—particularly in politics. Yet we still know relatively little about such affective responses and how to measure them. In this study, we focus on emotional valence and examine facial electromyography (fEMG) measures. We demonstrate the validity of these measures, discuss ways to make measurement and analysis more robust, and consider validity trade-offs in experimental design. In doing so, we hope to support scholars in designing studies that will advance scholarship on political attitudes and behavior by incorporating unconscious affective responses to political stimuli—responses that have too often been neglected by political scientists.
Abstract In May 2022, less than three months after Russia started its war of aggression against Ukraine, both Finland and Sweden applied for membership in NATO, thereby revoking their longstanding policies of non-alliance. What led to this shift? And what made formal NATO membership more attractive to these countries than their previous relationship with the alliance, which already amounted to informal alignment between them and NATO? To answer these questions, this article reviews the process and debates preceding the Finnish NATO application, which also proved decisive for Sweden's alliance bid. In doing so, the article contributes to the existing literature on Finland's NATO process as well as the broader scholarly debate about alliance formation. It argues that two factors prompted the Finnish NATO application: first, a dramatic shift in Finnish public opinion on NATO membership and, second, the emergence of a broadly shared view among Finland's elites of the insufficiency of Finland's existing security arrangements in view of Russia's increased threat potential, with NATO membership seen as the only viable remedy. The article duly highlights the role of public opinion in shaping a state's alignment preferences. Moreover, it finds strong evidence for realist (threat) and rationalist (efficiency) explanations for alliance formation.
Dass vielfältige Inhalte und Meinungen über eine Vielzahl an Medien verbreitet werden, ist für unsere demokratische Gesellschaft heute wichtiger denn je. Gerade deshalb ist es unabdingbar, Meinungsmacht einzelner Medienunternehmen zu verhindern und dadurch zur Meinungsvielfalt beizutragen. Diese bedeutende Aufgabe kommt der Medienkonzentrationskontrolle des Medienstaatsvertrages zu. Doch haben die digitalisierungsbedingten Veränderungen in der Medienlandschaft zu einem inkonsistenten Prüfungsregime der Medienkonzentrationskontrolle geführt, da medienrechtlich aktuell nicht alle für die Meinungsbildung relevanten Medienakteure ausreichend erfasst werden. Die Arbeit untersucht die Thematik im Kontext der nationalen sowie internationalen medien- und wettbewerbsrechtlichen Rahmenbedingungen. Basierend auf den dabei gewonnenen Erkenntnissen wird ein den aktuellen Erfordernissen entsprechender normativer Vorschlag unterbreitet."Media Concentration Law in the Digital Age": In the interest of democracy, individual media companies must be prevented from gaining opinion power. To this end, media concentration is regulated in accordance with the Interstate Media Treaty. However, recent developments in the media sector have led to an inconsistent regulatory regime, which no longer adequately covers all media players relevant to the formation of public opinion. This publication analyzes the issue in the context of both a media law and competition law framework and presents a legislative proposal suitable for restoring regulatory effectiveness
AbstractMost states acknowledge the significance of Indigenous rights to rectify past injustices. Yet, on the domestic level, the realization of these rights depends on national policies. For democratic societies, questions about public opinion toward Indigenous policies are thus of great interest but remain largely unstudied. To what extent does the ethnic majority support policies conducive to Indigenous rights realization? And how different are the Indigenous population's policy preferences? I use original experimental data from a vignette study to investigate these questions in the case of the Sámi people in Norway and Sweden. I hypothesize that groups' attitudes are shaped by policies' potential to alter the social status hierarchy between the majority and Indigenous populations. The results provide a nuanced picture. The ethnic majority shows significantly less support for policies facilitating Sámi linguistic, self-governance, and territorial rights. While the Sámi have, in general, more positive attitudes toward such policies, their support seems to be less pronounced than the majority's resistance. Moreover, as attitudes are surprisingly similar when compared between Norway and Sweden, a country's existing policy context does not appear to be crucial in the formation of these preferences.
Gestützt auf Primärdaten aus der Datenbank "Varieties of Indoctrination" (V-Indoc), untersucht dieser Beitrag die Veränderungen, die es von 1945 bis 2021 bei der Politisierung der Schulbildung in Russland gegeben hat. Russland wird hier auch aus komparativer Perspektive betrachtet, wobei die Indoktrinierungsbemühungen und -inhalte in Russland mit denen anderer nichtdemokratischer Regime verglichen werden. Aus den Daten geht hervor, dass Putin zwar behauptet, russische Schüler:innen würden erst seit den frühen 2000er Jahren gleich nach seinem Machtantritt patriotische Werte in der Schule vermittelt bekommen. Seine anfänglichen Versuche einer Bildungsreform waren jedoch nur begrenzt erfolgreich. Nach der Annexion der Krim 2014 wurde erneut Anstrengungen unternommen, die patriotische Erziehung auszubauen, und die Meinungsfreiheit in den Klassenzimmern wurde zunehmend beschnitten.
Nigeria's security environment continues to be tense, tenuous and fluid. From all indications and yardsticks of policy planning and implementation, the country's security architecture seems to be unraveling. As the nation's security establishments confront multiple security crises especially in Northern Nigeria, their policy and operational reactions continue to be reactive. While the Boko Haram insurgency rages, a decade after the commencement of military operations against the group, military successes in the Northeast are at best modest. Following a decade of commitment of military resources including billions of dollars deployed to the procurement of armament and military hardware, expansion of forces' strength and creation of special operation formations, one can ask why have the military operations continued to falter and security architecture unravel? The study was anchored on the qualitative research approach and sourced data from published and openly available official documents, scientific publications and newspapers articles, reports, opinion pieces and commentaries. Making use of this open-sourced information, this study explains faltering military operations and Nigeria's worsening security environment to the failure of security planning, poor civil-military relations including lack of depth in intelligence agencies penetration of local communities across Northern Nigeria, rivalry among the three arms of the Nigerian Armed Forces, persistency of the poor culture of intelligence information sharing and lack of synergy and poor coordination among Nigeria's security establishments. This study recommends that more attention need to be paid to intelligence gathering, synergy and coordination among the security establishments in the bids to enhance the prospects of Nigeria's counter-terrorism operation and other military engagements across the country.
Democracy will remain under pressure in Africa, with key elections coming up in 2024. While conflict risks could intensify, the decline of Western influence will continue. Structural socio-economic challenges are likely to persist despite economic growth. The Africa Cup of Nations will be a highlight at the beginning of the year. We present here a list of "Ten Things to Watch in Africa" in 2024. Politics: With the recent wave of military coups, democracy has come under pressure. Further coups remain a risk, especially in countries with politicised militaries and political crises. Important general elections will, inter alia, be held in Ghana and South Africa where heavy losses for the ruling parties are expected. Peace and security: Coups are often connected to armed conflicts. The spillover of jihadism and related ethno-regional tensions in West Africa will be a major security challenge. In the Horn of Africa, the ceasefire in Ethiopia's Tigray Region seems to be holding but the country remains instable. Internationally: Similar to Russia's war on Ukraine, the Israel-Hamas conflict also divides African governments. The relative decline of Western influence is likely to continue, not least regarding military presence. Growing anti-immigration sentiment in Europe has made migration a salient issue in African-European relations. Socio-economic development: African economies are set to experience continued growth that will, however, vary across countries, while debt remains a formidable challenge. Green deals are likely to remain sluggish.
Crowd Intelligence and Crowd Cooperative Computing -- Explicit Coordination Based Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Intelligent Traffic Signal Control -- A Crowdsourcing Task Allocation Mechanism for Hybrid Worker Context Based on Skill Level Updating -- Blockchain-Based Multi-factor K-anonymity Group Location Privacy Protection Scheme -- Context-Aware Automatic Splitting Method for Structured Complex Crowdsourcing Tasks -- A Method for Security Traffic Patrolling Based on Structural Coordinated Proximal Policy Optimization -- Crowdsourced Task Recommendation via Link Prediction -- Research on Multi-UAV Target Allocation Based on Improved Auction Algorithm -- Enhancement of Cat Breeds Classification Model based on Meta Loss Correction -- Multi-UAV Cooperative Reconnaissance Task Allocation Based on IEPPSO Algorithm -- Cooperative Evolutionary Computation and Human-like Intelligent Collaboration -- Group Role Assignment with Trust between Agents -- Memetic Algorithm with Exchange Coding for Intelligent Scheduling Optimization -- A Dimension-Based Elite Learning Particle Swarm Optimizer For Large-Scale Optimization -- Compactness and Separateness Driven Fuzzy Clustering Validity Index Called TLW -- Cross-lingual Speaker Transfer for Cambodian based on Feature Disentangler and Time-Frequency Attention Adaptive Normalization -- Refining Skeleton-based Temporal Action Segmentation with Edge Information -- CoME: Collaborative Model Ensemble for Fast and Accurate Predictions -- Study on the evolution of public opinion on public health events -- Enhance the Transferability From an Overfitting Perspective -- CMGN: Cross-Modal Grounding Network for Temporal Sentence Retrieval in Video -- Fast Community Detection Based on Integration of Non-cooperative and Cooperative Game -- Professional Text Review Under Limited Sampling Constraints -- Latent Diffusion Model-Based T2T-ViT for SAR Ship Classification -- Domain-Specific Collaborative Applications -- An Empirical Study On the Urgent Self-Admitted Technical Debt -- Modular Joint Training for Speech-Driven 3D Facial Animation -- Extracting Structural Knowledge for Professional Text Inference -- Card Mini Program Design and Implementation Based on SCHOLAT Social Network -- A Traffic Flow Prediction based Task Offloading Method in Vehicular Edge Computing -- A Prediction-based Fuzzy Method for Multi-objective Microservice Workflows Scheduling -- Smart Contract Generation Supporting Multi-instance for Inter-Organizational Process Collaboration -- Arterial Traffic Optimization Algorithm Based on Deep Reinforcement Learning and Green Wave Coordination Control in Complex Lane Queuing Conditions -- Multi-robots Formation and Obstacle Avoidance Algorithm based on Leader-follower and Artificial Potential Field Method -- A Multi-stage Network with Self-attention for Tooth Instance Segmention -- Fault Tolerance Aware Virtual Machine Scheduling Algorithm in Cloud Data Center Environment -- Personalized Learning Made Simple: A Deep Knowledge Tracing Model for Individual Cognitive Development -- Vehicle Edge Computing Network Service Migration Strategy Based on Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning -- A Lightweight Dual Branch Fusion Network for Single Image Deraining -- 3D Object Detection Method Based on LiDAR Point Cloud Data -- Collaborative Computer Vision and Cloud Platform for Gastrointestinal Polyp Detection -- An Intelligent Teaching Evaluation System Integrating Emotional Computing and Cloud Platform -- Deep Learning-Based Fastener Counting and Localization Correction Method -- Design and Simulation of Cooperative Communication Networks for Wireless Sensors in Underwater Environments.
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Anyone who has ever taken or taught a philosophy class is familiar with the claim "[Blank] is subjective" in which the [Blank] in question could be anything from literary interpretations to ethical norms. This response effectively ends any and all cultural and philosophical discussion, which is why it is so aggravating. One response is to argue against this claim, to point out that not every interpretation of a poem, novel, or film, is authorized, that there are better or worse interpretations, with respect to cultural version. With respect to the ethical or political arguments it is tempting to point out that the very existence of ethics, of society, presupposes norms that are shared as well as debated and challenged.What if we took a different perspective? Instead of arguing against this view, ask the question of its conditions. To offer a criticism in the Marxist sense. By Marxist sense I mean specifically the criticism that Marx offers of idealism, of philosophy, in The German Ideology. In that text Marx gives the conditions of how it is that the world appears so upside down that ideas and their criticism rather than material conditions drive and determine history. So we could ask a similar question, how has subjectivity, subjective opinion and perspective, has come to appear as so prevalent and powerful. How did we come to live under the reign of subjectivity?In a move that will surprise no one who has read this blog that I find a useful starting point for answering this question Frank Fischbach's book Marx with Spinoza. In that text Fischbach argues that rather than seen alienation as an alienation from subjectivity, a reduction of a subject to an object, it is subjectivity itself that is an alienation, an alienation from objectivity, a privation of the world. As Fischbach argues:"The reduction of human beings, by this abstraction, from natural and living beings to the state of 'subjects' as owners of a socially average labour power indicates at the same time the completion of their reduction to a radical state of impotence: for the individual to be conceived and to conceive of itself as a subject it is necessary that it see itself withdrawn and subtracted from the objective conditions of its natural activity; in other words, it is necessary that 'the real conditions of living labour' (the material worked on, the instruments of labour and the means of subsistence which 'fan the flames of the power of living labour') become 'autonomous and alien existences'"And also: "This is why we interpret Marx's concept of alienation not as a new version of a loss of the subject in the object, but as a radically new thought, of the loss of the essential and vital objects for an existence that is itself essentially objective and vital....Alienation is not therefore the loss of the subject in the object it is the loss of object for a being that is itself objective. But the loss of proper objects and the objectivity of its proper being is also the loss of all possible inscription of one's activity in objectivity, it is the loss of all possible mastery of objectivity, as well as other effects: in brief, the becoming subject is essentially a reduction to impotence. The becoming subject or the subjectivation of humanity is thus inseparable according to Marx from what is absolutely indispensable for capitalism, the existence of a mass of "naked workers"—that is to say pure subjects possessors of a perfectly abstract capacity to work—individual agents of a purely subjective power of labor and constrained to sell its use to another to the same extent that they are totally dispossessed of the entirety of objective conditions (means and tools of production, matter to work on) to put to effective work their capacity to work."At the basis of subjectivity, of subjectivity understood as an abstract and indifferent capacity, there is the indifferent capacity of labor power. Behind the figure of the subject there is the worker. I have already argued elsewhere on this blog that this reading of the Marx/Spinoza connection could be understood as one which reflects and critically addressed our contemporary situation in which subjecitivity, a subjectivity understood as potential and capacity, is seen as the condition of our freedom rather than our subjection. What Fischbach suggests through a reading of Marx and Spinoza that such capacity, capacity abstracted and separated from the material conditions of its emergence and activity, can only really be impotence. Just as a worker cut off from the conditions of labor is actually poverty, a subject cut off from the conditions of its actualization is impotence. What now I find provocative about this analysis is that if we think of it as a general schema in which an objective relation, a relation to objects but also others, is transformed into a subjective potential or capacity it is possible to argue that the constitution of subjectivity through labor power is only one such transformation, and that the current production of subjectivity is itself the product of several successive revolutions in which subjective potentials displace objective relations. One could also talk about the creation of subjectivity as buying power, as a pure capacity to purchase. I know that criticisms of consumer society from the fifties and sixties today seem moralistic and often passé. I am thinking here of Baudrillard, Debord, Lefebvre, and of course Horkheimer and Adorno. It is worth remembering, however, that some of the early critics were less interested in moralizing criticisms of materialism as they were in this kind of constitution of subjectivity. As Jean Baudrillard wrote in The Consumer Society, 'It is difficult to grasp the extent to which the current training in systematic, organized consumption is the equivalent and extension, in the twentieth century, of the great nineteenth-century long process of the training of rural populations for industrial work.'One person who continued such an an analysis is Bernard Stiegler. Stiegler even uses the same word, "proletarianization" to describe both the loss of skills and knowledge by the worker and the loss of skills and knowledge by the consumer. As I wrote in The Politics of Transindividuality:"At first glance, the use of the term proletarianisation to describe the transindividuation of the consumer would seem to be an analogy with the transformation of the labour process: if proletarianisation is the loss of skills, talents, and knowledge until the worker becomes simply interchangeable labour power, then the broader proletarianisation of daily life is the loss of skills, knowledge, and memory until the individual becomes simply purchasing power. Stiegler's use of proletarianisation is thus simultaneously broader and more restricted than Marx, broader in that it is extended beyond production to encompass relations of consumption and thus all of life, but more restricted in that it is primarily considered with respect to the question of knowledge. The transfer of knowledge from the worker to the machine is the primary case of proletarianisation for Stiegler, becoming the basis for understanding the transfer of knowledge of cooking to microwaveable meals and the knowledge of play from the child to the videogame. Stiegler does not include other dimensions of Marx's account of proletarianisation, specifically the loss of place, of stability, with its corollary affective dimension of insecurity and precariousness. On this point, it would be difficult to draw a strict parallel between worker and consumer, as the instability of the former is often compensated for by the desires and satisfactions of the latter. Consumption often functions as a compensation for the loss of security, stability, and satisfaction of work, which is not to say that it is not without its own insecurities especially as they are cultivated by advertising."For the most part Stiegler considers this deskilling to take place in the automation of the knowledge and skill that makes up daily life. Everything from cooking to knowing how to navigate one's own city is now more or less hardwired into precooked meals and the ubiquitous smartphone. Other cultural critics have pointed to the general deskilling of daily life through the decline of repair, tinkering, and mending. The effect of all this is to change the consumer from someone who buys things based on knowledge and familiarity to a pure expression of buying power, an abstract potential. Just as the worker is separated from the means of production, from the objective conditions of their labor to be the subjective capacity to work, the consumer is separated from the knowledge to consume to become a personification of buying power. As with work the conditions to realize this buying power are outside the control of the consumer. We do not decide what to buy based on our knowledge of our needs and desires but on what is advertised to us as a need or desire.As much as the worker and consumer are opposed, making up two sides of economic relations under capitalism, they are unified, connected in the tendency to transform work to abstract labor power and consumption into abstract buying power. While abstract subjectivity is how these two sides of the capitalist economic relation function it is not how they are lived. They are lived as profoundly individual, subjective in the conventional sense of the word. What one does for a living is in some sense considered to be one's identity: "What are you?" is in some sense equivalent to "What do you do?" If for any one of the myriad reasons what one does is inadequate to constitute an identity, remains just a day job, then consumption or the commodity form steps in to supply the necessary coordinates for an identity. From this perspective we can chart not only the historical progression of the two identities, but also the structural similarities. With respect to the first, consumer society, consumption, and the myriad possibilities to construct an identity through consumption, comes after the worker, after the formation of capitalism. Any attempt to read Marx's Capital for consumer society, for the common sense understanding of commodity fetishism as the overvaluing of commodities, is going to have a hard time navigating the dull world of linen, coats, corn and coal. The consumer comes after the worker. However, it is also possible to see a similarity of a structural condition. In both case subjectivity is abstracted from, or separated from, objectivity, from not just objects, but objective spirit, in Hegel's sense, institutions, norms, and structures. This abstraction is lived as a highly individualized identity, in some sense work and consumption form the basis of individuation as such. However, it only has effects, only functions in the aggregate. As a worker one only has effects, both in terms of the creation of value, and in terms of any disruption of exploitation, as part of a collective. The same could be said for consumerism, even though it is through consumerism that we are encouraged to believe that we can have ethical effects as individuals, green consumerism, cruelty free products, etc. I am wondering if one can see a similar structure of abstract/individual subjectivity in other aspects of society. I am thinking of politics, in which individuals are abstracted from any real connection to their communities and societies only to be constituted as "voting power," an abstract aggregate that is lived as a highly individualized identity. I will have to think more about that one. My point here is to connect the often asserted claim "that everything is subjective" back to its material conditions, to the production of subjectivity in both work and the reproduction of everyday life, production and consumption. It is not just a matter of a bad reading of Nietzsche, although it is often that as well, but an effect in the sphere of ideas and discussion of what is already at work in the sphere of production. The thread running through both is connection between power and impotence. If everything is subjective then I can offer any interpretation, create my own moral code whole cloth, live as I prefer, but if everything is subjective then I can do very little, nothing at all to alter or change anything. This is the fundamental point of intersection between Marx and Spinoza, subjectivity, individual subjectivity, is not the zenith of our freedom and power, it is the nadir of our subjection.