So much in our culture emphasises long-term love; it may be time to hear a word or two in praise of the short-term approach.
30 June 2016
Slate: It Can’t Happen Here
These numbers suggest that anti-immigration sentiment drove support for the referendum but wasn’t enough to pass it. On the most generous interpretation, 81 percent of leavers were driven by migration concerns. That translates to 42 percent of the electorate. If you define the anti-immigration vote more narrowly, it was about 30 percent to 45 percent of leavers, which works out to 16 percent to 23 percent of the electorate. You could argue that people who expressed concern about “sovereignty,” “Britain’s ability to make its own laws,” and “Britain’s right to act independently” were really just anti-immigration voters. But that slights their legitimate grievances about the British–EU relationship—an arrangement for which there’s no clear parallel in the United States. And even if you include these people, they don’t boost the anti-immigration “Leave” vote above 40 percent. [...]
These numbers don’t mollify some of Trump’s critics. They worry that pundits have consistently underestimated Trump and that his victory in the Republican primaries, followed by the Brexit vote, shows broad support for his nativist agenda. Brexit suggests that “victory is possible” when “hostility to migrants” is coupled with anti-intellectualism, writes Jonathan Freedland in the New York Review of Books. “There are lessons here aplenty for Americans contemplating their own appointment with nationalist, nativist populism in November.”
That’s true. Brexit is a warning, and we did underestimate Trump before primary season. But in the American electorate as a whole, as opposed to the GOP, there’s no majority for Trump’s views on immigration or ethnicity. [...]
The poll’s GOP respondents broadly support Trump’s agenda. Seventy-three percent say immigration from predominantly Muslim countries is too high or shouldn’t be allowed at all. Sixty-eight percent say the same about immigration from the Middle East. Sixty-six percent want a wall on the Mexican border, 66 percent want a ban on Syrian refugees, 64 percent want a temporary halt to entry by foreign Muslims, and 60 percent favor “a serious effort to deport all illegal immigrants.”
IFLScience: Cracking The Mystery Of The ‘Worldwide Hum’
Deming began by describing the standard history: The Hum was first documented in the late 1960s, around Bristol, England. It first appeared in the United States in the late 1980s, in Taos, New Mexico.
He then examined the competing hypotheses for the source of the Hum. Many have pointed to the electric grid or cellphone towers. But this theory is dismissed on two grounds: cellphones didn’t exist in the 1960s, and the frequency emitted by both cell towers and the electric grid can be easily blocked by metal enclosures.
He wondered whether mass hysteria was to blame, a psychological phenomenon in which rumor and “collective delusions” lead to the appearance of physical ailments for which there’s no medical explanation. The fact that so many people have researched the Hum on their own, using a search engine – rather than hearing about it from some other person – moves the conversation away from delusion and hysteria spread by word of mouth. [...]
The latest update of the Hum Map, from June 6, presents roughly 10,000 map and data points, and we’ve already made some notable findings.
For example, we’ve found that the mean and median age of Hum hearers is 40.5 years, and 55 percent of hearers are men. This goes against the widely repeated theory that the Hum mainly affects middle-aged and older women.
Interestingly, there are eight times as many ambidextrous people among hearers as there are in the general population. As more data are collected from Hum hearers, I hope that specialists in demographics and inferential statistics will be able to generate more detailed result.
Vox: Europe needs a real opposition party
o save itself, the European Union is going to need a real opposition political party: one that can formulate a coherent alternate policy agenda and give dissatisfied voters the opportunity to “throw the bums out” without tearing down the entire institutional edifice they inhabit. [...]
The notion of a “loyal opposition” is in many ways the key innovation in the institutionalization of democracy. The idea is that an organized political movement may object stridently to the agenda of the current governing regime without being seen as disloyal to the state or the nation. This means that incumbent rulers face meaningful electoral accountability. If voters are displeased with their performance, a rival team waits in the wings ready and eager to take over.
Traditionally we think of a loyal opposition as being absent because of repression by the rulers. But the European Union suffers essentially from the opposite problem — too much consensus. [...]
In institutional terms, developing a real opposition party would also require entrenching the idea that the European Commission should be accountable to the European Parliament in the way that a normal national cabinet is accountable to the national parliament.
The Atlantic: The Psychology of Voting to Leave the EU
These feelings help explain why immigration was such a controversial issue during the Brexit campaign, just as it is currently in the U.S. No doubt, xenophobia and racism were motivators for a minority of voters. Jo Cox, a member of Parliament and Remain advocate, was horrifically killed by an avowed racist during the campaign, and attacks on immigrants and minorities spiked 57 percent in the days after the vote. But for the majority of Leave voters, the immigration issue was perceived as one of reciprocity and a loss of control. Rightly or wrongly, many voters felt immigrants have been getting a better deal in terms of jobs, benefits, and public services than they were. They felt immigrants were unfairly “jumping the queue.” And they felt the country had lost control of its borders.
The reason the Remain camp lost was that they didn’t understand the game they were playing. They thought they were playing a rational game, appealing to people’s pocketbooks and sense of security. They fought their campaign with facts and figures and by highlighting the risks of Brexit. But the voters were playing the Ultimatum Game. Leave understood this and fought with promises to “take back control.” Like the Remain campaign, Hillary Clinton is also playing the rational game, appealing to voters’ economic and security self-interest. Donald Trump is the weapon of the altruistic punishers. Clinton needs to recognize that voters are not playing the same game she is. She needs to convince voters that she hears them and will restore the fundamental promises of capitalism and democracy. If she doesn’t, November 11 might be as shocking a day as June 23.
The Guardian: Turkey paying a price for Erdoğan's wilful blindness to Isis threat
The basic problem is that Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Turkey’s president, believes indigenous Kurds in those areas and in south-east Turkey pose a bigger threat than does Isis. This perceived ambivalence has led to numerous accusations of tacit Turkish support for or, worse still, complicity in Isis’s activities since the group swept to prominence in 2014 – all flatly denied by Erdoğan and his ministers.
The mostly unproven accusations, listed in a research paper published by New York’s Columbia University, include claims that predominantly Sunni Muslim Turkey has covertly supplied, trained, financed and assisted the recruitment of Isis’s Sunni fighters in their battles with the Kurds, with Iraq’s Shia-led government, and with the Syrian government, which Turkey opposes. [...]
Kemal Kiliçdaroglu, leader of the main Turkish opposition Republican People’s party (CHP), produced documents and transcripts in 2014 purporting to show that Turkey supplied weapons to terror groups inside Syria. It was suggested the arms went to ethnic Turkmen fighters opposed to Syria’s leader, Bashar al-Assad, not Isis.
Erdoğan’s government has also been accused of supporting – by what means is unclear – an al-Qaida-affiliated Syrian rebel force, Jabhat al-Nusra, which is said to be backed by Turkey’s ally Saudi Arabia but which is proscribed as a terrorist outfit by the US and Britain, also Ankara’s allies.
The Guardian: Brexit: ‘A frenzy of hatred’: how to understand Brexit racism
True Vision, a police-funded hate-crime-reporting website, has seen a 57% increase in reporting between Thursday and Sunday, compared with the same period last month. This is not a definitive national figure – reports are also made directly to police stations and community groups – but Stop Hate UK, a reporting charity, has also seen an increase, while Tell Mama, an organisation tackling Islamophobia, which usually deals with 40-45 reports a month, received 33 within 48-72 hours.
In Great Yarmouth, Colin Goffin, who is vice-principal of an educational trust, was told about taunts and jeers being directed at eastern European workers by 10am on Friday morning – just hours after the results of the referendum had been announced. Goffin went to see a Kosovan-born friend, the manager of a car wash, to discuss the vote. In the Norfolk coastal town, 72% had voted to leave. [...]
Reports of xenophobia and racism have piled up in the media: the firebombing of a halal butchers in Walsall, graffiti on a Polish community centre in London and laminated cards reading: “No more Polish vermin” apparently posted through letterboxes in Huntingdon. Asked about the rise in hate crimes during PMQs on Wednesday, David Cameron said the government would be publishing a hate-crime action plan. [...]
Stop Hate UK’s Rose Simkin cautions that about 80-99% of hate crimes go unreported, making their prevalence hard to estimate. Woolley thinks this could be “because they want to cleanse themselves of the experience and forget that it happened”. Bagguley is confident that after a spike in incidents, things will calm down. Yet he also warns that if these attacks go unchallenged, the damage to our social fabric could be lasting, making attacks more frequent in the future. “It is the residue that is the problem. If people get away with [racist attacks], then the next time there is a reason to have a go, they will.”
AP: Trump's 'America First' echoes old isolationist rallying cry
Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump boils down his foreign policy agenda to two words: "America First."
For students of U.S. history, that slogan harkens back to the tumultuous presidential election of 1940, when hundreds of thousands of Americans joined the anti-war America First Committee. That isolationist group's primary goal was to keep the United States from joining Britain in the fight against Nazi Germany, which by then had overrun nearly all of Europe. But the committee is also remembered for the unvarnished anti-Semitism of some of its most prominent members and praise for the economic policies of Adolf Hitler. [...]
Historians told The Associated Press there are some ideological parallels between Trump's rhetoric on the campaign trail and the positions taken 75 years ago by members of the American First Committee. Then as now, an economic downturn fanned popular resentment toward immigration, especially by those who were not perceived as traditional Americans.
"Building a wall is about the illusion that there can be a physical safeguard to prevent intrusion from alien forces," said Bruce Miroff, a professor who teaches on American politics and the presidency at the State University of New York at Albany. "America First was tapping into suspicion of an ominous other who threatened the American way of life. At that time, it was about Jews. With Trump, it's Muslims and fear of terrorism."
Independent: Spanish PM opposes EU talks with Scotland
The Spanish prime minister, Mariano Rajoy, has said he will oppose any attempts to hold talks with Scotland over its EU membership in the wake of Brexit.
Speaking as Nicola Sturgeon arrived on the second day of an emergency summit in Brussels, Mr Rajoy said that "if the UK goes, Scotland goes too".
Mr Rajoy, who is the acting prime minister after Spain's inconclusive election results at the weekend, said he was "extremely against" the idea of taking Scotland as an independent party. [...]
Ms Sturgeon was due to meet Mr Juncker on Wednesday evening after conversations with the president of the European Parliament, Martin Schulz.
And after that meeting Mr Schulz told reporters she was "at an early stage of this process".
"I have set out Scotland’s desire to protect our relationship with the European Union, I don’t underestimate the challenges that lie ahead for us in seeking to find a path," she said.
Reuters: Supreme Court refuses to hear gay-sex ban challenge
A number of well-known lesbian, gay and bisexual Indians had argued that Section 377 of India's penal code, which prohibits "carnal intercourse against the order of nature with any man, woman or animal", undermined their fundamental rights by failing to protect their sexual preferences.
"The Supreme Court refused to hear the matter and asked the petitioners to approach the Chief Justice of India," Arvind Dattar, a lawyer for one of the petitioners, told Reuters.
India's chief justice is already hearing a separate case to strike down the ban, and the top court has previously argued that only parliament has the power to change Section 377.
AP: EU to Britain: No access to single market without migration
Tusk convened a special EU summit on Sept. 16 in Slovakia's capital Bratislava to work out a plan to keep the EU united. There's a widespread sense that the post-war project to foster peace via trade has become too bureaucratic and undemocratic with not enough meaning for its 500 million citizens. The initial EU founding nations in the west lean toward a tighter, closer union, while newer nations in the east want to keep more control with national governments — notably of their borders. [...]
German Chancellor Angela Merkel said the lesson from Britain's departure isn't necessarily either deeper integration or returning more powers to national governments. She said Wednesday: "this is not about more or less Europe as a principle, but about achieving better results." She said that combating youth unemployment, for example, could involve both scrapping EU directives and deepening European cooperation. [...]
Vodafone, one of Britain's biggest companies, will consider moving its group headquarters because of the vote. The company, which says a majority of its customers are in other EU countries, said in a statement Wednesday that EU membership had been an important factor in its growth, and that free movement of people, goods and capital were integral to any pan-European business.
Salon: The pope’s moral confusion: He should be applauded for his pro-LBGT remarks — but he didn’t go far enough
It’s nice to hear the pope say this, and he ought to be commended for it, but let’s not shower him with praise just yet. First, his distinction between the Church and its members is misleading, and obscures the role of dogmas. The Church is a constellation of the people and the institutions that make it up. It’s individuals who decide and act. It wasn’t “the Church” that used indulgences to pick the pockets of believers, it was Catholics. It wasn’t “the Church” that burned heretics at the stake, it was Catholics. It wasn’t “the Church” that supported fascism in Italy, Spain, Portugal, Croatia, Hungary, and Slovakia, it was Catholics. And it’s not “the Church” that preaches the sinfulness of condom use in AIDS-ravaged Africa, it’s Catholics, including Pope Francis. But the church is culpable for these crimes insofar as it perpetuates the beliefs that motivate them.
The pope is a good man doing his best to turn an archaic institution around, but there’s no avoiding an ugly truth: Christians condemn gay people not because of what they do but because of who they are, and they do so for purely theological reasons. Millions of Christians offer solidarity and love to LGBT people, but that’s an ethical intuition they bring to their faith from outside it. They do what most decent religious people do: pirouette around the parts of the Bible they find violent or regressive. [...]
The Church’s position on homosexuality illustrates why it’s so important to link ethical claims to the reality of human suffering. Religious people often confuse doctrinal obedience with ethical responsibility, but these are different things. There is no ethical reason to judge a gay person on account of his or her homosexuality. And yet religion gives good people bad reasons to do just that. When Francis said gay people need pastoral care, what he means is that they’re fallen and need spiritual guidance. But that assumes they’re broken or defective. What gay people need is what all people need: love. What Francis offered was judgment masquerading as compassion.
The Guardian: UK voted for Brexit – but is there a way back?
The British government has not yet said how parliament should implement the decision to leave. It is not clear, for instance, if and what laws would have to be passed to put the referendum decision to leave the EU into effect.
At present, there is not a majority for Britain to leave the EU in either the House of Commons or the House of Lords. Indeed, given a free vote, the unelected Lords would probably reject Brexit by a margin of six to one. [...]
More plausibly, the Commons might set conditions on the renegotiation, including access to the single market, membership of the European Free Trade Association or the preservation of the union with Scotland. The opportunities to filibuster and delay are innumerable. It is, for instance, disputed whether triggering article 50 requires the authority of parliament. Most legal opinion suggests not, but political necessity may require the endorsement of parliament. [...]
All these scenarios, however, are inherently speculative – and require an accumulator bet coming good – but if you think it is not being discussed in Whitehall and Westminster, you are mistaken.
29 June 2016
FiveThirtyEight: How Many Republicans Marry Democrats?
Evidence abounds that Democrats and Republicans really do not like each other. Researchers have found that they avoid dating one another, desire not to live near one another and disapprove of the idea that their offspring would marry someone outside their party (see here, here, here). Sure, most people are not very political, but among those who are, partisanship seems to be affecting nonpolitical realms of their lives.
That phenomenon motivated a colleague and me to gather data about mixed-partisan marriages. We were curious: How many Americans are married to someone of the other party? Who are these people? Are they old or young? Where do they live? Do they vote? [...]
Second, 55 percent of married couples are Democratic-only or Republican-only, which raises a question: Is that a big number or a small number? In other words, is there more or less partisan intermarriage than we should expect? Here are two ways we try to answer that. We can compare interparty marriages to interracial marriages. Using voter registration data, we can do this in three states, Florida, Louisiana and North Carolina, where public voter files list everyone by their party affiliation and their racial identity. In those states, 11 percent of married couples are in Democratic-Republican households. In comparison, only 6 percent of married couples are in any kind of interracial household. At least in these states, there’s about twice as much interparty marriage as interracial marriage. [...]
If you have an image in your head of a “battleground neighborhood” that is fiercely divided between Democrats and Republicans, you might imagine tension between neighbors. But the truth is that in these neighborhoods, half of the married couples living under the same roof are not one-party pairs. In fact, except in overwhelmingly Democratic neighborhoods (which tend to be African-American neighborhoods), close to half of households are not Democratic-only or Republican-only. This is likely to contribute to a more tempered political climate in battleground areas than we might first expect.
The Huffington Post: "The Only Thing Jesus 'Open Carried' Was the Cross": A Minister Confronts the Gun Industry
When the local minor league baseball team, the Battle Creek Bombers, advertised that one of their home games would be hosting a “2nd Amendment Appreciation Night” that encouraged gun owners to “open carry” at the game, at the same time as they were honoring the Boy Scouts, Rev. Dannison decided it was time to act decisively. He started a petition to boycott the team if they went ahead. Despite the many signatures supporting this action, the team went ahead. [...]
That’s the new strategy of this faith and community movement. Town by town, baseball game by baseball game, and faith commitment by faith commitment we change the image of guns from the way Americans express their “freedom” to the dangerous bondage to the gun industry and its false and idolatrous promises of safety. [...]
“Jesus conquered death. There is no reason for a Christian of good faith to carry a weapon.”
The Week: Is Pope Francis revolutionizing the Catholic Church — or just ad libbing?
If what the pope means is that individual Christians have often treated gays badly, subjecting them to violence, overt discrimination, and abuse, and shown an egregious lack of charity toward them for pretty much the entirety of the past 2,000 years, that is indisputable — as is the contention that an apology for such mistreatment is in order.
But if Francis means that the Roman Catholic Church as an institution owes gays an apology — well, that raises some unsettling issues. [...]
Not only does this mean that the church cannot bless same-sex marriages. It also means that no act of homosexual intercourse is ever acceptable. In order to conform to church teaching, a gay man or woman must embrace celibacy — meaning, he or she must forever renounce any hope of sexual fulfillment or companionship. Because, once again, acting on homosexual desires is always and everywhere gravely immoral, innately sinful, and "objectively disordered."
Pope Francis' suggestion of an apology to gays raises the question of whether he thinks it would be possible for the church to make such an expression of contrition while continuing to affirm and teach this view of homosexuality. I'm just going to go out on a limb and speculate that such an apology would not be especially well received in the gay community.
AP: Israel's security figures take aim at hard-line Netanyahu
Long-serving Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu faces a potentially formidable challenge to his hard-line rule — not from Israel's civilian politicians but instead from its revered security establishment.
An extraordinary array of former top commanders are criticizing Netanyahu in increasingly urgent terms, accusing him of mishandling the Palestinian issue and allying with extremists bent on dismantling Israel's democracy.
On Tuesday, a group representing more than 200 retired leaders in Israel's military, police, Mossad spy service and Shin Bet security agency presented a plan to help end the half-century occupation of the Palestinians through unilateral steps, including disavowing claims to over 90 percent of the West Bank and freezing Jewish settlement construction in such areas. [...]
Following years of failed peace efforts and occasional violence, Israel pulled troops and settlers out of the Gaza Strip in 2005. But in the West Bank, hundreds of thousands of settlers receive an array of subsidies and privileges in what is in effect an Israeli colony. The Palestinian majority there does not have Israeli citizenship and lives under a mix of limited autonomy and Israeli military rule.
The view that this is corrosive is becoming overwhelming across the country's established classes: Beyond the security figures, leaders in academia, the legal system, the media, business and the arts also seem increasingly agitated by the prospect of permanent attachment to millions of restive, politically disenfranchised Palestinians.
Slate: Donald Trump, Defender of the American Worker, Sure Used to Love Outsourcing
Donald Trump just got done giving a speech, staged appropriately in front of a pile of recycled trash, about the evils of trade. This has, of course, been one of his consistent campaign themes—that incompetent (or possibly courrupt) U.S. politicians (especially Bill and Hillary Clinton) have sold out U.S. workers in one bad trade deal after another, and that only he, Donald Trump, is willing to stand up for the interests of American blue-collar workers. (He even had a charming, seemingly ad libbed aside in this speech about how presidents after him might go back to mucking things up.)
Because, like an elephant, the internet never forgets, some writers have been having fun remembering the days when Trump wasn't so sour on the idea of sending jobs overseas. NBC's Alex Seitz-Wald pulled up this 2005 gem from the Trump University blog, titled, “Outsourcing Creates Jobs in the Long Run.” [...]
But it does add to the sense that his opinions on globalization can be a bit mushy, or, you know, hypocritical. Before he was praising Brexit, he once wrote a Davos-pegged op-ed for CNN praising Europe and saying that we'd have to “leave borders behind and go for global unity when it comes to financial stability,” whatever that meant. There's the fact that the anti-immigration demagogue and friend of the American worker happily uses seasonal guest workers at his Florida golf clubs (he says he can't find qualified Americans to work short term, which seems like a fairly weak excuse). Then there are his clothing lines, which are of course made overseas. He says it's difficult to have apparel manufactured here (that'd be true, if he added the words "cheaply" to the end of that sentence). Add it all up, and you get the impression the man might not have cared all too deeply about the plight of middle-class wage earners until recently. Perhaps we should start calling him a born-again protectionist.
The Guardian: Where the streets have new names: the airbrush politics of renaming roads
And when new mayor Manuela Carmena swept to power with the backing of the anti-austerity movement Podemos nine months later, British MPs were said to be up in arms at reports she was planning to wipe Thatcher’s name from the city’s street map.
While Carmena’s office issued a denial, and Plaza Margaret Thatcher still stands in Madrid, the mayor has now set her sights on street names associated with former dictator General Francisco Franco. Policies such as ordering Balthazar in the annual Three Kings parade be played by a black man rather than a white man blacked up, or opening the elite Club de Campo Villa de Madrid to the public, have proved controversial in some quarters, but it is the idea of changing Franco-era street names that has arguably gone deeper and reopened old divisions.
While many streets and squares directly bearing the name of Franco were renamed a decade ago under socialist prime minister José Luis Zapatero’s Historical Memory law, Carmena believes the Popular party of Botella never went far enough in the two and a half decades it ruled Madrid until her surprise victory last June. [...]
It’s not only in Madrid where name changing is a big issue. In Poland, around 1,500 streets, squares and bridges could have their names revised in an effort by the ruling Law and Justice party to “de-communise” the country. [...]
Darran Anderson, author of Imaginary Cities, says that much of our sense of identity and belief is wrapped up in signs and symbols. “Once you decide to name a street after a person or an event, rather than topography, you’ve started something intrinsically political and subjective,” he says. “When we fail to look at what existed previously and why, we rob ourselves of context and roots.”
Jacobin Magazine: Die Linke: Ten Years On
The refugee crisis gave Die Linke a unique opportunity to articulate a principled, leftist response that connects antiracist and antifascist groups to the national pro-refugee movement.
Although the party largely continues to maintain a firm open borders stance, it has not been proactive in any real sense, outmaneuvered by Angela Merkel’s surprisingly humane policies in the crisis’s first months. [...]
It is an irony of recent German history that Die Linke figures with no influence over policy call for restrictions and deportations, while those with power publicly advocate open borders while quietly cooperating with the state’s deportation program in the background. But looking back at the party’s formation helps to understand this fault line.
Die Linke is both part of a broad European trend and uniquely German. Like other new left parties, its social and political base rests on a crisis of class representation and a rising but uneven wave of social protest that began in the early 2000s.
These European parties are — to a greater or lesser extent — contradictory formations, described by Daniel Bensaid as “part of a range of forces polarized between resistance and the social movements, on the one hand, and the temptation of institutional respectability, on the other.” [...]
Rather than pandering to chauvinism or trying to minimize the injury of deportation by having a “left government” carry them out more humanely, Die Linke ought to defend refugee rights as a matter of principle, while continuing to develop a popular narrative that links the current situation with wider international and social questions to win over disenfranchised German workers.
The Guardian: Ignored by the authorities, emboldened by Brexit, Europe’s far right is a real danger
Extreme rightwing terrorism has been a growing problem in Europe for some time. A recent study by a consortium led by the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) highlighted that when looking at the phenomenon of “lone actor” terrorism in particular (terrorist acts conducted by individuals without any clear direction from an outside group), the extreme right wing was responsible for as many as Islamist extremists. And not all were random one-off killers – Anders Breivik was able to butcher 77 people in a murderous rampage in Norway. What was particularly worrying was the fact that these individuals sat at the far end of a spectrum of extremists that included elements closer to the mainstream. [...]
The response from security forces has been mixed. While we have seen an apparent increase in extreme rightwing violence, there has been less attention paid to it by authorities. In the RUSI-led research, a particularly striking finding was that in about 40% of cases of far-right extremists, they were uncovered by chance – the individual managed to blow himself up or was discovered while authorities conducted another investigation. By contrast, around 80% of violent Islamist lone actors were discovered in intelligence-led operations – in other words, the authorities were looking for them. [...]
The concern from this phenomenon must now be twofold. On the one hand, the increasing mainstreaming of a xenophobic anti-immigrant narrative will feed the very “clash of civilisations” narrative that groups such as al-Qaida and Isis seek to foster – suggesting that there is a conflict between Islam and the west which they are at the heart of. It will only strengthen this sense and draw people towards them.
The Guardian: Benedict endorses Pope Francis in unprecedented Vatican ceremony
Benedict XVI has endorsed Pope Francis’s ministry in an unprecedented Vatican ceremony featuring a reigning pontiff honouring a retired one on the 65th anniversary of his ordination as a priest.
The ceremony in the Clementine Hall of the Apostolic Palace served in part to show continuity from Benedict to Francis amid continued nostalgia from some conservatives for the former’s tradition-minded papacy. [...]
While Francis presided, it was Benedict who stole the show with an off-the-cuff mini theology lesson sprinkled with Greek and Latin that showed that the mind of the German theologian is still going strong at 89.
In it, Benedict thanked Francis for letting him live out his final years in the beauty of the Vatican gardens, where he said he felt protected.
Business Insider: Russia thinks the US government is using Netflix to get into its people's heads
You might joke that Netflix is taking over the world, but to Russian Culture Minister Vladimir Medinsky, it is no joke.
In an interview with news service The Rambler, translated by The Moscow Times, Medinsky suggested that the US government is funneling money to exert American power across the globe. [...]
The idea of using “soft power,” and specifically American culture, to further the American political agenda is not a new one. But Medinsky seems to also fundamentally not believe that the Silicon Valley system of venture capital could exist.
That said, if the goal of Netflix is to exert control over Russian minds, it might not be doing a particularly good job. Netflix launched in Russia in January, and research from UBS in April suggested that interest in the service might be lackluster.
euobserver: Poland to push for 'radical' new EU treaty
The EU should have a new treaty that shifts power from the European Commission to EU states and Jean-Claude Juncker and Donald Tusk should resign, Poland has indicated ahead of Tuesday’s (28 June) summit.
Polish foreign minister Witold Waszczykowski told press on Monday that prime minister Beata Szydlo would likely outline Poland’s post-Brexit vision at the leaders’ dinner. [...]
Speaking the same day in an interview with the Rzeczpospolita daily, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the powerful head of the ruling Law and Justice party (PiS), said mounting euroscepticism in countries such as France and the Netherlands showed that “the vision of the EU forced upon us by the Lisbon Treaty has failed”. [...]
Other Polish politicians criticised Kaczynski's ideas, however.
Wlodzimierz Cimoszewicz, a left-wing former Polish PM, warned that there is no appetite in the EU for a new treaty. “These proposals are senseless, because they amount to an invitation for a no-holds-barred [political] scrap”.
Ryszard Petru, an economist who founded the liberal Modern party, predicted the EU would split into three zones: the eurozone, pro-EU countries outside the euro, and “almost-out of the EU” states such as Hungary and Poland.
Politico: What the EU will tell David Cameron
That question of how quickly and dramatically to react has divided the other 27 EU countries and even the European institutions. Should they start the divorce process immediately or give Britain time to sort out its internal politics before difficult negotiations on the way forward can begin? [...]
For the summit Tuesday and Wednesday — and also for the foreseeable future — the Brexit vote has forced other important issues off the table: migration, security policy, the European economy. Talks on those matters usually fill up a summit; on Tuesday they will be shoehorned into a three-hour opening session during which most leaders will undoubtedly be impatient to get to the big question: What now?
Here’s a tour de table of what several of the countries are likely to tell Cameron:
The New Yorker: How to Steal an Election
Early American Presidential elections were not popular elections, not only because the vote was mainly restricted to white male property owners but also because delegates to the Electoral College were elected by state legislatures. The legislative caucus worked only as long as voters didn’t mind that they had virtually no role in electing the President, a situation that lasted for a while since, after all, most people living in the United States at the time were used to having a king. But a new generation of Americans objected to this arrangement, dubbing it “King Caucus.” “Under what authority did these men pretend to dictate their nominations?” one citizen asked in 1803. “Do we send members of Congress to cabal once every four years for president?” New states entering the union held conventions to draft state constitutions, in which they adopted more democratic arrangements. This put pressure on old states to revise their own constitutions. By 1824, eighteen out of twenty-four states were holding popular elections for delegates to the Electoral College. Between 1824 and 1828, the electorate grew from fewer than four hundred thousand people to 1.1 million. Men who had attended the constitutional convention in 1787 shook their gray-haired heads and warned that Americans had crowned a new monarch: “King Numbers.” [...]
Populism is very often a very clever swindle. But since 1831, with only one exception—the Whigs in 1836—every major party has nominated its Presidential candidate at a Convention. [...]
The rise of the primary was a triumph for Progressive reformers, who believed that primaries would make elections more accountable to the will of the people. That didn’t quite come to pass. Instead, primaries became part of the Jim Crow-era disenfranchisement of newer members of the electorate. Frederick Douglass addressed Republicans at a Convention in Cincinnati in 1876, asking, “The question now is, Do you mean to make good to us the promises in your constitution?” Sarah Spencer, of the National Woman Suffrage Association, was less well received at that Convention, which marked the centennial of the Declaration of Independence. “In this bright new century, let me ask you to win to your side the women of the United States,” Spencer said. She was hissed. In 1880, Blanche K. Bruce—a former slave, a delegate from Mississippi, and a U.S. senator—served as an honorary vice-president of the Republican Convention, and wielded the gavel.
28 June 2016
Quartz: The “reverse Greenland”: One solution that could prevent dismantling the United Kingdom after Brexit
While the political dust settles, leaders in Scotland and Gibraltar are also looking at another, more middle-ground option: a federated membership of the UK, which they hope will allow them to retain their EU status whilst still remaining within the United Kingdom.
Senior figures in the Scottish Labour party are reportedly consulting with constitutional lawyers to look into a new federal system. And it’s not just devolved regions interested, the Labour initiative is also exploring whether the federal system could also be applied to English regions that voting to stay in the EU, such as London. The mayor, Sadiq Khan, has acknowledged that the British capital needs more say. [...]
There is perhaps some precedent for this proposed federal system. The Danish Realm is made up of three countries: Denmark, Greenland, and the Faroe Islands. Denmark joined the European Economic Community, the predecessor to the EU, in 1973. By 1979, Greenland gained autonomy from Denmark and seceded from the EU in 1985. The Faroe Islands have also chosen to remain outside the EU.
Salon: The geography of Brexit: Britain’s referendum reveals a United Kingdom that’s anything but
For the past 30 years the principal aim of government economic policy has been, arguably, to protect London’s position, particularly as a financial center, while leaving the rest of the country largely ignored. In the U.K. version of trickle-down economics, London is the golden goose whose droppings fertilize the rest of the country. In reality there was not much trickle and the U.K., like the U.S., is becoming a more unequal society.
There is a spatial dimension to this social inequality. The U.K. has the most marked regional inequality in Europe. The rich and wealthy are concentrated in London and the South East where household incomes are higher than the rest of the country. As the U.K. became a more unequal and divided society, the cleavage between London and the South East compared to the rest of the country is becoming more marked. [...]
What happened? The EU provided benefits to Scotland that the London-biased U.K. government did not. Scotland’s political culture, it turns out, is closer to the EU than that of London-based Tories. And years of punishing Thatcher rule in the 1980s soured many in Scotland against a reliance on the U.K. political system. The EU softened the neoliberalism of English Tory rule.
The Washington Post: Why Iran was so quick to praise Brexit
While the international community squirmed in distress when Britain voted to leave the European Union, there was one country which was quick to voice its optimism: Iran. Even though only a few Iranian political and military leaders decided to speak about Brexit, the ones who did expressed support and even enthusiasm for the referendum. [...]
Some Iranian officials see a Britain outside of the E.U. as a major geopolitical reshuffle that might give the country more leverage in a political environment that has historically been against them. [...]
Though they haven't gone into detail, it's possible to speculate that some Iranian officials were thrilled with the announcement for economic reasons. Europe is an important trading partner with Iran. And as an emerging market, some Iranian officials believe that they stand to benefit from business opportunities. In addition to having an easier time making business deals with individual European countries such as Italy, Greece or Spain, as Buzzfeed's Borzou Daragahi points out, Britain might also stand to benefit.
Forbes: How Europe Was Lost: Five Ways The 'Remain' Campaign Failed In Britain's European Union Referendum
What are the answers to these questions? Mostly, they have not been articulated or done so without conviction or passion. Instead, there have been threats of emergency budgets, defensive manoeuvres over immigration and a barely defended war of words over the alleged undemocratic nature of the EU. No wonder many of the electorate now say they did not know what the vote was all about. [...]
There should have been a mission, a reforming zeal, a continued passion for the European project – something that’s unparalleled in the history of the continent. Britain leads the world’s advertising industry. What were none of its brand message leaders up to the task of getting the message right? [...]
The lack of a powerful, positive Remain campaign meant its cause was constantly playing a defensive catch-up game to the other side’s agenda. “Leave” fought with conviction on issues that it knew mattered to people. Immigration, with its alleged effects on jobs and housing was allowed to move to center stage, while the constant mantra that the EU is undemocratic was so successful that it passed into public parlance without much debate. [...]
The resulting uncertainty is clear to see in the stock and currency markets’ reaction to the vote. Yet it would not have been difficult to have put much better contingency plans in place.
The Washington Post: Brexit is not just Europe’s problem. It highlights a crisis in democracies worldwide.
Britain’s political system remained in turmoil Monday, virtually leaderless and with the two major parties divided internally. But the meltdown that has taken place in the days after voters decided to break the country’s ties with Europe is more than a British problem, reflecting an erosion in public confidence that afflicts democracies around the world.
Last Thursday’s Brexit vote cast a bright light on the degree to which the effects of globalization and the impact of immigration, along with decades of overpromises and under-delivery by political leaders, have undermined the ability of those officials to lead. This collapse of confidence has created what amounts to a crisis in governing for which there seems no easy or quick answer. [...]
The seeds of what has brought Britain to this moment exist elsewhere, which makes this country’s problems the concern of leaders elsewhere. In Belgium and Brazil, democracies have faced crises of legitimacy; in Spain and France, elected leaders have been hobbled by their own unpopularity; even in Japan, where Prime Minister Shinzo Abe faces no threat from the opposition, his government has demonstrated a consistent inability to deliver prosperity.
Anthony King, a professor of politics at the University of Essex, said the underlying factor is that many people no longer believe that, however imperfect things are economically, they will keep getting better.
The Jerusalem Post: NGO transparency bill moves towards final vote
The bill, a combination of a Justice Ministry proposal and initiatives by MKs Bezalel Smotrich (Bayit Yehudi) and Robert Ilatov (Yisrael Beytenu), states that any non-profit organization that receives more than half of its funding from a foreign political entity must write as much on any publication or letter to elected officials or civil servants.
In addition, a list of the NGOs falling under the bill’s purview, as well as the countries from which they received donations, must be posted on the Non-Profit Registrar’s website. [...]
Ahead of the referendum in the UK over leaving the EU, Regavim, an organization that Smotrich headed before taking elected office, launched a campaign in favor of what has been nicknamed “Brexit,” arguing that a weaker EU is better for Israel. Regavim combats illegal use of Israeli land, in some cases by Palestinians funded by the EU. The NGO has received payment from local authorities in the West Bank for its services. [...]
Constitution Committee chairman Nissan Slomiansky (Bayit Yehudi) pointed out that the bill is different from how it was originally proposed.
For example, Smotrich’s version of the bill would have required representatives of foreign-government-funded NGOs to wear brightly colored named tags while in the Knesset, like lobbyists do, but that clause was removed.
VICE: Post-Brexit, Britain's Still Racist as Ever
As the ripple effect of last Thursday's referendum result spread across the country, you may have noticed a sudden uptick in stories about alleged racist and/or xenophobic incidents. There was that one in west London, where the police were called to a Polish cultural center to investigate "allegedly racially motivated criminal damage"—graffiti a spokesperson for the center described as "really unpleasant." [...]
This all may be true; it makes sense that racists and xenophobes will be buoyed by the victory of what was a largely racist and xenophobic campaign—that they will feel more comfortable voicing their prejudices. However, as any non-white British person who has lived in the UK will already know, these kind of incidents are sadly nothing new. On any day of the week at any given time, someone who knows nothing about you may stop and demand your ethnic credentials. They might ask about your background, your "people," where you're "really from." Or they might ask to touch your hair, follow you around a shop, or, as I had the pleasure of experiencing in December last year, spit on you in the street and call you a black bitch. [...]
Putting vocally racist people "back in the box" won't work. This is a time when we in the UK need to have a frank and honest discussion about race and ethnicity, in which we actually listen to each other. People are scared—they're worried about job security, school places, waiting times at hospitals—and will continue to scapegoat others based on ethnicity until we unpack both the roots of prejudice and the real reasons life has been getting harder for so many of us, starting with the impacts of Thatcherism on British manufacturing and moving on to ensuing welfare cuts.
AP: Intolerant acts surge as British referendum result sinks in
In the wake of last Thursday's vote to leave the European Union, Britain has seen a surge in xenophobia expressed in taunts, threats and worse. For many, foreign- and native-born, the U.K. has suddenly become much scarier place.
"Before Friday we lived in a tolerant society," said Oana Gorcea, a 32-year-old Romanian who has lived in Britain since she was a teenager. "I've been here 13 years, but I've never felt like I had to hide where I came from. But from Friday, things completely changed." [...]
British reporters across the country have seen the resurgence of racism up close and personal. Adam Boulton, a presenter for Britain's Sky News, posted a message to Twitter saying he and his family had witnessed three separate incidents of when-are-you-going-home?-style abuse aimed at Europeans over the weekend. Channel Four's Ciaran Jenkins said that within a five-minute span in the northern England town of Barnsley, three people had shouted "Send them home!" BBC reporter Sima Kotecha said that she was in "utter shock" after having returned home to the southern England town of Basingstoke and been abused with a racial slur she hadn't heard "since the 80s." [...]
For the victims, the link between the referendum and the abuse is clear. Immigration was a key issue in the campaign, with Farage posing in front of a massive, truck-drawn poster carrying a photograph of hundreds of swarthy migrants under the words "Breaking Point." Many "leave" voters cited the influx of foreigners as a top concern.
Deutsche Welle: Germany seeks UN Security Council seat again
In a foreign policy speech in Hamburg on Monday, Steinmeier announced that Germany would campaign for a non-permanent seat in 2019 and 2020. The country last held a Security Council seat from 2011 to 2012.
Diplomats will seek support for Germany's candidacy before an election is held in mid 2018. Germany's application would require approval from at least two thirds of the 193 states in the UN General Assembly to be successful. [...]
But he also used his speech to once again criticize the UN body as out of date, vowing to seek further reform - along with India, Brazil and Japan.
Los Angeles Times: European leaders scramble for a solution to 'Brexit' crisis
Johnson, who is thought to have the inside track to succeed David Cameron as prime minister, called the majority verdict “not entirely overwhelming” in an op-ed in the Sunday Telegraph, his first extended comment on a vote that has come near to propelling him into 10 Downing Street. But he was also cautious the day after the vote, when he said there was “no need for haste” in following through on it. “Nothing will change in the short term,” he said. [...]
“Our responsibility is not to lose time in dealing with the question of the U.K.’s exit and the questions for the 27 [remaining EU members],” said French President Francois Hollande, who met with Merkel and Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi in Berlin.
Before flying to the German capital, Renzi gave a speech to Parliament in Rome urging a speedy start to the process. He also said Brexit could be a golden opportunity to create an ever-closer union without Britain, which he said had impeded integration in the past.
The Guardian: China 'bans Lady Gaga' after Dalai Lama
Lady Gaga has reportedly been added to a list of hostile foreign forces banned by China’s Communist party after she met with the Dalai Lama to discuss yoga. [...]
Following Lady Gaga’s meeting, the Communist party’s mysterious propaganda department issued “an important instruction” banning her entire repertoire from mainland China, Hong Kong’s pro-democracy newspaper Apple Daily reported on Monday.
Chinese websites and media organisations were ordered to stop uploading or distributing her songs in a sign of Beijing’s irritation, the newspaper said. [...]
“Lady Gaga knew how Beijing would react,” Bill Bishop, who runs the Sinocism newsletter, wrote on Twitter. “Good for her to show some courage, unlike most celebrities who are scared of bullying Beijing now.”
The New Yorker: On Brexit, the 2016 Euro Championship, and Trump
The parallels with the Trump campaign could not be more obvious. Trump praised Brexit as a resounding revolt against “rule by the global élite.” White working-class voters, ignored or disdained by the richer, better-educated political class, seem to have decided that, since Europe was doing very little for them, they had nothing to lose by leaving it. (Nor did love letters from Julie Delpy, arguments by Nobel laureates, threats by George Soros, or pleas by David Beckham and Bob Geldof make any difference.) You can imagine a similar conclusion if American voters were asked to decide what Washington was doing for them, and whether to revert to states’ rights on everything. And how eerie that, just as in current American political life, it was President Obama—brought in by Prime Minister David Cameron to tell the British that they would be at the back of the line if they left the E.U.—who became the bogeyman in the British war of the populists against the élites. In a Fox News-style turn, the economists and politicians were written off by Michael Gove, one of the leading Brexiteers, as “experts,” of whom “the British people are sick.” [...]
Of course, both the Brexit campaign and the Trump movement have tended to coalesce around the threat of immigration. In both cases, there are two streams of anxiety. One is economic: poorer, hungrier, more eager workers from nearby countries (Mexico; or Poland, Slovakia, Spain) are taking jobs that somehow “belong” to native populations (even if those native people seem disinclined to do them) and are swallowing up much-needed public resources, like education and health care. The second anxiety is cultural and religious—which is to say, fear of Islam. Would the Brexiteers have achieved their small majority without the migrants from Syria, and Angela Merkel’s hospitality toward them? It’s doubtful. Farage’s right-wing ukip produced a scandalous poster, with the words “BREAKING POINT: The EU has failed us all.” It showed a photograph, from 2015, of a massive, snaking crowd of Syrian migrants, mostly young men, at the Slovenian border. The implication was raucously clear, just as it is when Trump regularly inflates the number of Syrian immigrants admitted by the Obama Administration: they are swamping us.
At the same time, leaders of the Brexit campaign seem to want Britain to remain part of a common market, if not part of an overweening political bureaucracy. This makes sense, since most of them are members of the Conservative Party, people committed (as was Margaret Thatcher, who campaigned for British entry into the European Common Market, in 1975) to free enterprise. But wouldn’t a single market entail the more or less free movement of labor—the Briton who goes off to work in Paris, the Greek who comes to teach in Bristol? Asked this very question on TV, a day after the momentous vote, Daniel Hannan, a Conservative member of the European Parliament and leading pro-Brexit campaigner, conceded as much. He was, he said, in favor of the free movement of labor, but keen to reduce unemployed European citizens’ automatic right to free British services. We could be like Norway, he said, a country that never joined the E.U. When an exasperated interviewer suggested that this vision was completely at odds with the dark threats of his campaign, and its promise to “control” immigration to Britain, he replied that leaving the E.U. was never likely to have had a drastic effect on immigration levels. And notice the entirely expected conclusion of such a Norwegian-style compromise: the “acceptable” immigrant, such as the French banker who arrives in London with a generous contract in hand, gets to stay, while the eager but unemployed Pole, just looking for work in a richer country like the U.K., gets screwed. And the Syrian refugee, unaffected by Brexit, comes anyway.
27 June 2016
The New Yorker: Casual Sex: Everyone Is Doing It
Up to eighty per cent of college students report engaging in sexual acts outside committed relationships—a figure that is usually cast as the result of increasingly lax social mores, a proliferation of alcohol-fuelled parties, and a potentially violent frat culture. Critics see the high rates of casual sex as an “epidemic” of sorts that is taking over society as a whole. Hookup culture, we hear, is demeaning women and wreaking havoc on our ability to establish stable, fulfilling relationships. [...]
The Casual Sex Project was born of Vrangalova’s frustration with this and other prevalent narratives about casual sex. “One thing that was bothering me is the lack of diversity in discussions of casual sex,” Vrangalova told me in the café. “It’s always portrayed as something college students do. And it’s almost always seen in a negative light, as something that harms women.” [...]
This last theory relates to another of Vrangalova’s findings—one that, she confesses, came as a surprise when she first encountered it. Not all of the casual-sex experiences recorded on the site were positive, even among what is surely a heavily biased sample. Women and younger participants are especially likely to report feelings of shame. (“I was on top of him at one point and he can’t have forced me to so I must have consented . . . I’m not sure,” an eighteen-year-old writes, reporting that the hookup was unsatisfying, and describing feeling “stressed, anxious, guilt and disgust” the day after.) There is an entire thread tagged “no orgasm,” which includes other occasionally disturbing and emotional tales. “My view has gotten a lot more balanced over time,” Vrangalova said. “I come from a very sex-positive perspective, surrounded by people who really benefitted from sexual exploration and experiences, for the most part. By studying it, I’ve learned to see both sides of the coin.”
Part of the negativity, to be sure, does originate in legitimate causes: casual sex increases the risk of pregnancy, disease, and, more often than in a committed relationship, physical coercion. But many negative casual-sex experiences come instead from a sense of social convention. “We’ve seen that both genders felt they were discriminated against because of sex,” Vrangalova told me. Men often feel judged by other men if they don’t have casual sex, and social expectations can detract from the experiences they do have, while women feel judged for engaging in casual experiences, rendering those they pursue less pleasurable.
The Guardian: The global order is dying. But it’s an illusion to think Britain can survive without the EU
If there is a sense of flux in British politics this week, that is because all the forces are aligning towards two antagonistic projects: those who want to intensify the economic dislocation, and those who want to minimise it. I am in favour of minimising it, and there is a very clear vehicle through which to do so: the European Economic Area – the single market in which Norway and Iceland participate. In the battle to succeed Cameron, the first question for the Tory party (and Labour) should be: EEA or not?
An application to remain inside the EEA should be the touchstone of all those who want Britain to save globalisation while ditching neoliberalism. It keeps us in a single market; it forces us to define our new immigration policy inside the EU free-movement laws, not against them. We could fight for – and gain – considerable flexibility on which single market rules we follow, and for a timeout or partial opt-out from free movement. We might, of course, fail. But it is worth trying. [...]
In the 1930s, economic nationalism meant stealing what growth there was from a rival country, or empire, through aggressive state intervention and trade rivalry. But we have no model, and no case study, for what happens if you pursue economic nationalism when there is system-wide stagnation. That is, where there is a guaranteed negative sum at the end of the game.
Bloomberg: Markets Were Rational, But U.K. Voters Weren't
Markets, which aren't ideological but do provide a daily reference of relative value, weren't buying it. The euro gained 9.4 percent in the second half of 2010 and advanced another 11.9 percent through 2015 when 19 countries accepted it as their national store of value. Last year, when another Greek government was back in the headlines reportedly on the verge of default and soon to exit the euro, the investor George Soros said Greece was going down the drain. During this time the yield on the benchmark Greek bond never got close to its 2012 low yield of 30 percent, instead fluctuating between 7 percent and 18 percent. Greek debt, protected by the shared European currency, proved to be the best investment globally from July through the end of 2015, Bloomberg data show. [...]
But Britons' vote to leave the EU is unlike any other event in modern times. Investors didn't imagine a majority of voters choosing a result that proved unprecedented in its immediate and devastating impact on the British pound. The scope of this misjudgment, derived from a combination of complacency and wishful thinking, was revealed in minutes. While sterling suffered its biggest one-day decline since 1980 on June 24, the 8.05 percent loss was almost twice that of Sept. 16, 1992, the so-called Black Wednesday, when the Conservative government was forced to withdraw the pound from the European Exchange Rate Mechanism against a tide of speculation led by Soros. The toll of Thursday's vote on the pound was more than double any of the eight worst days since 1981, and its almost 13 percent reversal in less than a week dwarfed any of the previous currency debacles, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
Politico: France and Germany hatch a plan to save EU
So far, the ideas haven’t been endorsed by Angela Merkel’s chancellory, where officials urged caution. Merkel, whose center-right alliance governs in a grand coalition with the Social Democrats, doesn’t believe such proposals can be rushed out or that they should be pushed without including all remaining EU members. Whether Europe’s Social Democrat leaders, who are meeting on Monday in Paris to coordinate their Brexit response, can push their agenda against Merkel’s resistance is doubtful.
The idea behind the Franco-German initiative is to focus cooperation on areas such as security, foreign policy, border control, the digital agenda, energy, transportation and eurozone governance, but shift other decision-making to national capitals. [...]
The overall goal is to try to play to the perceived EU strengths in foreign policy and security cooperation, giving it a more visible role on the global stage.
The EU’s foreign policy chief, Federica Mogherini, touched on this new direction in the foreword to a new “Global Strategy” she will present this week to European leaders at a summit.
Business Insider: The Brexit may not even ever happen
Nigel Farage, the leader of the U.K. Independence Party, spent Friday morning distancing himself from the "Leave" campaign's promise that Britain's EU funds would be redirected to the National Health Service; and Tory European Parliament member Daniel Hannan admitted that renegotiating Britain's relationship with the EU wouldn't actually decrease immigration. [...]
The United Kingdom's withdrawal from the EU can't happen until the country sends the EU an "Article 50 notification," a formal announcement that it intends to withdraw. That notification starts a two-year countdown during which Britain and Europe negotiate the terms of their separation. At the end of two years, regardless of the state of those negotiations, Britain's out.
So who sends the notification, and when? Neither the EU charter nor the Brexit referendum specifies. (The vote was nonbinding, although both sides assured voters their decision would be implemented.) Prime Minister David Cameron could plausibly have done it on Friday, but he didn't. Such a step, he said, should be taken by his successor (probably Johnson). [...]
Perhaps Johnson-or pro-"Remain" Tory MP Theresa May, or whoever else succeeds Cameron-will make a point of delivering the notification on his or her first day in office. And if the "Leave" crowd is still riding high, that's what will happen. But that doesn't seem to be the way things are going-which is why, even after a referendum that has paused global markets and unseated a prime minister, there's a strong chance that there will never be a Brexit.
Daily Dot: The top six plot twists in British politics after the Brexit referendum
People have been comparing the post-referendum fallout to Game of Thrones, a clichéd but worryingly accurate parallel. This story has everything: feuding aristocrats, racism, international rivalries, and the collapse of a once-great empire. It's also unfolding very fast, so here's a quick guide to the key events from this weekend. [...]
On the day after the referendum, leaders of the Leave campaign quickly began to sidestep their promises about transferring that mythical £350 million to the NHS. UK Independence Party leader Nigel Farage described it as "a mistake," while the prominent Conservative politician Iain Duncan Smith said the figure was "an extrapolation." [...]
This one is more of an outlier than Scottish independence, not least because of the political complexities in the region. Aside from the fact that people in Northern Ireland were more likely to vote Remain in the referendum, it's the only part of the U.K. that has a land border with Europe. Would the Republic of Ireland (which is part of the EU, and uses the Euro) have to set up border checkpoints between itself and Northern Ireland? Could the two halves of Ireland potentially reunify into a single state? Basically, nobody knows. But over the past few days, a lot of U.K. citizens have started thinking about applying for Irish passports, just in case.
Deutsche Welle: Scotland to do 'whatever it takes' to stay in EU
"What's going to happen with the UK is that there are going to be deeply damaging and painful consequences ... [of Britain leaving the EU] I want to try and protect Scotland from that," Sturgeon said Sunday.
Asked whether she would consider requesting the Scottish parliament to block its consent for the move, she told the BBC: "Of course." [...]
But one analyst has suggested that Scotland could declare independence before Britain's departure from the EU is finalized.
It could then define itself as a "successor state" and effectively inherit Britain's EU membership, including the budget rebate, said Andrew Scott, a professor of European Union studies at the University of Edinburgh.
Deutsche Welle: 'Apart from Erdogan, there is a great, modern Turkey'
Can Dundar: I'll summarize what I said with a few items: One, the agreement that you forged with Turkey is a shameful agreement and Europe will be ashamed of this down the road. Two, this agreement is not working anymore. You aren't granting visa exemption, Turkey is not moving towards changing (terror) laws, and, as far as I can see, Europe does not have a plan B. Three, Turkey does not exclusively consist of Erdogan - you are making this mistake. In fact, apart from Erdogan, there is a great, modern Turkey that believes in Western values, democracy, the rule of law and press freedom, and you are disregarding it. This is the Turkey that needs to be supported and that Europe needs. [...]
There are lots of problems, but Erdogan is at the outset of all of these problems. On multiple levels, we have never faced such an oppressive leader in our history. We are facing a leader who disregards the law, does not attach importance to democracy and has nearly exported this understanding to Europe. Turkey's sole problem is not Erdogan, but its biggest problem is Erdogan.
The Guardian: Pope Francis says Christians should apologise to gay people
“I think that the Church not only should apologise … to a gay person whom it offended but it must also apologise to the poor as well, to the women who have been exploited, to children who have been exploited by (being forced to) work. It must apologise for having blessed so many weapons.” [...]
The pope did not elaborate on what he meant by seeking forgiveness for the Church “having blessed so many weapons”, but it appeared to be a reference to some religious leaders who actively backed wars in the past.
In other parts of the conversation, Francis said he hoped the European Union would be able to give itself another form after the United Kingdom’s decision to leave. [...]
Francis said he had heard that when some Church officials had gone to Benedict to complain that Francis was too liberal, Benedict “sent them packing”.
Quartz: The simple reason so many US businesses openly support LGBT rights
The “competitive edge” pertains both to commodities and labor. Reflecting upon the hundreds of businesses that supported the marriage equality movement, Todd Sears, the founder of Out Leadership, explains how company cohesion and sustainability is linked to employee equality. “Businesses that had already adopted policies that treated every employee equally [prior to marriage equality in 2015] saw the negative effects of a state-based patchwork policy on marriage equality,” he said. “It complicated their strategies and made it more difficult to locate talent in states that lacked protections for married LGBT couples.” [...]
“We’re already seeing that businesses are standing up for equality when it comes to the Religious Freedom Restoration Acts and other discriminatory legislation that are rapidly proliferating in states around the country,” Todd observes. “In Indiana, opposition from the business community forced the government to back down from the RFRA they passed last year; in Georgia, Governor Deal listened to the voice of business and vetoed the bill that came before him.” [...]
Importantly, allies are also incredibly attentive to corporate treatment of the LGBT community. The Center for Talent Innovation’s 2016 report, Out in the World: Securing LGBT Rights in the Global Marketplace, found that “71% of LGBT individuals and 82% of allies say they are more likely to purchase a good or service from a company that supports LGBT equality.”
26 June 2016
The Guardian: Scotland did not want to leave the EU. But we may want to leave the UK
My partner voted no in the independence referendum, like many on the left who could not bear to be aligned with nationalism of any kind. If, or rather when, a second independence referendum comes around she says she would now vote yes. There will be many more like her who, through gritted teeth and perhaps even horror, would make the previously unimaginable switch. Even JK Rowling, one of Scotland’s most high-profile unionists, has noted the inevitability of it all: “Scotland will seek independence now,” she tweeted in the hours after the EU referendum result. “Cameron’s legacy will be breaking up two unions. Neither needed to happen.”
However uncomfortable it is to respond to one deep and painful fracture by willing another, this is where we are now. As for me, I remain a Londoner, English, British, Indian and a European who has lived in Scotland for most of my adult life. And right now I’m not only proud to be here. I’m relieved.
Politico: How David Cameron blew it
Less than a month before the historic EU referendum, the team assembled by Cameron to keep Britain in the European Union was worried about wavering Labour voters and frustrated by the opposition leader’s lukewarm support. Remain campaign operatives floated a plan to convince Corbyn to make a public gesture of cross-party unity by appearing in public with the prime minister. Polling showed this would be the “number one” play to reach Labour voters.
Senior staff from the campaign “begged” Corbyn to do a rally with the prime minister, according to a senior source who was close to the Remain campaign. Corbyn wanted nothing to do with the Tory leader, no matter what was at stake. Gordon Brown, the Labour prime minister whom Cameron vanquished in 2010, was sent to plead with Corbyn to change his mind. Corbyn wouldn’t. Senior figures in the Remain camp, who included Cameron’s trusted communications chief Craig Oliver and Jim Messina, President Obama’s campaign guru, were furious. [...]
Hardened by close-run contests in the 2014 Scottish independence referendum and last year’s general election, the strategists running Stronger In decided to follow the playbook that worked in those campaigns, particularly the 2015 Conservative sweep, and focus mainly on economic security.
It failed spectacularly. The depth of public anger over the influx of workers from other EU countries, and more broadly the rejection of political and business elites, was more significant than they had anticipated.
25 June 2016
LSE Blog: How foreigners became the convenient scapegoat of the referendum campaign
The campaigning use of immigration was to identify an enemy, exaggerated and partly imagined as enemies always are in this familiar political tactic, who could be blamed for longer waiting lists in the NHS, overcrowded class rooms in schools, reduction in public services. The government could never say these worsening of the conditions of the people were not because of immigration but because of its own old-fashioned economic liberal policy of austerity.
So two completely different debates were being carried on, a fairly abstract debate about the economic benefits of the EU by the Remain campaign, and a scapegoating campaign against immigrants and the European Union.
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