Critical thinking; is the policy for promoting turnout effective?

   On Thursday, July 7, 2016, the Washington Monthly published an article titled “What Works to Turn Out Voters?” In this article, the author, Anne Kim, a senior fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute, describes what policies for promoting people to vote on elections are effective with the credible reports of GAO. According to her explanation, same-day voter registration and vote by mail are the most effective policies, and texting of voting center and extended voting hours have potential influence. On the other hand, “Early in-person voting, emails, mailings and robo-calls” showed disappointing results in studies that examined the effectiveness of the policies. However, she emphasizes that even the effective policies do not have significant impact on raising the rate of participation in vote.

     Her argument suggesting broader reforms for promoting turnout to states is agreeable to the low turnout problem of the United states. As what she refers, current policies are limited to one aspect of convenience of voting. Officers might thought that enhancing convenience of voting system seems good solution of this problem, as the convenience in economical scene promote frequency of use. For example, some products’ convenience in real life causes high sales. People even buy expensive but convenient products. Convenient store is also a good example of how convenience can affect significantly to the frequency of use; a number of customers are using convenient store because of its high convenience. Thus, convenience in economy has great impact on frequency of use because it is directly upon daily life. However, elections are not everyday events and in political area, so convenience cannot be a direct reason for voters to vote. In short, the convenience in economy gives the reason why people buy something, whereas the convenience in voting system does not give voters the strong reason why they should vote. 

    Besides, the interventions of states for making voting system more convenient for voters is similar to beg of voters to participate in elections, which can make voters more passive in political events. More serious problem is that the convenient voting system does not appeal to voters significantly. Therefore, the policies for promoting turnout must be what makes citizens participate in vote spontaneously.

     Also, citizen’s interest in politics is the most important factor that must be considered for developing the policies. No matter how easy to vote, voting is still bothersome for politically indifferent citizens. However, more voters will vote on elections if they have strong desire to vote. Think about the people who vote for celebrities. They endure the bothersome in voting joyfully with love for their favorite celebrities. On the other had, attachment to candidates is insufficient to promote people to vote. Thus, it is necessary to make people have their favorite candidates in order to promote them to vote without external push.

Critical thinking; Is the creative thinking really helpful in predicting future terrorism?

     On Wednesday, September 7, 2016, the Congressional Quarterly published an article titled "How creative thinking could help prevent the next 9/11." In this article, the author suggests interesting idea that creative thinking is helpful to predict and prevent terrorism in the future. He gives some examples how the writers’ imagination seem to have predicted the 9/11 terror. It might be true. However, it is not enough to consider the imagination of them as prediction of the 9/11 terror; the stories which imply a terror might be just what people have imagined at least once. A lot of novels might had predicted the 9/11 terror by imagining possible happening or even conjecturing based upon facts, yet no one can sure whether the writers of the novels which imply the terror were really prophets of upcoming hazard or the writers' imagination became true stories after the 9/11 terror had occurred. In short, the author’s idea that creative thinking can be helpful resource of forecasting terrorism has insufficient logical evidence that the idea is true; there is high possibility that the similarity between the stories and 9/11 terror was just a casual coincidence. To make his idea more reliable, he should have given enough evidence that the writers created the stories based on a well-founded conjecture.
    As he said that avoiding the next terrorism is difficult, actually almost impossible, thus, predicting upcoming hazard such as terrorism must be implemented elaborately with reliable facts. Of course, sometimes unscientific thing can be a satisfactory explanation of enigmatic situation, so similar imagination of many people about terrorism could be a starting point of predicting the next one and preparing emergent situation because people might sense an imminent danger unconsciously. However, now, when the threat from terrorism is prevalent in all around the world, especially in America, there are sufficient sources of information which officers of government can refer to in preparing future terrorism. Many terrorists’ identity are disclosed, and they keep on warning their next terrorism plot so that officers can observe their movement closely instead of reading all of the terror stories. Furthermore, even though novels reflect reality and some of these are based on facts, it is not natural that people think a made up story as a prediction of upcoming terror. Also, if the made up stories that seem to foresee terrorism but actually is not true are considered seriously, it can give unnecessary fear to citizens. Therefore, the author’s argument that the highly imaginative people can be America’s “last, best hope” for preventing future terrorism is not likely to persuade his readers. It should be better using the imagination skill to prepare unexpected situation when a terror occurs for protecting citizens from death threats after figuring out and analyzing the movement and intention of terrorists.