‘The world’s shortest highway’: Entrepreneurial populism and the making of a personal campaign

‘The world’s shortest highway’ is 1 metre long and was built in 2019 by a Romanian businessman as part of the campaign ‘Romania wants highways’. This brought interesting evolutions to the landscape of social movements in Eastern Europe. It was a highly personalised campaign, one which faced several internal contradictions and displayed an uncritical adoption of stereotypes about progress and development. We argue that it produced a discourse that revolves around ‘Westernisation’ and ‘nationhood’. As this article seeks to demonstrate, the campaign is framed in a discourse of ‘entrepreneurial populism’. By analysing this discourse, we contribute with a peculiar case to the debates on the varieties of populism and on the culture of business celebrities. Our analysis indicates that, although this single-issue campaign is nominally about highways, its substance is rather about business celebrities occupying the space of social activism.

President Greenwald's Man

To what degree do serious issues require serious consequences for politicians who fail to address them? Should politicians who fail to keep campaign promises have greater consequences than not being reelected? In this work of philosophical short story fiction, Brian Greenwald is running a unique presidential campaign. Not only is he a single-issue candidate for stopping global warming, but an ominous figure follows him everywhere with the promise to kill him at the end of his term if he fails to move the needle. The electorate knows this, and elects Greenwald President in a landslide. Everything he does in office is focused on the single goal of lower greenhouse gas emissions. At the end of his first term emissions have gone flat, but not down. By the end of his second term, even after exceptional efforts, global greenhouse gas emissions have failed to significantly fall. Good to his word, the ominous figure kills him for failing to deliver.

Biomimetic Architecture Towards Bio Inspired Adaptive Envelopes: In Case of Plant Inspired Concept Generation

In recent decades, the value of architecture become more due to its importance for reducing detrimental effects on the environment and natural capital. To minimize the building's impact on the environment, architectural designs should be highly incorporated into the environment rather than behaving as a separate element focused on a single issue. To address this problem, different methods and design approaches have been introduced. However, exploring the natural solutions for survival can provide invaluable data which can address the human-caused problems. Throughout decades, nature has been survived and evolved. Biological solutions due to their adaptability and multi-functionality are great source of inspiration. This article with help of content analysis method aims to review the concept of biomimetic design in architecture. And proposes plant-inspired solutions for envelope design which can play significant role on buildings’ energy efficiency. Thus, the plant-inspired concepts to be integrated on adaptive envelopes were studied. And a framework for concept generation introduced. Furthermore, a case study on an existing building envelope in the Mediterranean climate region presented and two plant-inspired techniques proposed and conceptually applied.

PR for the Public Interest

Chapter 4, PR for the “Public Interest,” reviews the endeavors which allowed industrial interests to promote their anti-environmental agenda as rational and reasonable. It also allowed them to advocate against the passage of further legislation. By advancing a rhetoric of “compromising for the common good,” PR actors helped diffuse the appearance of adversity in a 1970s and 1980s context of public concern over environmental damage, and cemented public relations as a legitimate profession with specialized skills of negotiation and dispute resolution. Throughout the 1950s, ‘60s, and ‘70s, as intensified battles over environmental futures were waged between environmental groups and business associations, PR actors found ways to create and manage influence in political contexts. PR consultants developed single-issue coalitions, public-private partnerships, green business networks, and other multiple-member groups, along with multi-pronged media strategies, to advance the idea of plurality.

Adolescents and society

In the paper I touched on such a painful and necessary issue as upbringing, adolescence and society.The issue of upbringing occupies a special place in Georgian pedagogical thinking. It starts with Georgian folk pedagogy and ends with modernity.The merit of the Georgian chronicle writers in the formation of the Georgian national consciousness is also important.If not Georgian thinking in the 60-s of the nineteenth century , Georgia would probably not be what we have today. There was not a single issue related to the country, culture, education, so that he does not think, care and do not decide this issue based on the goals of the country and the people.“We belonged to ourselves” said Georgian chronicle writers and they really brought freedom back to the nation. All this continued in the Georgian society. In his morals, intellect and this power lives my country so weak today.When we talk about upbringing, we attach great importance to moral upbringing. This is the same morality or how a person should live.

Précis of Uncut

Uncut is a book about two kinds of paradoxes: paradoxes involving truth and its relatives, like the liar paradox, and paradoxes involving vagueness. There are lots of ways to look at these paradoxes, and lots of puzzles generated by them, and Uncut ignores most of this variety to focus on a single issue. That issue: do our words mean what they seem to mean, and if so, how can this be? I claim that our words do mean what they seem to, and yet our language is not undermined by paradox. By developing a distinctive theory of meaning, I show how this can be.

Conflict and cohesion within parties

This chapter explores a number of key questions relating to intra-party cohesion and conflict in Britain. To what extent do parliamentary backbenchers influence the development of government policy? How factionalized are British political parties? And what bearing does intra-party politics have on matters of cross-party cooperation and realignment? We discuss conceptual distinctions between factions, tendencies, and single-issue alliances, before going on to identify the main attitudinal clusters within the major parties’ extra-parliamentary memberships and parliamentary groups today. The chapter further identifies the most significant intra-party groups that exist inside parliament and among the parties’ grassroots.

Digital Issue Movements: Political Repertoires and Drivers of Participation among Belgian Youth in the Context of ‘School Strike for Climate’

It often remains unclear how young citizens are combining various forms of political participation, as well as why they choose some over others, especially within a single-issue movement. Moreover, little is known about how social networking sites (SNS) fit into the political repertoires of citizens. Therefore, this study explores youths’ political participation patterns in the context of the 2019 youth-led climate strikes. We rely on data from a paper and pencil survey among 498 high school students in Belgium. To identify different types of activists, the study used latent class analysis (LCA). In addition, a multinomial logistic regression was conducted to assess how identified participation types differ from each other. Four different participation repertoires regarding the climate issue were identified, each distinctive in the way they rely on different forms of political participation. In addition, membership to each of the different classes is associated with a unique set of characteristics (in terms of political efficacies, climate issue involvement, and online expression motives). The article shows how SNS make up a crucial part of youths’ issue-specific participation patterns and sheds light on the mechanisms underlying their participation choices within the climate movement.

The Semantics of Chinese Noun Phrases

Chinese nominal phrases are typologically distinct from their English counterparts in many aspects. Most strikingly, Chinese is featured with a general classifier system, which not only helps to categorize nouns but also has to do with the issue of quantification. Moreover, it has neither noncontroversial plural markers nor (in)definite markers. Its bare nouns are allowed in various argument positions. As a consequence, Chinese is sometimes characterized as a classifier language, as an argumental language, or as an article-less language. One of the questions arising is whether these apparently different but related properties underscore a single issue: that it is the semantics of nouns that is responsible for all these peculiarities of Mandarin nominal phrases. It has been claimed that Chinese nouns are born as kind terms, from which the object-level readings can be derived, being either existential or definite. Nevertheless, the existence of classifiers in Chinese is claimed to be independent of the kind denotation of its bare nouns. Within the general area of noun semantics, a number of other semantic issues have generated much interest. One is concerned with the availability of the mass/count distinction in Mandarin nominal phrases. Another issue has to do with the semantics of classifiers. Are classifiers required by the noun semantics or the numeral semantics, when occurring in the syntactic context of Numeral/Quantifier-Classifier-Noun? Finally, how is the semantic notion of definiteness understood in article-less languages like Mandarin Chinese? Should its denotation be characterized with uniqueness or familiarity?

Amateur Magazines of Tomsk Seminarians: The History of Magazine “Soyus”

The problem of publications made by students in the early 20th century recently became a matter of interest among scholars. The purpose of the article is to study one of them, “Soyuz” magazine, which was published by students of the theological seminary in Tomsk in 1907. The problem is that not a single issue of the magazine has survived to this day. Therefore, the research relies on the method of historical reconstruction based on the archival documents. The main achievements of this study are as follows. Based on the analyses of previously unknown archival sources, it reconstructs the history of the magazine, its team, printing equipment, and capacities, and the list of authors. It discovers a description of the magazine made by the Tomsk gendarme office. The article contains the contents of two issues of the magazine. It establishes that the magazine stuck to social-democratic ideas and was the structural element of the Tomsk branch of the All-Russian Seminary Union. It indicates the place of the magazine among other Tomsk periodicals. On the one hand, it fully fitted into the practice of the work of social-democratic organizations, on other hand, in terms of the methods of technical and organizational creation, it was a typical students self-published publication.