“The Meaner & More Usual &c.”

Michael Greaney, “‘The Meaner & More Usual &c.’: Everybody in Emma” (pp. 417-440) This essay aims to read Jane Austen’s Emma (1815) not as a portrait of a pampered individual but as a story of collective or communal selfhood—that is, as the story of everybody. “Everybody”—the term is used approximately one hundred times in this novel—in Emma is both more and less than a village or a neighborhood. Spread and shared across people, discourses, bodies, and institutions, “everybodiness” is variously apprehended as public opinion, or a ubiquitous collective gaze, or a shared repertoire of constantly updated gossip-narratives, without ever being quite reducible to any one of these. With a mixture of disdain and disquiet, Emma equates everybodiness with banal group-think, senseless chatter, lackluster mediocrity, and oppressive sameness—but, even as it thinks these superciliously undemocratic thoughts, Austen’s novel grants “everybody” narrative space in which to contest the terms of its own marginalization.

White Knights, Black Armour, Digital Worlds: Exploring the Efficacy of Analysing Online Manifestos of Terrorist Actors in the Counter Terrorism Landscape

Over the past few years, a number of major terrorist attacks have been accompanied by the uploading of detailed, online manifestos, which chart and publicise ideologies, motivations and tactical choices in the backdrop of a dehumanized foe. Such manifestos can also act as inspiration for potential copycats and group-think style supporters within an insulated network. However the types of conclusions that can be drawn from manifesto analysis is a complex issue. The broad aim of this chapter is to explore such identity construction and the usefulness of analysing terrorist manifestos through a narrative framework, with a view to demonstrating that manifestos can be understood as a script to a violent performance (the terrorist act) in the theatre of terrorism (the digital world). These insights can serve the development of policy directed towards aspects of the personal attitudes and the social drivers that are necessary for the amplification of violence rather than in the often impenetrable prediction of who is and who is not likely to become a terrorist actor.

The European Union and First Years AKP: Popular Nationalism in Turkey

Nationalism is one of the important ideologies; it is too difficult to express what nationalism is in one sentence, because it is a multidimensional, debatable ideology. In Turkey, nationalism is also an important issue because of its multi-ethnic and multi-cultural structure. Moreover elites have an important roles on constructing a type of nationalism, especially popular nationalism. Critiques and opposition of the political and intellectual elites against the governmental policies indicated the escalated atmosphere in nationalist discourse in Turkey until 2010. Therefore, this work empowered the theories of popular nationalism, which contribute the relationship between the elites and nationalism to the body of theoretical knowledge. However, some other issues may escalate the popular nationalism in Turkey. Turkish public thinks on that way; 29 percentages of the sample group think that the cause of escalating nationalism in Turkey is PKK terrorism, and secondly 17 percentages of the sample group suggested that EU demands led the increase. On the other hand some may claim that even those issues are interrelated.

Busting the Icon

Carl von Clausewitz has had a massive influence on military officers. One faculty member at a US war college had spent most of his academic life teaching Clausewitz and would brook no contrary word. Whatever the occasion, he had a quote from On War to bolster his argument. The result was a skewed interpretation of what Clausewitz was attempting to inform, and this tended to push students into a group-think mentality. Some people, in and out of uniform, take their Clausewitz very seriously, so this chapter is an attempt to restore a balance. It looks at what Clausewitz wrote, but also what military leaders and civilian pundits thought he meant in the two centuries since.

European Council Note - 20/21 February: Coming to Terms with Failure

The latest Briefng Note documents and seeks to explain a failure. The special European Coun cil of 20-21 February did not just fail to reach an agreement on the EU's Multiannual Financial Framework for 2021-2027. It failed to indicate how one might be reached in the coming weeks or months. MFF negotiations are always diffcult and, in order to fnish the job, the heads of state and government had had to meet at least twice on previous occasions. The breakdown on this occasion was however ominously complete. There are many reasons for this failure. Four nevertheless appear to have been particularly relevant: ˙ The lethal juxtaposition of three irreconcilable factors. Firstly, the emergence over the pre vious fve years of a new, more ambitious EU agenda in the face of climate change and other major challenges, all of which required, and therefore raised expectations of, more rather than less EU expenditure. Secondly, the dependence of a huge clientele in most if not all member states on the maintenance of EU funding for Cohesion and the Common Agricultural Policy. Thirdly, Brexit, which meant that at a time when it needed to spend more, the EU was bound to have revenue at least 10 billion euros per annum less than in the current MFF. ˙ The entrenchment of group think. Caucuses are normal and healthy. Before and at the February European Council, however, the two main caucuses, the Frugal Four, led by Mark Rutte, and the Cohesion Group, led by Antonio Costa, displayed levels of collective intran sigence which made agreement impossible. ˙ The inability of Angela Merkel to take the lead in breaking the impasse. Macron's marginal utility was par for the course as far as French presidents in MFF negotiations are concerned. Merkel, whose position at home had been seriously undermined in the previous fortnight in Thuringia and then in Berlin, could not however step into the breach, even though on the Friday morning she tried to do so. ˙ The failure of Charles Michel, the European Council president, to maintain his grip on a process which, as a result of his own initiative, had become Michelsache as much as if not more than Chefsache . Since 21 February, the MFF negotiations have been overtaken by the Covid-19 crisis. This has at one and the same time made an early resumption of the process improbable and cast doubts on some of the factors which militated against success in February. In a situation of unprec edented gravity, European Council members, both severally and collectively, have been chal lenged 'to think outside the box', particularly about the role of public fnance in facilitating post-crisis recovery. And some at least have begun to do so At the same time, the stock of the intransigents in general and of Mark Rutte in particular has fallen sharply. Thirdly, Michel has been given a fresh lease of life. Whenever therefore the MFF negotiations resume they will do so in a very different environment.

Gaslighting and Echoing, or Why Collective Epistemic Resistance is not a “Witch Hunt”

This essay reflects on some of the problems with characterizing collective epistemic resistance to oppression as “unthinking” or antithetical to reason by highlighting the epistemic labor involved in contending with and resisting epistemic oppression. To do so, I develop a structural notion of epistemic gaslighting in order to highlight structural features of contexts within which collective epistemic resistance to oppression occurs. I consider two different forms of epistemic echoing as modes of contending with and resisting epistemic oppression that are sometimes mischaracterized as “unthinking” or “group think.” The first sense highlights the epistemic labor entailed in withdrawing from conditions of structural epistemic gaslighting that is sometimes mischaracterized as a pernicious self-sequestering that is antithetical to reason. The second sense highlights the epistemic labor entailed in actively confronting epistemic structures that gaslight what is sometimes mischaracterized as an “irrational group think.” In both cases, I highlight how epistemic acts that may appear unreasonable “within the gaslight” are, on the contrary, engaged in serious and important epistemic labor.

Breastfeeding: what do women who participate in a prenatal group think?

ABSTRACT Objectives: to understand breastfeeding meanings and practices produced by women attending prenatal care at a Basic Health Unit in the Brazilian Northeast. Methods: a social research characterized as participant research. A Focal Group was conducted with nine pregnant women who had other children. For the analysis, Discursive Practices and Production of Meanings in Everyday Life perspectives were worked out. Results: prenatal care, mother-baby relationship, family, and pain/suffering categories were produced. Final Considerations: breastfeeding benefits for the child, wife, family and society are numerous, but it is necessary for the woman to have access to a prenatal care and a qualified puerperium so that she feels supported by a perspective of comprehensive care.

Autism spectrum traits predict higher social psychological skill

Social-cognitive skills can take different forms, from accurately predicting individuals’ intentions, emotions, and thoughts (person perception or folk psychology) to accurately predicting social phenomena more generally. Past research has linked autism spectrum (AS) traits to person perception deficits in the general population. We tested whether AS traits also predict poor accuracy in terms of predicting generalized social phenomena, assessed via participants’ accuracy at predicting social psychological phenomena (e.g., social loafing, social projection, group think). We found the opposite. In a sample of ∼6,500 participants in 104 countries, AS traits predicted slightly higher social psychological skill. A second study with 400 participants suggested that heightened systemizing underlies this relationship. Our results indicate that AS traits relate positively to a form of social cognitive skill—predicting social psychological phenomena—and highlight the importance of distinguishing between divergent types of social cognition.