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I was wondering where you would recommend someone who doesn't have a clue about politics starts if they wish to take an interest.

 

I am fascinated by politics but don't have a good understanding of it, especially considering there is so much to and affected by it. When I watch the news or read articles I struggle to grasp a great deal of what is being conveyed purely because I don't have an understanding of, anything really, in the political world.

 

Where would you say is a good starting point? Are there any good books or YouTube channels that can serve as a good introduction to such a wide subject? I'd just like to be a bit more informed but the subject can be a little intimidating, especially when it seems that everyone engaging in related dialogues knows so much that you don't!

 

Thanks! :D Sorry if it's a bit of a silly question...

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Try contacting your local universities to see if any lecturers would be happy to provide you a reading list aimed at first year students. Good luck! ^_^

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I don't know what part of the United Kingdom you are united with, but I suggest you pay close attention to BREXIT. A funny sounding term until I realized it was a pseudo-acronym for "British Exit". Quaint. British politics and American politics have a lot in common these days. Conservative nationalism. Here in America we spit in the face of our NATO allies while you Brits seem to want nothing to do with the European Union. Well, some of you do. The EU has been quite patient but as the great American celebration of Halloween approaches, time is running out. There may be dire consequences if the Union is left without any compromises. Northern Ireland appears to be the fulcrum on which your ultimate decision is being weighed. As a Yank, I find the best source of news is provided by an entity not openly liberal or conservative. Our Public Broadcasting Service is probably the most non-biased source of news available. However, journalists will be journalists and there is always a bit of liberalism sprinkled into the mix. It leaves me wondering what weird chimeras those ultra conservative news feeds are. Sheep in wolves clothing? Maybe they are actually liberals who like acting. An actor's best role is always the exact opposite of their true self. Thus, California burns, the Yanks betray the Kurds and some irate Scandinavian teenager has started a world wide protest about climate change. Story at 11. The only constant is change, but if one examines the weave carefully one realizes nothing really changes. 

 

- and that's the way it was ...

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@Eutierria - that's a great idea. My sister just started at university so may be able to help with that also. Why didn't I think of that? Thank you! :D

 

@Yeast - that's one of the subjects I aim to understand. The day that it was revealed the vote had gone to leave, I was working in a school and had the class teacher crying. There was a lot of confusion and one of the few things your everyday person seems to agree on is that nobody was properly informed as to what they were really voting for, and if you ask the average person what on earth the point of Brexit is they will be unable to tell you and probably just say it's a mess. So yes, I would very much like to learn more about politics in an attempt to understand it a bit better, because from a layman's perspective it is an ever changing beast that you constantly, CONSTANTLY hear about but looks different each time. The second half of what you wrote is brilliant. Sheep in wolves clothing and actors, nothing really changes. Even without political understanding I think anybody would be hard pressed to disagree with what you wrote there. The movie keeps moving as planned...

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As a rule, I tend to avoid news sources that use exclamation(!) points(!) in(!) all(!) of(!) their(!) headlines(!) - or otherwise inflammatory language designed to stir up an emotional response. Most of those sources are geared towards profit over accuracy. Contacting a university for a syllabus on politics seems like an easy place to start - I'd also recommend history of politics as well, as that often contains more context for the decisions being made now.

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I got most of my original political understanding from reading about politics in newspapers, especially commentaries. Some newspapers are better than others; some quite obviously support one party and/or a general political view (i.e. Left or Right / Remain or Leave).

 

I've since followed up by reading the websites of the political parties which interest me + a lot of wikipedia for context/terms/etc.

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Beyond 100 Days (Mondays to Thursdays 7pm on BBC News) is a good way to catch up with the news and understand them. It's a news programme that is supposed to explain American politics to British viewers and British politics to American viewers, although other news come up to some extent too. There are a lot of interviews to help viewers understand the background, which I find really helpful and also interesting.

 

For a bit of general background there are two things I can recommend. The first is House of Cards, and by that I mean the British original. It's on the iPlayer, unless you want to read the book of course. On the iPlayer there's also a 4-part (I think) documentary about Margaret Thatcher (with the imaginative name "Thatcher") which is really quite helpful to understand why this country is in this mess its current situation.

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I had a friend who went into politics - briefly.  He discovered that it is all about "compromise" which translates to "supporting things you don't believe in, in order to get support for your career, and to get other things you want".  You can't be a successful politicization without that.  Most ideological people are not willing to do that. 

 

 

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5 hours ago, spacecakes said:

 

Where would you say is a good starting point?

I'm American, and it has been decades since I took any classes about British/European political systems, but here are some places you might want to look:

 

The current government:  https://www.gov.uk/government/how-government-works

 

Political system of the UK:  https://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/british-politics/

 

Political parties:  https://www.parliament.uk/about/mps-and-lords/members/parties/

 

BREXIT:  https://brexitexplained.org/

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Hi everyone - wow, what a response! Thank you all for getting back, so many different starting points across so many different topics within politics which will no doubt help me get going, as well as others who view this page and were wondering where might be best to get started also. There is much reading/ watching/ thinking to be done! 

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That is a very difficult question to answer objectively. I, along with everybody else on here, am not neutral. The things people will recommend here will reflect their political opinions. Keep that in mind :) 

There are no truly objective sources. Honestly I'd probably advise you to first learn about media literacy, so you'll at least be aware of the biases in the things you are reading/watching.

This video series may talk down to you a bit, but they do legitimately have good advice: 

Spoiler

 

For low effort checking whether a source is trustworthy there is this website: https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/

 

I've looked up the definition for 'political' a lot of times, but haven't really come up with anything satisfactory. The best thing I found was 'anything that has to do with power,' and when I used that definition in a uni presentation on online activism, my professor on digital politics accepted that definition, and added a second one; 'anything that has to do with the distribution of resources.' It's still vague to me though. If you include societal/cultural power in your definition of politics (which I do, I don't personally see how you could exclude cultural oppression from the realm of politics, but that is an opinion), then almost anything you do on a day to day basis could be political. Money is power. Any time money moves from one entity to another, that's a tiny shift of power. But also something like a TV show including an ace character, that gives asexuality more visibility and legitimacy, giving us more social power. 

 

So 'politics' is very broad, and I'm not sure what type of information you are looking for.

  • Are you looking for political theory and isms (capitalism, socialism, democracy, plutocracy, social democracy, communism, liberalism, nationalism, fascism, authoritarianism, anarchism etc)?
  • Or are you looking for info on more specific contemporary issues, such as Brexit, trans rights, conflicts in the middle east? 
  • Or were you looking for social political movements (feminism, lgbtq movement, alt-right, organized religion)?
  • Or were you looking for how bureaucratic systems like voting on bills and elections work, you know, separation of powers and all that jazz?

I don't think there's a fast track for learning all of this. It's a lot. The first three bullet points are very susceptible to political bias, especially the second one. I don't think I could in good faith send you anything as specific as a YouTube channel without risking putting my own political bias in that. And even if I wanted to just recommend something centrist, the political spectrum in Europe is radically different from the one in the US (the US has shifted way further right wing than Europe, so which center would I pick?

 

I'm going to give you a run-down of the isms. I hope to be as objective as I can, but no guarantee, sorry. Full disclosure, I lean left wing and progressive. But yeah, you should also do your own research.

Also, I'm going to give a lot of definitions of things. Don't think that I think you're dumb, and I'm sorry if I'm explaining things you already know, but better safe than sorry, you know?


 

Spoiler

 

Generally, in all 'developed' countries except the US, in terms of economics, you've mainly got the social democrats (center left) versus the (neo)liberals (center right).

 

Liberalism and neoliberalism overlap.

Classical liberalism stands for civil liberties under the rule of law, and economic freedoms in free market capitalism.

Neoliberalism has taken the 'economic freedoms in free market capitalism' - part of that further. It is associated with laissez-faire economics, privatization, fiscal austerity, deregulation, free trade, and reductions of welfare programs. They want people to take care of themselves, rather than relying on society. They are not in favor of financial aid to poorer communities, nor progressive taxation (=the rich get taxed more than the poor). They like privatizing (=making a company own it and draw profit from it, rather than having the government own it) national social services such as public transport, healthcare and education, and believe that competition will ultimately drive prices for those services down, while improving the services' quality. Would include Theresa May.

 

Neoliberalism also describes the current tendency people have to apply market solutions to all of society's problems, not just the economic ones. You need to find a date? On tinder there's a market on which, you, the consumer, have a choice between an endless number of potential partners. You want to express an opinion? Do it on twitter and make yourself heard on the marketplace of ideas, where attention and likes are currency.

 

The social democrats prefer a Keynesian approach to economics (=adjusting interest rates for borrowing money from the central bank periodically in order to mitigate the booms and busts of economies, basically making the booms less intense and the busts less devastating), and believe in solidarity rather than self-reliance. They do believe in progressive taxation and aid to the poor through social services such as financial aid, government subsidized healthcare insurance etcetera, not only because everyone deserves a basic standard of life, but also because ultimately, people buying things is what drives an economy to grow, and if people can't buy things, then companies can't sell things, can't pay their employees, and you've got a downwards spiral. Would include Jeremy Corbyn.

 

In the US, the meaning of political words have shifted as their only two relevant parties have shifted. When someone from the US says 'liberal', they mean the American 'left wing' (which is to say, the furthest left they have). Liberalism may have been 'left wing' and 'progressive' while it first gained power during the French revolution in 1789, but in comparison to an 18th century absolute monarchy most things are left wing and progressive. I'm going to stick with the original meaning of the word 'liberalism', so when I say it, I mean right wing, supports free market capitalism.

Since 2015-ish, a new social democratic wing is rising within the neoliberal Democratic Party (Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez), but before that, there was nothing to the left of neoliberalism that you could vote for. Both the establishment Democratic Party (Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama) and the establishment Republican Party (Mike Pence, Mitt Romney, Raegan) believe in neoliberalism and free market capitalism. While the Republican Party is far to the right of the Democratic Party in terms of economic policies, the main difference between these two parties lies in their social policies. The Republican Party is socially conservative (family values, traditional marriage and gender roles, religiosity), while the establishment Democratic Party is a bit more progressive, though it'd still fall in the center between conservative and progressive if you compared them to European parties. The social democratic wing of the Democratic Party would count as progressive if compared to European progressive parties.

 

So now we've got (neo)liberalism (right) versus social democracy (left) on the economic axis, and conservatism (right) versus progressivism (left) on the social axis.

That is the overton window (Any political opinions one can have that lie outside the overton window are seen as extremist, silly, or unrealistic by general society) which establishment politics takes place in in Europe.

In the US, the overton window used to include only liberalism and extreme liberalism on the economic axis, but with the advent of the social democrats within the liberal Democratic Party, their overton window for the economic axis has opened up to the left, while staying the same to the right. 

In Europe, parties that are right wing (liberal) on the economic axis can be left wing (progressive) on the social axis. In the US there are only two relevant national parties, so this is impossible.

 

Another axis is populism versus elitism (though the word elitism is barely ever used, and I think that might be because it is the default). Populism can be either left wing or right wing (both economically and socially speaking), but generally when people mention 'populism' they are talking about the right wing type.

Populism is claiming to represent what 'the people' want. You can tell a lot about a populist movement by looking at who it excludes from 'the people.' It may be foreigners, LGBTQ people, people of color, people of another faith etcetera. One group populism always ostensibly excludes is 'the elites,' wealthy establishment politicians who have been in power. Trump is a right wing populist.

 

Left wing populism does not tend to be called populism. It tends to be called socialism. They too claim to represent what 'the people' want, and in their case they exclude the capitalist class from 'the people.' 'The people' are all the workers of the entire world.

 

Socialism, at its core is 'workers own the means of production.' It is in direct opposition to capitalism, in which capitalists own the means of production.

The 'means of production' is large scale property, such as a factory, company, a property you can rent out, a piece of expensive equipment or a piece of land, that you can use to make money off of, literally 'the thing you need to produce stuff'. 

A capitalist is someone who makes money by hiring workers to work on the property he/she/they owns, and then skimming off the 'surplus value,' so a capitalist pays his workers less than what those workers actually earned the company, because otherwise the capitalist and his shareholders would make no money. 

 

What amount of money is considered 'surplus value' depends on the opinion of a company's owner as well as on how much he's legally required to pay his workers. He has incentive to pay his workers as little as possible, so that he can give his shareholders large amounts of 'dividends.'

A shareholder invests money into a company sort of by buying tiny pieces of that company, called stocks. At the end of a year the shareholder gets a tiny part of the money the company earned for each 'stock' they've bought, and that money is called 'dividends'. As a boss of a company, you want to keep your shareholders happy by giving them large amounts of dividends, so they don't start selling your company's stocks, and bringing your company's stock market value down. The stock market is part of the 'financial sector' of the economy, in which people make far more money than in the sector in which things are actually produced, even though nobody in the financial sector produces anything.

 

Social democrats like Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn are not looking to overthrow capitalism by giving ownership of companies to the people who work in them, so they are not socialists.

You'll hear people from the US say they are 'democratic socialists.' With this, they usually mean they are social democrats (yes those two things are different, I'm sorry, I didn't make this shit up just to be confusing). They are not actually socialists. Social democrats are looking to soften the edges of capitalism with wealth redistribution and health care, not to overthrow capitalism in its entirety.

In the original meaning of the term, a 'democratic socialist' is a full on anti-capitalist socialist who wants to have a democracy.

To many people from the US 'democratic socialist' sounds like a contradiction in terms, because they think that socialism is 'the government owns everything and decides everything,' which is false, but that's what fifty years of cold war propaganda will do to a populace.

 

A fifth political axis is authoritarianism versus anarchism. (Recap, so far we've got liberalism/social democracy, conservatism/progressivism, populism/elitism, socialism/capitalism, and now authoritarianism/anarchism.)

Authoritarianism is a system with a strong central power that represses any challenges to its regime. Authoritarian regimes can be right wing (most dictators), as well as left wing (e.g. soviet union).

Anarchism is the belief that all unjust and unnecessary authority must be dismantled from below. Anarchists want to get as close to a society without hierarchy as possible. A parent's authority over a child can be proven to be just and necessary, and so can a doctor's professional authority, so those are types of authority that can stay. Anarchism is traditionally left wing and often combined with socialism, communism and direct democracy (= people in town halls/councils directly vote for bills/regulations they support, as opposed to representative democracy, in which people elect representatives to vote for them). Anarchism is against the existence of a state, which it defines as a system in which an elite minority hold a monopoly on the use of violence (police and military violence are okay, but any violence outside of that state-sanctioned violence, such as protesters' violence, is illegal) and a territory over which to exercise that violence. Anarchists would like to replace the state with alternative forms of political organization. These alternative forms generally involve the population more directly in the decision making process, and if representatives are elected, they can be withdrawn at any time. There are too many types of anarchism for me to explain here, but I've got a list if you're interested. (I had a minor 'ism' obsession a while back, wanted to understand them all, like pokemon.)

 

Right wing anarchism is generally called libertarianism, or being an ancap (anarcho-capitalist). It advocates for abolishing the state, but leaving capitalism intact, so everybody can do whatever they want. It does not have the rich multiple century old philosophical history left wing anarchism has, and unlike left-wing anarchism, has never been tried in real life. (Opinion: Somehow, people take this one seriously in the US, with candidates like Gary Johnson actually getting a decent amount of support in national elections.)

 

And we're at the sixth axis, communism versus markets

Communism, at its core, is summed up in the phrase 'from each according to ability, to each according to need.' Meaning, everyone works the jobs they do well, and if they can't work (due to disability or mental health issues or whatever), then they don't have to, and they're still allowed to get what they need. (Opinion: Utopian? Definitely. I'm just explaining what they believe man.) Communism seeks to abolish money and markets. This could either be a planned economy, such as in soviet Russia, or, if resources are abundant, a 'just take what you need from the store and walk out' - society. After all, hunger is a distribution problem, not a production problem.

 

So communism and socialism are not the same thing, and they don't necessarily have to go together, though they could. Socialism is about ownership of the means of production. Communism is about how you distribute resources.

A society in which workers own the means of production, but in which there is still a market economy, is possible (e.g. revolution in Spain 1936.)

There can also be a society in which workers don't own the means of production, but there is no market economy anymore (such as soviet Russia, the workers didn't own the means of production, the state did. But they did have a failing planned economy.)

 

And number seven is nationalism versus internationalism (internationalism is also barely used, again probably because it's the default). 

There are two types of nationalism.

 

The first type of nationalism is the belief that people can be subdivided into nations (which are sort of like ethnicities), that these are unchanging and have existed since forever, and that each such nation deserves to have their own territory and state (a nation-state). Funnily enough, even though we see the existence of nations as the unchanging, self-evident, matter-of-fact state of affairs, nationalism and nation-states have only been around since the 19th century. (read Benedict Anderson's 'Imagined Communities' for more info.)

This type of nationalism is what lead to anti-colonialist movements in places like Indonesia and China. All of the disparate peoples who lived in those territories first had to come together and identify as a single people, before they could beat the colonialists to establish their own nation-state.

 

The second type of nationalism (which is more accurately called ultra-nationalism) is the idea that your own nation is the best, and you should support it to the detriment of other nations. 'America first.'

This one often goes together with right wing populism, and with fascism.

 

Internationalism is countries working together to reach internationals goals. Think of the UN.

Ultra-nationalists might derisively call this globalism or cosmopolitanism. Some suspect 'the global elites' to secretively run the world behind the scenes. (Opinion alert: Some asshats think it's a Jewish conspiracy. Be careful when you encounter the words globalism or cosmopolitanism.)

 

Fascism is not directly opposite to any other political ideology, because it does not have a coherent summarizable political ideology. One thing fascists have in common is a belief in Social Darwinism (= applying the theory of evolution to social relations, only the strongest will survive. Might makes right. Some peoples are inherently better than others.)

Since fascism is super hard to pin down, here's the last part of the conclusion to Robert Paxton's book 'The Anatomy of Fascism,' a man who spent his entire life researching fascism. In case you're interested, I found the whole book online for free.

Spoiler

What Is Fascism?
The moment has come to give fascism a usable short handle, even though we know that it encompasses its subject no better than a snapshot encompasses a person.


Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.


To be sure, political behavior requires choices, and choices—as my critics hasten to point out—bring us back to underlying ideas. Hitler and Mussolini, scornful of the “materialism” of socialism and liberalism, insisted on the centrality of ideas to their movements. Not so, retorted many antifascists who refuse to grant them such dignity. “National Socialism’s ideology is constantly shifting,” Franz Neumann observed. “It has certain magical beliefs—leadership adoration, supremacy of the master race—but [it] is not laid down in a series of categorical and dogmatic pronouncements.”73 On this point, this book is drawn toward Neumann’s position, and I examined at some length in chapter 1 the peculiar relationship of fascism to its ideology—simultaneously proclaimed as central, yet amended or violated as expedient.74 Nevertheless, fascists knew what they wanted. One cannot banish ideas from the study of fascism, but one can situate them accurately among all the factors that influence this complex phenomenon. One can steer between two extremes: fascism consisted neither of the uncomplicated application of its program, nor of freewheeling opportunism.
I believe that the ideas that underlie fascist actions are best deduced from those actions, for some of them remain unstated and implicit in fascist public language. Many of them belong more to the realm of visceral feelings than to the realm of reasoned propositions. In chapter
2 I called them “mobilizing passions”:

  • a sense of overwhelming crisis beyond the reach of any traditional solutions;
  • the primacy of the group, toward which one has duties superior to every right, whether individual or universal, and the subordination of the individual to it;
  • the belief that one’s group is a victim, a sentiment that justifies any action, without legal or moral limits, against its enemies, both internal and external;
  • dread of the group’s decline under the corrosive effects of individualistic liberalism, class conflict, and alien influences; 
  • the need for closer integration of a purer community, by consent if possible, or by exclusionary violence if necessary;
  • the need for authority by natural chiefs (always male), culminating in a national chieftain who alone is capable of incarnating the group’s historical destiny;
  • the superiority of the leader’s instincts over abstract and universal reason;
  • the beauty of violence and the efficacy of will, when they are devoted to the group’s success;
  • the right of the chosen people to dominate others without restraint from any kind of human or divine law, right being decided by the sole criterion of the group’s prowess within a Darwinian struggle.

Fascism according to this definition, as well as behavior in keeping with these feelings, is still visible today. Fascism exists at the level of Stage One within all democratic countries—not excluding the United States. “Giving up free institutions,” especially the freedoms of unpopular groups, is recurrently attractive to citizens of Western democracies, including some Americans. We know from tracing its path that fascism does not require a spectacular “march” on some capital to take root; seemingly anodyne decisions to tolerate lawless treatment of national “enemies” is enough. Something very close to classical fascism has reached Stage Two in a few deeply troubled societies. Its further progress is not inevitable, however. Further fascist advances toward power depend in part upon the severity of a crisis, but also very largely upon human choices, especially the choices of those holding economic, social, and political power. Determining the appropriate responses to fascist gains is not easy, since its cycle is not likely to repeat itself blindly. We stand a much better chance of responding wisely, however, if we understand how fascism succeeded in the past.

 

 

 

 

 

So that was a lot of isms and definitions, but it's only the basics. To really know politics you'd need to dig deep in to international history, while seeing through the biases of the sources you're reading.

And then for each specific contemporary issue you'd need to go through the whole news-reading, bias checking, opinion forming -process again. I can't make that any easier for you, but I hope this helps you build up from the basics :) 

It's hard. It's a lot of effort. I don't think you're the only one struggling to keep up, and it's not a silly question. We can't expect everyone to have the free time to do all of this research on their own, even though it actually is really important that people do know what's going on in the world, because politics influences everyone's lives, and if people aren't politically savvy, then they're easy to manipulate with clever wording in press releases and shit like that, which is disastrous.

On the bright side, it's really interesting once you get in to it. :) On the less bright side, there's a high chance you'll be disillusioned with the state of the world.

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@Laurann - all I am going to say is thank you so much for taking the time to write such an informative post. That is incredibly helpful. I've actually copied it to a word document to print off and read again to make sure it sticks - as you said, a lot of ism's to learn but your descriptions are so concise yet digestible enough for a layman like me to understand! :D I have no doubt your post will be of great value to many others who are looking to get started with learning a bit more about politics and visit this thread. Thank you again!

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@spacecakes I'm glad I could help, but don't take my word as gospel, and do check out that media literacy thing :) 

Media literacy is an essential skill everyone should have in our media-saturated society. (Set it to 2 times speed though, ain't nobody got time to watch 13 YouTube videos of 10 minutes each, 13 videos of 5 minutes is much more doable ;) )

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Mysterywriter221

You can also reach out your local political parties to get their stances on issues. 

 

I recommend getting a new email address for that though. I'm still getting emails from the SNP and I left Scotland in 2015. 

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DarkStormyKnight

I would say pick a decent magazine and start regularly reading it! I'm not in the UK, but I read Time magazine every week since I know it'll give me a good overview of what's going on. Don't just read the titles, read the whole article/issue! Also following political people on social media is a great way to stay up-to-date. 

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