Political Critique: Illiberalism and authoritarianism can be successfully challenged in Poland

This past week Poland’s PiS government suffered its first blow since coming to power nearly a year ago. In what amounted to a complete U-turn following a dramatic parliamentary session in the wake of the Black Monday protest, PiS MPs struck down a proposed bill to ban abortion. Domestic and international media were quick to hail this as a victory for the anti-government protest movement. More so, PiS became divided over the issue as 32 MPs defied party discipline to vote against the bill.

It was an optimistic note in a region where illiberal populism and authoritarian governments are on the rise. During the same week in Hungary, a referendum challenging an EU plan to resettle refugees was held in which 98% of voters endorsed Orbán’s FIDESZ government’s anti-refugee and xenophobic stance. [...]

Such affinities have prompted many comparisons between the two countries in the past year. While there are admittedly some similarities the differences are crucial. Poland has not seen its Constitution changed and its civil liberties restricted as in Hungary. There is also no far right political force in Poland comparable to Hungary’s Jobbik, though Poland is seeing a rise of far right and xenophobic sentiments in particular among its youth.

More so, though PiS has taken over the state-run media, there are no oligarchsin Poland who could buy up independent media and silence it as in Hungary. Internationally, PiS is much weaker than FIDESZ which can count on support from the European People’s Party, while PiS lost its biggest ally in the EU arena, the British Conservative Party, after the Brexit vote. In addition, PiS’ arch-nemesis, Donald Tusk, is President of the European Council. And PiS’ more-than-average Polish Russophobia rules out any Orbán-style flirtation with Putin.

In Poland’s current situation, rhetoric matters more than actions. Of all PiS’ social-economic electoral promises it has only managed to implement a watered-down version of its child support programme. That alone has put enormous strain on the budget pushing the deficit to its largest since 1989. [...]

While PiS’ victory in last year’s elections produced a non-coalition government for the first time since 1989, PiS is much weaker than it looks despite its parliamentary majority. This majority rests on merely five seats in parliament (235 MPs out 460 in total) and is in fact made up of PiS in alliance with two smaller parties, Polska Razem and Solidarna Polska, which had rallied together with PiS for the elections. Both parties, each having nine MPs in the PiS bloc, are headed and represented by former political secessionists.

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Jacobin Magazine: Theresa May’s Le Pen Moment

This is the leading Tory who spent years in opposition decrying the party’s reputation as the “nasty party” and urging it to drop its attachment to the insurgent phase of Thatcherism. She was a modernizer, a liberal. This is not to claim that she lacked the authoritarian malice to also make her a convincing Tory. In a number of cases, she demonstrated that she would cheerfully crush a life in the interests of maintaining a right-wing base, and flip off those whom she has now contemptuously scorned as “activist, left-wing human rights lawyers.” [...]

In the aftermath of the Brexit vote, however, May has seen fit to anchor this language even further to the Right, denouncing the elites who find “your patriotism distasteful, your concerns about immigration parochial, your views about crime illiberal, your attachment to your job security inconvenient.” In cadences that would not be out of place at a UKIP rally, she made mincemeat of the cluelessness of metropolitan liberals, trying to reverse a democratic verdict. “If you’re well-off and comfortable,” she said, “Britain is a different country and these concerns are not your concerns.” [...]

The idea of a society that seems to have spun out of control, that has somehow been taken over by anti-social, anti-British elements — from migrants and criminals to international bankers — didn’t just emerge ex nihilo. It has been cultivated through overlapping strategies and vectors of political struggle, which really converged into an explosive mixture during the 2011 riots.

Those riots saw the shoots of an authentic, violent Poujadism, planted and cultivated long before, grow in English soil. When the riots broke out, British politics had been in a panicked stalemate since the credit crunch struck. Far from radicalizing, most people reached for the familiar and secure. They voted for the center, for safety. But the coordinates of the familiar were being scattered. [...]

Scotland is the main center of opposition to this kind of belligerent British restorationism, for obvious reasons. Notably, of all the major parties, only voters for the Scottish National Party do not approve of May’s new policies, such as forcing companies to publish statistics on how many “foreign” workers they employ. This is not because Scottish voters are more enlightened than others in the United Kingdom. It is because Scottish nationalism has deliberately harnessed itself to a progressive, center-left prospectus for post-British prosperity.

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Vox: The biggest climate change story in the world this week is quietly playing out in Rwanda

I’m referring to the current UN talks in Rwanda to tackle hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), an extremely potent greenhouse gas found in air conditioners, refrigerators, and foams. These HFCs were originally developed to replace the CFCs that were famously chewing a hole through the ozone layer. But HFCs have since become a major contributor to global warming, so countries are trying to phase them out under the same treaty that got rid of CFCs, the Montreal Protocol.

It won’t be easy to reach an agreement. If the HFC phase-out proves too costly, it could put air conditioning out of reach for millions of people in India and other developing countries who badly need it. But a successful deal would matter greatly for the future of this planet. The stakes are awfully high for such an obscure little meeting. [...]

But we shouldn't forget that we emit other important greenhouse gases, too. There's methane (CH4), which comes from landfills, livestock, and natural gas leaks. There's nitrous oxide (N2O) from agriculture. And there are the halocarbons such as the CFCs and HFCs in our air conditioners and refrigerators that also trap heat when they leak out of aging or faulty equipment and waft into the atmosphere. [...]

So the world's nations got together and enacted the Montreal Protocol in 1989 to phase out CFC use over time. It was one of the all-time great environmental success stories, and the ozone layer is now recovering.

Except for one teensy detail. One of the most popular substitutes for CFCs are a class of chemicals known as HFCs (hydrofluorocarbons). These coolants are fairly harmless to the ozone layer, but they turn out to be extremely potent greenhouse gases — up to 10,000 times as effective at trapping heat as carbon dioxide — when they seep out into the atmosphere. 

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VICE: The Problem with the Concept of a 'Good Immigrant'

I remember the racism he experienced over the years: people shouting at us in the street, and the time some kids tossed lit fireworks through the letterbox of our shop and it felt like we'd been bombed. He told me stories about men in pubs trying to punch him for daring to date an English girl (my mom). I remember how 9/11 happened—and Iran went from being just somewhere in the Middle East to being "an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world"—and everything got ten times worse. [...]

A bit later, his studies paid off, and he became a math teacher. And then something weird happened. It was like the volume on his otherness had been abruptly turned down and something else had been turned up. Abusive comments became less frequent. Hassle evaporated. He became respected, almost revered. He always swears that even the bricks and mortar of our little semi-detached house seemed to take on new meaning. "Some foreigners live there" became "a teacher lives there." Neighbors who usually struggled to give us the time of day started turning up at the door step with a bottle of whatever was on sale, asking if he could tutor their kids on their homework. In the eyes of our immediate community, he had gone from being a threatening other—the sort of "bad immigrant" who invades in hordes, steals jobs, sponges off the NHS, gobbles benefits, takes a dump on the economy, and is personally responsible for all that is wrong with life in Britain—to being someone worth their time, a "good immigrant." 

That's the good immigrant/bad immigrant binary: that all immigrants are automatically deemed bad people until they somehow earn their right to be treated as humans and to sit at the table. It's one of many triggers that inspired the author Nikesh Shukla to put together a new book: an anthology of essays from 21 different BAME writers, titled The Good Immigrant, exploring what it means to be black, Asian, or minority ethnic in Britain in 2016. [...]

This isn't the book on race, as Shukla often makes sure to state. It doesn't try to define "the black experience" or claim to know how every Chinese person in Britain feels right now. It treats race and identity not as segmented discussions of skin color or origin, but as a vast and nuanced spectrum of individual stories, spanning gender, age, ethnicity, upbringing, and environment—all underlined by a sense of hope and optimism. Some stories will make you feel uncomfortable, some will shine an awkward light on the shadowy corners where we all still harbor some form of subconscious ignorance. But mostly it seems astounding that these experiences, everyday otherness felt by the writers, are stories rarely heard.

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Al Jazeera: When will Iran abandon Bashar al-Assad?

Iran is undoubtedly the most important ally of Syria's President Bashar al-Assad. Without Iran, Assad would have been toppled years ago. The Iranian regime has backed Assad politically by maintaining its unequivocal red line, that Assad should not be forced to renounce his position in any transitional period.

It also backed him militarily by supplying him with arsenal and financial support that has kept him in power. The conventional wisdom says that it would be really hard for Iran to relinquish its buddy in Syria, and yet, looking at it from a more pragmatic standpoint, Iran would surely bet on several horses and is almost certainly setting the preliminaries for a post-Assad Syria.

There are three possible scenarios that would compel Tehran to finally abandon Assad.  

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Jakub Marian: Number of public holidays by country in Europe

A public holiday, also called national holiday or legal holiday, is a special holiday established by each country’s (or autonomous region’s) law. Public holidays are usually non-working but paid, which means that they serve as additional paid holidays with dates fixed by law. Alternatively, workers usually receive a higher hourly wage if they work during a public holiday.

One notable exception is the United Kingdom, where observing public holidays is not obligatory for employers, and employees are not entitled to an enhanced pay rate. This is partially compensated by the fact that British workers are entitled to 28 days of annual leave, which is more than in any other European country, and when an employer observes a public holiday, it counts towards the minimum.

The following map shows the theoretical maximum number of non-working days as defined by law. However, the real number of non-working days changes from year to year depending on the number of holidays falling on a weekend (which, however, may be compensated by an additional non-working day during the workweek in some countries). When a range of numbers is given, the actual number depends on a municipality or religious affiliation.

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VICE: Have Queer Muslims Gained Acceptance In Their Communities Since The Pulse Shooting?

This past June, after Omar Mateen, a Muslim man, gunned down 49 patrons of Orlando's Pulse gay nightclub, leaders of prominent American Muslim organizations issued a statement unequivocally condemning the attack. They declared their commitment to "our shared humanity," despite "differences in faith or lifestyle," and the "cherished political right" of Americans to "pursue happiness as each one sees fit."

Others went beyond such qualified language: "For many years, members of LBGTQI community have stood shoulder-to-shoulder with the Muslim community against any acts of hate crimes, Islamophobia, marginalization and discrimination," wrote Nihad Awad, the executive director of the Council of American-Islamic Relations. "Today we stand with them shoulder-to-shoulder[...] Homophobia, transphobia, islamophobia are interconnected systems of oppression, and we cannot dismantle one without dismantling the other."

Homophobia is widespread within many Muslim communities; Muslim LGBTQ activists, who have struggled for years to bring attention to the issue, were encouraged by the support expressed after Pulse, hoping the tragedy might spark an increased commitment to addressing the struggles of queer Muslims. Ani Zonneveld, founder of Muslims for Progressive Values (MPV), a pioneering human rights organization in the fight for LGBTQ Muslim rights, called the shooting "a moment for the traditional Muslim communities to put their money where their mouth is." With American Muslims supporting LGBTQ rights in increasing numbers—a 2014 Pew Research poll found that 45 percent of American Muslims accept homosexuality, up 7 percent since 2007, and 42 percent support gay marriage—the time seemed ripe for change.

This July, MPV launched the No to Homophobia campaign, calling on prominent imams and other representatives of faith-based institutions, such as schools, mosques, and universities, to "pledge to eradicate all homophobic teachings in my community and in the religious institutions I am affiliated with, and [to] affirm the dignity of LGBT individuals."

But the outcome was underwhelming. Zonneveld told me, "We wrote [emails] to Hamza Yusuf"—a co-founder of the prominent Muslim liberal arts college Zaytuna College—"and several prominent imams directly and didn't get a response. We know that they opened it; one or two opened it several times. The only ones who have responded to our emails have been chaplains and policy makers."

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The Guardian: The Tallinn experiment: what happens when a city makes public transport free?

The capital of Estonia introduced free public transport at the beginning of 2013 after their populist mayor Edgar Savisaar called a referendum on the decision, dismissed by critics at the time as a political stunt that the city couldn’t afford.

Three years on Savisaar has been suspended amid allegations of corruption, but the city remains committed to the programme – claiming that instead of it costing them money, they are turning a profit of €20m a year.

To enjoy Tallinn’s buses, trams, trolley buses and trains for free you must be registered as a resident, which means that the municipality gets a €1,000 share of your income tax every year, explains Dr Oded Cats, an expert who has conducted a year long study on the project. Residents only need to pay €2 for a “green card” and then all their trips are free. [...]

The project took a year from inception to reality in which time Alakula and his team struggled to find cities to learn from. The city of Hasselt in Belgium had free transport for 16 years but they had to reintroduce fares when it became financially unsustainable. It is also free in the town of Aubagne near Marseille in France, but neither were on the scale of Tallinn’s ambitions.

Three years later the project has been inundated with requests – from the Chinese city of Chengdu, home to 14 million and desperate to ease traffic congestion, to Romania’s capital Bucharest. “We would be happy to hand over the title of the free public transport capital of the world,” Alakula laughs. [...]

Dr Cats, who is based at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, found that the number of people in Tallinn using public transport instead of cars was up by 8%, but at the same time the average length of a car journey had gone up by 31%, which he said meant there were more, not fewer, cars on the road in the time they tested.

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