Warren, McCain, and Obama Needed Fuzzy Sets at Presidential Forum

During a presidential forum in the 2008 US presidential campaign, the moderator, Pastor Rick Warren, wanted Senator John McCain and then-Senator Barack Obama to define rich with a specific number. Warren wanted to know at what specific income level a person goes from being not rich to rich. The problem with this question is that there is no specific income at which a person makes the leap from being not rich to being rich. This is because rich is a fuzzy set, not a crisp set, with different incomes having different degrees of membership in the rich fuzzy set. Fuzzy logic is needed to properly ask and answer Warren's question about quantitatively defining rich. An imprecise natural language word like rich should be considered to have qualitative definitions, crisp quantitative definitions, and fuzzy quantitative definitions

Obama v. Trump

This book determines what can legitimately be regarded as the legacy of the Obama presidency and investigates how far the Trump administration has reversed it

Forging a New Democratic Party: The Politics of the Third Way From Clinton to Obama

This dissertation analyzes the evolution of the American Democratic Party’s ideological orientation from 1985 to 2014. The central problem is to develop an understanding of how shifts in political-economic context and factional agency combine to produce alterations in the predominant ideology of a U.S. political party. The primary question posed is how the centrist perspective known as the ‘third way’ replaced the left-liberalism of the New Deal and Great Society eras as the guiding public philosophy of the Democratic Party. Whereas many scholars propose that the modern third way revisionism of center-left parties is explained primarily as electoral opportunism or as an adoption of the political logic of the New Right, this study focuses on how changes in political economy (particularly the transition from Keynesianism to neoliberalism) prompted the elaboration of an alternative ideological framework that sought to adapt to new times. In the U.S. case, the primary agent of this process of ideological reorientation was the New Democrat faction, most well-known for its connection to President Bill Clinton. Combining qualitative document analysis and focused interviews with personnel from the think-tanks and policy institutes of the New Democrat faction and its competitors, the dissertation finds that the initiation and maintenance of reorientation is dependent on a faction’s success in elaborating and continually ‘decontesting’ an alternative framework that de-legitimatizes a party’s pre-existing ideological commitments. Adapting Michael Freeden’s approach to the study of ideologies, a conceptual morphology, or map, of third way politics is presented that centers on the particular meanings of opportunity, responsibility, and community elaborated by the New Democrats. These ‘decontested’ concepts signified a commitment to equality of opportunity over egalitarian outcomes, a vision of the welfare state centered on obligation rather than entitlement, and a devotion to communitarian rather than class or identity politics. By analyzing the process of continuous decontestation engaged in by this faction, the dissertation argues that the third way not only constitutes a distinct ideological system, but that it has been the predominant policymaking outlook of the Democratic Party for nearly a quarter century – stretching from Clinton to Obama and possibly beyond

First steps in the study of cyber-psycho-cognitive operations

Dissertação (mestrado)—Universidade de Brasília, Instituto de Relações Internacionais, Programa de Pós-Graduação em Relações Internacionais, 2019.O presente trabalho é uma análise dos mecanismos informáticos e tecno-comunicacionais envolvidos na articulação de mundos da vida orientados estrategicamente para estimular, prever ou minar o desenvolvimento das condições psico-cognitivas adequadas para a construção e sustento da legitimidade racional de uma autoridade ou ação política. A aplicação de instrumentos “arqueológicos” Foucauldianos ao estudo das narrativas políticas que engendraram e surgiram de “Russiagate” permitiu situar a teoria num contexto histórico e validar a premissa da convergência e incorporação de tendências de agendamento comuns e de práticas típicas de operações psicológicas tradicionais. Contudo, os efeitos tanto da disponibilidade comercial das TICs com capacidade de “deep learning”, quanto da estruturação baseada em conhecimento permitida pela ubiquidade e centralidade econômica dessas tecnologias, tornam o conjunto de mecanismos analisados num fenômeno que merece uma conceptualização e marco investigativo únicos. A obra é uma contribuição a esse empreendimento.This is an analysis of the ICT-based mechanisms involved in the articulation of lifeworlds that are strategically oriented to foster, prevent or undermine the development of psycho-cognitive conditions adequate for the construction or sustainability of an authority’s or a political action’s rational legitimacy. While grounding theory to a historical context, the application of Foucauldian “archeological” instruments to the study of the political narratives giving birth and springing from “Russiagate” also served to validate the premised convergence and incorporation of common agenda-setting trends and practices typical of traditional psychological operations. However, the effects of both the commercial availability of deep-learning ICTs and the cognition-based structuration afforded by their ubiquity and economic centrality set this “dispositif” apart, thereby deserving a unique conceptualization and research framework. This study is a contribution to such endeavor

John F. Kennedy History, Memory, Legacy: An Interdisciplinary Inquiry

On September 25, 1963, President John F. Kennedy traveled to Grand Forks, North Dakota, greeted its citizens while touring the city, and delivered a speech at the University of North Dakota Field House, which addressed important issues still vital today: environmental protection, conservation of natural resources, economic development, the struggle between democracy and totalitarianism, and the importance of education and public service. The University conferred on the President an honorary Doctor of Laws degree. Over 20,000 people assembled on campus that day to see JFK -- the largest campus gathering in UND history. Tragically, less than two months later, the thirty-fifth President of the United States was assassinated in Dallas. To commemorate the forty-fifth anniversary of the President\u27s Grand Forks visit, and in tandem with the University\u27s one hundred and twenty-fifth anniversary, UND organized a September 25-27, 2008 conference to foster interdisciplinary discussion and analysis of the issues addressed in JFK\u27s UND speech, as well as other significant issues of the Kennedy era, including civil rights, space exploration, the nuclear threat, and the influence of the media on presidential politics. The Conference also explored issues related to the President\u27s assassination within weeks of his UND visit. This publication of conference proceedings collects the papers presented during this conference as well as transcripts of significant addresses and discussions.https://commons.und.edu/oers/1002/thumbnail.jp

A Different Welcome Home: How Accusations of Brainwashing Affected the Experience of the Returning American POWs from the Korean War

American POWs from the Korean War had a different experience than POWs from other wars. The POWs who returned from the Korean War faced a home front that was suspicious of them. Due to the prevalence of McCarthyism in America during this time, the military, government, media, and citizens all worried that the returning POWs may return as communists. The military and FBI investigated the POWs and court-marshaled a few for collaborating with the North Koreans while in the camp. The experience of what happened to the American soldiers in the POW camps has received much scholarly attention, but the topic of their experience, when they returned home, has received less, usually just the concluding chapter in scholars’ books. Although prisoners of war were a reality in other wars, the experience of American POWs from the Korean War returning home was different because of the suspicions they encountered when they returned home due to McCarthyism, how the government and military treated them due to fears of brainwashing and communism in the POW camps, and how the newspapers and magazines reported on the returning men. Archival records from the National Archives, Eisenhower Presidential Library, and Truman Presidential Library along with oral histories, newspapers, and magazine articles, will demonstrate what the POWs faced when they returned home. This topic will add to the historiography of the Korean War and to the historiography of American Korean War POWs because it will provide a more in-depth analysis of the unique experience they encountered

The Whitworthian 2008-2009

The Whitworthian student newspaper, September 2008-May 2009.https://digitalcommons.whitworth.edu/whitworthian/1093/thumbnail.jp

The Mainstream Outsider: News Media Portrayals of Presidential Candidate Mitt Romney and His Mormonism, 2006-2008

This study examines how news media framed former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and his Mormonism during his unsuccessful quest for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination. The study's central finding is that, in the aggregate, news accounts framed Mormonism as outside the American religious and cultural mainstream. This framing emerged as part of campaign's "horse-race" coverage, which focused on who was ahead in the nomination race, who was behind and why. That coverage naturally highlighted aspects of Mormonism that caused Romney electoral problems. Journalists zeroed in on the church's history of polygamy, on whether the church is a Christian faith and on current church beliefs that may appear outside the mainstream. Basic beliefs that Mormons share with other American faiths, such as helping the poor, were mentioned, but less frequently. Romney himself was framed as a generally mainstream candidate whose central problem was his faith. This dissertation also describes how news media relied heavily on an analogy between Romney's struggle to overcome his "Mormon problem" and presidential candidate John F. Kennedy's struggle to overcome anti-Catholic sentiments in 1960. Implications of these conclusions are discussed for candidates of other minority religions and further research is suggested. The study proposes a "horse-race influence model" that highlights a candidate's weaknesses, providing voters with reasons to vote against a candidate, which is reflected in the next set of horse-race coverage polls. Horse-race coverage, therefore, may create a feedback loop that increasingly harms a candidate's chances. Quantitative findings are based on a content analysis of 205 news articles that appeared in eight prominent American news outlets between January 2006 and Romney's withdrawal from the race in February 2008. Articles in the sample mentioned Mormonism at least four times and Romney at least once. The content analysis obtained a mean intercoder reliability of .84

Daily Eastern News: February 15, 2010

https://thekeep.eiu.edu/den_2010_feb/1009/thumbnail.jp