There are many people and organisations who need water in order to survive. All people need water for life and for hygiene and daily use, while farmers need water for their crops and animals and companies need water for the operation of their businesses.
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The Third Way is a now largely-discredited political ideology that sought to supercede the supposedly outmoded ideologies of left and right. It is most commonly associated with the New Labour administration of Prime Minister Tony Blair but has been witnessed to a variety of degrees in many other countries.
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The concept of sustainable development is a form of critique on rampant capitalism which has, when given free rein, proved to be disastrous around the world in terms of causing environmental degradation, promoting inequalities in society, creating waste and materialism in large quantities.
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And so we return to the bad boy of contemporary philosophy, the Elvis of cultural theory, the world’s most famous and controversial living Slovenian and a person who divides even those who broadly agree with his opinions. In this, his most recent book, Slavoj Zizek takes as his starting point (or possibly has been persuaded to do so by his publisher) the concept of the impending end of civilization as we know it and then invited to scrawl his dialectics all over the place.
Read the full review here: http://www.bookideas.com/reviews/index.cfm?fuseaction=displayReview&id=6424
There is little doubt that, looking at America from the outside, the country faces a number of significant problems. There is not much point trying to determine which of these is the most important because it will just lead to irresoluble arguments but the problems include the following: American manufacturing has declined to such an extent that the country now has a massive balance of trade problem; unemployment continues at a very high rate because of lack of a large enough stimulus placed into the economy by the government; political discourse has been completely debased by a group of fanatics who have brought Third World politics (e.g. lies, refusal to accept facts, ad hominem attacks and subversion of the media) into the mainstream.
Read the full article here.
China’s political leaders regularly reassure the world and their own people that the rise of the Chinese state, which is one of the most important and central political issues taking place in the world today, will be entirely peaceful in nature. They point to the fact that China has not made any attempt to expand its borders beyond what is commonly understood to be Chinese territory for the best part of a thousand years. Where the borders have changed, for example in Tibet, this it is argued is because Tibet is historically considered by the Chinese to be an inseparable part of the country.
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Although I cannot be there myself, Khun Wilaiporn is due to deliver, on Friday, this paper at the International Conference on Local Government at Khon Kaen University:
Communicating Political Messages Efficiently: Empirical Evidence from Thailand
Wilaiporn Laohakosol and John Walsh
Abstract
Models of consumer behaviour generally posit an eclectic paradigm in which diverse elements may have an influence on an individual consumption decision. These elements might include personal experience, bias, the influence of family members and peer groups and the like. This understanding of human behaviour has been relocated from the commercial realm to the political realm with a view to helping to understand how the formation of people’s voting intentions might take place and how it might be influenced. Since politics consists of a series of competing ideologies competing for the scarce resource of votes with a view to aligning state policies and the distribution of state resources along the lines of the manifesto on which a party is fighting, it follows that politicians will wish to use communication strategies to encourage as many eligible individuals as possible to vote for their policies. To date, in Thailand, most forms of political communication have been based on establishing personal contact and, hence, a form of personal relationship based on personality rather than policies. This situation is beginning to change and there is a need for those involved in determining the nature and extent of political communications to understand which channels are appropriate for which groups of voters and which voters will not be influenced by any medium or message. Using a quantitative sample of 400 voters in four provinces of Thailand, this paper provides evidence to show that the degree to which people pay attention to political communications and to difference channels varies in reasonably predictable fashions. This will enable political institutions and parties to work together to determine good and effective means of communicating their policies to the public in ways which will strengthen democratization in the country.
Keywords: political participation, channels of political communication, ideology
Even in those portrayals of the ruling class at its most feckless, spending its time on hunting and wenching and carousing and so forth, there is usually one or more intense-looking close personal servants who keeps busy by poring over complicated ledgers, making inscrutable notes, and generally intimidating the peasantry. These servants, often in reality supplemented by members of the ruling elite themselves, have in fact throughout history been responsible for conducting the essential core functions of the ruling class: that is, firstly by establishing the systems, structures, and apparatuses by which that rule will be enforced and, secondly, recreating those same agencies so that they will continue to be operable in the future, no matter what changes to the economy or to society might have occurred in the meantime.
Read the full review here.
As Bertolt Brecht remarked, recorded in conversation with Walter Benjamin (p.97): “There can’t be any doubt about it any longer: ‘the struggle against ideology has become a new ideology.’” This struggle has continued until the twenty-first century and does not seem likely to be resolved any time soon. In the realm of aesthetics, it is most commonly witnessed as the struggle between art which is committed and art which is aimed at pleasing the masses (and which is often mischaracterized as high-brow versus low-brow art).
Read the full review here.
Speaking about Afghanistan after that country had been invaded by the Soviet Union, Tariq Ali writes (p.120): “Given that Afghanistan, thanks to the Russians, had now become fundamental to civilization, it was crucial for it to acquire a heroic political history. This required outside help on various levels. Knights in shining armour were dispatched to the region. Washington alerted researchers and advisers from different agencies and think tanks.”
Read the full review here.
