Attacks on Health Care Workers in Historical Pandemics and COVID-19

Previous pandemics have been used/misused for (geo)political reasons, in wars/genocides and for terrorism. COVID-19 has been no exception with the former American president challenging the relations with China calling it the ‘Chinese virus’, and Russia and China setting up cyberterrorist actions against health care organizations in the United States and Europe. Aside from state-driven factors, both left and right-wing activists and anti-vaxxers adhering conspiracy theories are a threat for health care organizations and patients. Socioeconomic and religious/cultural factors also play a role in why health caregivers are a possible target. Fear of viral pathogens, fear of losing jobs by lockdown measures, anger because of quarantine and proper burials of the beloved being denied, are amongst the reasons people revolt against health care providers. We provide a review of the impact of violence against health care workers during the COVID-19 pandemic and earlier pandemics and suggest preventative strategies.

The Interpretive Challenges of American Presidential Discourse Described as Joking (Russian Translation)

When the American President speaks in a way that is later characterized as joking/kidding, a wide range of interpretations become possible. At a minimum, there are two basic interpretations: serious and non-serious.At the other extreme, there may be as many nuanced interpretations as there are audiences for the discourse. In this study, I will first examine the “just/only joking” strategy, considering how it fits within a theoretical understanding of humorous discourse, and lay out the prototypical strategic moves. Then I will explore how the two main audiences (the currently polarized political groupings in the United States) tend to interpret the “joking” in relation to the performance style of President Donald J. Trump. Using three examples, I will attempt to show how the same utterance can be interpreted by one audience as a harmless joke and by the other as a grave threat.

Main directions and possible economic consequences of Baiden's migration policy

The article analyzes the directions and economic consequences of the immigration policy pursued by the Biden administration in the context of global shifts taking place in the modern world, as well as taking into account the peculiarities of the development of the internal political situation in the country. Today we can talk about the transitional state of the entire global system of social relations, we can talk about the situation of world transition that humanity is going through, which is reflected in the instability of the modern world, in the state of general uncertainty that society is experiencing. The growing chaos inevitably accompanies the process of destruction of the old order of things – institutions, mechanisms of interaction, actors; it has a significant impact even on countries in which there were no doubts about the stability of the situation before. We observe a picture of the growing fragility of the foundations of social existence today in the United States, which until recently was the only and unconditional world economic and political leader. The current situation both in the country and in the world is unlikely to allow the American president to ignore the realities of life, including economic ones, being completely in captivity of a purely ideological discourse, and this is already happening.

The American role in the Anti-Soviet Afghan War (1977- 1980)

Purpose of the study: This study aims to discuss the American role in the anti-Soviet Afghan war and disclose the reasons for the Soviet worry about the growth of the fundamentalist terrorist groups inside Afghanistan. Methodology: This is library-based research work. Results: The article has come up with some main points on that severe war. One of these was that the American President Jimmy Carter's Doctrine in 1980. Carter's Doctrine could be considered a sort of policy that allows the use of military force in case American interests are exposed to Soviet threats. As a result, the American administration promised to militarily support the Afghan fighters against the Soviet control in Afghanistan. But, at the same time, the Americans failed to realize the ethnic, ideological, social, lingual, and theological structure of the Afghan society. Application: This study could have many applications in the faculties of politics and the contemporary altogether to teach the ways of public and secret or hidden political relationships between the secular states or so-called superpowers that employed the extremist groups to overwhelm the stable states that do not subdue to the western domination. Novelty: This study explores the incorrect claim of the superpowers in general and of the United States of America in particular of the theory of separation religion and the state, which is often used in the double standard.

Hedging in Political Discourse: The Case of Trump’s Speeches

This study examines the use and functions of hedging devices in political discourse by analysing two of the now former American President Donald Trump’s speeches. The study adopts Salager-Meyer’s (1997) framework to analyse the use of hedging devices and Rabab’ah and Abu Rumman’s (2015) framework to assign functions to hedges. The findings reveal that approximators and modal auxiliary verbs were the most frequently used hedging devices in the two speeches and that there is a noticeably frequent use of the modal auxiliary verbs will and must, an indication of power. In addition, the findings show that Trump used hedging devices almost equally between the two speeches although there is a one-year gap between the speeches selected . As for the functions, the analysis shows that, in addition to the five functions in Rabab’ah and Abu Rumman (2015), there emerged three additional functions; namely, emphasis, power and multi-functional hedges. Most hedges were generally used to mitigate language while some were used to indicate necessity and authority. Keywords: Hedging, Political discourse, Functions, Trump.

Toward a Post-Apocalyptic Rule of Law

This paper considers how science fiction, and the subgenres of speculative historicism and futurism in particular, might open legal discourse to hitherto unseen and potentially instructive perspectives. It begins with the proposition that recent historical events of global significance such as the election of Donald Trump in 2016, the outbreak of the Covid19 pandemic of 2020, and the extreme weather events of 2021, were widely predicted and foreseen in the media by way of political reporting as much as popular social and natural science reporting in the years and decades prior. The same tropes were also present in the plotlines of popular literature, television, and film during that period. The central argument of the paper is that before media pundits and policy-makers expressed their surprise at the fragility of the Rule of Law in the “unprecedented” ascent of Trump, the lethal capacity and transmissibility of a “novel” coronavirus, and the “sudden” arrival of climate change in the daily lives of North Americans and Europeans, the spectre of these menaces had already penetrated our collective conscious in a way that ought to have changed outcomes. Neil Postman’s conceptualization of the present epoch as “Technopoly” is a means of explaining how, despite ample warnings, we were not ready for much. Technopoly refers to the historical present as the historical moment in which the technocratic capacity of individuals, states, and markets to respond to existential problems is hindered by information overload, e.g., the threat to the Rule of Law presented by an outgoing American President who refuses to accept the verdict of the electorate; the threat to public health posed by persistent vaccine misinformation and inequitable global vaccine distribution; and, the threat posed to our collective habitat by extreme climate events. The paper concludes that fiction is a powerful potential antidote to the numbing effects of information overload in Technopoly if it is treated seriously as a source of normative authority rather than dismissed as pure diversion.