Böll-Stiftung: The Referendum in Hungary: “A Clear Foreign Policy Debacle and a Temporary Domestic Setback for the Government”

It is difficult to state with certainty why so many voters stayed away from the polls. Several factors were probably at play, in particular the opposition parties’ campaign to boycott the referendum, although their options were very limited. Another factor was certainly that the aggressive tone and extent of the government campaign had gone too far for many people. In addition, Hungarians seem to be tiring of the immigration issue. The government has been pushing this topic since early 2015, even though Hungary hasn’t been directly affected by immigration since the closure of its southern border. Instead of focusing on immigration, Hungarian voters would apparently prefer that the government address other pressing issues, such as employment, education, the health care system and corruption.

The bottom line is crucial: although the overwhelming majority of Hungarians expressed their opposition to refugee quotas in opinion surveys and despite the government’s massive campaign, which exceeded in its extent all previous political campaigns in Hungary and which cost more than both the Leave and Remain campaigns in the Brexit referendum combined, the Hungarian government failed to mobilise 50 percent of eligible voters. The number of “no” votes was scarcely more than the number of votes cast for Fidesz and the extreme right-wing Jobbik party in the 2014 parliamentary elections.

Although the composition of those who voted “no” is not known in detail, we can surmise that Orbán was unable to massively mobilise voters of the opposition parties for his purposes. At the same time, the government played up expectations too high, with Fidesz politicians stressing the importance of a valid referendum until two weeks before the vote.

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Jacobin Magazine: Sympathy for the Devil?

Trump’s three signature racially coded themes — immigration, terrorism, and crime – were among the possible choices; a third of Trump supporters picked one of those as their top issue. Two-thirds did not. 51 percent chose traditional kitchen-table issues like the economy, health care, Social Security, taxes, or the national debt. Another 8 percent chose culture-war issues like abortion, gay rights, or “morality.” And the remaining 8 percent chose “military strength,” “foreign policy,” or gun control.

Let me be clear. All of the following are true: From the start, Trump has put naked appeals to racism at the center of his campaign. In the process, he has magnetized a congeries of alt-right eugenicists, Confederate flag-wavers, and paranoid Mexican-haters to his cause. And then he went on to win 52 percent of the Republican vote in the primaries; he’ll probably win at least 40 percent of the popular vote in November. [...]

And that seems to be the case all around the world. Take the example of France, where the level of racism in political discourse seems to reach new heights every week and the far-right has been on the ascendant for decades. Yet the percentage of the French who say there are “too many immigrants in France” fell from 75 percent in 1988 to 50 percent in 2012. The percentage who think immigration is a “source of cultural enrichment” rose from 44 percent in 1992 to 75 percent in 2009. The percentage who agree that immigrant workers “should be seen as being at home here, since they contribute to the French economy” rose from 66 percent in 1992 to 84.5 percent in 2009. [...]

The numbers will be clear: downscale whites are a big pool of untapped votes. Yet if a cordon sanitaire is placed around that demographic territory and hung with the notorious label, “Trump Vote,” the Democrats will be even more likely to let the party system drift down its current path: into the culture-war politics of the reactionary Tammany-versus-Klan 1920s, rather than the class-based politics that followed.

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Seeker Stories: The Russian Schools Training Women To Be Housewives

The Guardian: Gay men are battling a demon more powerful than HIV – and it’s hidden

It’s an issue covered by the former Attitude editor Matthew Todd in his utterly brilliant – and disturbing – recent book Straight Jacket. He identifies a number of problems that most gay men, if they were honest, would at least recognise: “Disproportionately high levels of depression, self-harm and suicide; not uncommon problems with emotional intimacy … and now a small but significant subculture of men who are using, some injecting, seriously dangerous drugs, which despite accusations of hysteria from the gatekeepers of the gay PR machine, are killing too many people.” He lists a disturbing number of gay friends, acquaintances and people in the public eye who struggled with addictions and took their own lives.

The statistics are indeed alarming. According to Stonewall research in 2014, 52% of young LGBT people report they have, at some point, self-harmed; a staggering 44% have considered suicide; and 42% have sought medical help for mental distress. Alcohol and drug abuse are often damaging forms of self-medication to deal with this underlying distress. A recent study by the LGBT Foundation found that drug use among LGB people is seven times higher than the general population, binge drinking is twice as common among gay and bisexual men, and substance dependency is significantly higher.

Why? As Todd puts it: “It is a shame with which we were saddled as children, to which we continue to be culturally subjected.” The problem gay people have isn’t their sexuality, but rather society’s attitude to it. It is “our experience of growing up in a society that still does not fully accept that people can be anything other than heterosexual and cisgendered [born into the physical gender you feel you are]”. There’s the weight of centuries of hatred and bigotry, with legally enforced discrimination only dismantled in very recent times. All gay and bisexual men – as well as women and trans people – grow up hearing homophobic and transphobic abuse. “Gay” is a word used in the playground as the repository for all that is bad. Popular films and TV programmes have largely lacked sympathetic, well-rounded LGBT characters, often resorting to crude homophobic tropes. Even the inability to hold hands with someone you love in almost any public space is a reminder that a depressingly large chunk of the population still rejects you. Coming out – a process that isn’t a one-off, but a wearingly repetitive event in different contexts – involves constant stress. And for those who think it’s all inevitably getting better, since the EU referendum, there’s been a 147% rise in homophobic hate crimes.

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Quartz: Linguistics offers an unexpected explanation for Donald Trump’s constant manterruptions

Though the term manterrupting is mostly a phenomenon that lives within the social feeds and comment sections of the internet, there is academic research to back it up. Numerous studies have proven that men tend to interrupt women more often than women interrupt men: A 2014 study from the George Washington University found that people of both sexes tend to interrupt women more often than they interrupt men, and in a classic 1975 study of casual conversations between men and women, men were responsible for 47 out of 48 interruptions.

Are Trump’s interruptions just an extreme example of the manterruption phenomenon? Maybe. But there’s also something else going on. Because although there’s plenty of evidence that The Donald doesn’t hold women in very high regard, he doesn’t just interrupt women—he butts in on men, too. He interrupted Jeb Bush seven times over the course of just 80 words during one primary debate, and in last night’s debate, he interrupted moderator Chris Wallace seven times during Wallace’s question about Aleppo alone.

As a linguist, I’d argue that Trump’s seemingly impulsive behavior is actually something he does consciously and intentionally—and not just because of his gender. Despite his spotty business record, Trump is a businessperson who has written (or has at least hired a ghostwriter to write) several books on making deals. It’s therefore likely that his brash interruptions are examples of a time-testing practice in negotiation: misdirection.

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The New York Times: Brutalism Is Back

But now, like the chevron mustache, Brutalism is undergoing something of a revival. Despite two generations of abuse (and perhaps a little because of it), an enthusiasm for Brutalist buildings beyond the febrile, narrow precincts of architecture criticism has begun to take hold. Preservationists clamor for their survival, historians laud their ethical origins and an independent public has found beauty in their rawness. For an aesthetic once praised for its “ruthless logic” and “bloody-mindedness” — in the much-quoted phrasing of critic Reyner Banham — it is a surprising turn of events.

For long-suffering admirers of Brutalism, the internet has proved an unexpected boon companion. Popular Tumblrs unleash endless streams of black-and-white images of gravity-defying cantilevers from the world over. A hulking concrete school in downtown Miami swallowing students! A concrete ski resort in Chamonix, France, that appears poised to tumble off the edge of a mountain! Brutalism, it turns out, lends itself to ­Instagram-style scrolling, one eye-popping hunk of brush-hammered weirdness after another. [...]

THERE’S NO QUESTION that Brutalism looks exceedingly cool. But its deeper appeal is moral. In the words of Reyner Banham, it was an attempt to create an architectural ethic, rather than an aesthetic. When the Smithsons called their work Brutalist or part of a New Brutalism, the brutality to which they referred had less to do with materials and more to do with honesty: an uncompromising desire to tell it like it is, architecturally speaking. The Modern movement in architecture had supposedly been predicated on truthfulness in materials and forms, as well. But as a dreary stroll down Park Avenue will remind you, Modernism swiftly became a gutless orthodoxy, its high ideals devolving into the rote features of the International Style, a repetitive and predictable series of gestures (curtain walls or ribbon windows, recessed plinths, decorative piloti, windswept plazas, ornamental lawns and flat shimmering pools).

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The Telegraph: What would happen if Donald Trump refused to concede the US presidential election?

But in practice what would actually happen if Mr Trump refused to concede?

There is nothing written down, no legal requirement, that he has to. It is only a custom, but one that has always been kept.

The process of Mrs Clinton becoming president would go ahead as usual without Mr Trump's concession. [...]

Mr Trump would effectively be setting himself up as an alternative leader for his own supporters.They may then refuse to recognise the authority of the occupant of the White House.

According to Scott Farris, author of "Almost President: The Men Who Lost The Race But Changed The Nation", a presidential concession speech is "one of the things that makes American democracy work. Our democracy is a bit more fragile than we think".

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The Huffington Post: Is Mexico ready for gay marriage?

The large anti-gay marriage protests came as something of a surprise. Gay marriage is already legal in Mexico City and several states. And, in 2015, Mexico hosted 70 Pride events, making this Catholic, Latin American country only third in the world for the number of such events (after the US and Brazil).

Still, when President Enrique Peña Nieto announced a proposed constitutional reform to recognise same-sex marriage on World Day Against Homophobia (May 17), negative reaction swiftly followed. [...]

Mexico’s National Institute of Statistics has found that from 1950 to 2010, the percentage of the population that identified as Catholic dropped from 98.2% to 89.3%. Only 4.9% of Mexicans report no religious faith.

As such, in the fight for sexual diversity, and for the rights of single-parent families and same-sex parents, leadership must come from the church. Many catholics believe in church dogma, obey their priests and seek to avoid “living in sin”. They want to do as the church mandates. [...]

Violence and discrimination against LGBT people in Latin America is widespread, despite gay marriage legalisation in several countries, including Uruguay, Argentina, and Brazil. Brazil has actually seen an increase in anti-gay hate crime since a 2013 court ruling opened the door to same-sex marriage, and there, says the New York Times, “a gay or transgender person is killed almost daily”.

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