Modern, Stevie The appearance of Ayn Rand's 'lost' novel Ideal, 80 years after it was written, gives us cause to examine the life and works of the humanist author, playwright and philosopher.

Modern, Stevie In a dark uniform, she walks swiftly through the tram carriage, her movements machine-like and efficient. Wordlessly, she punches passengers' tickets and passes money from the coin-changer strapped to her hip. The passengers pay small attention, their gazes vaguely forward. They do not see the face of evil, the anonymous official who stands above them returning their ticket stub. The tram clatters on through Berlin's streets.

Modern, Stevie March 15, 2016: A 19 year-old American tourist is arrested in Jerusalem. Police authorities had found him asleep in a prohibited cave area, deep under the Muslim quarter of the Old City. A search finds his backpack loaded with rubble dug with a pickaxe, at a site where myth tells of lost religious treasure. The tourist claims no memory of his actions. Israeli media reports the story as a possible case of 'Jerusalem Syndrome' - a religiously themed psychosis. (...) The syndrome affects nearly 100 people each year out of millions of tourists who visit Jerusalem. (shrink)

Modern, Stevie At its annual general meeting in May this year, the Council of Australian Humanist Societies voted in support of volunteer ethics teachers entering public schools and teaching ethics programs to students as a secular alternative in religious education. The motion was put to the meeting by the NSW Society with the support of the Humanist Society of Victoria. The motion was opposed by the Queensland, Western Australian and South Australian Societies. Here is why the motion is a grave (...) mistake, and why Western Australia moved its own motion against it. (shrink)

Modern, Stevie The September 11 Memorial Museum at Ground Zero opened in May this year, nearly 13 years from the date when 2,983 people were murdered by Islamist hijackers. It is 20 years from Al Qaida's first attempt to bomb the World Trade Center in 1993.

Modern, Stevie In the movie Exodus set in 1947, Paul Newman plays a Jewish 'people smuggler' Ari Ben Canaan in an amusing early scene where he disguises himself as a British soldier. Ben Canaan fools a commanding officer into signing off on the transport of recent holocaust survivors out of detention in Cyprus, making the officer believe the survivors would be shipped back to Germany.

This analysis investigates the evolution of the modern spirit of sports within the context of industrial and late capitalist societies. Anchored by historical materialism and Weberian notions of modernization, it critiques interpretations by Collins and Vamplew on sports commercialization, addressing how unified rules, profit stabilization, and professionalization reflect the ideological underpinnings of capitalism. The study explores early industrial influences, including work ethics, and transitions into consumerism’s dominance, marked by the commodification of athletes and the rise of media-driven consumer aesthetics. (...) The role of anti-doping movements is discussed as a response to consumer demands for authenticity, revealing contradictions between elite sports’ realities and idealized imagery. Ultimately, the modern spirit of sports is identified as a construct of late capitalist ideology, balancing industrial profitability and consumer satisfaction. To infuse this spirit in the sporting world, the World Anti-Doping Agency was created. (shrink)

Richly illustrated study drawing on art, literature and science to explore Victorian attitudes towards sight.

The relationship between knowledge and values, experts and lay people, represents a major issue of the debate involving environment and technology. There is a growing awareness that the connection between value commitments and technical solutions, scientific expertise and lay competence, is much more entangled than once was believed. The article deals with this issue by analysing Robert Dahl's `minipopulus' and Silvio Funtowicz and Jerry Ravetz's `extended peer communities' arguments. They are subsequently inserted into the sociological debate which is, at present, (...) considerably influenced by the reflexive modernization framework. As a result, Ulrich Beck's and Anthony Giddens' theories appear as one of four ideal-typical approaches to the social construction of the issues that can be outlined, according to the priority assigned to knowledge versus power and nature versus society. The idea of an `extended peer review' of problems and solutions is remarkably close to the deliberative democracy concept. However, the high level of uncertainty characterizing major environmental and technological questions suggests that a `strong' version of deliberative democracy, such as the Discourse Ethics proposed by Habermas, is untenable in its search for a universal, rational consensus on the normative grounds of action. Thus it is necessary to develop a `weak' interpretation of the extended peer review, exploring the possibility of fair and stable agreements on bounded, practical solutions to bounded, practical problems. (shrink)

Over 40 years ago, Daniel Bell made the provocative claim that ideological polarization was diminishing in Western democracies, but new ideologies were emerging and driving politics in developing nations. This article tests the EndofIdeology thesis with a new wave of public opinion data from the World Values Survey (WVS) that covers over 70 nations representing more than 80 per cent of the world's population. We find that polarization along the Left/Right dimension is substantially greater in the less affluent and less (...) democratic societies than in advanced industrial democracies. The correlates of Left/Right orientations also vary systematically across regions. The twin pillars of economic and religious cleavages remain important in European states; cultural values and nationalism provide stronger bases of ideology in Asia and the Middle East. As Bell suggested, social modernization does seem to transform the extent and bases of ideological polarization within contemporary societies. (shrink)

The article is devoted to how stable the forms of government are, as well as what are the main directions of their evolution in the context of the modernization of the state and civil society. The purpose of the study is to establish the specifics of modernization of modern forms of government in the conditions of political transformation. The significance of systemic and non-systemic political forces, their value and ideological and doctrinal settings in the context of stability or (...) instability of the form of state government is characterized. It was emphasized that socio-economic processes also program approaches to the modernization of the form of state government. The balance of relations between the central and local authorities is analyzed as one of the serious factors in the formation of the agenda of reforms of the form of government. The European priorities and the vector of the development of Ukrainian statehood, which require bringing the constitutional and legal base into compliance with the functioning of supranational institutions, are revealed. The ratio of the mechanisms of separation of powers, which regulate the power functionality of each institutional branch, in order to prevent one branch from performing the main functions of another, has been clarified. It is revealed that constitutional changes aimed at unifying the institutional design of decision-making are an integral process of European integration. It is proved that the attitude towards the constitution as an unchanging document and a necessary value begins to change due to the new needs of state formation. It has been established that criticism of constitutional changes aimed at changing the form of government is becoming more and more widespread due to the politicization of specific proposals. It is assumed that the expediency of modernizing the fundamental principles of forms of state government is especially problematic during the Russian war in Ukraine. It was established that the presence of non-public rules for the distribution of powers and influence within the political and institutional design of modern Ukraine actualizes the need for transparency in approaches to the transformation of the form of government. It has been found that ascertaining the crisis of the constitutional and legal foundations of the political design of Ukrainian democracy requires proposals to overcome the crisis. It was concluded that in the conditions of political transformations there is a vector of unmotivated changes to the constitutions that regulate the balance of interaction between the branches of government. (shrink)

Global modernization provides rich experiential references and diverse perspectives for Chinese-style modernization. While Chinese-style modernization, as one with a huge population scale, faces unprecedented complexity and uniqueness, requiring the construction of independent knowledge and theoretical systems. This study proposes that the organic integration of Chinese-style modernization and the development of population theory to form a population theory system aligned with China's national conditions is an inevitable measure to advance Chinese-style modernization in a coordinated manner. This (...) interconnected and integrated development model can not only clarify the value contribution of Chinese-style modernization to population theory innovation, but also elaborate on the value guidance of population theory innovation to Chinese-style modernization, thereby providing Chinese solutions and Chinese wisdom for the global modernization process. (shrink)

The theory of reflexive modernization plausibly advocates postnational cosmopolitanism. As the nation state is eroding today, we are becoming citizens of a ‘global risk society’ whose unity and cohesion is generated by the risk that is threatening us world-wide. By the same token, this world risk society is no longer unified in any political sense. There is no world state; its very idea is even rejected. In this sense, the cosmopolitanism argued for in the theory of reflexive modernization (...) proves predominantly to be an extrapolation of civil society on a global scale, while, strictly speaking, having no cosmo‘political’ counterpart. Building on Marcel Gauchet’s political philosophy, the article questions the cosmopolitanism-beyond-the-political position of the theory of reflexive modernization. To do so, it goes substantially into Gauchet’s view of the representational role of the political as an essential dimension in society formation. (shrink)