Understanding Politics and Helping to Improve it
Do you know much about power struggles?
Do you know how to tell the difference between being reasonably dominant and being unreasonably domineering?
Do you know how to define dominance and prominence in the context of politics?
Do you know how to identify abusive power and control, and how to report it appropriately?
You may regard the public interest as reflecting good societal health, good environmental health and good mental health, and protecting them.
Do you know much about epistemology?
Are you quite well acquainted with the sociology of knowledge?
Do you know how to identify a crisis, and respond to it appropriately?
Are you acquainted with agnotology?
Are you acquainted with various epistemic communities?
Do you know much about the replication crisis?
Are you capable of interpreting an epistemic crisis with adequate objectivity?
Do you know how to define and compare epistemic regimes?
Have you attempted to understand the strategies used for gaining and maintaining dominance and prestige?
Do you spend much time observing expressions of dominance?
Are you acquainted with the levels of stress associated with gaining and maintaining dominance?
Have you giving much thought to chronemics in relation to politics?
Perhaps you have wondered why so many people with a desire for social dominance seek political power in democracies. They have no real interest in democracy itself or its egalitarian basis.
Perhaps you have wondered why unjust social dominance is so difficult to dismantle.
Submission to dominance is often associated with fear and confusion. It may even reflect the delusion that domineering behaviours are reasonable.
Domineering individuals tend to associate egalitarianism with mediocrity and/or mob rule and/or a lowering of moral standards in other ways. They tend to admire dominance as prestigious, regardless of the source of that dominance.
Do you know much about how prestige arises, and its influence?
Have you assessed your own reputation as dominant and/or prestigious in a particular context, and possibly otherwise in other situations?
There is much politics associated with public interest journalism.
Domineering people often mistake deference for civility. They do not view their own behaviour as requiring courtesy towards anyone they regard as inferior to themselves. They are uninterested in practicing civility.
Domineering people may associate basic courtesy with unnecessary formality. They may even be convinced that their incivility and rudeness are reflective of friendly informality and humour rather than effrontery.
Domineering people may also associate civility with excessive formality. They may seek to develop and/or maintain unnecessary rituals for their own grandiose purposes.
How do you distinguish between public interest journalism and other practices?
What have you discovered about politics through your formal experiences of education?
What have you discovered about politics through your informal education?
Public interest journalism is never sensationalist. Its purpose is to inform rather than arouse strong emotions.
Its purpose is to provide reasonable yet informal social control in order to prevent corruption and other expressions of injustice.
You may regard pleasant journalism as necessary to the public interest.
When have citizen journalists provided better news services in the public interest than 'professional' journalists?
How do you know when a media organisation has too much power and acts against the public interest?
Locating public interest journalism is so much easier when knowing where it is unlikely to be found.
What is veracity, in your view, and how do you acquire it when it is most necessary to your decision-making?
And how do you place value on it?
How does the public interest relate to the common good, in your view?
How does public interest journalism relate to public history, in your view?
How does it relate to popular science?
How does it relate to popular history?
How does it relate to health education?
While popular science and popular history are usually regarded as credible, the same does not necessarily apply to popular psychology, or to the lower forms of journalism.
How and where have you been exploring the public interest and defining its meaning?
How are you investing in improved constitutions, and who is assisting you, and who is preventing you from doing so?
How do you usually assess the conduct of powerful people, and influential ones, and why do you take that approach?What do you do when (your) needs are not being met?
How do you distinguish between the reasonable and unreasonable parts of the formal economy?
How do you distinguish between the reasonable and unreasonable parts of the informal economy?
What do you know about formal and informal voting?
What do you know about the reasonable use of language in connection with public interest journalism?
How should public interest journalism attempt to prevent electoral fraud and other unjustly manipulative political practices?
How do you usually assess the health of a society?
How are you already paying the price for bad politics, and bad journalism, directly and indirectly?
What do you know about quality of life in the absence of public interest journalism?
How does your creativity support the greater good?
What do you know about transport in relation to the greater good, and greater harm?
What is newsworthy about public health information?
How do you tell the difference between public health information and political propaganda?
How, if at all, have you been using social media, possibly including twitter, to help you act the public interest?
Conducting research
with excessively limited resources often prevents important insights
from being acquired. This is especially the case when urgent problems
arise and fail to be addressed.
Public interest journalism is a form of activism. Its intention is always to serve the greater good.
How, then, do you encourage the greater good, directly and indirectly?
Who should have access to the archives associated with the world's finest and most enlightened news service, and how, and why?
What do you already know about that news service and its archives?
How have you been assessing the future?
How, for example, are you investing in conservation, in the public interest, and who has been attempting to negate your efforts, and how, and why?
How have you communicated evidence of that opposition, and to whom?
What do you know about elegant egalitarianism in relation to journalism and editing?
How, if at all, have you been investing in elegant egalitarianism, in the public interest?
What do you know about the right to know?
Understanding politics is everyone's right.
Helping to improve politics is everyone's right, too.
How do you ascertain relevance to the public?
How do you prefer to respond when political activities, and political journalism, lack relevance to the public interest, and may even be aggressively opposed to it?
How, if at all, are you already involved in rebuilding democracies?
How, if at all, are you attempting to build democracies where they have never appeared before?
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