Michael Rosen and Dr Laura Wright explore the words that children invent and reimagine, from snotrils and jumpolines, to Farmer Christmas and the hippyhoppymus. What do these linguistic leaps of imagination tell us about how children learn language? With writer Nicola Skinner and linguist Dr Kriszta Szendroi, who explains what's going on in the brain when children reach for the right word.
31 October 2016
The Atlantic: A World Without People (MAR 15, 2012)
For a number of reasons, natural and human, people have recently evacuated or otherwise abandoned a number of places around the world -- large and small, old and new. Gathering images of deserted areas into a single photo essay, one can get a sense of what the world might look like if humans were to vanish from the planet altogether. Collected here are recent scenes from nuclear-exclusion zones, blighted urban neighborhoods, towns where residents left to escape violence, unsold developments built during the real estate boom, ghost towns, and more.
The Week: Why Vladimir Putin swore allegiance to ultra-conservatism
Although ultra-conservatism has always played a major role in Russian society, particularly outside the big cities, it was granted the status of Russia's unofficial ideology in 2012, after mass protests in Moscow against Vladimir Putin's return to the Kremlin for a third term.
In a keynote speech to parliament after the pro-democracy protests had been quelled, Putin declared that social and religious conservatism were the only ways to prevent Russia and the world from slipping into what he called "chaotic darkness." In a separate speech he also accused Western countries of betraying "Christian values" and pursuing polices that "place on the same level a multi-child family and a same-sex partnership, a faith in God and a belief in Satan." [...]
This intolerance for anything that smacks of "liberal" Western values has also had serious consequences for Russia's national health, in particular its fight against a growing HIV and AIDS epidemic. Almost one million Russians are registered as having contracted HIV, out of a population of 143 million people, an almost twofold increase from 2010. Officials predict that up to three million Russians will be living with the virus by 2020. [...]
In August, Putin appointed Olga Vasilyeva, a religious scholar with deep ties to the Russian Orthodox Church, as education minister. One of her first acts as minister was to visit the Russian Orthodox Church's powerful head, Patriarch Kirill, to seek his blessing for her appointment. Vasilyeva is not only an Orthodox believer, however: She has also previously praised Joseph Stalin, the Soviet dictator who sent millions to their deaths in the gulags.
Deutsche Welle: Film brings Ukrainian atrocities in wartime Poland to big screen
The region of Volhynia had been within Polish borders before the war. It was first occupied by the Soviets in 1939 and then by the Germans in 1941.
Some 100,000 ethnic Poles were slaughtered in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia from 1943 to 1945 by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA).The UPA was a guerrilla force seeking Ukrainian independence and which cooperated with local Ukrainians in some of the very brutal killings.
Later reprisals by Poles claimed the lives of 10,000-12,000 Ukrainians, including 3,000-5,000 in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia. [...]
In July, for example, the Polish parliament passed resolutions declaring the Wolyn massacres genocide, to which the Ukrainian government responded by accusing Poland of 'politicizing history,' with the deputy speaker of parliament promising 'retaliation.'
Kyiv city council also in July named a street in honor of Ukrainian nationalist leader Stepan Bandera and in August a Ukrainian MP forwarded a resolution declaring that Poland had committed genocide against Ukrainians in the years 1919-51. [...]
But most reviews of the film have focused on its balance and lack of finger pointing. Poland's largest newspaper, Gazeta Wyborcza, for example, notes that the film does not just focus on events during the war, but places them in a longer-term context. "This reveals the entire chain of evil," including the pre-war Polish state's mistreatment of its Ukrainian citizens. "Poles in this film are not only victims, but also avengers," conducting violent reprisals against Ukrainians. As such, the newspaper notes, the film "does not judge" - nor does it, as many had feared, play into any group's "historical politics." It will not "disrupt fragile Polish-Ukrainian reconciliation, support Polish nationalism or the Russian point of view."
Deutsche Welle: Just how far will the nativist vote get Trump and the AfD?
As the US winds up its most unwound presidential campaign in modern history, Germany is preparing for the 2017 Bundestag battle to unspool. The rise of Donald Trump as a major-party presidential candidate in the US and the likelihood that Alternative for Germany (AfD) will enter parliament show that nativism remains an effective election strategy. Advocating for "the people" but preferring policies that exclude large segments of the population, nativist candidates and parties exploit insecurity to steer the political conversation in directions that had no longer been politely permissible. [...]
Like Trump in the United States, the AfD is letting everything ride on German voters' distrust of foreigners. And, so far, enough of the electorate has been willing to gamble on the party's lack of a track record. In many ways, it is the AfD's very inexperience that appeals to its voters. German Chancellor Angela Merkel is three-quarters of the way through her third term, and her Christian Democrats (CDU) have chosen to form coalitions with their primary rivals, the Social Democrats (SPD), for two of those terms, with another round of joint governance looking increasingly possible after the 2017 elections. [...]
About 20 percent of voters display xenophobic tendencies, according to "The Disinhibited Middle: Authoritarian and Extreme Right Disposition in Germany," a study by the Leipzig researchers Oliver Decker and Elmar Brähler released during the summer. The researchers found that 52.6 percent of AfD voters demonstrate prejudice against foreigners. But the population more broadly has xenophobic tendencies. The study found that one-third of Germans believe that migrants come only for social benefits. Another third say the country has too many foreign influences. A quarter want migrants deported in times of low employment. The study found anti-foreigner sentiments in 16.6 percent of SPD supporters, 14.6 percent of CDU voters, 13.7 percent of Free Democrats (FDP), 8.4 percent of Left voters and 7.2 percent of Greens.
Quartz: Ancient Roman mythology shows an obsession with sex robots that’s lasted thousands of years
At a New York University conference on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence earlier this month, Kate Devlin, lecturer in computing at Goldsmiths, University of London, pointed out that interest in sex robots is apparent in the ancient myth of Pygmalion. [...]
“Pygmalion doesn’t like the outside world, he doesn’t like women, he sees them as prostitutes. They disgust him because they wear make-up and behave inappropriately,” she says. “For Pygmalion in Ovid’s story, having a sexbot of his own is great because he doesn’t have to interact with real women, he doesn’t have to engage with the world. He’s no longer living a life of celibacy, which is something David Levy picks up on in his work Love and Sex with Robots, arguing that sexbots in the 21st century will be an answer to loneliness.” [...]
Pygmalion is far from the only tale that draws on sex robot themes. The story was inspired by the Greek myth of Pandora, in which a woman is molded from the earth by the gods. “She’s inherently artificial. She’s a technological creation,” says Liveley. “She’s programmed by the gods to behave in certain ways that are all about being seductive and erotic.” The earliest surviving writing on Pandora dates from 8th century BCE, though Liveley says it likely has much older roots. The tale is also the Greek version of the tale of Adam and Eve, a connection that highlights how the first woman of the Abrahamic religions was molded to serve the needs of the man.
Deutsche Welle: 'Turks in Germany still lack a sense of belonging'
I think the cause lies in that in the beginning people weren't viewed as having needs, but only viewed as labor. Therefore, measures weren't undertaken - there was little interest - that those coming here also learnt German. They were here to work: Germany needed extra hands. The so-called guest workers from Turkey were welcomed to that end. It was an oversight that they didn't also learn the language. This denied them contact to society and everyday contact with people. [...]
German politicians always say they've learned from their mistakes. But when I look at the regulations over the last years or decades - I've been here for 36 years - they aren't very heartening for people in Germany. They more resemble sanctions that don't convey a sense of belonging. Nevertheless, there have been German courses at language schools for several years. I think we're moving in the right direction, albeit 50 years too late. [...]
Compared with 20 years ago, the education situation is better. There are more high school graduates, more university students - despite how socially disadvantaged Turks as a group are. The Turks who came here weren't academics. They were workers, often unskilled, who couldn't further support their children academically. This made for a low education level also in the second generation. Now in the third generation, we see more jurists, medical professionals and businesspeople. They are more successful than the previous generation.
The Huffington Post: How a new generation is changing evangelical Christianity
Since the late 1970s, American evangelicalism has been largely identified with right-wing politics. Conservative religious values entered the political sphere through movements such as Moral Majority and Focus on the Family that opposed gay rights, abortion, feminism and other liberal issues.
Evangelical leaders have influenced national elections and public policy. They have been instrumental in pushing the Republican Party toward increasingly conservative social policies. They have generally been the most consistent voting bloc within the Republican Party. [...]
For example, in most surveys and political polls, “evangelical” is limited to white believers, with others who may be similar theologically being classified into other racial/ethnically identified categories such as “Black Protestant,” “Latino Protestant” or “Other nonwhite Protestant.”
Further, as with all religious groups in the U.S., the evangelical movement began struggling to keep its young people in the fold. Recent research shows that among young adults who were identified as evangelicals as teenagers, only 45 percent can still be identified as such. [...]
Further, while the educational successes of evangelicalism, through its many and varied curricula, have served to socialize young people into the “biblically based” moral world, it has also taught them how to read the Bible critically and to pay attention to biblical themes and narrative through-lines that resonate with their own life experiences.
Vox: The pope tried to convince skeptical US Catholics that climate change is real. Here’s why he failed.
There was much hue and cry among climate hawks in 2015 when Pope Francis issued his "Laudato Si," an impassioned, 184-page statement decrying humankind’s ill treatment of the Earth. In particular, it framed global warming as a challenge to the religious conscience. [...]
Now another, more thorough investigation of the pope’s climate influence has been done by researchers at the Annenberg Public Policy Center. (It was just released in the journal Climatic Change.) After more than a thousand 20-minute phone interviews with Catholics across the country, both before and after its release, influence of "Laudato Si" has become clearer. [...]
The Annenberg researchers spend a lot of words trying to explain this, but it’s not that complicated: Partisanship is more powerful than religion in the US. Or as the authors put it, "the worldviews, political identities, and group norms that lead conservative Catholics to deny climate change override their deference to religious authority when judging the reality and risks of this phenomenon."
30 October 2016
FiveThirtyEight: Clinton Leads Trump — And Obama And Reagan — In The Newspaper Endorsement Race
This paragraph, from USA Today’s editorial “Trump is unfit for the presidency,” is not an outlier. It reflects yet another oddity of the 2016 election cycle: The unprecedented shunning of a major-party nominee by nearly every widely read daily publication in the country.
Of the top 100 daily newspapers ranked by 2016 circulation, 55 have endorsed Hillary Clinton.1 Only one, the Las Vegas Review-Journal, has endorsed Donald Trump.
For many newspapers, this hardly comes as a surprise; The New York Times, for instance, has endorsed a Democrat in every presidential race since 1960. But for others, a Clinton endorsement is truly off-brand. Six major papers — The Dallas Morning News, Arizona Republic, San Diego Union-Tribune, Columbus Dispatch, Omaha World-Herald, and Cincinnati Enquirer — are each breaking a streak of Republican endorsements going back 32 years or more to choose Clinton. Other reliably conservative editorial boards are instead siding with Libertarian Gary Johnson, or simply refusing to pick a candidate. And USA Today, the highest-circulation daily newspaper in the country, is stepping into the endorsement game for the first time with the “anti-endorsement” of Trump quoted above. [...]
So perhaps Clinton’s unparalleled landslide in newspaper endorsements is reflective not of ideological bias, but of general agreement among journalists — conservative as well as liberal — as to the qualities that make a candidate fit or unfit for the presidency.
Quartz: 99.9% of Americans will know a victim of gun violence in their lifetime
Almost every single American—99.85%—will know at least one victim of gun violence during his or her lifetime, a recent analysis in the journal Preventive Medicine estimates.
Around 30,000 gun-related deaths and 80,000 non-fatal injuries occur annually in the US, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). A study published in the American Journal of Medicine earlier this year showed that Americans were 10 times more likely to die as a result of a firearm compared with residents of 22 other high-income countries. Of all firearm deaths in all these countries, more than 80% occur in the US. [...]
The researchers made additional assumptions, such as that gun violence happens to anyone at random, so all individuals face same risk. In reality, of course, some people are much more likely to be shot than others, but the thinking here is that, when averaged across the entire US population, everyone’s likelihood of experiencing gun violence is about the same.
FiveThirtyEight: Terriers Were Once The Greatest Dogs In The World
Ultimately, each dog is judged according to its own breed’s rubric. In the Best in Show ring, a dog competes against the others, but also against the platonic ideal of its own breed. And these ideals are public record. The American Kennel Club’s standard for the wire fox terrier, for example, comes in at just over three dense, single-spaced pages. [...]
Westminster’s dog show is the second-longest-continuously-running sporting event (if you’ll permit it the label) in the country, after the Kentucky Derby (ditto). Since Westminster first crowned a Best in Show, in 1907, 46 winners have been terriers. Of the 43 Best in Shows that were awarded in the first half of the 20th century, 29 went to a terrier.1 The first three Best in Shows all went to the same terrier — Warren Remedy, a fox terrier. The terrier “is to Westminster awards what Meryl Streep is to the Oscars, except that the terriers win more,” The New York Times wrote in 2003. But this has changed. The market and tastes that made terriers such popular show dogs in the first half of last century shifted, and a broad decline in terrier popularity is now mirrored by fewer terrier Best in Show titles. [...]
For some terrier breeds, the situation is existential. In 2011, a campaign was launched to save the Sealyham terrier — winner of four Westminster Best in Shows and once the dog of choice of King George V, Cary Grant and Elizabeth Taylor — from extinction. “If we can save the rhino or tiger, we can surely save this useful and charming breed of dog,” the British magazine Country Life wrote. Some related breeds, like the English white terrier, from which the Sealyham line descends, have already gone extinct. In 2010, only 49 Sealyham puppies were registered with the U.K.’s Kennel Club, down from 2,000 in the breed’s peak years. The near-extinction of the Sealyham is an extreme illustration of terrier decline — even among terriers, the Sealyham is extremely difficult to show. The dogs have very thick coats, for one thing, and their white fur tends to get dirty easily.
CityLab: In Houston, an Underground Cistern Is a New Temple for Art
Houston built its cistern in 1926 to serve as the city’s underground water reservoir. By 2007, the year that the city decommissioned it, Houston was already sourcing its drinking water from lakes and rivers. The cistern had sprung a leak over the past decade that rendered it unusable. So the city locked it up and promptly forgot all about it.
The cistern might have stayed lost, too, had it not been for two things: One, from the outside, it forms a rather prominent hill in a city that doesn’t have many. Two, the cistern enjoys pride of place near the edge of Buffalo Bayou Park, the 160-acre stretch of restored parkland that opened to great fanfare in the summer of 2015. [...]
The bottom of the Houston Cistern is still covered by about 6 inches of water; the egress added by Page is the only part of the structure that can be occupied by people, which limits tours to just 30 visitors at a time. Nevertheless, Buffalo Bayou Park has registered more than 11,000 registrations for tours since the cistern opened to visitors in May.
ArchDaily: Trouble Hits the Final Stages of Gaudí's La Sagrada Familia
Over the course of 134 years of construction of the Sagrada Familia, the unfinished masterpiece of Antoni Gaudi in Barcelona has experienced three unresolved conflicts. First, there was a lack of a (contemporary) construction permit, the nonpayment of taxes, and finally the uncertainty about whether or not to finally build the large plaza to the southeast that Gaudí imagined with the forced expulsion of up to 3,000 residents and lessees, all living in the area surrounding Sagrada Familia’s Glory Façade.
In recent days, these three issues have come to light almost simultaneously, but let’s discuss them one by one. Bitterly upset by what he describes as "a project without plans in Gaudi's name" Councilman of Barcelona Architecture, Urban Landscape and Heritage Daniel Mòdol called the Sagrada Familia a "giant Easter cake". [...]
Regarding the building permit, the Board of the Sagrada Familia has made a statement to the Spanish press that the construction is based on a permit request made to the City of Sant Martí de Provençals in 1885, 12 years before its administrative annexation to Barcelona. Jordi Fauli, the head architect of the temple explained the Board’s position on the absence of a building permit, following questioning from El País last September:
Al Jazeera: How Oman aims to become a tourist hub
Oman's economy was powered by agriculture, fishing, camel and goat herding, and handicrafts, until oil was discovered, propelling the sultanate's dramatic development over the past four decades. But when oil prices plunged in 2015, Oman ran a budget deficit of $8.57bn, forcing the government to raise corporate taxes, fuel prices and visa fees, and to cut subsidies. Many private companies started downsizing and suspended bonuses, and some expatriates sent their families home to cut back on living costs. [...]
But Oman plans to replace its heavy reliance on hydrocarbons by diversifying its economy, and transforming the tourism industry into a major revenue generator.
"Tourism certainly can and is playing a major role in Oman's economy," James Wilson, CEO of the state-run developer Omran, told Al Jazeera. "The government is now focused on five key economic sectors: tourism, logistics, manufacturing, mining and fisheries, all of which will help Oman advance from its current dependency on oil." [...]
Yet Oman's dream of becoming a tourist hub in the region is strewn with difficulties. Tourist visa regulations are one issue. A lack of transportation for tourists may also be a difficulty: Although Oman is dotted by a string of valleys with lush date plantations and emerald-green waters, they are far from the capital Muscat, where much of the accommodation lies.
Bloomberg: Record Green Power Installations Beat Fossil Fuel for First Time
Renewable energy reached an important turning point last year with record new installations of emissions-free power surpassing sources that burn fossil fuel, according the International Energy Agency.
New installations of renewable energy overtook conventional power for the first time in 2015, the Paris-based agency said Tuesday in its Medium-Term Renewable Energy Market Report. Global green power rose by a record 153 gigawatts, equivalent to 55 percent of newly installed capacity last year. Total installed capacity exceeded coal for the first time, the IEA said. [...]
The IEA raised its estimate of the amount of green energy on power grids by 13 percent, revising its forecast to 42 percent by 2021. About 500,000 solar panels were installed each day across the globe in 2015, according to the report.
Renewables capacity will be supported by falling costs, according to the agency. Solar panels are projected to be a quarter cheaper over the five year forecast period ending in 2021. Onshore wind-turbine prices may drop 15 percent.
Politico: How the European Left can survive
These are terrible times for center-left parties in Europe. Social Democrats were defeated in Spain, Croatia and Ireland this year, and suffered crushing losses in Lithuania and the Czech Republic. In recent votes in the United Kingdom and Austria, up to 80 percent of workers turned away from the center-left and cast their vote for right-wing populists. Today, only two European Union countries are exclusively governed by the center-left: Portugal — where a battered Social Democratic Party heads a shaky minority government — and the Mediterranean island of Malta. [...]
According to annual continent-wide Eurobarometer polls conducted by the European Commission, immigration and terrorism trump the economy and unemployment as European’s biggest concerns. This shouldn’t come as a surprise. EU-wide unemployment is currently at the lowest level since 2009 and even youth joblessness is decreasing. [...]
Navigating this sensitive and controversial issue without giving in to prejudice is a daunting task, but it is crucial that the center-left establishment recognize and address voters’ genuine concerns. Dismissing populist voters and labeling them as “extremist” will not help solve the root causes of the problem. This approach extends an invitation for real extremists and fringe politicians, who are only too keen to exploit the opportunity.
29 October 2016
Foreign Affairs: The Great White Nope
Most Americans are optimistic about their futures—but poor and working-class whites are not. According to a recent analysis published by the Brookings Institution, poor Hispanics are almost a third more likely than their white counterparts to imagine a better future. And poor African Americans—who face far higher rates of incarceration and unemployment and who fall victim far more frequently to both violent crime and police brutality—are nearly three times as optimistic as poor whites. Carol Graham, the economist who oversaw the analysis, concluded that poor whites suffer less from direct material deprivation than from the intangible but profound problems of “unhappiness, stress, and lack of hope.” That might explain why the slogan of the Republican presidential candidate, Donald Trump—“Make America Great Again!”—sounds so good to so many of them. [...]
Trump also loves to tell his audiences that they are victims of a “rigged” political system that empowers elites at their expense. On that count, the evidence supports him. Consider, for example, the findings of a widely cited 2014 study by the political scientists Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page, who researched public opinion on approximately 1,800 policy proposals (as captured by surveys taken between 1981 and 2002) and found that only those ideas endorsed by the wealthiest ten percent of Americans became law. This domination of politics by economic elites has produced the de facto disenfranchisement of everyone else—a burden experienced by the entire remaining 90 percent, of course, but perhaps felt most acutely by those who have fallen the furthest. [...]
In Isenberg’s telling, the Puritan leader John Winthrop—whose image of the Massachusetts Bay Colony as a charitable, compassionate “city upon a hill” has become a leitmotif of American exceptionalism—was no democrat; rather, he was an elitist who felt no pity for the poor, whom he termed the “scum of the land.” Winthrop’s colony, Isenberg writes, was not an incubator of egalitarianism but a repressive, insular community obsessed with the maintenance of a class hierarchy. She also casts a critical eye on the ideas of a number of figures who shaped the American Revolution, including John Locke and Thomas Paine, who were both dismissive when it came to the plight of the poor. The central figure of early American mythology is the landowning yeoman, most prominently hailed by Thomas Jefferson. But during its first few decades of existence, the United States offered little to the poor and landless, scratching out lives on the margins.
VICE: What It's Like to Have an Illegal Abortion
According to a recent survey conducted by the Polish Public Opinion Research Center (CBOS), one in four Polish women have had an abortion. But the authors admit that the majority of the surveyed women had an abortion when it was still legal—before the introduction of the so-called Abortion Compromise in 1993.
Since abortion is illegal and the subject itself is such a taboo, it's impossible to get any clearer numbers than rough estimates about abortion in Poland. But what is it like when you're one of the people who actually makes up that number? I spoke to a woman who had an illegal abortion in a Polish clinic a few years ago. She agreed to tell me her story on the condition that we keep her identity anonymous. [...]
How did the people around you feel about your abortion?
When I came home after the procedure, my boyfriend didn't even turn from his computer—so I absolutely knew I had done the right thing. He left about a month later. He didn't support me financially in any way—I had borrowed the money for the abortion from a friend and had to pay her back over the subsequent months.
The only thing my mom said after I had told her everything was, "Why did you do this to me?" She is religious, but she might have also been worried she would have to pay for it. We never talked about it again. My friends were all very supportive, though.
BBC4 Thinking Allowed: Hoods - Construction Blacklist
Hood: a cultural history of a seemingly neutral garment which has long been associated with violence, from the Executioner to the KKK and inner city gangs. Laurie Taylor talks to the America writer, Alison Kinney, about the material and symbolic meaning of hoods.
Also, the blacklisting of employees. Dr Paul Lashmar, Senior Lecturer in Journalism at the University of Sussex, examines a hidden history of discrimination. He's joined by Jack Fawbert, Associate Lecturer at Anglia Ruskin University, who provides the most contemporary and widespread instance of blacklisting in the UK - an extraordinary corporate crime which led to over 150 current or retired building workers reaching a substantial out of court settlement with the country's eight largest building employers earlier this year. All had been blacklisted for their trade union activities and alleged political views. How did this happen?
Vox: The Restless Lives of Teens in Former East Germany
Two decades later, Seiffert would make his way to the eastern German town of Lübbenau, a two-hour drive from Berlin, with a friend who was studying urban sociology. Visions from his youth, long forgotten, reemerged; he recognized the socialist monuments, the flagpoles used in old May Day celebrations.
That first visit coincided with the demolition of the BKW Kraftwerk Jugend, a power plant responsible for tens of thousands of jobs. Lübbenau, the photographer explains, is what's known as a "shrinking region." Once a site of booming industry, it's now rife with unemployment and abandoned buildings. [...]
In the young people of Lübbenau, all born after 1989, the photographer witnessed an acute sense of restlessness. The town was becoming more consumerist and globalized, but most teenagers longed to leave behind the quiet life in search of real opportunity. Against the backdrop of a declining place, kids ached for adventure.
Los Angeles Times: Jewish Americans don't vote with Israel in mind, they vote as liberals
Although Jewish Americans represent just 2% of the population, politicians — and would-be politicians — have long considered the “Jewish vote” a prize worth pursuing. That’s actually not irrational. Jews contribute a disproportionate amount of money to political candidates and causes; many Jews live in the swing states of Florida (846,700 of 19.9 million), Pennsylvania (324,700 of 12.8 million), Ohio (173,700 of 11.6 million), and Michigan (105,200 of 9.9 million); and Jews tout a stellar turnout record of 80%, according to multiple sources. [...]
Israel was the “most important” voting issue for a mere 4% of respondents in the Public Religion Research Institute’s 2012 Jewish Values survey. Israel was one of two top “voting issue priorities” for just 10% in a J Street poll conducted around the same time. More recently, “U.S.-Israel relations” was the most important issue for only 7.2% in the American Jewish Committee’s 2015 study of Jewish American opinion, ranking fifth behind “economy” (41.7%), “national security” (12.3%), “healthcare” (12%), and “income inequality” (11.6%). It was the second and the third-most important issue for only 7.6% and 11.1%, respectively. [...]
Indeed, the Pew Research Center’s landmark 2013 survey “A Portrait of Jewish Americans” found that caring about Israel was an “essential part of being Jewish” for 53% of Jews 65 and older. By comparison, only 32% of Jews 18 to 29 expressed that same sentiment. It’s also estimated that Jews constitute at least 20% of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Movement. And take what you will from this: American Jewry was effectively split down the middle over the Iran nuclear deal, which made the community’s support for the deal 20 percentage points higher than for Americans overall.
The Guardian: Trump's rise and Brexit vote are more an outcome of culture than economics
The rise of protectionism and anti-immigrant sentiment in Britain, America, and Europe is widely believed to reflect stagnant incomes, widening inequality, structural unemployment, and even excessive monetary easing. But there are several reasons to question the link between populist politics and economic distress.
Most populist voters are neither poor nor unemployed; they are not victims of globalisation, immigration, and free trade. The main demographic groups behind the anti-establishment upsurge have been people outside the workforce: pensioners, middle-aged homemakers, and men with low educational qualifications receiving disability payments.
In Britain, where detailed analyses of the votes actually cast in the Brexit referendum are now available, the group most directly affected by low-wage competition from immigrants and Chinese imports – people under 35 – voted against Brexit by a wide margin, 65% to 35%. Meanwhile, 60% of pensioners who voted backed the leave campaign, as did 59% of voters with disabilities. By contrast, 53% of full-time workers who participated wanted Britain to remain in Europe, as did 51% of part-time workers.It seems, therefore, that the conflicts generally ascribed to economic grievances and globalisation are actually the latest battles in the culture wars that have split western societies since the late 1960s. The main relevance of economics is that the 2008 financial crisis created conditions for a political backlash by older, more conservative voters, who have been losing the cultural battles over race, gender, and social identity. [...]
It seems, therefore, that the conflicts generally ascribed to economic grievances and globalisation are actually the latest battles in the culture wars that have split western societies since the late 1960s. The main relevance of economics is that the 2008 financial crisis created conditions for a political backlash by older, more conservative voters, who have been losing the cultural battles over race, gender, and social identity.
Politico: Could Trump blow it in Texas?
The odds are long, they say, in a state that hasn’t voted Democratic for president in 40 years. But in recent polling data and early voting results, they are also seeing signs of the perfect storm of demographic and political forces it would take to turn Texas blue.
According to some Republican and nonpartisan pollsters, Donald Trump is turning off enough core GOP constituencies and motivating Hispanic voters in ways that could pump up Clinton’s performance to higher levels than a Democratic nominee has seen in decades. In 2012, Mitt Romney won the state in a 16-point blowout. The current spread is just 5 points, according to the RealClearPolitics polling average. [...]
Jacob Monty, a prominent Republican Hispanic activist based in Houston who resigned from Trump’s National Hispanic Advisory Council after an incendiary Trump speech on immigration, said he will not vote for the top of the ticket but will vote Republican down the ballot — highlighting the failure, even in deep-red Texas, to fully consolidate the GOP base behind the party nominee. [...]
A Clinton victory would also require a massive rejection of Trump by the Republicans who dominate the Dallas and Houston suburbs and formed the core of the George W. Bush coalition. While establishment Republicans appear to have ditched Trump in crucial areas like the Philadelphia suburbs and in suburban enclaves in Virginia and Colorado, there’s little sign of significant suburban erosion in Texas. Some Republicans actually see evidence from early voting suggesting high turnout in Republican-leaning areas of Fort Worth’s Tarrant County and in the suburbs north of Dallas.
BBC4: Linguistic confusion in politics: in Germany no means no
Damien McGuinness is in Berlin where the politicians are frustrated that British politicians don't seem to understand that no means no.
listen to the podcast
The Guardian: Professor's death could see Taiwan become first Asian country to allow same-sex marriage
Picoux, 67, who taught French at the National Taiwan University, died after falling from the tenth floor of his Taipei apartment block. Friends believe he had taken his own life.
They blamed depression after the death last year by cancer of his Taiwanese partner of 35 years, Tseng Ching-chao.
Picoux had reportedly been crushed when his lack of legal status denied him the right to participate in crucial medical decisions in Tseng’s final moments. He later found himself with no legal claim over the property they shared. [...]
A new draft bill tabled by the ruling Democratic Progressive party [DPP] on Monday to amend family law in favour of LGBT rights was a “breakthrough”, they said.
“We actually can see that there are about 66 legislators who will probably vote yes on marriage equality,” said Pride Watch activist, Cindy Su. “That’s a majority of 58.4%, the first time in Taiwanese history that we have more than half,” she said.
Recent polls also show a public majority in favour of same-sex marriage.
28 October 2016
Salon: Gay and voting for Donald Trump? It’s not as crazy as it seems
Trump’s support in the LGBT community is small but nonetheless considerable. An estimated 20 percent of registered LGBT voters plan to vote for the billionaire businessman, according to a NBC News/SurveyMonkey poll conducted in September, while 80 percent are voting for Clinton. That’s roughly in line with, if a bit smaller than the LGBT support for Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney back in 2012 (23 percent), John McCain in 2008 (27 percent) and George W. Bush in 2004 (23 percent).
These static numbers might suggest that conservative voters in the LGBT community are merely diehards who will vote for any Republican candidate, no matter how dangerous or destructive their beliefs are. During the Republican National Convention in July, the GOP unveiled the most virulently anti-LGBT platform in its history. [...]
The key to Trump’s LGBT appeal isn’t just ticket loyalty. As his party moves to the far right, the CEO has been falsely billed as an ally to the LGBT community. Although the Log Cabin Republicans opted not to support Trump because of his ties to anti-gay zealots like Jerry Falwell Jr. and Rick Santorum, the organization’s president, Gregory T. Angelo, said that Trump could be the “most pro-LGBT president that this country has ever had.” [...]
Trump isn’t the compassionate conservative you’re looking for. But what he has done — and very successfully, one might say — is to use the LGBT community to drum up support for his plan to place American Muslims in a Third Reich-style registry.
During the Republican National Convention, Trump became the first GOP presidential nominee to ever mention the LGBT community in his acceptance speech. That act wasn’t a benevolent one: He exploited the Orlando Pulse nightclub shooting — in which a lone gunman killed 49 people, while injuring 53 more, in a Florida gay bar — by connecting it to radical Islamic terror.
The Atlantic: Will Single Women Transform America?
In her book, All the Single Ladies, Rebecca Traister traces the long history of marriage and its varied purposes in the United States. She also argues that the unprecedented rise in independent, unmarried women demands shifts in power dynamics and policy. It’s completely revolutionary, Traister explains in this animated interview, for more young women to be unmarried than not. In the 1800s, Susan B. Anthony wrote: “In women's transition from subject to sovereign, there must needs be an era of self-sustained, self-supported homes.” Traister says that her prediction was correct, and that this has led to what Anthony once described as an "epoch of single women" in America.
The Conversation: Why do so many women oppose feminism? A psychologist explains
Contemporary sexism is mainly ambivalent in nature. We often hold both positive (benevolent) and negative (hostile) attitudes to women (and men). Hostile sexism involves old-fashioned and overt negativity towards women, whereby they are perceived as wanting to control men. It reflects beliefs that men should have more power than women, that women may use their sexuality to benefit from men’s higher status and that women are less competent than men.
Benevolent sexism on the other hand is more subtle. It is positive in valence but still undermines and patronises women. It views them stereotypically and restricts their social roles. It includes beliefs that good women are nurturing and that men should protect them, implying that they are weaker. This form of sexism often goes unnoticed and yet has negative consequences for women – making them less interested in activism, under-appreciating their own competencies and even lowering their performance.
It may come as a surprise but individuals who score high on benevolence to women in psychological tests are likely to be high on hostility as well. People can often have such seemingly conflicting attitudes without even realising it. This is because people divide women into “good ones” (those who deserve “positive” attitudes) and “bad ones” (those who deserve punishment). It is sometimes referred to as the Madonna vs whore divide. Crucially, both forms of sexism serve to maintain status quo.
Quartz: The economic theory behind why Americans spend more money on Halloween during presidential election years
When it comes to seasonal holidays, Halloween has a special place in the hearts of Americans. From a social science perspective, consumers’ excitement to spend big money on a public festivity is a curious phenomenon. That’s because such behavior goes against what is commonly known among economists as the “free rider problem.” The theory goes that consumers will spend less on certain items when they think that their neighbors will take on the weight of the expense—why splurge with your own money when you think the rest of your community will take care of it? In a non-holiday application, this kind of thinking makes it hard to efficiently provide public goods by collective contributions, such as in the context of military defense services or the maintenance of public parks.
Not so with Halloween. The spooky holiday turns the free rider problem into a competition between households to out-do each other in costume choice, exterior decoration, and sweets for the kids that go from door to door to demand “trick or treat!” Instead riding on the coat tails of your community, you want to one-up them. [...]
So why do consumers spend exceptional amounts on Halloween goods during election years? One of the most citied concepts in modern economics is the “permanent income hypothesis,” which was coined by Milton Friedman. It states that individuals make consumption decisions based on present economic conditions as well as future expectations over how the economy will turn out. Take a look at the below chart, noting the US presidential-election years in 2008, 2012, and 2016. [...]
But the season is not solely based on costumes and candy anymore—it’s all things pumpkin-themed. In fact, pumpkin-flavored product sales across the industry totaled over $360 million in 2015, including the sales of Starbucks’ pumpkin-spice lattes, which have increased 13 times from 2014. Forbes estimates that total sales of pumpkin goods will increase to more than $500 million in 2016.
The Intercept: At Hillary Clinton’s Favorite Think Tank, a Doubling Down on Anti-Iran, Pro-Saudi Policy
THE CENTER FOR American Progress hosted a sort of preview of Hillary Clinton’s Middle East policy on Tuesday, with a Clinton adviser and a Gulf state diplomat agreeing that the next president should double down on support for the Gulf states, including Saudi Arabia, while ramping up action against Iran.
It is a signal that a future Clinton administration would overwhelmingly favor the Gulf states in their ongoing, Middle East-wide power struggle with Iran, implicitly rebuking President Obama, who has come under fire from Gulf states for mild criticism of their foreign policy and his nuclear deal with Iran.
The founder of the Center for American Progress, John Podesta, is the campaign chair for Clinton’s presidential bid; many of the candidate’s closest advisors are alumni of CAP and it is widely viewed as a launching pad for policy staff for Democratic presidents. The center is currently helmed by Clinton transition co-chair Neera Tanden.
Panelists at the event, titled “Strengthening U.S. Partnerships in the Middle East,” argued for what is essentially a supercharged anti-Iran, pro-Saudi posture, with little disagreement from CAP moderator Brian Katulis.
Politico: For Martin Schulz, it’s Brussels, Berlin or bust
Juncker and European Council President Donald Tusk are both from the center-right, and each unequivocally supports the status quo. Juncker has advocated for “stability,” and Tusk endorsed Schulz during a debate in Germany earlier this month. “For me Martin Schulz is the best person to guarantee that the ‘grand coalition’ [between the center-right European People’s Party and the S&D] can be the basis for a rational and responsible majority in the European Parliament,” he said. “We need strong leadership, and I am sure that Martin Schulz is currently the best.”
Support for the current power-sharing arrangement comes from further afield, too. Spain’s center-right Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy made a clear link between a third Schulz presidency and the renewal of Tusk’s mandate in mid-2017, telling reporters that there was currently “reasonable equilibrium within the European institutions” before flying home from last week’s EU summit in Brussels. [...]
For Schulz, leaving Brussels would also certainly mean returning to Germany to lose an election. A recent opinion poll puts support for the SPD at 22 percent, far behind Merkel’s conservatives, who are at 35 percent. But there could be advantages to the move. If the SPD secured enough votes to remain in a coalition with Merkel, Schulz could be sure of a prestigious cabinet post, such as the foreign ministry. Otherwise, he could become the leader of the opposition — or even have a stab at becoming chancellor by forming a so-called Red-Red-Green coalition with the far-left parties, the Greens and The Left.
Al Jazeera: Israel: Settlers' takeover of security posts 'alarming'
The top posts in Israel's national police force are now in the hands of hardline religious settlers who are seeking to make "alarming" changes to policing in both Israel and the occupied territories, critics have warned.
The growing influence of the settler movement was highlighted this month with the appointment of Rahamim Brachyahu as the force's chief rabbi. He lives in Talmon, a settlement close to the Palestinian city of Ramallah in the West Bank. [...]
That has raised deep concern among Palestinian leaders because Brachyahu has defended a notorious rabbinical handbook for settlers known as the King's Torah. It argues that Jewish religious law justifies killing Palestinians as a preventative measure - including children in case they grow up to become "terrorists". [...]
The gradual infiltration of religious settlers into the police has mirrored a similar process in the Israeli army that began two decades ago, noted Jafar Farah, director of Mossawa, a political advocacy group for Israel's large Palestinian minority.
Although the so-called national religious community - who adhere to the ideology of the settlers - make up only 10 per cent of Israel's population, recent figures suggest that as many as half of all new army recruits are drawn from their ranks."There is a clear coalition of interest between the right-wing government and the settler leadership to get their people into high positions in the major state institutions, including the security services, the courts and the media," he told Al Jazeera.
Motherboard: A Suicide Cult’s Surviving Members Still Maintain Its 90s Website
The mass suicide of members of the UFO cult Heaven’s Gate is one of the most bizarre and enduringly fascinating events of the 90s. But nearly 20 years after the strange deaths, part of the cult’s legacy lives on via its perfectly preserved retro website, loyally maintained by two surviving members. They’ll even answer your questions via email. [...]
By all accounts, the administrators behind HeavensGate.com are a couple named Mark and Sarah King, though they would not confirm their identity when I emailed this week. Via email, the couple told me they were entrusted with this task after being members of the group for 12 years. They have regular full time jobs outside of tending the site, but take their duties seriously. They answer any inquirer’s questions within a day or so, and make sure the site—crammed with information about the cult’s beliefs, and with a strikingly 90s aesthetic—ticking along, exactly as it was in March 1997. [...]
It’s a fairly fitting legacy considering the cult had earned money throughout the 90s through a web design company (which is detailed in this Motherboard story from 2014). But what’s the purpose? Marshall Applewhite, the founder of Heaven’s Gate and one of the members who killed himself in ‘97, had predicted that the Earth would be “recycled” shortly after the cult member’s deaths, and that this was the last chance to exit to the Next Level. If the mass suicide was the last chance to depart Earth, why force two believers to stay behind and preserve information for a planet full of hopeless beings?
The admins simply told me they stayed behind because they were asked to, but in an interview with Reddit’s blog, Upvoted, last year, they went into a little more detail, explaining that those on the Next Level will return at some point, and anyone on Earth who is ready may have an opportunity to join them.
Politico: Moment of truth for Cyprus reunification talks
Anastasiades and Akıncı agreed on Wednesday to resume their talks in Mont Pèlerin, Switzerland from November 7 to 11. The focus will be on where to draw a line marking the Turkish Cypriot community in the north and Greek Cypriot community in the south — which could result in homes and towns being reassigned, likely from the Turkish area to the Greek. Greek Cypriots want to shrink the Turkish community to reflect their larger population and economy, and take back areas that were traditionally Greek. [...]
That last phase will focus on the future roles of Cyprus’ three guarantor powers — Turkey, Greece and the U.K. — and in particular the presence of more than 30,000 Turkish troops in the north. It would likely be discussed in a meeting between the four governments, plus the U.N., outside of Cyprus. [...]
The question of whether Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan will accept an agreement that diminishes his country’s influence in Turkish Cyprus, and the size of its military presence there, still looms large. Greek Cypriots are still skeptical of Ankara’s support, especially since the failed military coup against Erdoğan in July and his purge of the alleged organizers and their supporters.
“It’s uncertain when Erdoğan will agree to pull out his troops. After decimating the army, he wants to prove that he is at least as tough as the military,” said Michael Leigh, senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund in Brussels. Greek Cypriots “will never agree” to Turkish troops remaining after reunification, but a gradual withdrawal could work, he added.
27 October 2016
The Intercept: Open Data Projects Are Fueling the Fight Against Police Misconduct
Seda, a Legal Aid attorney representing adolescents charged as adults in Queens, thought the allegations against her client were dubious and was looking for a way to get him out on bail. That’s when she decided to look into the officers named in the complaint against him. What she discovered stunned her.
The arresting officer, she learned, had been sued several times, and in the 1990s, he had been part of a group of officers working a narcotics operation that was accused of planting drugs on people and stealing drugs from suspects. Some of the officers went to trial and were convicted on felony charges, but most settled, costing the city some $1.2 million in damages to their victims. The officer she was researching was acquitted in court, but he had been named in connection with at least nine separate misconduct cases and had settled at least two, she told The Intercept. [...]
Most police misconduct goes unreported, particularly in less extreme cases and in more disenfranchised communities, but complaints filed with police departments and civilian review boards, as well as lawsuits, can point to significant histories of abuse tied to specific officers and precincts. In most cases, however, a citizen who becomes the victim of police abuse has next to no way of knowing if that officer is a repeat offender or has a history of targeting certain people, say, or sexual harassment. [...]
Eventually, it emerged that Van Dyke had been accused of misconduct at least 17 times before he killed McDonald, including several allegations of brutality. Yet none of those complaints — one of which cost the city a $500,000 civil settlement — had resulted in any disciplinary action. Between 2012 and 2015, the city of Chicago paid $210 million in police misconduct settlements — with just 124 of the city’s roughly 12,000 police officers accounting for $34 million in payouts. The Chicago Police Department did not respond to a request for comment.
The Intercept: Syria's 'Voice Of Conscience' Has A Message For The West
YASSIN AL-HAJ SALEH has lived a life of struggle for his country. Under the Syrian regime of Hafez al-Assad, he was a student activist organizing against the government. In 1980, Saleh and hundreds of others were arrested and accused of membership in a left-wing political group. He was just 19 years old when a closed court found him guilty of crimes against the state. Saleh spent the next 16 years of his life behind bars.
“I have a degree in medicine, but I am a graduate of prison, and I am indebted to this experience,” Saleh said, sitting with us in a restaurant near Istanbul’s Taksim Square. Now in his 50s, with white hair and a dignified, somewhat world-weary demeanor, Saleh, called Syria’s “voice of conscience” by many, has the appearance and bearing of a university professor. But he speaks with passionate indignation about what he calls the Assad dynasty’s “enslavement” of the Syrian people. [...]
The experience of prison transformed me and my ideas about the world. In many ways, it was an emancipatory experience. I developed the belief that to protect our fundamental values of justice, freedom, human dignity, and equality, we had to change our concepts and theories. The Soviet Union had fallen and many changes were occurring in the world. My comrades who refused to change, those who adhered to their old methods and tools, found themselves in a position of leaving their values behind. This is one reason why many leftists today are against the Syrian revolution — because they adhere to the dead letter of their beliefs, rather than the living struggle of the people for justice. [...]
Recently, an event in Rome that displayed images of those tortured and killed by Assad was attacked by fascists. Just days before, it had also been attacked in a local communist newspaper for promoting “imperialism.” There is a growing convergence between the views of fascists and the far-left about Syria and other issues. The reason for this is that perspectives on the left are outdated. They are interested in high-politics, not grassroots struggles. They are dealing with grand ideologies and historical narratives, but they don’t see people — the Syrian people aren’t represented. They are holding on to depopulated discourses that don’t represent human struggle, life, and death. [...]
I don’t think that there is anything democratic or progressive about this narrative, or about the practices and institutions related to this war on terror framing. The reason the world is now in a crisis is that the major global narrative now is not democracy, justice, socialism, or even liberalism — it is all about security and immigration. This means that Trump is better than Clinton, Marine Le Pen is better than Hollande. It means that a fascist is always better than a democrat, which means that Bashar Assad is better than the opposition.
The Conversation: Robert Manne: How we came to be so cruel to asylum seekers
If you had been told 30 years ago that Australia would create the least asylum seeker friendly institutional arrangements in the world, you would not have been believed.
In 1992 we introduced a system of indefinite mandatory detention for asylum seekers who arrive by boat. Since that time, we have accepted the idea that certain categories of refugees and asylum seekers can be imprisoned indefinitely; that those who are intercepted by our navy should be forcibly returned to the point of departure; that those who haven’t been able to be forcibly returned should be imprisoned indefinitely on remote Pacific Islands; and that those marooned on these island camps should never be allowed to settle in Australia even after several years.
How then has this come to pass? There are two main ways of explaining this.
The first is what can be called analytical narrative: the creation of an historical account that shows the circumstances in which the decisions were made and how one thing led to another. I have tried my hand at several of these.
The second way is to look at more general lines of explanation. I want to suggest five possibilities. These general lines of explanation are not alternatives to each other but complementary. Nor do they constitute an alternative to explanation by way of analytical narrative. Rather, they attempt to illuminate some of the general reasons the story took the shape it did.
The Atlantic: Living in an Extreme Meritocracy Is Exhausting
In her illuminating new book, Weapons of Math Destruction, the data scientist Cathy O’Neil describes how companies, schools, and governments evaluate consumers, workers, and students based on ever more abundant data about their lives. She makes a convincing case that this reliance on algorithms has gone too far: Algorithms often fail to capture unquantifiable concepts such as workers’ motivation and care, and discriminate against the poor and others who can’t so easily game the metrics.
Basing decisions on impartial algorithms rather than subjective human appraisals would appear to prevent the incursion of favoritism, nepotism, and other biases. But as O’Neil thoughtfully observes, statistical models that measure performance have biases that arise from those of their creators. As a result, algorithms are often unfair and sometimes harmful. “Models are opinions embedded in mathematics,” she writes. [...]
Indeed, the desire for an efficiency achieved through a never-ending gauntlet of appraisals is unhealthy. It exhausts workers with the need to perform well at all times. It pushes them into a constant competition with each other, vying for the highest rankings that, by definition, only a few can get. It convinces people—workers, managers, students—that individual metrics are what really matter, and that any failure to dole out pay raises, grades, and other rewards based on them is unfair. And it leads the better-off to judge those below them, honing in on all the evidence that tells them how much more they deserve than others do. In this way, “objective” models provide socially-acceptable excuses to blame certain people—most often, the poor and people of color—for a past that, once digitally noted, is never really forgotten or forgiven.
The Guardian: Xenophobic, authoritarian – and generous on welfare: how Poland’s right rules
Yet, despite the barrage of critical opinions from the western world, which Poles have historically aspired to, PiS remains the most popular party in Poland, currently polling at 38%, which is higher than the combined support of all other parliamentary parties put together. There are several reasons for this, revealing dynamics observable not only in the wider eastern European region, but further west as well.
While PiS is strongly rightwing on social issues, its economic approach can be described as leftist. It emphasises the need to tackle inequality and propagates strong welfare policies. It introduced unconditional monthly cash payments equivalent to £100 for all parents who have more than one child towards the upkeep of each subsequent child until he or she is 18. So if you have three children, you get £200 per month and so forth. For parents with one child, the payment is conditional on low income.
No previous government ever embarked on such a generous social programme. PiS’s approach puts many Polish leftists in a bind. On the one hand, they deplore the party’s unashamedly xenophobic rhetoric; on the other, they like its economic views, especially in comparison to the main opposition parties, Civic Platform and Nowoczesna, both dominated by folk still enamoured with Hayek. In effect, some on Poland’s left are not as mobilised against PiS as they could be.
While the west may have considered post-communist Poland a model of free-market success, many Poles felt marginalised in a society where successive governments espoused a “sink or swim” attitude towards citizens, irrespective of whether it was the left or the right in power. Individual success was emphasised above all. PiS’s more communitarian approach is appealing to many Poles who feel they now have a government interested in more than just macro-economic indicators.
The Intercept: Here’s why Donald Trump is deluded to expect “another Brexit”
At almost every campaign stop these days, Donald Trump urges his supporters not to lose heart just because most opinion polls show him headed for defeat. Look, he says, at what happened with Brexit — the British vote in favor of exiting the European Union in June that shocked the political and media elite of the United Kingdom.
In the past few days, Trump has predicted that America’s white working-class is poised to deliver an election-day sequel he’s called “Another Brexit,” “Beyond Brexit,” “Brexit Plus,” or “Brexit Times Five.” [...]
To start with, as Harry Enten of FiveThirtyEight observed last week, it is simply not true that the polls in Britain predicted a vote against Brexit in the final weeks of that campaign. [...]
Perhaps more importantly, the idea that the American electorate is similar to the British one on the issue Trump has made the centerpiece of his campaign, immigration, is not borne out by evidence.
Having spent a good part of my childhood shuttling between the United States and the British Isles, I can attest that one of the most common errors Americans make about Britain is failing to understand just how different the two cultures are, particularly with regard to attitudes on immigration, despite sharing a (more or less) common language.
Motherboard: Pregnant Women in Rural Pakistan Have an Unusual New Ally: Voicemail
Starting in January 2017, expectant mothers in rural Pakistan will be able to sign up for a voice message service that will give them simple healthcare tips over the course of their pregnancies, urging them to eat more iron, for example, or to get a certain vaccine.
This might sound ho-hum to people who live in the US and Canada, where many parents-to-be track every little aspect of their pregnancy through an array of gadgets and apps. But the picture is different in Pakistan, which has one of the highest infant mortality rates in the world—specifically, the highest rate of first-day deaths and stillbirths, at 40.6 per 1,000 births, according to a 2014 Save The Children report. Compare this to Canada, where approximately 2.5 per 1,000 births result in same-day deaths. [...]
For example, a woman may receive a message describing body changes she can expect during the pregnancy, such as soreness in her breasts. However, the word “breasts” would be changed to “upper body” or more subtle language to suit a rural Pakistani audience.
Although many Pakistanis don’t have reliable access to healthcare, 87 percent of households do have access to a cell phone, according to one 2012 report. Since there may be only one phone for a family, and not one for every individual woman, Ammi is being marketed as a family service. “The reality is that a man will likely see the messages first and pass on the information to his wife or family member,” said Shafiq.
Illiteracy is another hurdle, especially in rural areas. The total adult literacy rate in Pakistan is 80 percent for males between the ages of 15-24 and 67 percent for females percent for females in the same age range, according to UNESCO. That’s why a voice message, as opposed to a text message, is vital to get the words across.
Although some aspects of the service may initially be free to the user, Ammi is not a charity. It is a business that hopes to generate revenue by charging users a small subscription-based fee. While the co-founders couldn’t reveal to Motherboard exactly how much it will cost users, they are aiming for it to be around 0.15 CDN cents per month, or under $1 for the nine-month duration of pregnancy.
Politico: Lithuania’s ‘extreme tourism’ rankles the Roma
A company named Vaiduokliai, or Ghosts, just began its first tours of the Roma village of Kirtimai, advertising the trips as an “extreme challenge.”
People are being “treated like animals on a safari,” says Kvik, a Roma singer and community organizer, who fears such tours may further strengthen existing prejudices against the country’s Roma population. [...]
Lithuania has long struggled with the integration of its 2,000-some Roma population, with tens of millions of euros going toward housing and schools. But in the capital Vilnius, many residents say they don’t want Roma neighbors and so hundreds of Roma families are stuck in Kirtimai, a ramshackle village on the outskirts of town, effectively segregated from the rest of the population.
In local media, Kirtimai, the largest Roma settlement in the Baltics, is frequently described as a drug slum. A monitoring report from last year showed that news reports frequently describe Roma as lazy and criminal, often in the context of the drug trade, and one thing critics of the tour have fastened on is its emphasis on drugs and the fact that the tour guide is a former drug addict.
26 October 2016
The New Yorker: Hillary Clinton and the Populist Revolt
Earlier this year, an economist named Branko Milanović published a book called “Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization.” It’s a progress report on the “system” that Friedman heralded. Milanović analyzes global economic data from the past quarter century and concludes that the world has become more equal—poor countries catching up with rich ones—but that Western democracies have become less equal. Globalization’s biggest winners are the new Asian middle and upper classes, and the one-per-centers of the West: these groups have almost doubled their real incomes since the late eighties. The biggest losers are the American and European working and middle classes—until very recently, their incomes hardly budged. [...]
Summers described the current Democratic Party as “a coalition of the cosmopolitan élite and diversity.” The Republicans, he went on, combined “social conservatism and an agenda of helping rich people.” These alignments left neither party in synch with Americans like Mark Frisbie: “All these regular people who thought they are kind of the soul of the country—they feel like there was nobody who seemed to be thinking a lot about them.” In 2004, the political scientist Samuel Huntington published his final book, “Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity.” He used the term “cosmopolitan élites” to describe Americans who are at home in the fluid world of transnational corporations, dual citizenship, blended identities, and multicultural education. Such people dominate our universities, tech companies, publishers, nonprofits, entertainment studios, and news media. They congregate in cities and on the coasts. Lately, they have become particularly obsessed with the food they eat. The locavore movement, whatever its benefits to health and agriculture, is an inward-looking form of activism. When you visit a farm-to-table restaurant and order the wild-nettle sformato for thirty dollars, the line between social consciousness and self-gratification disappears. Buying synthetic-nitrate-free lunch meat at Whole Foods is also a way to isolate yourself from contamination by the packaged food sold at Kmart and from the overweight, downwardly mobile people who shop there. The people who buy food at Kmart know it. [...]
She was right. Obama was expressing a widespread liberal attitude toward Republican-voting workers—that is, he didn’t take them seriously. Guns and religion, as much as jobs and incomes, are the authentic interest of millions of Americans. Trade and immigration have failed to make their lives better, and, arguably, left them worse off. And if the Democratic Party was no longer on their side—if government programs kept failing to improve their lives—why not vote for the party that at least took them seriously? [...]
The conservative marriage survived the embarrassment of Palin’s campaign, which exposed her as someone more interested in getting on TV than in governing. It rode the nihilistic anger of the Tea Party and the paranoid rants of Glenn Beck. It benefitted from heavy spending by the Koch brothers and ignored the barely disguised racism that some Republican voters directed at the black family now occupying the White House. When Trump and others began questioning President Obama’s birth certificate, Party élites turned a blind eye; the rank and file, for their part, fell in behind Mitt Romney, a Harvard-educated investor. The persistence of this coalition required an immense amount of self-deception on both sides. Romney, who belonged to a class that greatly benefitted from cheap immigrant labor, had to pretend to be outraged by the presence of undocumented workers. Lower-middle-class Midwestern retirees who depended on Social Security had to ignore the fact that the representatives they kept electing, like Paul Ryan, wanted to slash their benefits. Veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan returned to Indiana and Texas embittered at having lost their youth in unwinnable wars, while conservative pundits like Kristol kept demanding new ones—but their shared contempt for liberal élites kept them from noticing the Republican Party’s internal conflicts. In this way, red states and blue states—the color-coding scheme enshrined by the networks on the night of the 2000 Presidential election—continued to define the country’s polarization into mutually hateful camps.
BBC4 Analysis: The Myth of Mobs
In popular imagination, being in a crowd makes people scary and irrational. But is this true? In this edition of Analysis, David Edmonds asks social psychologists - including a leading expert on groups, Steve Reicher - about the psychology of crowds. This is far more than merely a theoretical matter. It has profound implications for how we police crowds.
25 October 2016
Vox: Genetically engineered humans will arrive sooner than you think. And we're not ready.
And so, instead of transforming the world around ourselves to make it more what we wanted it to be, now it’s becoming possible to transform ourselves into whatever it is that we want to be. And there's both power and danger in that, because people can make terrible miscalculations, and they can alter themselves, maybe in ways that are irreversible, that do irreversible harm to the things that really make their lives worth living. [...]
It is, but I'm always careful about saying that, because I don't want to fall into technological determinism. Some of the writers like Ray Kurzweil, the American inventor and futurist, have tended to do that. They say it's coming whether we like it or not, and we need to adapt ourselves to it.
But I don't see technology that way, and I think most historians of technology don't see it that way either. They see technology and society as co-constructing each other over time, which gives human beings a much greater space for having a say in which technologies will be pursued and what direction we will take, and how much we choose to have them come into our lives and in what ways. [...]
Well, let's put it this way: If only rich people have access to these technologies, then we have a very big problem, because it's going to take the kinds of inequalities that have been getting worse over recent decades, even in a rich country like ours, and make them much worse, and inscribe those inequalities into our very biology.
So it's going to be very hard for somebody to be born poor and bootstrap themselves up into a higher position in society when the upper echelons of society are not only enjoying the privileges of health and education and housing and all that, but are bioenhancing themselves to unprecedented levels of performance. That's going to render permanent and intractable the separation between rich and poor.
The Huffington Post: LGBT Rights And Religious Refusals In Mississippi: What's Actually At Stake?
It’s no surprise Governor Phil Bryant of Mississippi is one of the few prominent Republicans left defending Donald Trump. Governor Bryant already proved his stubbornness when he was the only public official to appeal the enjoining of Mississippi’s radical anti-LGBT legislation passed this spring. Lawyers on both sides are currently gearing up for briefing and arguments in the Fifth Circuit over Mississippi’s religious refusal bill, HB 1523. HB 1523 provides explicit, special protections designed to allow individuals and businesses in Mississippi to discriminate against LGBT individuals and families if they believe that marriage is between a man and a woman, sex should be reserved to such a marriage, and/or that the gender a person is assigned at birth is immutable. [...]
Epstein fails to account for any of these grave realities on the ground. He also seems to not understand the reality of the bill itself. He imagines HB 1523 as limited to private “market-regulated” spaces, but the bill’s scope extends far beyond that. HB 1523 prevents the state from interfering in a foster parent’s decision to “guide, instruct, or raise” a child in accordance with the favored moral beliefs. One section of the bill allows counselors to deny mental health services to a lesbian teenager struggling with coming out on the basis that the provider believes marriage is between a man and a woman (without any requirement of a referral). The bill extends this protection to state employees, such as a school counselor at a public school, which for many young people is their only access to mental health services. This is in a state, mind you, with one of the highest risks of suicide for LGBT youth. There is nothing hyperbolic about saying that this is about life and death for LGBT individuals in Mississippi. When mental health care providers turn away HIV positive patients, doctors and public health professionals have already warned us what the likely outcome will be.
Richard Epstein believes that although racial anti-discrimination protections were previously justified as a “necessary corrective against massive abuses of state power under Jim Crow. Thankfully, that risk is gone today.” That may better describe where Richard Epstein teaches law and contemplates his academic theories: New York City. But for LGBT Mississippians who received KKK flyers in their driveways, Epstein’s assertion that the risk is gone is laughable. Don’t take my New York word for it: listen to the voices coming directly from Mississippi. For LGBT citizens in Mississippi there’s not just the “risk” of a Jim Crow South, it’s their daily reality.
The Guardian: ‘I felt abandoned’: children stolen by France try to find their past, 50 years on
Cheyroux and his two sisters were among more than 2,000 children removed from the tropical island between 1963 and 1982 as part of a French government programme to repopulate increasingly deserted areas of rural postwar France. Cheyroux now believes he was forcibly taken from his mother, Marie-Thérese Abrousse, who had three children out of wedlock and was trying to raise them alone in the impoverished neighbourhood of Coeur-Saignnat. [...]
The people of Réunion are descendants of slaves brought there by French colonisers to work on sugar plantations. The island is a departement, essentially an overseas territory of France. In the 1960s, the MP for Réunion, Michel Debré, set up a scheme to move children from the island to mainland France. His government promised islanders that their children would be sent to the best schools and be adopted by loving, rich French parents who could provide for them in a way that most creole people could not. Residents of Réunion spoke of the red government trucks that would roam the streets after school picking up children; and parents being forced to initial or fingerprint papers that they couldn’t read. [...]
Children like Cheyroux were taken to France in batches of 30. First, they were kept in a temporary home in Réunion where they were taught French and to stop speaking in their native creole.
From there, they were taken to various parts of France where adoptive parents could come to take them home. Cheyroux and his sisters were chosen by a couple from Auch, a commune in the south-west of the country. They were the only children with dark skin in their neighbourhood, and were teased and picked on by their friends. “They’d call me chocolat or negro or noireau,” he says.
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