Month: February 2020

(It’s a board game pun, bare with me)

So in class recently, we’ve been learning about political ideologies. To break it down, an ideology is a way of looking at the world that a group of people share. Political ideologies more likely than not revolve around the way a country is run, and how their politics works. To make it easier, I made some notes using a mind map:

Political Ideologies

To help us along, we wound up doing a test that would help us figure out our own political ideologies:

As you can see, my ideologies are quite left leaning, as I tend to not agree with many right ideologies. For instance, while conservatives believe in tradition, I tend to be more open to change.

To help explain it a bit better, I made my own political spectrum. Using monopoly cards. Please bare with me, I will explain:

Let me take the time to explain each card and why I chose it.

Communism.

In this card, you get to ride a train to a certain location. Notice how you don’t need to pay to ride the train. Many communist parties believe that public transport would be free, as it is owned by the government. In communism, the government owns everything. There is no private areas, everything is public, including trains.

Socialism

If given this card, you have to pay school taxes. Which makes sense with socialism, as the ideology implies that everyone owns everything together. So everyone having to pay for something such as a school makes sense, public education funded by the people.

Liberalism

This card is the “go directly to go” card. In Liberalism, everyone is equal, to each according to his own need. And going past go and collecting $200 is an opportunity that everyone gets, it isn’t divided by anything. It doesn’t give you any unfair advantages in the game, it just simply moves your position.

Conservatism

The “go back 3 spaces card.” Why is this conservative? Well, conservatives don’t really believe in change. If you’ve moved forward, then move back to where it was before so that nothing changes too much.

Fascism

Finally, the “go directly to jail” card. In Fascism, all decisions are typically made by one supreme ruler. You don’t question their authority, they gave final say. So, if you are told to do something, you do it. For instance, if you’re told you’re going to jail, you go to jail, no fighting it.

And that’s all, hope you enjoyed!

Read You Later,

Parker

 

Hello!

We’re back, baby! This time, with a project that started out in a bit of a different way. We were told we got to pick anything from Billy Joel’s We Didn’t Start The Fire, and do a project on it.

Anything. For reference, that song lists 106 things. After looking through the lyrics, I settled on Punk Rock. I had to argue why punk rock was significant, and why it deserved to be in the song along side such major things as Watergate and Bob Dylan. So why was it significant?

First of all, the punk movement affected so many people. It started out with the British youth, who were upset with the government and felt ripped off. From there, it soared into America and people really felt connected to it. The upset working class had a way of rising up, after the hippie movement died out.

Secondly, it had political effects. Obviously starting with the left wing punks, and how they were very anti-establishment. The Dead Kennedy’s famously released California Uber Alles, which compares Jerry Brown’s possible presidency to Hitler (read the lyrics, they’re the very definition of punk rock). Then there were the right wing punks, who were impacted by the National Front in England and wound up completely missing the point of what it was to be punk.

And finally, they had such a lasting impact. Punk is still a movement today, and their music lives on in bands like Nirvana and Blondie.

To show the significance of our topic, we had to create an artifact. I wound up dying some shoelaces to show off the punk “shoelace code”

Each colour represents something.

White = white pride

Red = Neo-Nazi

Black = Apolitical

Purple = Anti-Skinhead

Yellow = Anti-Racist

Blue = Cop-Killer

The shoelace code goes to show how politics affected the punks, to the point of them having to wear shoelaces to discern what type of punk they were. No one wants to get mistaken for a nazi, after all.

That’s all, thanks for reading!

Read You Later

Sincerely, Parker