Category: Government 2.0
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Real Democracy for California — Rise Up!
Rise Up California (“Levántate California”) is a new movement of working people from different races and backgrounds who want to create a better future for our state. Rise Up California believes that our state’s wealth and power should belong to the people who work hard every day, not the greedy tech billionaires who exploit us.…
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What Can We Learn from Kafka’s “Before the Law”?
Within Franz Kafka’s The Trial — a story about a person prosecuted by obscure elites for an unclear crime — there is a short parable called “Before the Law.” In this short story, a man wishes to gain entry “to the law,” which is in a gated community. A guard, or gatekeeper, tells the man…
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Eisenstein and Brecht: Political Ideology-Influenced Theater and Film
Marxism, the systems-philosophy based on the political economy of Karl Marx, holds that history is the sum of material class struggles – that a society’s material production and distribution shapes its culture and consciousness, and that “progress” is reflected in successive revolutions creating more egalitarian material (economic) and political systems. Not surprisingly, Marxist views of…
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The Difference Between Liberals, Progressives, and Leftists
Guest post There’s more to politics than ideological labels, and for most people, encapsulating the complexity and nuance of one’s political views with a single term may prove difficult. However, in a country where conservative politicians spout oxymoronic combinations — for example, when Senator Ron Johnson described Joe Biden as a “liberal, progressive, socialist” —…
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Cyber-As-Material-Battlefield, Political Communication and Imperialism
In April of 2020, at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic but in anticipation of a predictable phenomena, Christoph Laucht and Susan T. Jackson posted a great piece at the History and Policy website on the militarization of pandemic response rhetoric. They noted that “the dominant feature of the novel coronavirus pandemic is the many…
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Facial Recognition, Politics and Communication
The well-known microbiologist, experimental pathologist, and environmentalist René Dubos once wrote: “There is a demon in technology. It was put there by man and man will have to exorcise it before technological civilization can achieve the eighteenth-century ideal of humane civilized life.” Recent discoveries that artificial intelligence can predict all kinds of characteristics of human…
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From Operatic Blobs to Mental Illness Predictions, AI’s Getting Deeper
In his essay “Taming the Digital Leviathan: Automated Decision-Making and International Human Rights,” Malcolm Langford of the University of Oslo warns against the mystification of artificial intelligence. This mystification begins when we treat AI as something exceptional, alien, or definitively non-human. “Discussions of automation and digitalization should be guided by a logic of minimizing danger,…
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Human Error Has Always Happened in Election Tabulation
In their book Human Error: Cause, Prediction, and Reduction, John W. Senders and Nevile P. Moray define human error as something “not intended by the actor; not desired by a set of rules or an external observer; or that led the task or system outside its acceptable limits.” There are many ways to commit human…
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YouGov Chat: An Experience in Interactive Polling
Trying to reach constituents, voters, and potential supporters via electronic communication technology is daunting for the inexperienced and frustrating for the experienced campaigner. People are so close and yet so far: close enough that you can establish an electronic dialogue with them, but too far away to be able to screen for unspoken sentiments or…
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Bad-Faith Speakers Like Trump Let Audience Fill in the Blanks
Way back in 2007, a GOP political strategist on a cable news discussion show said of the then-longshot presidential candidate, “I don’t think the Republicans have anything to fear from Barack Hussein Obama.” His voice emphasized the word “Hussein.” The meaning was obvious–or somewhat obvious, and that was the point. The American people would never…
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