The New Yorker: The Moral Weakness of Pope Benedict’s “Last Testament”

Once he was Pope, Ratzinger’s different line led him, in 2009, to lift the excommunication of the traditionalist cleric Richard Williamson, a notorious Holocaust denier, sparking a controversy he now dismisses as “stupid,” and to denigrate Islam just after the fifth anniversary of 9/11, repeating a medieval slur that led to worldwide protests by Muslims, and about which Benedict now seems cavalier. (“I just found it very interesting to bring up this part of a five-hundred-year-old dialogue for discussion,” he says.) Benedict should get credit for defrocking four hundred sexually abusive priests during his papacy, although, again showing a present failure to appreciate the moral scale of past mistakes, he describes to Seewald his dread of “premature intervention” in abuse cases and the need to “go about it slowly and cautiously.” More to the point, he seems utterly disconnected from the consequences of his instruction, as Cardinal Prefect in 2001—just as the Boston Globe was laying bare the scandal—that priestly sex-abuse cases “are subject to the pontifical secret,” a ruling that prompted bishops to quietly bring such matters to the Vatican, not to civil authorities. That, of course, was the bishops’ essential failure. [...]

The true meaning of Benedict’s resignation did not become clear until the unrelentingly positive spirit of his successor began to show itself. He pays full tribute to Francis, expressing how “beautiful and encouraging” it is that the Church is “alive and full of new possibilities.” But he seems not to grasp that the Francis phenomenon runs far deeper than the Argentine’s personal charisma. Benedict is one of those who perceive Francis as a maestro of style, not altering the substance of belief, when, in fact, style and substance are inseparable. Benedict’s approach—not mainly his reticence, but his detachment—stamped his era with belief removed from real life, a moral perception so partial as to be immoral, with drastic consequences for the Church and all whom the Church was called to serve. Francis is anything but detached, and his perceptions are rooted in a visceral preference for experience over ideology. While the white-robed Pope Emeritus retreated to the seclusion of Castel Gandolfo, Pope Francis, only this month, opened it to the public.

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Jacobin Magazine: Occupying Trump?

This consensual social experience centered on the autonomy of the individual. Occupiers were not held accountable to any particular agenda or leadership. As one participant put it at a general assembly meeting, “None of us are leaders; [therefore] we are all leaders.”

Today, as high school students walk out en masse and anti-Trump protests sweep the country, the memory of Occupy should give us pause. [...]

Yet it’s telling that the sixties critique of uniformity and authority was appropriated not only by subsequent social movements, but by capitalism. Calls “to live, to express oneself, to be free” now survive as tag lines for soft-drinks and SUVS. In their book The New Spirit of Capitalism, Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello go so far as to argue that capitalism co-opted the ’68 demands for autonomy to create our contemporary postindustrial economy of worker instability and commanded flexibility. [...]

Occupy’s system of consensus-based decision-making turned this into a tiring and time-consuming, if not effectively impossible, task. Inspired by Spain’s acampadas, the occupiers opened general assemblies to everyone. If someone vehemently disagreed with a proposal, they could block it, and it would have to be adapted until a super-majority of ninety percent supported the proposal. It did not matter if the dissenter was new to a movement others had been invested in for weeks; they had just as much of a say as the original Occupiers. As a result, a simple decision like how to take care of laundry could take hours to make. [...]

While it’s easy to laugh at his claim that “climate change is happening because of the state of our minds,” this sort of magical thinking survives in the recent outpouring of praise for Occupy as consciousness-raising. It also lives on in the call to check one’s privilege, which often imagines that self-edification — rather than structural change — can solve inequality. But realizing one’s individual privilege does nothing to dismantle the prison industrial complex, or block environmentally destructive legislation, or improve wages for workers.

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Quartz: “Cities will be a powerful antidote to Donald Trump”: Social scientist Benjamin Barber on the emergence of a new urban radicalism

This is not something new. We were already witnessing the devolution of authority and power and moral authority as the result, even before Trump, of the breakdown of national governments. Whether it’s Brexit, or right-wing governments in Poland and Hungary, or anti-immigrant feeling in France and Belgium and Holland, or a crazy man in the Philippines violating civil rights, or Brazil with no national government at all. The election of Donald Trump is obviously a further sign of this kind of dysfunction. He is somebody who is in fact an enemy of national governments, an enemy of the intervention by the state on behalf of justice, redistribution, etc. [...]

I believe the vertical separation of powers is going to play an important role because in fact the blue parts of the American map are urban. It’s not East and West coast…it’s urban versus suburban and rural. Take climate change, for example—an area where cities have a very large role to play. About 80% of greenhouse gas emissions come from cities and cities also control about 80% of GDP. They can do a lot to combat climate change, whether or not Trump undermines the COP21 agreement. [...]

Already, Mayor Bill de Blasio in New York has a program that gives unregistered, undocumented immigrants the right to apply for a New York ID card and use it, even though technically they’re illegal. In Los Angeles, Eric Garcetti is another visionary, powerful mayor, Mayor Kasim Reed in Atlanta, Mayor Marty Walsh of Boston. I think you will find that, not because they’re brave—although I think they probably are—but because it will be in the interest of the democratically elected leaders of what in fact is a majority of Americans who voted against Trump. This is a place where you can have legitimate, democratic dissent, but more importantly, legitimate, democratic action on behalf of progressives—whether or the federal government wants it.

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Time: Oxford’s Word of the Year for 2016 Is ‘Post-Truth’

Oxford Dictionaries kicked off “word of the year” season by anointing their pick on Tuesday: post-truth.

The word, selected by Oxford’s editors, does not need to be coined in the past year but it does have to capture the English-speaking public’s mood and preoccupations. And that makes this one an apt choice for countries like America and Britain, where people lived through divisive, populist upheavals that often seemed to prize passion above all else—including facts.

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Jakub Marian: Percentage of pupils learning German by country in Europe

German is the most widely spoken language in the European Union—and arguably the most important language of Central Europe. It shouldn’t be surprising, then, that a large number of pupils in Central European countries learn German at school, as the following map shows (the map is based on data by Eurostat (2012) for upper secondary education) [...]

A few notes are in order here. First and foremost, the percentages should not be understood as indicators of the percentages of people who can actually speak German within each given country, because most people who learned a second or third foreign language at school (after English) gradually lose the ability to speak it over time. You can see the percentages of actual speakers here.

A significant exception is the Netherlands and Denmark, where more people are capable of speaking German than just those who learned German at school. This is probably caused by the linguistic and geographical proximity of Dutch and German, resp. Danish and German, which makes achieving proficiency in German both easy and desirable for native speakers of Dutch and Danish, even without any formal education.

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VICE: Documenting the Secret Lives of India's LGBTQ Youth

What I found was that I lost the ability to distinguish who was gay. I think that's culturally determined. It's like when I first went to Canada, I thought everybody was straight. I couldn't tell. When I went back to India ten years later, I reversed that: Everybody seem to be gay because they all walked in hand in hand. They all were limp-wristed. It's so cultural, but no one wanted to talk about it. That put people off. In a cruising area, for example, people came to have sex, not to have a chat about it. I was trying to collect audio interviews as well as photographs, for artistic purposes. I guess I looked like some kind of social scientist with a tape recorder and a camera, and people were not keen to speak, and they were definitely not keen to be in a picture. Everybody was in the closet still, and I thought it would be very unfair to publicize them all over the world without their knowledge. [...]

To add to what Sunil said about how the scene has changed or really hasn't changed: Gay men are all still married. Back in the 1980, when I was taking the pictures meeting these people at the parks, they were claiming to be gay, and I used to say, "Well, you're not gay because you're married with five children." They're not gay in the sense that the West knows—that you walked of your house, left your biological family home, and didn't get married to the opposite sex and had children. That's a huge social pressure and norm in India, and it's still there [today]. [...]

In the 80s, when I was finding that men had no speech about [being queer] and they were voiceless or in the closet, but were able to have a lot of public sex, women had a relatively opposite experience. Streets [in India] can be dangerous to women, so they're not hanging out on the street corners, and so women did have a voice. Privately, women were talking a lot more about a women's movement, in which there's space for sexual difference. Some of India's more recent gay liberation and the politics of it from the 90s, early 2000s, emerged from the women's movement.

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Deutsche Welle: 300 years after the death of Leibniz - what can we still learn from him today?

When Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz was born in Leipzig in 1646, the scientific understanding of our world was still pretty manageable. It was still possible to perceive that one person could theoretically accumulate all the knowledge of the time, as it was written down in books.

People like Leibniz, who, after finishing his law degree with a PhD at the age of 21, went on to research as a historian, philosopher, linguist, physicist, mathematician and to do practical work as a librarian, mining-engineer, diplomat, political advisor and founder of what later became an academy. [...]

What is probably the most important heritage is the method of empiric research based on evidence. This is something we owe to the pioneers of enlightenment, like Leibniz: All progress made over the past three hundred years could not be envisaged without people like him. Scholars who pressed forward with open eyes and vigor, in a period of ignorance and superstition.

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The Guardian: Bad news for leavers – the EU has bigger priorities than Brexit

Brexit means Brexit. Theresa May has made it clear that it is she who will ultimately decide what that means. But the prime minister is deluding herself. And I’m not convinced that, despite the recent high court ruling, the House of Commons is about to shape our negotiating strategy. Our fate lies not only in the government’s hands, but also in those of our European partners. [...]

The challenges May’s plan will face include France’s centre-left and centre-right politicians having no interest in allowing Britain an exit deal that strengthens Marine Le Pen. And their desire to send a political message is shared by centrist politicians in the Netherlands, nervously tracking the electoral prospects of their own populist firebrand, Geert Wilders. The Dutch traditionally may have been a close and reliable ally of ours in the EU, but politics is politics, and an attractive Brexit deal is not in the political interest of the governing party. [...]

An MP from the governing CDU explained why. As far as Germany’s government is concerned, the challenge of Brexit is akin to that of dealing with Russia after its invasion of Crimea. Then too business leaders warned of economic pain if sanctions were imposed on Moscow. But the government held the political imperative to be more important than the economic calculation. This, he added with someone finality, would prove to be the case in negotiations with London as well.

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