Political Attacks Research Articles

Сучасний політичний гумор як поліфункціональне явище.

Political humor is a complicated phenomenon with its scientific reflection occurring in two major dimensions. On one hand, under the conditions of politics complication, politisation of various social aspects, permanent critical state of government, humor conducts the role of a tool to comprehend the politics with its current state, events and personalities. On the other hand, political humor is integral element of modern politicians’ public image who are supposed to act like «one of the guys» with the help of a certain political technology. Politics can be considered as a state of dual opposition, where humor and seriousness are two poles of such an opposition. Political humor is a polyfunctional phenomenon. General functions of political humor are: emancipating, critical, evaluative, integrative and more. Political humor is a contextual phenomenon with its functions, types and forms being dependent on political regime of a society. Forms of political humor are also flexible and can include satire, irony, grotesque and caricature. In a modern cultural dimension one of the most solicited form of political humor is the Internet – memes, slogans, viral videos and more. Despite the vast amount of folk art, the biggest channel of humoristic representation in modern Ukraine is professional humor, provided by media. With all that, even risky political attacks cannot be classified as sharp political satire as their social criticism is too soft and does not urge to fight against the flaws. The government ignores this humor and even agrees to become the subject of it, which leads to the political humor softening, the loss of revealing function and adopting the entertainment feature. Another aspect of political humor problems is its usage as political technology for modern political leaders.

Gender in Translation: Beyond Monolingualism

Anglophone theoretical reflections on gender often assume the generalizability of their claims without first asking whether "gender" as a term exists, or exists in the same way, in other languages. Some of the resistance to the entry of "gender" as a term into non-Anglophone contexts emerges from a resistance to English or, indeed, from within the syntax of a language in which questions of gender are settled through verb inflections or implied reference. A larger form of resistance, of course, has to do with fears that the category will itself release forms of sexual freedom and challenges to existing hierarchies within the second language. The well-organized political attack on gender and gender studies now occurring throughout the world has many sources, and that is not the focus of this essay. This essay maintains that there can be no theory of gender without translation and that Anglophone monolingualism too often assumes that English forms a sufficient basis for theoretical claims about gender. Further, because the contemporary usage of gender emerges from a coinage introduced by sexologists and reappropriated by feminists, it proves to be a term that is bound up with grammatical innovation and syntactical challenges from the start. Without an understanding of translation—its practice and its limits—there can be no gender studies within a global framework. Finally, the process of becoming gendered, or changing genders, requires translation in order to communicate the new terms for recognizing new modalities of gender. Thus, translation is a constitutive part of any theory of gender that seeks to be multilingual and that accepts the historically dynamic character of languages. This framework can help facilitate a way of recognizing different genders, and different accounts of gender identity (essentialist, constructivist, processual, interactive, intersectional) as requiring both translation and its limits. Without translation and historical coinage, there is no way to understand the dynamic and changing category of gender and the resistances it now encounters.

A MANDATE TO LEAD: MANGOSUTHU BUTHELEZI AND THE APPROPRIATION OF PIXLEY KA ISAKA SEME’S LEGACY

This article discusses the appropriation of Seme’s name and political legacy by Mangosuthu Buthelezi, the leader of the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP). While Buthelezi has always invoked Seme’s name in his long political career, the analysis in the article focuses on two periods. The first was the 1980s when Buthelezi’s political party, Inkatha Yenkululeko Yesizwe, was involved in a fierce competitive struggle for political hegemony with the exiled African National Congress (ANC) and its allies inside the country. During this period, Buthelezi used Seme’s name to serve as a shield to protect him from political attacks from his adversaries in the broad ANC alliance. After the advent of democracy in the early 1990s, the political hostilities of the 1980s between the ANC and the IFP cooled down and the two parties worked together in the Government of National Unity (GNU). It was during this period that Buthelezi gradually moved closer to the ANC, especially under the leadership of its former president, Thabo Mbeki. Although the political circumstances had changed, Buthelezi continued to use Seme’s name to advance his political interests. The purpose for appropriating Seme’s name however changed. He invoked Seme in order to present himself as belonging to the broad black political tradition as represented by the ANC. I suggest that this change of tune and tack was Buthelezi’s tactic to secure himself a respectable position in the pantheon of the liberation struggle. In other words, he was staking a claim for his place in history.

‘Culture Is Inseparable from Race’: Culture Wars from Pat Buchanan to Milo Yiannopoulos

‘Culture Is Inseparable from Race’: Culture Wars from Pat Buchanan to Milo Yiannopoulos

Disembedded Politics: Neoliberal Reform and Labour Market Institutions in Central and Eastern Europe

AbstractDefying predictions of radical liberalization, labour market institutions in post-socialist Central and Eastern Europe are characterized by relatively protective employment legislation, sometimes combined with collective bargaining rights. However, not all protective employment regimes survived political attack by neoliberal reformers. Existing theories in comparative political economy suggest that employment regimes reflect the relative political power of producer groups. Others have suggested that in Central and Eastern Europe the content of labour market reform was determined by the coercive influence of transnational actors. Through a comparative analysis of labour market reform in Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Romania and Slovakia, this article finds that trade unions played a key role in early institutional settlements over labour markets. However, in Romania and Slovakia, these institutional settlements were subsequently undermined by attacks by ideologically motivated domestic elites in episodes of disembedded politics. The article develops the concept of disembedded politics and demonstrates its importance in post-socialist institutional change.

Guilt by Innuendo: The GAO’s Political Attack on Agency Training Programs, 1940

In 1940, the Government Accounting Office (GAO) released to Congress a slashing attack on in-house training programs in executive branch departments and agencies. The GAO had always used a strict constructionist approach to evaluate the legality of agency spending on training: Was it explicitly authorized by Congress? However, this report was much more of a broad-ranging political and ideological attack on training programs, including accusations of Communist influence and–contradictorily–influence by the Rockefellers. The report can be seen as one of the major attempts by the Congressional conservative coalition to stem the tide of modern personnel administration in the federal executive branch.

“A Genuine Old-Fashioned English Butler”: Nationalism and Conservative Politics in The Remains of the Day

Abstract In the context of twenty-first century global conservatism, where anti-immigrant sentiment is everywhere apparent, the importance of Ishiguro’s writing arguably lies in its on-going challenge to this perspective’s faulty logic and its capacity to reveal the radical violence behind nationalist political attacks on minority and immigrant populations. In this article I explore this challenge explicitly through a politically-oriented reading of The Remains of the Day (1989), highlighting this novel’s joint critique of Thatcherite nationalism and late twentieth century global entrepreneurialism. While this focus obviously represents a response to an earlier socio-political moment, defined by its own unique amalgam of ideological anxieties, nevertheless what emerges most prominently through this reading is the novel’s topical condemnation of cultural essentialism and its attendant hierarchies, concerns which remain of utmost critical significance within the twenty-first century. Thus, by making this assessment explicit, highlighting British conservatism’s devastating psychological and material implications for affected individuals, ranging from repressed and traumatised psychologies to radical economic precarity, this novel can be seen to register Thatcherite prejudice in a poignantly relevant manner. Indeed, the pseudo-respect granted to the ‘genuine old-fashioned English butler’ in this novel might also be seen as comparable to Trump’s pseudo-populism or Brexit nostalgia, both of which likewise ignore the pressing reality of imperialism’s historical violence.

Living in a world different from the one in which we think

ABSTRACT The rise of populist nationalism in many parts of the world poses urgent challenges for higher education institutions. Normally zones of liberal values and reasoned argument as well as sources of expert information, constructive criticism and useful advice for societies, universities face increasing uncertainty as a result of political and popular attack in a wide range of countries. Doing nothing is probably not an option. The challenge facing higher education broadly is to understand and to respond effectively to a geopolitical and social reality that is qualitatively new and threatening. Effective response will require a degree of self-examination, a re-articulation of purpose and a reconfiguration of action across multiple domains of university life.

Direct and Indirect Xenophobic Attacks: Unpacking Portfolios of Identity

Political threats are typically conceptualized by scholars as targeting particular groups of people. We call for also conceptualizing threats as political attacks directed towards particular facets of an individual’s identity portfolio. We reason that individual political responses to political attacks depend on the strength of identity with the group under attack, just as Social Identity Theory anticipates, but we contend that responses also depends on the shared social categories across an identity portfolio. Drawing on data from 2006–2016, we compare the political assessments of various presidential candidates between Mexican heritage Latinos and other non-Mexican heritage Latinos. Given the specificity of the rhetoric towards Mexican heritage Latinos in 2016, we find evidence that Mexicans and non-Mexicans cast distinct judgments of Donald Trump. Yet, we observe no comparable distinction in prior electoral contexts, suggesting that 2016 uniquely politicized the responses among Mexican heritage Latinos.

The Evolution of Identity Politics

The Evolution of Identity Politics

Comments on Fire! Classifying Flaming Comments on YouTube Videos in Malaysia

Flaming refers to the use of offensive language such as swearing, insulting and providing hateful comments through an online medium. In this study, the act of flaming will be explored in the context of social media, particularly YouTube. The research aims to discover the types of comments that are found on Malaysian themed YouTube videos and classify them accordingly. The Uses and Gratification theory was used as a base to explain the satisfaction obtained through YouTube as a platform to express via comments; hence obtain satisfaction through negativity. The methodology employed to carry out the study was through a content analysis. One video from the top 5 YouTube category namely entertainment, film and animation, news and politics, comedy and people and blogs were chosen with at least 100,000 views and a minimum of 100 comments. Top 100 flames were then sorted out for each video and analyzed using the thematic analysis approach. The results of this study show that the two most frequent types of comments found on Malaysian videos are political attack and racial attack. Other subcategories that are also driving the two categories mentioned above are stereotypes, speculation, comparison, degrading comments, slander/defame, sedition, sarcasm, threaten, challenge, criticism, name-calling, and sexual harassments. Through this study, the severity of the issue of flaming on account of YouTube comments has been identified; enabling the concerning party to take proper action including the use of artificial intelligence against cyber-bullying. Keywords : Social networking, online harassment, flaming, YouTube, malicious comments.

Semantic Prosodies and Frame Semantics in Media Discourse: A Case Study of the Ubiquitous Mayhem in the Iraqi City of Kirkuk

The study investigates the semantic prosodies and semantic framing of the Iraqi city of Kirkuk as depicted in the media. This research aims to supplement current critical research by investigating the issue of Kirkuk and the main reasons for its constant mayhem as presented in media discourse, which hitherto has never been investigated. Moreover, this study’s synergy of semantic prosody and semantic framing is novel. The corpus consists of Eastern and Western news articles retrieved from 4 December 2012 to 23 December 2012. The results of the study indicated that Kirkuk is typically associated with negative prosodies that revolve around political unrest, military tension, and bomb attacks. The main reasons for this mayhem, as depicted in the media, are the city’s most prominent features that is, its multi-ethnicity and oil wealth.

Confronting Climate Change: The Uneasy Alliance of Scientists and Nonscientists in a Neoliberal World

Confronting Climate Change: The Uneasy Alliance of Scientists and Nonscientists in a Neoliberal World

Inherent Imperialism

Since 2008, the International Criminal Court has been subject to criticism for being somehow imperialist, and some criticism of the Court has pursued a distinctly anti-imperialist narrative. Whilst such criticism is often motivated by political considerations, this article examines whether the narrative can be to a certain extent due to provisions of the Rome Statute itself, rather than contingent choices made by Court organs. This involves analysing the law for traces of what this article terms ‘inherent imperialism’. This is where the text of an instrument implicitly envisages an unequal or hierarchical legal structure. If some of the Rome Statute’s features can be considered inherently imperialist, this could provide a partial justification for some of the political attacks on the Court’s choices. This article, by providing a theoretical framework, which interprets claims that the law is imperialist, aims to put the anti-imperialist attacks on the Court in perspective.

Satirical Frame of Mind: Ken Kalfus’s A Disorder Peculiar to the Country and the Literary Engagement with 9/11

Prompted by debates on the role of comedy in the USA after 9/11, the essay explores the use of satire as one important narrative strategy that emerged in the subgenre of the American 9/11 novel. Criticism of 9/11 fiction tends to regard literary satire as a device used to counter governing descriptions of twenty-first century terrorism. By way of Ken Kalfus’s A Disorder Peculiar to the Country (2006), I show how literary satire on 9/11 is neither straightforward nor merely a means of political attack. Drawing on recent satire theory that views the satirical mode as unruly, various, and open-ended, I suggest that a closer look to the mixed intentions of this novel presents an opportunity to explore the dynamic between denunciation and comic relief in literary satire on 9/11 and opens the way for a more complex understanding of the operation and affordances of literary 9/11 satire.

On a Mission: Peter Stearns and the Journal of Social History

Founded in 1967 with social history still in its infancy in the United States, the Journal of Social History quickly emerged as an important home for this emerging field, even beyond North America. At first, with political, intellectual, and diplomatic histories supreme, Peter Stearns created the journal as a beachhead, but it soon came to play a major role and continues to do so to this day. From his position as editor, Stearns wrote over a dozen statements—many provocative—about the centrality of the field. This article focuses on these remarks in the JSH. Wishing to end the hegemony of the traditional fields, he urged social historians to work toward competing syntheses, proposing modernization theory or blended social and political explanations as alternatives. Later, he grappled with new methods such as the linguistic turn and accommodated the journal to such innovations. Beyond the academy came political attacks from conservatives who saw social history as a threat to traditional narratives that emphasized the role of elites. Stearns defended social history on all fronts right up to the time to pass the baton to a new editor. In sum, on both defense and offense, Stearns sought not only a role for social history but also one of fundamental importance in the discipline and society.

The Public Broadcasting Act of 1967: Radio’s Real Second Chance

This introductory essay serves to frame this special public radio symposium that commemorates the 50th anniversary of the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, on November 7, 2017. Drawing from his earlier writings on public broadcasting history, the author tells the story of how educational radio got its start and continued to struggle for survival until the fledgling enterprise could be reborn as public radio, a result of what may be the most significant piece of communications legislation of the second half of the 20th century. The author argues that despite the enterprise’s marginalized roots and repeated political attacks that span a half century, public radio, in one form or another, will survive well into the future.

Professors and politics: Noam Chomsky’s contested reputation in the United States and Canada

There is an extensive literature comparing the politics, sociology and economics of the United States and Canada, but very little work comparing the role that public intellectuals play in the space of public opinion and how their ideas are received in both nations simultaneously. Noam Chomsky provides a theoretically useful example of an established academic and public intellectual whose reputation is deeply contested in both countries. Our comparative case study offers leverage to contribute to debates on the sociology of knowledge, reputations, intellectuals, and the politics of professors using data from six major Canadian and American newspapers from 1995–2009 and an innovative coding of media portrayal. Earlier work has demonstrated that Chomsky is discussed as a public intellectual more prominently in Canada than in the United States (McLaughlin and Townsley in Canadian Review of Sociology, 48(4):341–368, 2011). Here we examine the comparative construction of a “public intellectual” reputation in the context of significant political change. We document small differences between the Canadian and American receptions of Chomsky, show change in the patterns of portrayal and number of publications over time, and offer an analysis of differences between political attacks and consecrations. We demonstrate more engagement with Chomsky’s political view in Canada than in the United States, a rise in Chomsky’s fame post 9/11, and illustrate clear political patterns in attempts to marginalize him.

How Do Emerging Markets Respond to Macroeconomic Shocks? - Dynamic Panel Evidence on the Effects of Disasters

Business cycles in emerging markets are characterized by several features that seem difficult to reconcile with consumption smoothing, such as volatile consumption and strongly countercyclical current accounts. Although there are several alternative approaches trying to explain business cycles in emerging markets by modeling different shocks and transmission mechanisms, there is little direct evidence about exogenous shocks and their transmission in emerging markets. Using a newly constructed dataset on disaster events, I test how emerging markets respond to actual exogenous shocks in a dynamic panel distributed lag model. This approach allows me to identify the dynamic effects of shocks on macroeconomic variables while controlling for unobserved global shocks, unobserved time invariant characteristics of different countries and the possible serial correlations in macroeconomic aggregates. My results show that political shocks and terrorist attacks can drive business cycles in emerging markets, having a significant and long-lasting negative effect on output and the domestic components of aggregate absorption. I also test whether savings, investments and the current account respond to these shocks as suggested by forward-looking models.

A Partial View of China’s Governance Trajectory

A Partial View of China’s Governance Trajectory Nicholas Calcina Howson (bio) Minxin Pei’s new book China’s Crony Capitalism: The Dynamics of Regime Decay recites in detail the morass of corruption and collusion in which the People’s Republic of China (PRC) party-state finds itself. Encyclopedic in scope, the book addresses corruption, extraction, and network formation in many of modern China’s formal settings—including in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), the nomenklatura system, state institutions, enterprises, the investment sector, and the real property market, among others—but also in nonformal contexts such as the rise of the “local mafia state.” The book’s basic storyline is this: the PRC’s radical devolution of intertwined political power and governance authority over productive assets in the early 1990s, matched with the accelerating creation of property rights, delivered on the party’s mission to lift China out of poverty and create sustained economic development. It did so, however, at the cost of generating uniquely harmful incentive structures and resulting extractive and efficiency-defeating behavior that has contributed to regime decay and the frustration of any future advance to democratic and rule-of-law governance structures. Passionate as the book is, there are aspects that detract significantly from its power and coherence. This review identifies three of those aspects: the data under examination, the theoretical framework, and the extended concluding argument of the book. The first aspect is the data employed and how it is used. Pei’s study is largely based on 260 cases of party discipline (and rarely criminal [End Page 162] prosecution) culled from the state media over several decades—ranging from semi-autonomous sources like Caixin to party-state propaganda organs such as the People’s Daily and Xinhua. The limited data set employed in the book and its origins have at least three implications. First, the substance of the book is largely determined by data originating from central-level propaganda and thus only rarely captures central-level party-state misdeeds. This would not be a negative if the data could be controlled for the fact that it is rife with often unproven (and some, in my knowledge, untrue) allegations deemed essential to a propaganda campaign or political attack. Second, there is a concern as to how representative these cases are of the different contexts prevailing in China today and over a period of more than three decades. Third, while Pei cautions readers that the data he invokes is not representative, he nonetheless draws rather robust conclusions based on such data. One example can be seen in chapter 3: Even though the fifty cases…in the sample were not randomly chosen, they provide useful clues for understanding how this form of collusion [maiguan maiguan] is carried out. Geographically, the fifty cases are drawn from twenty-two provinces, indicating the prevalence of this practice. Nine cases are from Anhui, a poor province with a high incidence of maiguan maiguan, at least according to press reports. Henan, a relatively poor agrarian province, and Guangdong, the booming manufacturing powerhouse, have five cases each. Hainan and Shandong have three cases each. As the sample includes both poor and prosperous regions, it appears that this practice exists in regions at all levels of economic development, although, without more data, it is impossible to determine its exact distribution (pp. 80–81, emphasis added). In essence, this passage states that because the limited sample of 50 cases includes an equal number of 5 cases from poor Henan Province and rich Guangdong Province, “it appears that this practice exists in regions at all levels of economic development.” Or does the caveat in the final clause deny that? This conclusion touches on a key question for development scholars—the relationship between economic development and governance—but is rendered on data that social scientists may find problematic for the reasons discussed above. While I appreciate the attempt to theorize the phenomenon of collusive capitalism, the book’s second shortcoming concerns some of the assumptions supporting its theoretical analysis. For instance, Pei points out repeatedly that crony capitalism was not observed in China until the 1990s. This is true, but that is because the “capitalism” side of...