Human sexuality shows occasional very surprising inclinations towards "defilement", even within otherwise extremely respectful and kind people. We shouldn’t be too surprised, as ever, by the unusual pathways of our sexuality. We should learn to understand them.
16 September 2016
Vox: Police have shot and killed at least 2,195 people since Ferguson
Fatal Encounters, a nonprofit, has tracked these killings by collecting reports from the media, public, and law enforcement and verifying them through news reports. Some of the data is incomplete, with details about a victim’s race, age, and other factors sometimes missing. It also includes killings that were potentially legally justified, and is likely missing some killings entirely. [...]
The map includes cases in which a police officer shot and killed someone. But some of the shootings — it’s hard to say how many — were “suicide by cop,” when people kill themselves by baiting a police officer into using deadly force. The map doesn’t include non-shooting deaths, such as vehicle crashes, stun guns, drug overdoses, and asphyxiations.
The FBI already collects some of this data from local and state agencies, but as Vox’s Dara Lind explained, that data is very limited. Reporting homicides for participating agencies is mandatory, but reporting the circumstances of homicides is not. So we might know that thousands of people die in a certain state, but we won’t always know why those homicides happened and whether they involved police. Participation in the FBI reporting programs is also voluntary, making the number of reported homicides in the federal data at best a minimum of what’s going on across the country.
The Guardian: Miloš Zeman makes Nigel Farage look like a nice guy. It’s even worse than that
A few examples. On the International Students’ Day on 17 November, which commemorates the closing of Czech universities by the Nazis in 1939, Zeman shared a platform with a Czech far-right party. And of the Czech Friends of the Earth, award-winning nature conservationists trying to protect a national park from illegal logging, he said he would treat them in a “good old medieval way: burn them, piss on them and salt them”. He really does make Nigel Farage look like a nice guy. [...]
To find a correct answer we have to recognise that Zeman is alone neither in the Czech Republic nor in the region of the post-communist EU member states. Rather, he is a vulgar version of the populists who have emerged across the region as its new political leadership. Think of Poland’s Jarosław Kaczyński, Viktor Orbán in Hungary or Robert Fico in Slovakia. In the Czech Republic, we also have the dangerous oligarch, media and agro-business tycoon and minister of finance, Andrej Babiš.
With their authoritarian style and fanning of hatred towards minorities and refugees, they all stand as evidence to the story of the failed transformations of the post-communist countries. We have to face the harsh reality: the central European post-communist countries have failed to build a decent type of democracy, and most of them are in acute danger of slipping into authoritarian regimes. [...]
In central Europe, you could even conclude that neoliberal capitalism has encouraged corruption by declaring that everything should have its price tag. If “everything”, why not state decisions? Why not university degrees or public offices? It has been proved that all of those assets have been the subject of murky trades in the Czech Republic’s recent past. [...]
But this crisis of political representation is not confined to the east. It partly explains Brexit, the emergence of movements such as Podemos or Syriza, and Jeremy Corbyn’s transformation of Labour. The left movement in eastern Europe was totally demolished by communism, and all attempts to establish progressive social movements are still struggling with that stigma.
The Atlantic: America's Cultural Civil War
Few moments have captured as clearly 2016’s evolution into a cultural civil war. Trump is rallying passionate support from the voters most estranged from the social and demographic trends reshaping America, particularly blue-collar, older, non-urban, and evangelical whites. But the brusque, racially barbed nationalism he has used to court those voters has provoked unprecedented resistance from all the forces that welcome (or even accept) this new America. That includes not only most minorities, young people, and cultural figures like Streisand who ordinarily tilt Democratic, but also much of white-collar white America and the business establishment, which ordinarily lean Republican. [...]
Against all this, it’s striking that Trump is keeping the race as close as it is (even if he’s yet to prove he can push much past 40 percent support). It also underscores why so many Trump voters view 2016 as their Alamo. It’s unlikely any future candidate will articulate their grievances as unreservedly as Trump. And it will only grow harder to construct a winning electoral coalition around his blue-collar base: although Census surveys show non-college educated whites as a larger share of all voters than media exit polls do, both sources show them declining on average by about three percentage points in each election since 1992. The minority and college-educated white voters most repelled by Trump’s insular message are inexorably filling the gap.
Clinton’s dismissal of the “deplorables” may help Trump energize his voters by deriding her as an elitist who “mocks and demeans” them (as he said Monday). But the exchange also portrayed Clinton to her coalition as the defender of a diverse, inclusive America against an opponent they consider uniquely hostile to it. And in fact, while polls show most Clinton voters welcome immigration and rising diversity, much of Trump’s support views each with alarm. Whoever wins in November will struggle to find common ground between these culturally antithetical coalitions. But it is Clinton, for all her other missteps, who has planted her party on the side of this divide that is growing larger every four years.
Salon: Are Americans nicer in Spanish? How morality changes in a foreign language
Psychologists who study moral judgments have become very interested in this question. Several recent studies have focused on how people think about ethics in a non-native language — as might take place, for example, among a group of delegates at the United Nations using a lingua franca to hash out a resolution. The findings suggest that when people are confronted with moral dilemmas, they do indeed respond differently when considering them in a foreign language than when using their native tongue. [...]
Using a very different experimental setup, Janet Geipel and her colleagues also found that using a foreign language shifted their participants’ moral verdicts. In their study, volunteers read descriptions of acts that appeared to harm no one, but that many people find morally reprehensible — for example, stories in which siblings enjoyed entirely consensual and safe sex, or someone cooked and ate his dog after it had been killed by a car. Those who read the stories in a foreign language (either English or Italian) judged these actions to be less wrong than those who read them in their native tongue.
Why does it matter whether we judge morality in our native language or a foreign one? According to one explanation, such judgments involve two separate and competing modes of thinking — one of these, a quick, gut-level “feeling,” and the other, careful deliberation about the greatest good for the greatest number. When we use a foreign language, we unconsciously sink into the more deliberate mode simply because the effort of operating in our non-native language cues our cognitive system to prepare for strenuous activity. This may seem paradoxical, but is in line with findings that reading math problems in a hard-to-read font makes people less likely to make careless mistakes (although these results have proven difficult to replicate).
An alternative explanation is that differences arise between native and foreign tongues because our childhood languages vibrate with greater emotional intensity than do those learned in more academic settings. As a result, moral judgments made in a foreign language are less laden with the emotional reactions that surface when we use a language learned in childhood.
Jacobin Magazine: Between Rojava and Washington
However, since his imprisonment, Öcalan appears to have mellowed and, in his writings, has reoriented the PKK away from Soviet-style Marxism towards an ideology that blends elements of feminism, environmentalism, and anarchism, inspired by the anarchist philosopher Murray Bookchin. [...]
These observations are not meant to idealize the Rojava revolution. Like all revolutionary movements, the PYD has often failed to live up to its ideals. It has yet to shake off the authoritarian impulses inherited from the PKK, and has frequently been accused of suppressing other Kurdish political parties in Syria, including the Kurdish National Council (KNC), an organization with close links to the Iraqi Kurdish political leadership. It also faces allegations of ethnic cleansing in Arab villages and has, at times, used child soldiers. The organization also continues to promote the cult of Öcalan through its control of the education system and media. [...]
The roots of this contradiction lie in the fact that the United States has long regarded the PKK — the organization from which the PYD sprung — as a terrorist organization, and has provided both military and political support for Turkey’s fight against the PKK for decades. With the decision to support the Syrian Kurds US officials have thus been thrust into the comical position of pretending that the PYD and PKK are entirely separate organizations, a fiction that is almost impossible to sustain.
This state of affairs has been exacerbated by the fact that, while the United States is prioritizing the fight against the Islamic State, Ankara views the PKK-PYD axis and the Assad regime as the main enemy. Indeed, Turkey has been more than willing to tolerate the flow of fighters and weapons into Syria in order to undermine its enemies — a policy that has bolstered the position of the Islamic State.
On the morning of August 24, Turkish forces backed by local Islamist militias associated with the Free Syrian Army crossed the frontier, taking control of the ISIS stronghold of Jarabulus. Significantly, ISIS offered almost no resistance to the Turkish advance, sparking accusations that the entire operation had been staged for Western eyes and that ISIS forces had been informed of the operation beforehand. While Turkey entered under the banner of the anti-ISIS coalition, the true target of the action was the PYD which had been slowly advancing towards the city.
FiveThirtyEight: Independent Voters Are Overrated
Although the results differ from poll to poll, a clear pattern emerges: Trump does better with independents than he does with the electorate at large. Clinton is still winning overall because she is doing better with Democrats than Trump is with Republicans.
Clinton leads among Democrats by an average of 81 percentage points, while Trump is ahead among Republicans by 76 points. That’s not a huge difference, but it’s meaningful. Trump has had problems with the GOP base since the primary season. Meanwhile, Clinton was cleaning up with self-identified Democratsduring the Democratic primaries, even as Bernie Sanders was doing well with independent voters. It’s also possible that Trump’s association with the Republican Party has caused some traditional Republican voters to call themselves independents, which makes the pool of independent voters more conservative leaning.
Indeed, many self-identified independents are not the moderate, persuadable swing voters they are often portrayed to be. As Amy Walter from the Cook Political Report has pointed out, independents usually lean towards one party or the other, even as they claim a nonpartisan label. Some lean Democratic or GOP. As Walter discussed, true independents only make up about 10 percent of all voters. Further, voters who typically favor the GOP make up a larger percentage of self-identified independents than they do of voters overall, which can make independents a Republican-leaning group relative to the electorate. In fact, the self-identified independents who consistently favor one party are often more ideologically extreme than those who identify with either party. That is, there is no reason to believe that independents should necessarily reflect the will of the overall electorate. [...]
In fact, here’s an interesting historical tidbit: In the four elections decided by less than 5 points since 1976, the candidate who won independents lost the national popular vote every time. That includes Mitt Romney in 2012, who many Republicans argued would win because he was leading with independents. Less remembered is John Kerry’s loss in 2004; he had less support among self-identified Democrats than Bush did among self-identified Republicans and so lost the election despite edging out Bush among independents.
Bloomberg: The Anger Won’t End on Nov. 8
Anger is different. Scans of angry brains show activity in the left frontal cortex, the part associated with approach emotions. That makes sense. When you’re angry, you don’t want to run away; you want to get in someone’s face. And unlike disgust or fear, anger feels good—you don’t nurse disgust. “Looking ahead to how you’re going to avenge a perceived harm feels exhilarating,” says Jennifer Lerner, a psychologist and professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Her research, with Dacher Keltner of the University of California at Berkeley, has found that angry people are much more optimistic than fearful people. The angrier you are, the safer you feel from future terrorist attacks, the better you rate your health, the more attractive you believe you are to marital prospects. Indeed, angry people see the future as rosily as happy people do. That’s not true with fear. [...]
This is the through line in Trump’s otherwise erratic presidential campaign. For all the talk of the blue-collar economic fears driving Trump’s campaign, it has run largely on spleen. Trump’s public pronouncements are heavy on threats, challenges, and insults; his supporters have blasted perceived enemies on social media with furious invective; and his rallies have been punctuated by brawls. (As in ice hockey, the fighting seems to be what many fans come for.) The parable Trump tells—about bad leaders who have weakened America and the artful dealmaker who, alone, can fix it—matches the angry mind’s simplified universe of personal blame. His repeated invocation of a “silent majority” parallels anger’s empowerment: His supporters aren’t weak, he tells them, they’re strong. They’re just not loud enough.
There isn’t anything inherently wrong with anger in public life. All political movements depend on it. Civil rights protesters were propelled by moral rage, and the original Revolution-era Tea Partiers were good and steamed. But politics does feel particularly angry at the moment. Poll after poll shows a more ideologically segregated country whose inhabitants view their opponents as aliens and their disagreements as irreconcilable. In a world of self-curated Facebook news feeds, everyone is like the subjects in the MacKuen study, reading manifestoes and rants that buttress their worldview and keep the indignation at a titillating simmer.
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