Congratulations to Andrew Hardie of the Democratic Society, who has been given an grant by UnLtd to progress his work on a participation and engagement web application.
Category: Democracy
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Time to get judgmental
I’m working with a few others on a new non-profit to re-engage people with politics. As our first bit of work, we are trying to work up a set of axes to use in describing users’ political profiles. To create a map of opinions and axes, I’ve set up a small quiz, in the format “if someone thinks X, where would you place them on a scale Y to Z”.
Take it here.
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Pofigism
An piece in this week’s New Republic, not available for free online,
talks about the large Russian community around Brighton Beach, in New
York state. There’s a fierce battle going on between two Russian-
speakers for the Democratic nomination (and hence the seat in November).The Russian community, interestingly, have been excluded from the
political process in the past, and that has bred in them a sort of
apathy that I find quite recognisable from disengaged people in the
UK. The speaker is Gene Borsh, a voter-education activist who works
with the Russians in Brighton Beach:“The result is this terrible apathy.What will my vote
change?” He summed up the communal affliction as “pofigism,” a one-of-
a-kind Russian neologism that roughly translates as “I-don’t-give-a-
shit-ism.” Borsh’s colleague Marina Belotserkovsky described it as
trepidation before the unknown that became expressed as disdain: “We
stand apart—we don’t get involved in the things these idiots do.”Pofigism – a word we have use for.
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To be a civil servant
I’ve just been reading Peter Hennessy and Richard Wilson’s highly engaging evidence to the Parliamentary Committee that investigated political memoirs a while back. The full exchanges can be read here, and are worth reading, but my favourite passage was surely this (from Hennessy, addressing Wilson):
You have always tried to think the best of people. That is why you have been a civil servant. You have had to pretend that the twerps that you have been dealing with were in fact pillars of the constitution and bring some insight. You cannot help yourself. You are still charitable about them. You do not realise what rats most of them are. You never have done!
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Tristram Hunt celebrates dissent
Tristram Hunt writes an excellent opinion piece in the Guardian, asking for people to pay more attention to, and to celebrate, Britain’s history of dissent and radicalism. It’s not all Kings, Queens and village greens, he points out.
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Why blogs don’t help democracy
Because they reward people who rush to the extreme and ignore compromise, like Maryscott O’Connor.
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Civic Minded blog
Stephen Coleman, Steven Clift and a couple of people I don’t know have launched a new group blog on Corante called Civic Minded. It’s about politics and participation in the age of the Internet. (RSS feed not working at present)