Elective Post (“9”): Of Our Parents

April 9th, 2012 § 0 comments § permalink

I can’t believe I haven’t used this platform to promote this project yet. WARNING: this is a little bit of “self”-promotion.

A few years ago, when my grandparents passed away, my brother decided to start interviewing family members about their perspectives on family, and parenthood in particular. What started as a series of interviews within the family quickly branched into interviews outside the family, with his friends and coworkers. Eventually, he got the idea to transcribe these interviews and create a blog (with permission of the interviewees, of course) featuring people’s stories about their parents. OfOurParents.com was the result. WARNING: some of the articles contain swearing, and some may contain distressing information.

Truly and genuinely, even if my brother wasn’t the creator of this website, I believe this is an amazing project. The people my brother have interviewed have sent him e-mails thanking them for the experience, describing it as cathartic. The most recent interview is an example of this. It is incredibly moving, and also difficult to read.

I know most people in this class are political science students, but I think there may be some Sociology majors (like me) or minors in the class. This may be of particular interest to you, as it is in a way a qualitative sociological study of family and parenthood.

Please, check it out, and if you are at all interested in participating in the project (either with an interview or even by conducting your own interview), feel free to e-mail my brother at the contact information provided on the website.

Mini-Assignment (12): Best of the Term – Classmate edition

April 9th, 2012 § 0 comments § permalink

In catching up on people’s posts from the last few weeks, I have to say I always enjoy the “Democracy in the News” posts by Amanda. Her commentary always offers a lot of insight into the context of the situation being discussed – something that even the news reports themselves fail to do frequently.

This post about presidential elections in Egypt, and the requirement for all candidates to be Egyptian citizens, is an example of her strong writing. She manages to convey both the point of the article, the importance of it, and her views in a clear and concise way.

Democracy in The News (12): Electronic Voting

April 8th, 2012 § 0 comments § permalink

One of the most interesting new developments in the field of democracy studies is the increasing influence of technology. This is often discussed in the context of social media and its impact on political movements and revolution, as discussed in this post I wrote on Digital Democracy. Another influence of technology – a particularly dangerous one – is the potential for hacking.

While Canada still resorts to the good, old-fashioned ballot voting system, many states in the US use an electronic voting system. Apparently, a few years ago, Washington introduced a new electronic voting system, and sought to demonstrate its effectiveness by holding a mock school board election. They even challenged people to break through it’s state-of-the-art security features without repercussions.

A professor from the University of Michigan and two of his students accepted this challenge and managed to gain control of most of the system within 48 years old, changing the results so that “Bender” (from the TV show Futurama) won with 100% of the vote. It apparently took administrators more than two days to even realize there was an intrusion.

While I’m not sure why this story is being released now, it remains pertinent to the issue. There are undeniable benefits to an electronic voting system. It would allow results to be determined basically immediately. It may increase voter turnout by facilitating the voting process. It would virtually eliminate spoiled ballots, and would (theoretically) eliminate human error from the ballot-counting process.

That being said, paper ballots can’t be hacked. And at the end of the day, as sophisticated as technology may be, it will always be created by a programmer who shares the same wealth of information (or less) as another programmer, or hacker, elsewhere in the world.

Elective Post (12): You Can Play

April 8th, 2012 § 1 comment § permalink

I am sure most people in this class are Canucks fans, and likely die-hards – and most of you likely hate the Leafs, as well. As I confessed (terrifyingly) at the beginning of the semester, I was born outside of Toronto and was born and raised a Leafs fan.

This post isn’t about the Leafs.

It’s about Brian Burke, the GM for the Leafs. In 2010, Burke’s openly gay son Brendan died in a car accident. Brian Burke has been vocal about his support for the gay community, and has marched in the Toronto Pride Parades that have occurred since Brendan’s death.

About a month ago, Burke and his other son, Patrick, launched the “You Can Play” campaign, which aims to end homophobia in hockey and – let’s up – professional sports in general. You can watch one of the first campaign videos here.

Democracy in The News (11): Canada’s Rights and Democracy agency

April 3rd, 2012 § 0 comments § permalink

Recently, the government of Canada announced that they are scrapping the Rights and Democracy agency (or, for googling purposes, better known as The International Centre for Human Rights and Democratic Development). According to the website, the agency was created in 1988 “to encourage and support the universal values of human rights and the promotion of democratic institutions and practices around the world” (source). This was interesting timing for the agency’s creation, as it was right towards the end of the Cold War and the Western powers’ fight against communism.

CBC outlines the turmoil that arose within the agency in 2010, when government-appointed board members challenged the funding of three human rights organizations because they were anti-Israel.

The controversy stems an interesting conversation about the supposedly non-partisan nature of the agency. Traditionally, non-partisan has been associated with intra-national politics. With increasing internationalization, countries are faced with the challenge of maintaining this non-partisan stance on a global level.

While the government says it will simply absorb the work of the agency into other departments, it will be interesting to see whether or not Canada’s role changes within international politics.

Elective Post (11): Goodbye, Penny

April 2nd, 2012 § 0 comments § permalink

It’s been a big month for Canadian money. There’s been the introduction of the new 50% bill. Although the 100$ bill has been out for awhile, I haven’t seen one yet. Has anyone else heard the rumour that it smells like maple syrup”? Is it possible that one person spilled some maple syrup on their money and this moment began the entire rumour?

The elimination of the penny is news I welcome with open arms. I’ve been ready for this since working customer service in high school, and being responsible for count out and roll those pointless coins. 50 coins, 50 cents. What’s the point? Some people have apparently been confused about how this process will work. A friend of mine posted a helpful tool on Facebook that I thought I would share:

Seems pretty sensible to me. And with that, I leave you with the following (seemingly unsynchronized) clip of the West Wing.

EDIT: Because I can’t seem to embed YouTube videos with this WordPress theme, you can watch the video HERE.

Elective Post (10): The Hunger Games

March 25th, 2012 § 2 comments § permalink

As a pop-culture maniac, one of my favourite things to do is go to midnight premieres. This year will likely be full of them: The Dark Knight Rises, The Avengers, The Amazing Spider-Man, the list goes on. Last Thursday/Friday was the midnight premiere of the Hunger Games, the movie I was probably most excited for this year.

My friends and I showed up at 9:30 and there were already hundreds of people in front of us. Luckily they had just opened another theatre so we swapped our tickets and get prime seats for that. I’m not sure how many of you have read The Hunger Games, or how many of you have seen the film – but it was great, and followed the book to a T. Even though I’ve read the book, I was clinging to my seat the entire time.

Anyways, without going into a boring, detailed review, especially for those of you who haven’t read the book and have no interest in it – I’ll just say that it was great, I enjoyed it, and go see it. It might even be better for those who haven’t read it because you’ll have no idea what’s going to happen.

Democracy In The News (10): NDP Leadership

March 25th, 2012 § 2 comments § permalink

After a (painfully) long four-ballot race at the NDP convention yesterday, Mr. Thomas Mulcair has won the leadership. His win creates an interesting discussion for Canadian politics. After the embarrassing turnout for the Liberal party last summer, and the defeat of Michael Ignatieff in his own seat, there were questions about whether or not a merger between the NDP and the Liberals was on the horizon. This certainly caused some heated debate in my family, which is mostly split between Liberals and NDPs. My parents, who are die-hard and long-time Liberals, felt a little shocked and betrayed that their own children thought it might be the best option for the left to merge, and stop splitting the vote.

While that conversation seems to have been put on the backburner for a little while, yesterday’s convention brought those issues to the forefront. Mulcair is notoriously centrist in comparison to many of the other candidates for the NDP leadership – that was both his downfall and his saving grace at the convention. Today’s editorial in the Globe & Mail discusses this in relation to Mulcair’s future as leader of the party. The author argues that Mulcair will have to toe a fine line, by pleasing the moderates without alienating the left.

It will be interesting to see how a three-party race will play out in three years with the NDP potentially catering to a larger portion of the public.

Democracy In The News (9): Russia

March 19th, 2012 § 0 comments § permalink

A recent poll shows that 8% of Russians see their country as democratic, with another 40% labeling Russia as “partly democratic”.

The article to which I am referring is written by Forbes, and seems to discuss these designations of citizen-identified democracy (or lack thereof) to what the author refers to as “Western style democracy”; that is, free press, freedom of speech, and religious freedoms. This was an interesting description to me as I suppose I assumed that a democracy is a democracy regardless of geographic location.

One specific part of the article of note is the fact that this 8% who see Russia as democratic is increased from 4% in 2010; this number may seem insignificant, but comparatively, it’s double. The article gives credit to Vladimir Putin, who “is still seen as the best man for the job” according to a provided poll. (I would like to criticize the article in this regard, as the article provides results for a poll but does not seem to state anywhere what was actually asked. My best guess is “job approval”.)

As far as I can tell, this significant change in public perception isn’t due to any empirically observed changes in the democratic system according to Freedom House, which states that Russia is not free. Unfortunately the 2011 country reports for Polity IV are not yet available; interestingly, however, the popular measure for democracy has described Russia as democratic since the fall of the Soviet Union.

Mini-Assignment (9): Digital Democracy

March 18th, 2012 § 0 comments § permalink

In what way do new technologies affect democracy? A quick google search on the topic (ah, technology) turned up this article: “Social Media. Good for Revolution. Bad for Democracy?” My issues with the use of punctuation in the title aside, the article raises some interesting points, particularly in distinguishing between technology’s effect on revolutions in comparison to its effect on the creation, or the maintenance, of democratic structures.

There is no doubt that it does have an effect on revolution. Social media websites such as Twitter offer a global platform with which people can come together – internationally – to raise awareness and lobby support for a specific cause. Twitter has been so influential in this regard that in a Wikipedia search of “Twitter Revolution”, four possible options come up. A more recent example can be see with Kony 2012, a campaign that sparked the support – and the outraged, dissenting opinions – of people using Twitter and Facebook. Was the revolution successful? Well, I don’t think many people will forget about Joseph Kony for awhile. On the other hand, it gained massive momentum in its first 24 hours and then halted substantially.

One part of the article sticks out to me in particular, regarding the timing of revolutions in social media. This is particularly important when discussing the development and stability of democracies. As has been discussed in this class, there are a wide variety of competing theories regarding both what a democracy is, and how it came about. This is something of particular interest to me not only in political science (though it’s certainly an important discussion), but in popular culture and in various research topics. Malcolm Gladwell discusses this in his book The Tipping Point; that is, maybe the successful establishment of democracy is due to a variety of factors, the most important of which is timing. The dangers of technology may be their ability to instigate revolution, and potential intervention, before these factors are aligned. As the article argues, this accelerated process may cause instability in development of new governing principles.

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