scholarly journals From Literary Culture to Post-Communist Media: Romanian Conspiracism

2017 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 31-40
Author(s):  
Onoriu Colăcel ◽  
Corneliu Pintilescu
Keyword(s):  
Literary Culture ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
Well Being ◽  
The Body ◽  
Conspiracy Theories ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Third ◽  
Health Related ◽  
Conservation Of Natural Resources ◽  
Conspiracy Thinking

Abstract Conspiracy thinking has a long history in Romanian literary culture. In the early 21st century, what counts as a conspiracy theory in the mainstream of Romanian life is nevertheless elusive enough to keep the public engaged more than ever before. The growing number of attempts to address the gap in knowledge with regard to local conspiracy theories is proof that concern with their possibly harmful consequences is on the rise as well. For most of the conspiracy-minded, the topics of the day are specific threats posed to post-communist Romania and its people. In the main, conspiratorial beliefs fall into three main fields. Namely, they come across as 1) conspiracy theories against the body politic of the nation, 2) health-related conspiracy theories and 3) conspiracy theories on use and conservation of natural resources. While the first two overlap and build on the tradition of home-grown populism, the third is mostly a borrowing from Western media sources. However, the most influential instances of Romanian conspiracism posit that the well-being of the nation’s body politic and that of individuals’ own bodies are one and the same.

scholarly journals Immigration and Healthy Policymaking

conexus ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 148-172
Author(s):  
Malcolm MacLaren
Keyword(s):  
Body Politic ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Careful Consideration ◽  
The Body ◽  
Political Systems ◽  
Liberal Democracies ◽  
The Public ◽  
Mass Migration ◽  
The People ◽  
Or Practice

If the people incorporated in the state are considered metaphorically as the «body politic», questions arise as to the body's well-being. The question addressed here is the extent to which «healthy policymaking» is being practiced on matters of great concern in Western states. Exemplary are the public debates on mass migration in Mitteleuropa and elsewhere that have recently wracked political systems and populations. The so-called migrant crises indicate a grave dysfunction in how policy is made in liberal democracies today. The following article attempts a diagnosis of national policymaking on «hot-button Issues». How far can the customary ideals of careful consideration of information, constructive exchange of different opinions, and amiable consensus be reasonably expected in such a highly emotive context? Alternatively, should public policy be made otherwise, i.e., through processes that do not afflict the body politic grievously? The investigation examines different prescriptions proposed by concerned politicians and commentators. It finds that adequate «therapies» ensuring healthy policymaking in this context have yet to be elaborated, either in theory or practice. Dysfunction in policymaking – and profound dissatisfaction with liberal democracy – will accordingly persist about mass migration. The body politic will – can – never develop a total immunity to «illnesses» in popular deliberation. At most an alleviation of symptoms may be hoped for.

The Relational Public

2021 ◽  
pp. 073527512110046
Author(s):  
Paul Starr
Keyword(s):  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
Social Categories ◽  
The Public ◽  
Shared Stories ◽  
Theoretical Reflection

This article sets out three ways of conceiving publics: (1) an organic conception, the public as the body politic; (2) an individualized conception, the public as an aggregate of individuals, grouped by social categories; and (3) a relational conception, in which publics are defined as open-ended networks of actors linked through flows of communication, shared stories, and civic or other collective concerns. These conceptions have emerged not only through theoretical reflection but also as the result of historical and institutional developments. Building on work from Tarde and Habermas down to recent theorists, I seek to advance the relational conception, suggest its implications for research, and highlight its connection to contemporary developments in both theory and society.

From Stone to Flesh

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Johann Chapoutot
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Third ◽  
New Man ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
German People

This chapter examines the body of the Third Reich's new man—a body first and foremost, and one which could only be achieved through recourse to an antiquity that the Nazis held up as the archetype and canon of racial beauty. The Greeks and Romans were Indo-Germanic populations, their bodies fulfillments of the Nordic type, which was vital to maintain or restore in the racial present. The Greek and Roman body was preserved in ancient statuary, which Hitler put forward as the standard for emulation by the German people. The sublime, fully realized archetype of the Aryan body would, by saturating the public with its image and continually proclaiming its perfection, nourish the same standard of beauty among its contemporary cousins.

Sex, Work, and the Victorians

2020 ◽  
pp. 61-80
Author(s):  
Nicola J. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Sex Work ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
Sexual Deviance ◽  
Commercial Sex ◽  
Victorian England ◽  
Capitalist Development ◽  
The Public ◽  
Stimulation Of

Focusing on Victorian England, this chapter examines how sex was increasingly constructed as something that was primarily biological in nature, and how this was bound up with discourses of prostitution as a threat to the reproduction of the body politic. In the first section, the author considers how the pathologization of commercial sex as abnormal and unhealthy worked to naturalize the public/private split on which capitalist development rested. In the second section, the author connects the medical, moral, and juridical regulation of sex work to the suppression and stimulation of other modes of sexual deviance including homosexuality. In the final section, the author explores the role of race and empire in constituting white, bourgeois sexuality as natural, privileged, and the antithesis of commercialized sex.

Conspiracy Thinking, Tolerance, and Democracy

2018 ◽  
pp. 187-198 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven M. Smallpage
Keyword(s):  
Central Question ◽  
University Professors ◽  
Conspiracy Theories ◽  
The Public ◽  
Thoughtful Reflection ◽  
Conspiracy Beliefs ◽  
Similarities And Differences ◽  
The One ◽  
Independent Thinking ◽  
Conspiracy Thinking

When university professors engage with conspiracy theories, the public is pushed to the limit in terms of what it will or will not tolerate. Professors that publicly hold conspiracy beliefs force the central question of political tolerance: what is the line between the intellectual inquiry that allows for communities to flourish, on the one hand, and the expression of viewpoints that undermine that community’s integrity altogether, on the other? The line is blurry, as careful skepticism underlies both the best academic work and the psychology of conspiracy thinking. Since conspiracy theorists often anger, provoke, and sometimes harass the public, we must decide as a community if we will tolerate professors who hold controversial conspiracy beliefs. Such decisions require thoughtful reflection on the similarities and differences between conspiracy thinking and its relationship to desirable traits of democratic citizens, like tolerance, independent thinking, and academic freedom.

Health and Well-Being

2021 ◽  
pp. 201-226
Author(s):  
Neal M. Krause
Keyword(s):  
Meaning In Life ◽  
Religious Life ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Proactive Coping ◽  
Coping Responses ◽  
The Third ◽  
Health Related ◽  
Extensive Body ◽  
Health And Well Being ◽  
Insight Into

The goal of this chapter is to show how a sense of meaning in life acts in concert with the dimensions of religion that have been discussed so far to affect health. The discussion that follows is divided into two sections. The extensive body of research that links meaning with health and well-being is examined first. Following this, three submodels are introduced that provide further insight into how meaning in life might affect health. The first submodel brings gratitude and prayer to the foreground. The second submodel focuses on the relationships among meaning in life, proactive coping responses, and health behavior. The third submodel brings issues involving the interface between meaning in life, negative aspects of religious life (e.g., religious doubt), and health-related outcomes.

Responding to prisoner sexual assaults

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert W. Dumond ◽  
Doris A. Dumond
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Violence ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
Sexual Assaults ◽  
Promising Practices ◽  
Skill Levels ◽  
The Public ◽  
Prison Rape Elimination Act ◽  
The Status ◽  
Correctional Settings

Sexual abuse in detention has been called ‘the most serious and devastating of non-lethal offenses which occur in corrections,’ because its impact upon survivors of such abuse, and ultimately society, is so profound. Given the proper tools, training, and resources, corrections can and will eliminate prisoner sexual violence. However, we must realize that corrections is a subset of the body politic itself. It is subject to budget shortfalls, political pressure, and the broader attitudes of the public. Adequate financial and programmatic resources must be mobilized to ensure appropriate staff skill levels to keep jails and prisons safe. Safe, well-run jails and prisons can, if properly used, help keep communities safe. The general public will have to be convinced to join this dialogue if we are ever to have safe, constitutionally adequate correctional settings. Corrections can, and must, together with its community partners, respond with vision and leadership to make corrections facilities safe places where human rights and dignity are protected, and the most vulnerable among us can emerge stronger and healthier than they went in. This chapter will explore the status of sexual violence in United States correctional settings in the 21st Century; examine what is currently known about sexual victimization in America’s jails, prisons, and juvenile facilities; discuss the successes and promising practices facilitated by the Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA) of 2003; consider the challenges that continue to exist; and make recommendations for addressing the issues.

Public-Regardingness as a Value Premise in Voting Behavior

1964 ◽  
Vol 58 (4) ◽  
pp. 876-887 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Q. Wilson ◽  
Edward C. Banfield
Keyword(s):  
Public Interest ◽  
Voting Behavior ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Public ◽  
A Value ◽  
Self Interest

Our concern here is with the nature of the individual's attachment to the body politic and, more particularly, with the value premises underlying the choices made by certain classes of voters. Our hypothesis is that some classes of voters (provisionally defined as “subcultures” constituted on ethnic and income lines) are more disposed than others to rest their choices on some conception of “the public interest” or the “welfare of the community.” To say the same thing in another way, the voting behavior of some classes tends to be more public-regarding and less private- (self- or family-) regarding than that of others. To test this hypothesis it is necessary to examine voting behavior in situations where one can say that a certain vote could not have been private-regarding. Local bond and other expenditure referenda present such situations: it is sometimes possible to say that a vote in favor of a particular expenditure proposal is incompatible with a certain voter's self-interest narrowly conceived. If the voter nevertheless casts such a vote and if there is evidence that his vote was not in some sense irrational or accidental, then it must be presumed that his action was based on some conception of “the public interest.”

Seeds of Cynicism: The Struggle over Campaign Finance, 1956–1974

2002 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 73-111 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julian E. Zelizer
Keyword(s):  
American History ◽  
Presidential Elections ◽  
Campaign Finance ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
Public Financing ◽  
The Public ◽  
Source Of Infection ◽  
Disclosure Laws ◽  
Private Financing

“It is a cesspool, it is a source of infection for the body politic,” Senator Hubert Humphrey (D-Minn.) warned his fellow senators in 1973 about the private financing of elections. “[I]f it doesn't stop, there are going to be good men in this hall right here today who are going down the drain, not that you are guilty, not that you have done anything wrong, but that the public is disenchanted with all of us, and they are going to want somebody new and say I want a fresh one here.” From 1971 through President Nixon's resignation in 1974, Congress enacted the boldest campaign finance reforms in American history, including strong disclosure laws, public financing for presidential elections, contribution and spending limits, and an independent enforcement commission. Despite these reforms, after only a decade under the new laws, citizens still felt that campaign finance was corrupt.

scholarly journals CONSPIRACY THINKING INVENTORY (CTI) – CONSTRUCTION AND VALIDATION STUDY

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 363-383
Author(s):  
Jelka Stojanov ◽  
Sara Stanisavljavić ◽  
Višnja Tatić ◽  
Aleksa Pantić
Keyword(s):  
Convergent Validity ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Dominant Factor ◽  
Psychometric Characteristics ◽  
Conspiracy Theories ◽  
Historical Significance ◽  
Preliminary Version ◽  
The Government ◽  
Health And Well Being ◽  
Conspiracy Thinking

Conspiracy thinking is defined as a form of reasoning about events and situations of personal, social, and historical significance, where “conspiracies” are a dominant factor. This research aims to construct and validate Conspiracy Thinking Inventory (CTI), which purpose is to measure general propensity for conspiracy thinking, rather than beliefs in specific conspiracy theories. Study 1 (N = 356), a preliminary version of CTI consisting of 93 items, was constructed and subsequently shortened to 23 items arranged in 4 facets: Control of Information, Government Malfeasance, Threat towards One’s Own Country, Threat towards Personal Well-being. In Study 2 (N = 180), factor structure and validity of CTI were tested, resulting in a two-factor solution: Conspiracy Thinking Aimed at Health and Well-being (CT), and Attitudes towards the Government Institutions and Representatives (AtGI). The pattern of correlations between CT and relevant constructs confirmed its convergent validity, and CT was also shown to be a good predictor of beliefs in specific conspiracy theories. Previously confirmed convergent and criterion validity and its psychometric characteristics show that CTI may be used as an indicator of conspiracy thinking. Nevertheless, divergent validity has yet to be confirmed by using other constructs (e.g., personality traits). Despite not having been foreseen, extraction of the second factor might be the consequence of using items with predominantly political content. This factor was not correlated with any external criteria which indicate that it does not reflect conspiracy thinking.

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