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Showing posts from March, 2023

Politics: Attention Spans, Politics and Populism – Why Does It Work?

Shakespeare’s first performed plays occurred in the late 16th century, the colour television was first demonstrated in 1928, the first YouTube video (‘Me at the zoo’, uploaded by co-founder Jawed Karim) was released approximately 23 years ago, and the modern social media titan, TikTok, was created approximately 10 years ago.  The final marked an important, dangerous and disquieting epoch in entertainment. Though the claim that human attention span has dropped under that of a goldfish remains an incontrovertibly proven fallacy, in the past 20 years alone, the average amount of time a person can spend focused on a task digitally has plummeted from two and a half minutes to just 47 seconds. 47 seconds before we check the time, fiddle with our phones and lose our train of thought. Addiction to short-form content as such has greatly contributed to this collapse.  To put it plainly, attention is a digital drug. It harnesses mass amounts of political, economic and social sway. For...
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The BBC and the boats - how an immigration bill brought the BBC into disarray

  SHREY CHANDARANA (L6) On Tuesday 7th March 2023, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and Home Secretary Suella Braverman announced the UK government’s latest attempt to solve the problem of illegal immigration into the UK. It’s a key issue in the UK, and an attractive one for a Conservative government to solve, considering it was a crucial part of the argument to vote for Britain to leave the EU in 2016 (with 65% of those who voted to Leave in 2016, having shown their support for the Conservatives in 2019), but the announcement of the bill has been controversial, with not only the government but also the public broadcaster, BBC being brought into disrepute.  Now, if you’ve seen the exact wording of this announcement you’ll see why there has been such a large public backlash to the introduction of this bill. Specifically, the main selling point of this potential law is that people who arrive in the UK illegally will be detained and then removed within weeks of their arrival. They will...
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Florida: The making of a red state

WESLEY AKUM-OJONG (U6) In the 2000 US presidential election, the future of America rested on the recount of a few thousand votes in Florida. Those days are now long gone. Especially over the past 15 years, Florida has drifted steadily rightwards and is moving from being a purple state to one of a distinctly redder hue. This has culminated in incumbent Republican governor Ronald DeSantis being re-elected by a 19-point margin in the 2022 gubernatorial election. But how did we get here?  The election in 2008 was the only one this century where Florida voted more Democratic than it had in the previous election. Discounting that, Florida has consistently trended right this century, with high-water marks including Bush’s 5-point victory in 2004 and Trump’s 3.4-point victory in 2020. Even in 2020 where the country as a whole shifted 2.4 points to the left, Florida bucked the trend and shifted 2.2 points to the right. Further to this, no Democrat has been elected as governor since Chiles w...
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Pathogens

  DANIEL CLINTON (L6) If you were to go back in time and ask what caused a particular ailment, the responses you would get would be nothing short of bizarre. People used to believe diseases were caused by anything from bad air to curses hence the common victorian tradition of carrying about flowers to ward off foul-smelling air. Fortunately, owing to the pinnacle of modern science that is the microscope, we now know that this is far from the truth, as what  really causes disease is pathogens. Bacteria, fungi and viruses are the three main types of organisms which could be classed as pathogenic (able to cause disease). However, the way in which they operate and the mechanisms through which they cause disease differs greatly between the three Viruses Since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, through social distancing and scandal, one fearsome phrase has remained in the limelight, standing at the forefront of it all: Mortality Rate. Covid, like the vast majority of other viruses,...
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Historic Methods of Processing The Insanity Plea Within Western Courts

  EMMANUEL CHUKWUEMEKA (U6) Introduction The insanity plea is an appeal from a defendant to reduce or completely remove responsibility for the crimes they are being charged with. This is usually due to them possessing a mental defect/illness that may influence behaviour to an extent that results in crimes being committed to any degree such as: antisocial personality disorder, kleptomania, psychopathy, obsessive compulsive disorder and intermittent explosive disorder. These are all disorders that can then lead to the sufferer committing crimes (of varying extremity) that they do not deserve the full repercussions of. What is Insanity in Criminals  Stephen J. Morse (the author of ‘Mental Disorder and Criminal Insanity’) gave a broad and convoluted description but summarises mental disorder as a manifestation of a behavioural, psychological or biological dysfunction in the individual, although even he acknowledges this definition as vague and too subjective to then be used to enf...
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