23 September 2016
BBC4 Thinking Allowed: Shyness - Names
Shyness: Laurie Taylor talks to Joe Moran, Professor of English and Cultural History at Liverpool John Moores University and the author of study of the 'shrinking violet' in history and sociology.
Also, a sociology of naming. Jane Pilcher, Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Leicester, explores the relationship between names and our sense of identity.Producer: Jayne Egerton.
The Guardian: Nicolas Sarkozy’s bigotry cannot define our worth as children of immigrants
“If you want to become French, you speak French, you live like the French. We will no longer settle for integration that does not work, we will require assimilation.” These were the words of former French president Nicolas Sarkozy this week. He went on: “Once you become French, your ancestors are the Gauls. ‘I love France, I learned the history of France, I see myself as French,’ is what you must say.”
This week, personalities from both sides of the political spectrum expressed their concern over this statement, made by Sarkozy on Monday night during a meeting in Franconville, a north Paris suburb. Curiously, the part that stirred up most controversy was the idea that, once you become French, the Gauls are your ancestors. This declaration is historically incorrect: Gaul is actually a geographical construct conceptualised by the Romans to refer to a territory bringing people of varied origins together. This notion was later used by Napoleon III, after defeat in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870, to rally the French around symbols such as courage and strength. [...]
Colonial nostalgia is making a comeback in France. It never left completely, but the approaching presidential election seems to have unleashed something. Two weeks ago, it was François Fillon, the ex-prime minister, publicly stating that “colonisation was merely a sharing of culture”. This is historical revisionism, nothing more. What about the rape, murder, forced work, not to mention the “fear, inferiority complex, tremor, kneeling (and) despair”, as Aimé Césaire described. And remember Nadine Morano’s comments last year? The former secretary of state for family said on television that France was a country of “white race”.
Jacobin Magazine: The Elections in Berlin
Die Linke enjoyed significant gains in the western part of the city and it remained the strongest party in the east, albeit with some losses. The party’s gains are encouraging, particularly for demonstrating that the Left can be successful with a consistently antiracist and pro-refugee message.
There is no doubt, however, that Sunday’s real winner was once again the AfD. The right-populist party secured a plurality of votes in many eastern neighborhoods Die Linke once took for granted, despite fielding multiple candidates openly associated with the far right. [...]
The vote in Berlin both confirms the city’s status as a cosmopolitan metropolis in which the forces of the center left enjoy broad hegemony, as well as reflects the wider national trend in which the parties of the center shed voters to both the left and right and the AfD establishes itself as the main destination for protest voters. The Alternative for Germany received its best results in the city’s poorer suburbs, followed by the middle-class neighborhoods in the west. [...]
That said, a drift among German workers towards right-populism can also be detected: according to exit polls, 27 percent of “workers” voted for the AfD, compared to 18 percent for the SPD, and 16 percent for Die Linke. While the urban, white-collar middle- and working-classes seem to respond to the crisis by moving left, large sections of the traditional center and working class are veering right.
This ongoing realignment remains an open-ended process, seen in both the rise of the AfD as well as the recovery of the Free Democrats, who enjoyed one of their first electoral successes since getting booted out of the Bundestag three years ago. It suggests that time may be running out for Germany’s period as a bastion of European stability, and will probably mean further electoral surprises in the future.
CityLab: From Ferguson to Charlotte, Why Police Protests Turn Into Riots
Some observers quickly denounced the riotous protests as senseless violence, criticizing the looting of a Walmart on Tuesday and a host of businesses in the downtown entertainment district on Wednesday. But it is worth noting that the riots in Charlotte are strikingly similar to those that took place in Baltimore in 2015, where the downtown entertainment district was also the site of clashes between protesters and patrons, and in Ferguson in 2014, where retail stores were a frequent target of riots.
Keith Lamont Scott was shot in a predominately African-American neighborhood in Northeast Charlotte. But the protests that followed his death moved from that community into a majority-white area, culminating in the blockading of Highway I-85 on Tuesday night. On Wednesday, nearly all of these sites of protests were in the downtown area’s upscale entertainment districts. (Scroll over the map below to see racial breakdowns by Census tract.)[...]
Louis Hyman, an associate professor of history at Cornell University, argues we cannot understand the protests and sporadic riots and looting that have occurred over the past two days without looking at the intense geographic and economic segregation in which they took place. From Ferguson to Baltimore to Charlotte, rioting, Hyman notes, often breaks out in poor, black neighborhoods—where people feel both oppressed by police and by the predatory lenders and overpriced stores in their communities. Hyman explored this idea in a conversation with CityLab: [...]
In the 1960s, mobile television cameras made police brutality real on the evening news, and gave the civil rights protesters legitimacy. But as the riots wore on through the ‘60s, that legitimacy turned into fear.
Bloomberg: America Is Not the Greatest Country on Earth. It’s No. 28
Every study ranking nations by health or living standards invariably offers Scandinavian social democracies a chance to show their quiet dominance. A new analysis published this week—perhaps the most comprehensive ever—is no different. But what it does reveal are the broad shortcomings of sustainable development efforts, the new shorthand for not killing ourselves or the planet, as well as the specific afflictions of a certain North American country.
Iceland and Sweden share the top slot with Singapore as world leaders when it comes to health goals set by the United Nations, according to a report published in the Lancet. Using the UN’s sustainable development goals as guideposts, which measure the obvious (poverty, clean water, education) and less obvious (societal inequality, industry innovation), more than 1,870 researchers in 124 countries compiled data on 33 different indicators of progress toward the UN goals related to health.
The massive study emerged from a decadelong collaboration focused on the worldwide distribution of disease. About a year and a half ago, the researchers involved decided their data might help measure progress on what may be the single most ambitious undertaking humans have ever committed themselves to: survival. In doing so, they came up with some disturbing findings, including that the country with the biggest economy (not to mention, if we’re talking about health, multibillion-dollar health-food and fitness industries) ranks No. 28 overall, between Japan and Estonia.
Think Progress: No, American politics didn’t create ‘Cafeteria Catholics.’ Catholicism did
That’s the question being batted about on Wednesday, when The Atlantic published a lengthy reported piece entitled “Why Only Cafeteria Catholics Can Survive in American Politics.” In it, religion writer Emma Green gives voice to an argument often repeated by centrist Catholics in election years: that America’s rigid two-party system, divided along deeply entrenched ideological lines, makes it impossible for rank-and-file Catholics to register with a party that matches all aspects of official Church theology. She argues this forces American Catholics to “pick and choose” their theology—making them dreaded “cafeteria Catholics”—resulting in a “diluted identity” for American Catholicism. [...]
But there remains a major problem with Green’s analysis: claiming a Catholic identity and harboring views contrary to Church hierarchy isn’t an American invention. It’s the norm in Catholicism, because being Catholic doesn’t necessarily mean agreeing with bishops, or voting the way they want you to. And it never has. [...]
No one disputes that American Catholics, once a beleaguered religious minority beset by rampant anti-Catholicism reminiscent of today’s Islamophobia, flocked to the Democratic Party to support Catholic candidates such as Al Smith in the 1920s and John F. Kennedy in the 1960s. They’re certainly not the first minority group to do so; America’s brand of democracy encourages minority groups to form alliances and cling to one party out of self-preservation. The same could be said of today’s American Muslims, for instance, who switched from voting for Republican George W. Bush to Democrat John Kerry in one election cycle, and remain firmly Democratic—even though many express conservative sensibilities on several issues. [...]
Granted, if this sort of dissenting spirit was unique among modern American Catholics, one could plausibly argue that the United States has created an environment that bifurcates Catholics in unusual ways. But it’s not: In 2014, a global survey conducted by Univision found that most of the planet’s Catholics disagree with the church on birth control, abortion rights, divorce, and priestly celibacy. This corroborates with several other polls showing the leftward tilt of many Catholic-majority nations: a 2013 Pew poll found that 65 percent of those in Brazil —which is still one of the world’s most Catholic countries—believe homosexuality should be accepted by society, which is probably why Brazil legalized same-sex marriage that same year. In Argentina, which Pope Francis calls home and where 70 percent of the population claims a Catholic identity, marriage equality is widely supported.
The New Yorker: Russia's Election: Every Choice Was a Bad One
Suppose you had to choose between eating nothing at all and eating something that would immediately make you throw up. Or, say, between walking on hot coals and standing naked in an icy rain. Or between sleeping on a bed of nails and under a blanket of wood screws. The Russian language, honed over centuries of impossible choices, has a colloquial expression for that: oba khuzhe, meaning “both are worse.” [...]
There is also the issue of the country itself. The number of electoral districts has grown by two since the 2014 annexation of Crimea. Some people—most notably Garry Kasparov, the chess champion turned political activist in exile—have argued that the illegal annexation rendered the elections and the parliament itself illegitimate, and participation in them immoral. Others—most notably Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the former oil tycoon and political prisoner turned political activist in exile—argued that any opening in the political system, no matter how illusory, can and should be used against the Kremlin. Khodorkovsky funded a small slate of candidates for parliament and local legislatures—not, he told me, with an eye to winning but with an eye to helping activists gain political experience that they will be able to use in an eventual age after Vladimir Putin.
Some of Khodorkovsky’s candidates ran as independents, and others joined an opposition party called parnas—an acronym for the Party of People’s Freedom—which was allowed on the ballot for the first time, as was a quasi-opposition party called Yabloko, which has been around for nearly a quarter century. Its leader, Grigory Yavlinsky, who served as an economic adviser to Mikhail Gorbachev in the late nineteen-eighties, has been a mild critic of Putinism. Two parties that criticize the party line seemed like an embarrassment of riches. This caused endless debates on strategy, oba khuzhe-style. True, some reformers argued, Yabloko has never in its existence taken a brave stand, but its chances of getting into parliament seemed marginally better than those of parnas, so give your vote to Yabloko. In the same vein, several opposition activists campaigned for an elderly historian who supports the ban on “propaganda of homosexuality” and would like to ban abortion, because at least he opposed the annexation of Crimea.
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