Old but gold. A classic video of Professor Randall Schweller explaining Realism Theory in international relations.
How has studying political science affected your view of the world and its major issues, such as war, conflicts, competition, national and international politics? I'd love to hear your thoughts
I've become a lot more politically engaged over the past year — I follow current events, form opinions, and I genuinely enjoy discussing them. But I keep running into the same pushback from different directions.
With my parents: whenever politics comes up and I point out something factually wrong in what they're saying, it turns into a lecture. They connect my interest in politics to me not clearing NEET, saying it's a distraction. Their argument is that unless I clear something like UPSC and actually hold power, caring about politics is pointless.
With friends at my PG: a casual conversation turned political, and most of the girls didn't want to engage. Their reasoning was similar — discussing it changes nothing since we're not public figures, so it just ends up making us feel worse for no reason.
My counterargument has been that awareness matters, that movements start with ordinary people caring before anyone has formal power, and that refusing to even discuss things doesn't seem reasonable just because we're not in charge.
Honestly, what gets to me more than any single argument is just how apolitical most people around me seem to be. It's not that they disagree with me — they don't even want to engage. At my PG, the moment politics came up, it was an immediate wall: "don't discuss politics here," "not right now," "not this topic" — no one even willing to hear the sentence out. And at home, the second I bring something up, I'm treated like I'm talking nonsense, like I'm just a distracted kid who should shut up and study.
It genuinely makes me sad. This is a country of over a billion people, and it sometimes feels like almost no one wants to actually sit with an uncomfortable topic for five minutes. Caring is treated like the weird thing, and not caring is treated like the mature, responsible default.
The one person who doesn't make me feel this way is my boyfriend. He's someone who actually stays engaged with what's happening around him and cares when people are being hurt or treated unfairly. Talking to him about this stuff feels different — like the caring itself isn't something I have to justify or defend. It's made me realize how rare that is, and how much most of my other conversations feel like I'm the problem just for wanting to talk.
So yeah — maybe I'm asking two questions now: is their "you have no power so why bother" argument reasonable? And separately — am I wrong to feel this disheartened by how few people even want to have the conversation at all?
I've been building a public dashboard that treats the 296 sitting members of South Korea's National Assembly as a graph, and infers edges between them from Korean-language news coverage rather than from roll-call votes. It's live and open source, and I'd genuinely like this sub to poke holes in the method.
What the graph contains right now — 296 Member nodes, 8 Party nodes, 296 affiliation edges, 39 directed sentiment edges (36 conflict, 3 alliance), 368 co-mention edges.
How edges are derived — A nightly job pulls articles from the politics, economy, and society sections of a major Korean news portal and resolves which legislators are named. Name resolution took the most work: Korean given names are short and frequently appear inside unrelated words, so I use longest-match masking plus a boundary check rather than substring matching.
Two different time bases, deliberately — the design decision I'd most like feedback on:
- Relations are cumulative. A conflict, once observed, is never dropped.
- Attention is a 7-day rolling window. News mentions plus log-normalized YouTube views.
Mixing a cumulative measure and a rolling one in one view risks misreading, so each panel carries its window as a visible label and a tooltip. I'm not sure that's sufficient.
Attention scoring — YouTube views are log-compressed (1k → 0, 10M → 100) before being added to the news component, and an article naming n legislators contributes 1/√n to each, so roundup pieces don't inflate everyone equally.
Where I know it's weak — the dataset is new (collection started 2026-08-30, so "cumulative" is days, not years); no inter-coder reliability on the sentiment edges; one news portal; coverage ≠ influence; conflict outnumbers alliance 36:3, which may be real or may be an extraction artifact.
What I'd like input on —
(1) Is media co-occurrence defensible as a complement to vote-based measures like W-NOMINATE, or is coverage bias fatal?
(2) What's the minimum validation before sentiment edges count as data — a hand-coded n=200 with reported kappa?
(3) Has anyone handled the cumulative-vs-rolling presentation problem well?
