Word: welling
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...parties have shot themselves in the jackboot with internal feuds and rickety organization. Now outfits such as the BNP are learning from past mistakes: they're slicker, and combine old-fashioned grassroots activism with Internet campaign techniques borrowed from the Obama playbook. They're also well placed to exploit the disillusionment with traditional politics that has seen voter turnouts in European and national elections plummet, and membership of big parties dwindle. As the global economy limps along and Western nations struggle to balance the needs of longtime citizens and newer immigrants, nobody should doubt that the far right is well...
...catastrophe, the urgent question is how best to contain the surge. Deny far-right leaders the oxygen of publicity? Tricky - they have a democratic mandate. Confront them? That risks casting them as martyrs, victims who tell unpalatable truths. Expose the racism that often underlies professions of patriotism? Well, yes, but that assumes voters choose far-right parties in ignorance of their views, rather than because they strike a chord. Steal their nationalist thunder by taking tough lines on issues such as immigration? This smacks of capitulation to the very ideas critics seek to defeat...
...door-to-door campaigning and local meetings. The bigger parties ignore such old-fashioned techniques at their peril, says Eric Pickles, chairman of Britain's Conservative Party. "You've got a kind of [mainstream politician] representing those estates who didn't grow up on them, doesn't know them well and visits like a political tourist." Mainstream parties have "got to re-engage the population," he says. "You can't write the people off who voted BNP as all being Nazis. It's neglect...
...professional (and obsessive) movie watcher, I find Netflix a helpful reference source for my never-ending entertainment education. (B-movie serials! BBC miniseries! Bollywood musicals!) But I have misgivings about the service's usefulness, especially compared with that of a real, well-stocked video store, and about the possibly harmful effect that Netflix and other online retail outfits may have on American society...
...Netflix ad has one contented couple purring, "We don't miss the video store at all." Well, I do. Specifically, I miss Kim's Video, a lower-Manhattan movie-rental landmark that housed 55,000 DVDs and cassettes of the vastest and most eccentric variety - until it closed early this year and shipped the whole stash to Sicily. Admittedly, Kim's was one of the gems, but cities large and small used to have video stores with all manner of movies that you could see right away. With Netflix, you surrender those basic American rights: impulse choice and instant gratification...