Books on the topic 'Organized fan groups'

The chapter traces the career of Shelley Shannon, whose work in the far right wing of the prolife movement reached its apex when she shot Dr. George Tiller in 1993, outside his Wichita clinic. Like many women who joined grassroots antiabortion groups, Shannon was energized by the immediacy of direct action protest. But Shannon’s particular circumstances, including her troubled childhood, her proximity to white supremacists activists near Grants Pass, Oregon, and her membership in conservative evangelical Christian Church framed her choice of tactics. While the Reagan and Bush administrations had refused to authorize the FBI to investigate whether anti-abortion extremists were part of an organized effort to terrorize abortion providers, President Clinton authorized Attorney General Janet Reno to protect the nation’s abortion clinics. But Shannon’s plan to shoot Dr. Tiller, designed with the assistance of the cryptic prolife extremist group Army of God, had been carefully planned before Clinton took office.

The American welfare state has a long and complicated history. Political institutions, organized groups, ideas, and values have worked singly and in myriad combinations to shape US social policy; no single factor stands out as the most important influence. The end result, however, is increasingly clear. Built over many decades and shaped by so many different hands, the American welfare state has emerged as a large, jerry-rigged contraption capable of helping some groups of citizens far more than others. While citizens, pundits, and policymakers alike may lament the lack of rational design, a historical perspective helps us understand why the contemporary American welfare state fails to deliver on some of its promises.

The causes and consequences of terrorism are matters of considerable debate and great interest. Spectacular events are recognized by their dates, including the 9/11 attacks in New York and Washington and the 7/7 London bombings. Many other attacks, including those in non-Western countries, receive far less attention even though they may be more frequent and cumulatively cause more casualties. In Terrorism: What Everyone Needs to KnowRG, leading economist Todd Sandler provides a broad overview of a persistently topical topic. The general issues he examines include what terrorism is, its causes, the roles of terrorist groups, how governments seek to counter terrorism, its economic consequences, and the future of terrorism. He focuses on the modern era and how specific motivations, ranging from nationalism/separatism to left- or right-wing extremism or religious ideals, and general conditions, such as poverty and inequality or whether a country is democratic or authoritarian, affect the frequency and costs of terrorism. The diversity of terrorist groups and type of attacks can be overwhelming, and Sandler provides a unifying framework to generate insight: strategic interaction. That is, like other organizations, terrorist groups organize to pursue goals and respond in an optimal fashion to a risky environment that can influence the group's size, its diversity of attacks, its regional location, its host country's characteristics, and the group's ideology. Terrorists also responded to enhanced security measures by altering their tactics, targets, and location. As such, they are formidable opponents to their stronger government adversaries. Governments, in turn, pursue various costly strategies to prevent terrorism, including passive barriers and active attacks against terrorists, their resources, and those who support them. Terrorism covers numerous questions on the subject and sheds lights on a wide-range of theoretical and empirical research.

This chapter rejects the idea that the history of the archaic polis was defined by the succession of different constitutions and highlights the impact of such an Aristotelian model on the scholarly tradition of ‘constitutional antiquities’. The notion of archaic oligarchies and of oligarchies of fixed number is part and parcel of this tradition, but it is no longer tenable. A thorough investigation of the evidence shows that the Thousand in Colophon, Cyme, Croton, Locri, Rhegium, and Opous, and the Six Hundred in Massalia were assemblies and not councils. They should be seen as political communities organized as numbered groups. Far from being oligarchic regimes, they must have thought of themselves as ‘the many’, and not ‘the few’. The archaic numbered political bodies were truly intrinsic to the processes by which a notion of citizenship took shape.

In recent years, feminists have turned to digital technologies and social media platforms to dialogue, network, and organize against contemporary sexism, misogyny, and rape culture. The emergence of feminist campaigns such as #MeToo, #BeenRapedNeverReported, and Everyday Sexism are part of a growing trend of digital resistances and challenges to sexism, patriarchy, and other forms of oppression. Although recent scholarship has documented the ways digital spaces are often highly creative sites where the public can learn about and intervene in rape culture, little research has explored girls’ and women’s experiences of using digital platforms to challenge misogynistic practices. This is therefore the first book-length study to interrogate how girls and women negotiate rape culture through digital platforms, including blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and mobile apps. Through an analysis of high-profile campaigns such as Hollaback!, Everyday Sexism, and the everyday activism of Twitter feminists, this book presents findings of over 800 pieces of digital content, and semi-structured interviews with 82 girls, women, and some men around the world, including organizers of various feminist campaigns and those who have contributed to them. As our study shows, digital feminist activism is far more complex and nuanced than one might initially expect, and a variety of digital platforms are used in a multitude of ways, for many purposes. Furthermore, although it may be technologically easy for many groups to engage in digital feminist activism, there remain emotional, mental, or practical barriers that create different experiences, and legitimate some feminist voices, perspectives, and experiences over others.

The chapter explores how narratives about the intelligentsia and its cultural identity unfold the experience and ideology of this significant group in parallel with catastrophic narratives about revolution, terror and war. Central texts include major Russian novels of the twentieth century, such as Gorky’s Life of Klim Samgin, Olesha’s Envy, Bulgakov’s The White Guard and The Master and Margarita, and Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago. Also important are the genres of autobiography, memoir, and oral history, and a case study of a single lyric poem, by Osip Mandelstam, further demonstrate the capacity of poetry to engage with the theme of the responsibility of the intelligentsia in a time of terror. The chapter shows how literary texts captured the conflicted and far from passive role of the intelligentsia as a beleaguered moral authority in a state organized around a central political idea.

Concentrating on America, this chapter explores the immense outpouring of volunteerism, compassion, and self-sacrifice wrought by the Great Influenza as seen in the response of traditional charitable institutions such as churches and men’s groups. Women, however, constituted by far the most significant charitable force, distinguishing this pandemic from all previous ones. From the Vanderbilts and McAdoos to black nurses, women crossed barriers into the most impoverished, hardest-hit neighbourhoods as ambulance drivers and orderlies, workers in diet kitchens, and carers for the ill and their families. They swept floors, fed the impoverished, took in orphans, and nursed the dangerously ill. In all these endeavours, they were the organizers as well as the workers. These crossings of class, ethnic, and racial divides, moreover, occurred within a general context of heightening racism, economic strife, jingoistic nationalism, and anti-immigrant hatred.

A Women’s History of the Beatles is the first book to offer a detailed presentation of the band’s social and cultural impact as understood through the experiences and lives of women. Drawing on a mix of interviews, archival research, textual analysis, and autoethnography, this scholarly work depicts how the Beatles have profoundly shaped and enriched the lives of women, while also reexamining key, influential female figures within the group’s history. Organized topically based on key themes important to the Beatles story, each chapter uncovers the varied and multifaceted relationships women have had with the band, whether face-to-face and intimately or parasocially through mediated, popular culture. Set within a socio-historical context that charts changing gender norms since the early 1960s, these narratives consider how the Beatles have affected women’s lives across three generations. Providing a fresh perspective of a well-known tale, this is a cultural history that moves far beyond the screams of Beatlemania to offer a more comprehensive understanding of what the now iconic band has meant to women over the course of six decades.

In his reading of Descartes, Whitehead extracts a definition of the subject as a relation through which feelings are unified and appropriated. The key point of disagreement is found in the inverse relations that each constructs between the subject and feeling. If Whitehead does in fact take up the problem’s terms, he is nevertheless radically opposed to the Cartesian economy organised around a subject qua foundation of feeling. Whitehead’s reading could be criticised, of course: he takes a Cartesian proposition, pushes it in the direction of speculative philosophy, only to return, finally, to Descartes’ own internal coherence, opposing it to an entirely different economy of thought. This, however, would be to lose what is important in Whitehead’s reading of Descartes. Whitehead is not doing history of philosophy. The relevance of each of his critiques and reprises could, of course, be justly attacked in so far as they are constructed on grounds that would have been completely foreign to the original thinkers.

This book compares Romantic England and Republican China as asynchronous moments of incipient literary modernity in different lifeworlds. These moments were oriented alike by “world literature” as a discursive framework of classifications that connected and re-organized local articulations of literary histories and literary modernities. The book examines select literary forms—the literary manifesto, the tale collection, the familiar essay, and the domestic novel—as textual sites for the enactment of new socio-political forms-of-life. These forms function as testing grounds for questions of both literary-aesthetic and socio-political importance: What does it mean to attain a voice? What is a common reader? How does one dwell in the ordinary? What is a woman? In different languages, activating heterogeneous literary and philosophical traditions, the texts analyzed explore by literary means the far-from-settled problem of what it means to be modern in different lifeworlds and ongoing traditions. Authors studied include Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lu Xun, Charles and Mary Lamb, Lin Shu, Zhou Zuoren, Jane Austen, and Eileen Chang. This book contributes to the fields of comparative literature, British Romanticism, and modern Chinese literature.

The volume summarises the contributions to the fourth conference of the Working Group "Law and Politics in the European Union", which was jointly organised with the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung in Berlin in April 2017. We started by investigating how narratives develop and what functions they have in the integration process. Does the "Europe of the Fatherlands" lead us into a European Union that is more strongly shaped by the national identity of the member states than before? What remains of the legal community? Is "peace" an outdated narrative? Why is it so difficult to reform the "Europe of welfare states" into a truly European social space? A number of arguments militate in favour of a more differentiated, flexible and pluralistic European legal area. It is far from clear, however, how such a structure could live up to democratic standards and on which normatively convincing narrative it could be established. With contributions by Armin v. Bogdandy, Sigrid Boysen, Claudio Franzius, Sylvie Goulard, Peter M. Huber, Albrecht Koschorke, Thorsten Kingreen, Gertrude Lübbe-Wolff, Franz C. Mayer, Martin Nettesheim, Angelika Nußberger, Jörn Reinhardt, Lars Viellechner, Mattias Wendel

The Quakers were by far the most successful of the radical religious groups to emerge from the turbulence of the mid-seventeenth century—and their survival into the present day was largely facilitated by the transformation of the movement during its first fifty years. What began as a loose network of charismatic travelling preachers was, by the start of the eighteenth century, a well-organized and international religious machine. This shift is usually explained in terms of a desire to avoid persecution, but Quakers, Christ and the Enlightenment argues instead for the importance of theological factors as the major impetus for change. In the first sustained account of the theological motivations guiding the development of seventeenth-century Quakerism, the volume explores the Quakers’ positive intellectual engagement with those outside the movement to offer a significant reassessment of the causal factors determining the development of early Quakerism. Tracing the Quakers’ engagement with such luminaries as Baruch Spinoza, Henry More, John Locke, and John Norris, the volume unveils the Quakers’ concerted attempts to bolster their theological reputation through the refinement of their central belief in the ‘inward Christ’, or ‘the Light within’. In doing so, the study challenges persistent stereotypes of early modern radicalism as anti-intellectual and ill-educated—and indeed, as defined either by ‘rationalist’ or ‘spiritualist’ excess. Rather, the theological concerns of the Quakers and their interlocutors point to a crisis of Christology weaving through the intellectual milieu of the seventeenth century, which has long been underestimated as significant fuel for the emerging Enlightenment

Federations have existed in a modern form since the constitution of the United States entered into force in 1789. Riker defines a federation as follows (1975, p. 101) “a political organization in which the activities of government are divided between regional governments and a central government in such a way that each kind of government has some activity on which it makes final decision.” The process of getting to the federation, the integration process, is best described as federalism.There is some agreement on the core of what a federation is, and some disagreement over whether to apply the term “federation” strictly to states and state-like actors or in a broader sense. Federations are concrete ways to organize government, but in many writings, they are also given positive attributes, such as enhanced democracy and efficiency, too.There are two ways to think about federalism: as a politico-ideological theory of action and as an academic theory of regional integration. The first theory is propagated by writers such as Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi, Jean Monnet, and Altiero Spinelli. This theory is of political rather than academic interest. Academic theories of regional integration are divided into two groups, following the common practice in international relations theory: liberal theories (by far the largest group) and realist theories.Federalism theory as a theory of regional integration was abandoned too early because, inter alia, it had been linked to the development of the European Community, which was in crisis from the mid-1970s till the mid-1980s. This was a mistake. Federalism theory provides the scholar with at least two tools. First, under the title “federation,” it introduces a large number of theories, methods, and empirical studies on how to analyze the European Union and other regional integration projects. Second, as a federalism theory, especially in the realist or the Riker-McKayian version, it provides a theory of how countries may unite peacefully. This approach must be developed in terms of (a) the concept of threat, which must be broadened to include economic, social, and cultural elements, and (b) the role of a basic common culture, which primarily facilitates the founding of the federation and constitutes the foundation securing the maintenance of the new federation.A brief analysis of the development of today’s European Union, following the realist approach, demonstrates that, broadly speaking, a correspondence exists between threat and the integration process: In times of threat, the process of integration and federalization advances; in periods of peace and no crisis, the integration process stagnates.

The effective altruism movement consists of a growing global community of people who organize significant parts of their lives around two key ideas, represented in its name. Altruism: If we use a significant portion of the resources in our possession—whether money, time, or talents—with a view to helping others, we can improve the world considerably. Effectiveness: When we do put such resources to altruistic use, it is crucial to focus on how much good this or that intervention is reasonably expected to do per unit of resource expended (for example, per dollar donated). While global poverty is a widely used case study in introducing and motivating effective altruism, if the ultimate aim is to do the most good one can with the resources expended, it is far from obvious that global poverty alleviation is highest priority cause area. In addition to ranking possible poverty-alleviation interventions against one another, we can also try to rank interventions aimed at very different types of outcome against one another. This includes, for example, interventions focusing on animal welfare or future generations. The scale and organization of the effective altruism movement encourage careful dialogue on questions that have perhaps long been there, throwing them into new and sharper relief, and giving rise to previously unnoticed questions. In the present volume, the first of its kind, a group of internationally recognized philosophers, economists, and political theorists contribute in-depth explorations of issues that arise once one takes seriously the twin ideas of altruistic commitment and effectiveness.