The New York Times: Obama, Acknowledging U.S. Misdeeds Abroad, Quietly Reframes American Power

Mr. Obama had similarly confronted American misdeeds this year in Cuba, Argentina, Vietnam and Japan, each time raising decades-old but still sensitive actions, framed in the language of reconciliation. In comparison, the last Democrat in the White House, President Bill Clinton, did so once and only indirectly: admitting, in a speech delegated to his secretary of state, the United States’ role in Iran’s 1953 coup.

Mr. Obama’s series of speeches reviewing historical trouble spots highlight several unusual facets of his worldview. They fit within his larger effort to reach out to former adversaries such as Cuba and Myanmar. They assert his belief in introspection and the need to overcome the past. And they highlight his perspective that American power has not always been a force for good.

The White House is not eager to call attention to this practice. The administration is still sensitive after being accused by conservatives of “apologizing for America” in 2009, after Mr. Obama spoke critically of his Republican predecessor during visits to Egypt and France. [...]

Professor Lind stressed that none of Mr. Obama’s comments constitute apology. But nor is the controversy around them without substance. Rather, these speeches touch on a longstanding domestic political divide over the nature of American power. [...]

Jeremy Shapiro, the research director at the European Council on Foreign Relations, said this idea, though widespread in the United States, is something of a fallacy. Only Americans believe that the United States’ power is inherently virtuous; elsewhere, people see this idea as not only false, but dangerous.

“The disjuncture in the way that this is seen abroad and at home is one of the huge problems in U.S. foreign policy,” said Mr. Shapiro, who is American. “This is an image that Americans have of themselves but is simply not shared, even by their allies.”

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National Public Radio: Sept. 11 Marked Turning Point For Muslims In Increasingly Diverse America

"Before Sept. 11, Muslims – the majority of them – were living here physically, [but] mentally and spiritually they were living back home," says Zahid Bukhari, executive director of the Council for Social Justice at the Islamic Circle of North America.

Interfaith efforts in those days were scorned as un-Islamic, he says. Bukhari, who moved from Pakistan to the U.S. in the 1980s and now lives in Frederick, Md., urges his fellow immigrant Muslims, including the most devout, to turn their attention away from their native lands and focus on their adopted homeland. [...]

The struggle to improve the image of Muslim Americans has not been easy. A 2014 survey by the Pew Research Center found that of eight major religious groups in the country, people ranked Muslims at the very bottom. [...]

In the 2000 election, a survey by the Muslims in the American Public Square (MAPS) project at Georgetown University and Zogby Analytics found that immigrant Muslims, especially those from Arab countries, preferred George W. Bush, the Republican candidate, over Democrat Al Gore. They appreciated Bush's criticism of the racial profiling of Arab-Americans, and many aligned with conservative positions on social issues and the Republican emphasis on personal responsibility over government welfare.

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Politico: Poles to the right of Jarosław Kaczyński

PiS has turned a blind eye to the activities of the likes of the All-Polish Youth and the National Radical Camp (ONR) — which were banned for decades before the fall of communism in 1989 — to the dismay of mainstream parties like the centrist opposition Civic Platform, which this week asked Poland’s prosecutor general to outlaw the ONR for propagating fascism. [...]

Green ONR flags rippled in the background as PiS-affiliated President Andrzej Duda made his way to a Gdańsk church for the reburial mass. Nationalists booed and harassed a handful of activists from the Committee for the Defense of Democracy (KOD), a centrist grouping that has staged anti-government street protests in recent months.

Lech Wałęsa, the historic leader of the Solidarity labor union and a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, was greeted with cries of “traitor” and “death to the country’s enemies.” [...]

In response, Elżbieta Witek, chief of staff to Prime Minister Beata Szydło, told reporters, “Above all, I value those who are patriots.”

In last October’s parliamentary election, PiS had the support of a quarter of voters aged 18-29, much better than its past performance with that age bracket. Not all of those voters were nationalists or right-wingers, but those groupings have become part of PiS’s support base. [...]

In practical terms, too, the PiS government has made it easier for the ultra-nationalists to operate. In a review of police training materials conducted by the interior ministry in June, the ONR’s symbol — a hand gripping a sword — was removed from a guide to hate crimes.

When the ONR announced its intention to patrol the streets of the city of Łódź to “protect the Polish people against migrants,” regional governor Zbigniew Rau from the PiS defended them, saying, “If young people want to do something for the common good and they are concerned that [public] safety could be in danger, then it is the kind of capital on which we can build.”

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Vox: This study shows American federalism is a total joke

A new study takes a closer look at why. Professor Steven Rogers of Saint Louis University found that voters don’t make decisions about whether to reelect their state lawmakers because of their specific policies, campaign promises, voting records, or any of the other things you’d normally expect to be relevant to their position as local lawmakers.

That’s because the politics of statehouses turn out not to be local at all. Instead, Rogers finds there’s one major factor in deciding who controls the statehouse: the popularity of the American president. [...]

He notes that just 1 percent of local news is about statehouse news. The vast majority of local coverage — more than 60 percent — is instead about the presidential election, one study found.

Fewer than 20 percent of voters can identify their state legislator, according to a Vanderbilt study published in 2013. An even higher number have no opinion about whether said legislator is doing a good job. [...]

Rogers looked at a big data set of online polling from the 2008, 2010, and 2012 elections. He found that voters were more than 40 percent more likely to vote against their state lawmaker if they disapproved of the president. (That controlled for the pull of partisanship, or voting against a lawmaker because he or she is a member of the opposition party, according to Rogers.) Overall, attitudes toward the presidency were more than three times more important for a legislator’s reelection bid than attitudes toward the state legislature itself.

Now, there’s no point at which the unpopularity of a president automatically dooms his party’s state legislators to defeat. But Rogers’s data makes clear that voters are reacting to the presidency when they cast their ballot for these positions, even though they don’t have any bearing on what happens inside the White House.

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Vox: What a liberal sociologist learned from spending 5 years in Trump’s America

There’s this red-state paradox that others have written about before. Red states tend to be poorer and rely more on federal help. But they’re also more opposed to the federal government. So I started by asking, how could that be? What do I not get? I wanted to go to the heart of red-state culture, which would be whites in the South. So that’s how I ended up in Louisiana. [...]

They feel their cultural beliefs are denigrated by the culture at large. They feel that they’re seen as rednecks, that they live in a region that’s being discredited. Many of them are deeply devout, but they see the culture at large becoming more secular. And then they see economically that this trapdoor that used to only affect black people and people one class below them is now opening and gobbling up them and their children too. So altogether it makes them feel like a forgotten tribe. "Strangers in their own land" is a phrase that kept recurring to me as I spent time there.

And the main point is that they feel the government, the federal government, has been an instrument of their marginalization. If you give it an arm, it’ll take a leg. I think that was the big thing that was getting in the way and causing their deep distrust of something they otherwise might need to recover the natural environment that they did want. [...]

Another thing, a lot of the people I talked to were doing really well now — but they had grown up in poverty, or their parents had, they’d struggled hard, and they’d worked hard. They were also white men, and they felt that there was no cultural sympathy for them, in fact there was a tendency to blame the categories of whiteness and maleness. I came to realize that there is a whole sector of society in which the privilege of whiteness and maleness didn’t really trickle down. And I think we have grown highly insensitive to that fact. [...]

There was one thing I found interesting about Donald Trump’s appeal to blue-collar men, though. He spends a lot of time shaming women and minorities and disabled people and even war veterans. So many different groups. But the one group he hasn’t shamed is those who are applying for food stamps or who may be needing unemployment insurance. If you look at the iconography of shame in Trump’s speeches, he leaves an exception for the blue-collar man who might lose his job or have a low-wage job that doesn’t pay the bills.

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ArchDaily: Architecture is Propaganda: How North Korea Turned the Built Environment into a Tool for Control

It is not that the architecture in Pyongyang has to be world standard, or even of a good standard at all; the people just need to believe that it is. In fact, due to the level of control, the buildings need only to do the bare minimum, capturing an architectural idea in order to convince the people of a notion of power, progress or wealth. The level of isolation is such that there is no way for citizens to compare the structures of their home country to the grandiose buildings of power around the world. Koreans I spoke to in the Grand People’s Study House seemed convinced, and in their minds rightly so, that this admittedly impressive building was the greatest in all of the world. Why shouldn’t they? The Arch of Triumph, a gigantic arch straddling one of the main highways through the city adorned with stories of Kim Il Sung, receives no comparison here with its counterpart in Paris or any other Roman arch around the world before that. It just has to be a symbol of power, wealth and, in the minds of the people, be an idea conceived by their leader. It does what it’s meant to do—people speak of the buildings with genuine pride in their eyes, and they see them as a gift from their leaders to whom they are ever grateful. This is, of course, after over 60 years of socialist rule. Few in the country would have been alive to see the city before the Kim dynasty; those that were must only remember it as a pile of rubble after years of war.

After the Korean War the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), led by Kim Il Sung and supported by the Soviets, was left with a scene of complete and utter destruction; with the exception of a handful of buildings Pyongyang had been completely flattened. For a young general with socialist ideals this was seen as a clean slate, on top of which a new country, both physically and ideologically, could be built. Today, even with knowledge of the outside world, it is hard not to admire the clear, axial urban plan of the city designed with the help of established communists, the Soviet Army. The designers of Pyongyang focused on portraying ideals to the individual on the ground. Standing at the foot of a monument celebrating the Worker’s Party, clear views open up across huge lawns adorned with fountains, and over the river Taedong to gigantic statues of both the late leaders. The monument symbolizes an appreciation of the people, idolizes their community spirit, and looks out to the men that supposedly gave them this city. Even to a visitor it’s a powerful motif and a spectacular view, and for a split second this tranquil viewing point might even make you believe that maybe people don’t have it so bad here. It’s not until the apartment blocks in your peripheral vision come back into focus with their missing windows and permanently sodden concrete that you remember just how poor the quality of life in this city is in comparison with the initial dream of a socialist utopia that was planned decades ago.

The Soviets, during their partnership with Kim Il Sung’s regime, left behind some monumental and genuinely impressive buildings, but almost overnight the Soviet Union collapsed and suddenly the North Korean regime was left without money or support. As the DPRK pushed to maintain an image of power and strength in the eyes of its people, genuine quality was replaced for buildings that merely gave the impression of wealth; construction quality plummeted and build speed increased. Even today buildings are in almost all cases constructed with weak and rudimentary concrete blocks that are hand shaped and comprised primarily of ballast. But to the layman on the street it looks like the city is in a constant state of rapid growth, and of course no one hears about it when an apartment block collapses. A recent development, named “Dubai” by expats living in the city, is an attempt at creating modern riverside apartment blocks. But don’t let the multi-colored neon lights fool you, the buildings themselves are but poorly made, barely insulated shells not suited for a standard of living even close to what you’d imagine. To your average North Korean however, they’re seen as the ultimate trophy home, one they might be awarded if they do their best for the Party; sadly, they don’t know any better.

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Reuters: Italy's Five Star party reels in Rome, losing national luster

Italy's anti-establishment 5-Star Movement (M5S) is in disarray following a disastrous start to its rule in Rome city hall, potentially denting its chances of winning power at a national level. [...]

Since her landslide victory, Raggi has struggled to make her mark. She took weeks to put together her team as party factions battled to impose their candidates for the top jobs and she drew criticism for offering big salaries to some of her staffers.

Last week five city officials, including the head of finance, quit in a chain reaction after Italy's anti-corruption agency said Raggi had not followed the correct bureaucratic procedures when she chose her chief of staff.

Still struggling to overcome the walkout, Raggi triggered fresh angst when she appeared before a parliamentary commission on Monday alongside Paola Muraro, the person she had appointed to sort out Rome's long-running rubbish collection problems.

During the hearing, Muraro revealed that she had found out in July that she had been placed under investigation for alleged malpractice in her previous job as a highly paid consultant at the city's AMA trash collection company.

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Los Angeles Times: In Germany, it can be a crime to insult someone in public

After Ali Sonboly went on a rampage that killed nine people, he stood on the roof of a parking garage and engaged in a strange shouting match with a man on a nearby balcony. Thomas Salbey, a 57-year-old backhoe operator, hurled a seemingly never-ending stream of epithets at the teenage gunman and threw a beer bottle at him; the profanity-laced exchange was captured in a cellphone video that was widely shared on social media and TV news.

A local woman requested charges be brought against Salbey after watching the clip on television — and, if charged, Salbey could have ended up in jail for a year or faced a hefty fine for his coarse language. [...]

There were 218,414 cases of insults filed with prosecutors in Germany in 2015, down slightly from 225,098 in 2014, but far above numbers of around 150,000 recorded a decade ago. Americans and other foreigners living in Germany sometimes run afoul of the law, unaware of it, and end up being called into police or prosecutor’s offices to explain their side of the story, before their cases are usually dismissed.

Hardly anyone ends up in jail for insulting their neighbor in the midst of a heated dispute, or for flashing the middle finger — the Stinkefinger, or “stinky finger” as Germans call it — at another motorist in heavy traffic. But cases do wind up in court and fines are sometimes handed down. [...]

A Berlin court awarded one person 8,190 euros in 2011 for insults published against him in social media; in a 2012 case, a trainee who made disparaging remarks about her boss on Facebook had to pay 2,500 euros in damages. A student accepted a 5,000 euro out-of-court settlement in 2013 for racist remarks made in a rap song about him posted on YouTube. The 13-year-old's family had originally demanded 14,000 euros in court.

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