Wednesday, April 06, 2005

Personal is political

At first while reading this article I didn't see much of a problem with the political strategy of targeting individual voters. If they're going to send you a bunch of flyers and stuff anyway, it might as well be about issues you're interested in.

However, the scenario presented at the end of the article is disturbing. Politicians might be able to stop publicizing a platform based on their own beliefs and intent, and just tell everyone what they want to hear. My question for this week is, do you think they could get away with this? Would it be possible to tell Voter A "I'll increase welfare programs and cut military spending" and Voter B "I'll increase military spendin and cut welfare programs" and not have people catch on? If the politican were elected and then did as she or he liked without regard to campaign promises, would they be held accountable?

1 comment:

  1. Most English teachers in Japan are either there through the JET program (sponsored by the government) or they work for a private English conversation school. There are numerous small, independant schools and several big chains. The "Big Four" English conversation chain schools are AEON, GEOS, NOVA, and ECC.

    I worked for AEON, which has it's flaws but judging from my research and my experience/observation in Japan is the best of the Big Four. GEOS seemed pretty okay too. ECC was not a presence in my region, so I don't know anything about them. NOVA has a very, very bad reputation. While some teachers do have good experiences with them it seems that this reputation is justified. Their policies and business practices can be very hard on teachers, and they have a high turnover rate.

    I have read people claim on the Internet that working for one of the little private schools is really best, but I never met teachers from those schools in Japan so I don't know. I expect conditions can vary a lot from school to school, whereas at least with the chains you have a better idea of what to expect.

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