31 January 2017
The RSA: A Field Guide to Lies | Daniel Levitin
We are bombarded with more information each day than our brains can process. It’s raining bad data, half-truths, and even outright lies in amongst the facts. But how can we know if we are being sold mistruths? Neuroscientist and New York Times bestselling author Daniel J. Levitin visits the RSA to help us sort the wheat from the digital chaff. We may expect newspapers, bloggers, the government, and Wikipedia to be factually and logically correct, but they so often aren’t. We need to think critically about the words and numbers we encounter if we want to be successful at work, at play, and in making the most of our lives. This means checking the plausibility and reasoning—not passively accepting information, repeating it, and making decisions based on it.
FiveThirtyEight: Trump Is Doing What He Said He’d Do
Almost all of the actions that Trump has undertaken, however, are consistent with statements and policy positions he issued repeatedly on the campaign trail and during the presidential transition. It was more than a year ago that Trump called for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States,” for instance. (Friday’s executive order stops short of that, but Trump allies such as Rudy Giuliani have spoken of the order as a legal workaround that seeks to accomplish the same objectives as a Muslim immigration ban.) Another executive order called for building a border wall with Mexico, which was perhaps the signature policy position of Trump’s campaign. And Trump might even try to “make Mexico pay for it” by imposing a tariff on Mexican imports — although most economists argue such a tariff would really make American consumers pay for the wall, via higher prices. [...]
Why, then, does Trump’s first week and a half in office seem so surprising, even to those of us who weren’t expecting a kindler, gentler Trump? One could wryly remark that it’s a surprise whenever presidents actually keep their promises. But a longstanding body of research from political scientists suggests that this shouldn’t be a surprise. Presidents actually do make a good-faith effort to keep most of their promises. [...]
I don’t have a good answer to this question yet, but it could be the one that Trump’s presidency turns upon. If his supporters took him literally, they’ll presumably see a lot to like so far. But many of these policies have tenuous public support beyond Trump’s base. If this is the framework, then Trump is just continuing with the strategy he’s bet upon all along — doubling down on support from his base — and his approval ratings will probably oscillate within a relatively narrow band of 40 percent to 45 percent support. With Republicans controlling both chambers of Congress and having a geographic advantage in the way their votes are distributed, that mediocre rating wouldn’t necessarily do much to constrain Trump in the near term, although ratings toward the lower end of that range might be enough to make the House of Representatives competitive in 2018.
Salon: This is your brain on knockoffs: The science of how we trick ourselves into not believing our eyes
In that case, Berenson’s gut reaction was right. The “American Leonardo” was sold in 2010 as by a “follower of Leonardo da Vinci, probably before 1750,” not by the master himself. But in other cases, the gut reaction may prove right, but your brain can toy with you, and convince you otherwise. Readers of Malcolm Gladwell’s “Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking” will know the phenomenon: He opens the book with the story of experts initially thinking that the Getty Kouros (a theoretically archaic Greek life-sized statue of an athletic male nude) was “wrong,” identifying it as a fake “in the blink of an eye.” But these renowned specialists convinced themselves that it was authentic, after much debate and careful consideration, and the museum bought it. It turned out not to be. Gladwell kicks off his book with this story because it demonstrates his main point: that our initial instinct tends to be correct, but overthinking things can get in the way. That “there can be as much value in the blink of an eye, as in months of rational analysis.” We run into “analysis paralysis” when we have too much information and we complicate the thinking process. A “thin-slicing” decision, made quickly and based on a reduced amount of data, is often the most accurate, he argues. [...]
This pleasure principle may be why experts seek a manifestation of their expertise, to say “yes, this is by Velazquez.” It is far less satisfying to say, “It’s not by Velazquez, I don’t know who it’s by.” While there might be reward in catching something as a copy or a forgery by spotting the anachronism, this is associated with negativity, and it is rarely as targeted as “Yes, this is by Velazquez.” It is usually a double negative, “No it’s not by Velazquez, I’m afraid, and I don’t know who it’s by.” Thus the brain seems wired for experts to find clues that feed its reward in recognition, essentially feeding its ego (what Gladwell describes as “psychological priming” and “implicit association”), which plays into the hands of the forger. [...]
In 2011, Martin Kemp, an Oxford art history professor, ran an experiment referenced in Ragai’s book, in which 14 non-specialists were shown genuine and fake “Rembrandt” paintings while undergoing brain scans. A painting was shown to them and they were told it was by Rembrandt. Another painting was shown to them and they were told it was a fake. By measuring the pleasure centers of the brain, Kemp concluded that “the way we view art is not rational.” Being told a work was authentic (whether or not it actually was) activated pleasure centers when it was shown, which was not the case when the viewer was told it was inauthentic (even if it was actually the real deal). It’s all about anticipation. If you’re poured a glass of wine and told it’s a 1955 Chateau Lafite Rothschild, you’ll enjoy it much more than if you’re told it’s a 2015 Trader Joe’s wine-in-a-box, whichever it truly happens to be. (For more on this, see my eBook single on wine forgery).
The Conversation: In Australia, land of the ‘fair go’, not everyone gets an equal slice of the pie
How does Australian society match up against these goals? For a start, there is an ongoing problem with poverty in Australia, with recent research suggesting that the relative poverty rate has been between 10% and 14% of households since 2000 (where the poverty rate is set at 50% of median income).
Around 5% of households were suffering from what is known as “deep exclusion”. Australians with a long-term medical condition or disability were particularly vulnerable, as were indigenous people. People lacking a year 12 qualification and those in public housing also had higher levels of deep exclusion. [...]
However, a 2007 study by Andrew Leigh found that Australia had a higher level of mobility than the US. As he put it in his 2013 book, “in the United States, the heritability of income is similar to the heritability of height. But in Australia, income is only about half as heritable as height”. A 2016 study reached broadly similar conclusions to Leigh, finding that Australia has “a relatively large amount of income mobility”. [...]
In 2011, the OECD reported that according to 2008 figures, “the average income of the top 10% of Australians was … nearly 10 times higher than that of the bottom 10%”. Australia is once again more equal than the US, but more unequal than the OECD average.
The Intercept: Suspect in Quebec Mosque Attack Quickly Depicted as a Moroccan Muslim. He’s a White Nationalist.
A MASS SHOOTING at a Quebec City mosque last night left six people dead and eight wounded. The targeted mosque, the Cultural Islamic Center of Quebec, was the same one at which a severed pig’s head was left during Ramadan last June. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called the episode a “terrorist attack on Muslims.” [...]
White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer exploited the attack to justify President Trump’s ban on immigrants from seven Muslim-majority countries. “It’s a terrible reminder of why we must remain vigilant and why the President is taking steps to be proactive rather than reactive when it comes to our nation’s safety and security,” Spicer said at this afternoon’s briefing when speaking of the Quebec City attack. [...]
The actual shooting suspect is 27-year-old Alexandre Bissonnette, a white French Canadian who is, by all appearances, a rabid anti-immigrant nationalist. A leader of a local immigration rights groups, François Deschamps, told a local paper he recognized his photo as an anti-immigrant far-right “troll” who has been hostile to the group online. And Bisonnette’s Facebook page – now taken down but still archived – lists among its “likes” the far right French nationalist Marine Le Pen, Islam critics Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, the Israeli Defense Forces, and Donald J. Trump (he also “likes” the liberal Canadian Party NDP along with more neutral “likes” such as Tom Hanks, the Sopranos and Katy Perry).
Al Jazeera: Mehdi Hasan on the rise of "fake" populists
Reality Check: The rise of ‘fake’ populism.
Mehdi Hasan on right-wing elitists who masquerade as ordinary folk.
CityLab: Barcelona Bans New Hotels in the City Center
For Barcelona’s tourism industry, the past week may have marked the end of an era. While Spain’s second city has seen galloping, almost uncontrollable growth in tourism since the millennium, the city voted Friday to adopt the most drastic ban on new vacation accommodations yet seen in any European city.
In the city center, all new hotel beds are banned, period. In a small area encircling the city center, new hotel beds will be permitted, but only to replace those in hotels that have closed. In Barcelona’s suburbs, new hotel beds will be permitted, but only under strictly limited conditions—land that has previously been earmarked for housing, for example, will be completely off limits. [...]
If these measures seem extreme, it’s because local frustration at the excesses of the tourist industry has been bubbling over for some time. A city of 1.6 million inhabitants, Barcelona received 32 million visitors last year, most of them concentrated in late spring and summer. These tourists are of course a cash cow, but they have pushed up the price of rents and reduced the number of available apartments for locals while providing jobs that are often poorly paid and merely seasonal. They have also squeezed businesses catering to locals out of the downtown, leaving a trail of tourist stores that are dull, generic, and sell goods with little real connection to the city’s culture. This has given some overburdened parts of the city the air of a theme park—one where you wait in line a lot and don’t have that much fun.
Quartz: If nutrition labels looked like this, your attempts to quit sugar might actually work
This image, which resurfaced on Reddit earlier this month, is part of an ad campaign from the German consumer interest group Verbraucherzentrale Hamburg.
The images (seen here, with ingredients in German) make the easily misread or overlooked information on nutrition labels hard to ignore. Slim-Fast is full of sugar. A brand of cereal called “Fitness” is full of sugar.
Yes, nutrition information is right there on the label. But those grams are hard to conceptualize, and food marketers can easily take advantage of that confusion. For example, the kid-friendly drink Capri-Sonne (or Capri Sun, as it’s known in North America) looks a lot healthier in this ad…
30 January 2017
BBC4 A Point of View: Teaching to the test
Will Self says it's time for schools to stop "teaching to the test".
He argues that in the contemporary wired world, "it seems obvious that young people need more than ever to know how to think outside the boxes, rather than simply tick them".
There's no reason, he says, to shackle children "to the go-round of memorization and regugitation".
The Conversation: Exploring the complexities of forgiveness
I grew up in a community of these remarkable people, but not once did I hear the topic of forgiveness for the Nazis discussed. The Nazis hardly warranted their consideration. Instead, what prevailed was the distinctive Jewish response to the tragedy of the Holocaust of not asking why, but what do we do now. Invariably the answer was a single-minded determination and commitment to rebuilding a new generation of proud and committed Jews. [...]
In the Jewish belief there is a distinction between forgiveness and consequences. Lack of consequences is not synonymous with forgiveness and negative consequences does not equate with lack of forgiveness, as in forgiving one’s child for demonstrating carelessness or inconsideration while still holding her accountable.[...]
But far from being just a necessary but regrettable allowance, Judaism teaches that the practice of forgiveness was divinely designed from the very outset of creation. Thus, the reason why God deliberately created us imperfect is because through the process of sin and reconciliation, both the forgiver and the forgiven can experience tremendous personal and religious growth. [...]
So, since we are human beings who still have a conscience to discern good from evil, the only conclusion we must come to is that we cannot in any way forgive the Nazis. To think otherwise would be to dishonor the victims of the Holocaust and to degrade our own moral compass.
FiveThirtyEight: Will Trump’s Refugee Ban Have Public Support?
Donald Trump signed a wide-ranging executive order on Friday that resets the United States’ immigration and refugee programs. The policy bars immigrants from seven heavily Muslim countries from entering the U.S. for 90 days, including people with green cards. It bans all refugees from entering the U.S. for 120 days, and indefinitely bans Syrian refugees. And it cuts the number of refugees the U.S. will accept overall in 2017. (For a more detailed rundown, read here.) [...]
Slight differences in framing and question wording can also have big effects on how well immigration, refugee and terrorism policies poll. Whether Trump’s executive order is viewed in humanitarian terms or (as the Trump administration has tried to frame it) in the context of counterterrorism could go a long way towards determining how much the public supports it. [...]
Again, there are so many ways to look at these numbers. Will Americans react more to the fact that the U.S. is temporarily banning all refugees or to the halts on immigration from predominantly Muslim countries? It’s just not clear how it will play out politically. American opinions on immigration, counterterrorism and refugees are complicated and interact with one another, and different opinions can be activated at different times. Furthermore, some aspects of the policy — such as banning U.S. green card holders from re-entering the United States (or only allowing them to re-enter on a case-by-case basis) — have not been polled at all. For the time being, it’s probably safe to say that the policy is neither as unpopular as its detractors might hope for, nor as popular as its supporters might assume. But that could change as the public learns more about it in the days and weeks ahead.
The Spectator: Atheist and gay, Frederick the Great was more radical than most leaders today (3 October 2015)
After Frederick’s accession in 1740, he became, in his turn, the tormentor of the family. Although he did not imprison his wife like George I, he repeatedly humiliated ‘this incorrigibly sour subspecies of the female sex’, as he called her. They barely met. His nephew and heir, the future Frederick William II, wrote of him in 1780: ‘That animal is a right scourge of God, spat out of Hell on to earth by God’s wrath.
After his accession, in Blanning’s words Frederick ‘came out’. He spent most of his time far from prying eyes in Potsdam, south- west of Berlin, and enjoyed ‘intimate relations’ with young officers, as well as his first valet Fredersdorf. The king called him ‘du’ and he acted as an unofficial prime minister. Frederick commissioned a fresco of Ganymede and filled his parks with statues of Antinous or pairs of male lovers. His poems ‘The Orgasm’ and ‘Palladion’, the first written for his handsome Italian favourite Count Algarotti, praise ‘glorious heroes, responding both actively and passively to their lithe and obliging friends’.
Blanning emphasises the luxury and grandeur of the court of Prussia. Berlin had one of the largest city palaces in Europe and was surrounded by at least 20 country palaces for the monarch and the ruling family — many more than Vienna. Frederick II extended Charlottenburg, built Sans Souci, and the 638-room Neues Palais in Potsdam and bought a new palace in Breslau, capital of Silesia, in which he installed a throne room. On campaign he shared his troops’ hardships: they loved him. In peacetime, he amassed magnificent collections of pictures, sculptures, jewelled rings and snuff boxes. Frederick’s greenhouses were as luxurious as his gilded rococo bedrooms and music rooms. He built the Berlin opera and founded the Berlin porcelain factory. [...]
Like the recent books of John Röhl on Wilhelm II and Jonathan Steinberg on Bismarck, Blanning shows that Prussia had a court society and culture — a ‘deep state’ not always visible on the surface. If more diaries and memoirs, such as those of Count Lehndorff and Hildegard von Spitzemberg, or the journalism of Alfred Kerr (father of the children’s author Judith Kerr) were translated, they would help us understand the driving force of the country which, before the self-inflicted cataclysm of 1914, was the powerhouse of Europe.
Politico: Ukraine and Poland’s History Wars Are a Gift For Putin
After Russian propaganda sought to dismiss the Maidan revolution that ousted former President Viktor Yanukovych as an exclusively far-right protest, Ukrainians began using Bandera as a symbol to troll the Kremlin, and his popularity in the country has continued to rise to new heights. On New Year’s Day, thousands of Ukrainians marched in cities across the country to mark Bandera’s birthday. In the Ukrainian capital alone, over 2,000 people participated in the march, carrying torches through the center of Kiev while chanting, “Bandera is our prophet.”
The problem is that in neighboring Poland, Bandera is reviled on the same level as Adolf Hitler and his inner circle. Poles across political lines mainly remember him for collaborating with the Nazis and for his followers slaughtering Polish civilians. That conviction has heightened in recent years as the country has devoted increased attention to atrocities committed against Poles during World War II. [...]
This changing political landscape has left Warsaw as Kiev’s most reliable advocate within both the EU and NATO and the only guarantor that Ukraine will stay on the international agenda. Poles across all political lines view Russian influence in Eastern Europe as a detriment to their country’s security and stability. Warsaw has long made it a mainstay of its foreign policy, and the EU’s, to pull post-Soviet states out of Moscow’s orbit.
The Guardian: Grassroots Labour supporters revolt against Jeremy Corbyn over Brexit
On Saturday night a highly critical open letter to the Labour leader, circulating on Facebook, had been signed by almost 2,000 members in constituency parties across the country, around half of whom are believed to have voted for Corbyn as leader. The letter, organised by a group called Labour Against Brexit, accuses Corbyn of a “betrayal of your socialist values” and of backing a policy that will hurt working people.
One of the organisers, Jonathan Proctor of the North Tyneside constituency Labour party, told the Observer that the motive was not to destabilise Corbyn, but to stand up for Labour principles and values. He said the response from members since its launch on Friday had been overwhelming. [...]
Tulip Siddiq, the MP for Hampstead and Kilburn, has left her frontbench post, and two whips, Thangam Debbonaire and Jeff Smith, have said they will not vote for the bill. Another shadow cabinet member, Rachel Maskell, is said by colleagues to be considering resigning, and Clive Lewis, regarded as close to Corbyn early in his leadership, now says he will vote against the bill at third reading unless there are a series of safeguards.
Al Jazeera: Why is Russia so happy with Trump?
Both the elites and the ordinary people in Russia greeted the new US president, and even some in the political opposition saw the potential for positive developments under his administration.
The reason for Russia's warm welcome of President Trump had nothing to do with claims in US media that he was "a Kremlin agent" or that "Russian hackers" helped him win the election. It had much more to do with expectations among the elites, the ordinary people, and even the intelligentsia, of a new direction in US-Russian relations that would de-escalate internal and external tensions and favour their self-interests. [...]
The "new Yalta" would redistribute spheres of responsibility to recognised great powers. The Kremlin, of course, sees Russia as one of them (alongside with the US, China, and perhaps Europe).
Among the ruling elite, there is also a much more modest expectation from Trump concerning matters of self-interest. Since at least 2014, after the annexation of Crimea and Russian support to the anti-Kiev rebels in Eastern Ukraine, many members of the ruling class experienced the effects of sanctions targeting them. With Trump in the White House, they expect the sanctions to be lifted, if he indeed wants to start a new chapter in Russian-US relations.
The Guardian: Trump banned refugees on Holocaust Remembrance Day. That says everything
In 1939, the German oceanliner St Louis and its 937 passengers, almost all Jewish refugees, were turned away from the port of Miami and sent back to Europe. Of those passengers, 254 were murdered in the Holocaust. The US government turned away those refugees, so heartbreakingly close to safety – and also restricted Jewish immigration and instituted new vetting procedures – because of rampant overblown fears that the Nazis might smuggle spies and saboteurs in among the Jewish refugees.
On Friday, which was Holocaust Remembrance Day, the White House put out a statement that failed to mention the 6 million Jews who were exterminated by the Nazis. Hours later, Donald Trump signed an executive order suspending all refugee resettlement for 120 days and indefinitely suspending the resettlement of refugees from Syria. [...]
We have freedom of belief. We do not have religious litmus tests for participation in society. Trump’s order is anathema to those founding principles. It violates the first amendment’s establishment clause, which prohibits the government from preferring or disfavoring any religion. Trump’s anti-Muslim policy also violates the equal protection clause, the part of the 14th amendment that guarantees that everyone is entitled to equal protection under the law.
Independent: Native American tribe vows to stop Donald Trump building Mexican border wall on their Arizona reservation
The Tohono O’odham Nation, a federally recognised tribe with a reservation that spans 75 miles along the US-Mexico border, said on Thursday that it does not support the proposed wall and will attempt to block construction if it goes ahead.
In a statement it criticised the White House for signing an executive order without consulting the tribe, and hinted at Standing Rock-style mass resistance if necessary. The tribal vice-chairman has previously said the government could build the wall “over my dead body”. [...]
The tribe, which has about 28,000 members, said it has suffered for decades from the "militarisation" of the international border, which cuts across its ancestral lands. Members have said they are frequently assaulted or threatened by border guards and impeded in visiting relatives south of the border.
29 January 2017
The Huffington Post: Why Poland's ruling party don't like popular mayors
The ruling party proposes that the limit would take place “immediately”, and include currently acting city mayors. As a result, in the coming local elections, out of a total of 107 mayors of big Polish cities and towns, as many as 66 of them would have to resign and never be able to apply for the office. Since out of 107 bigger Polish cities and towns, only 10 mayors belong to the currently governing party, the move is obviously designed to oust the popular city mayors with different party affiliation in order to promote their own candidates.
There has been an outcry of indignation in Poland. Many agree that this is not the beginning, but the continuation of a dismantling and demolition of a democratic legal system. It aims at disciplining the society into subjects of the omnipotent power. [...]
In Europe, there is no lack of mayors, whom people had entrusted with the function to act as their leaders for 3, 4 or even more terms. Herbert Schmalstieg was the mayor of Hanover for 34 years, from 1972 to 2006. Michael Häupl has been serving as mayor of Vienna since 1994 till today. The Hanseatic city of Lübeck has been enjoying the same mayor, Bernd Saxe for 17 years now. And in Hungary, whose practices are so dear to Polish ruling party PiS, there are city mayors with long experience. In Pécs - 12 years with a break between terms ruled Zsolt Pava, and in Szeged for 15 years - Laszlo Botka.
Quartz: To defeat Marine Le Pen, France’s center-left must put their nation ahead of party politics
As a result, growing numbers of mainstream liberals are frantically plotting to abandon their radical Socialist wing to block the anti-immigrant, Muslim-bashing, and far more electable Le Pen junior from qualifying for the May ballot. (The French presidential election has two rounds, one on April 23 and the decider on May 7, with the two first-place getters in the first ballot qualifying for the final). Ahead of Sunday, senior Socialist party figures are signaling they will, if required, break away from the hard-left tax and spend candidate Benoit Hamon. Hamon is favored to defeat ex-prime minister Manuel Valls for his party’s nomination but seems unlikely to vanquish Le Pen.
Enter Emmanuel Macron. The 39-year-old independent candidate is a dynamic if relative newcomer to French politics whose centrist, modernizing stance could, according to his backers, unite the moderate left faithful and pull votes away from the embattled center-right. Macron resigned in 2016 as outgoing president Francois Hollande’s economy minister after pushing through landmark labor law reforms. He is running on an economically liberal, pro-Europe platform under the banner of his political grouping, “On the Move.” [...]
Macron already has the friendly ear of former Socialist presidential candidate Segolene Royal. Other sympathizers include supporters of Valls. A group of MPs allied with Valls’s push for the nomination have started circulating a communique to release early next week, paving the way for a mass defection to Macron. Even France’s Green party has signaled it may be willing to join forces. Dany ‘The Red” Cohn-Bendit, co-founder of the ecologist party EELV, said he was ready to vote for Macron because he was “the only candidate” who could avoid the impossible dilemma of a Le Pen-Fillon duel. Cohn-Bendit explained (link in French) Macron’s vertiginous rise in the polls as evidence of “a desire for renewal, new faces, new ideas, new personalities.”
Mashable: Rebuilding Dresden
Over two days and nights in February 1945, American and British bombers dropped 2,400 tons of high explosives and 1,500 tons of incendiary bombs on the German city of Dresden.
The barrage turned the cultural jewel of Saxony into a hellish inferno. A firestorm raged across the city, generating hurricane-force winds and temperatures near 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Civilians sheltering in basements suffocated as the city above them was consumed by flame.
When the fires were finally extinguished, an estimated 25,000 people had died and the baroque city center had been reduced to rubble.
A few months later, the war in Europe ended. Under Soviet occupation, the survivors began the daunting task of cleaning and rebuilding their city.
Vox: Trump says his refugee ban is about protecting America. It's really about Islamophobia.
If you take a close look at Trump’s executive order, you see that it contains a major loophole — an exemption from its ban on refugee entry to the United States for “religious minorities” being persecuted by their governments. Who’s going to qualify for these exemptions? A lot of Christians — according to Trump himself. Here’s what he said in a Friday interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network’s David Brody: [...]
The text of Trump’s executive order never uses the words “Islam” or “Muslim.” Perhaps that’s for legal reasons. But it’s so full of code words that it’s impossible to mistake the intent. [...]
Which “violent ideologies” are those? Surely it’s not white nationalism — the executive order doesn’t ban Scandinavian skinheads from entering the United States. Instead, it bars anyone and everyone from Iraq, Iran, Syria, Yemen, Lebanon, Somalia, Sudan, and Libya, making clear that the theory behind this order is that Muslims, specifically foreign-born Muslims, are seen as an especial kind of threat of violent extremism.
This is a dubious theory. Since 9/11, home-grown white supremacists and similar extremists have killed more Americans in the US than all Islamic extremists, American or non-American, put together. It seems that, if your goal is saving lives and stopping extremism, it makes more sense to look at home than singling out a group of immigrants who come, disproportionately, from one religious group.
Deutsche Welle: Polish government wins Gdansk World War II museum case
The museum tells the story of World War II by including all the nations involved in the conflict, with a particular focus on civilian suffering instead of military campaigns. Several prominent historians were behind the development of the museum, considered by some as one of the best efforts to explain the global context of the war.
But the PiS has opposed the international angle of the war explained at the museum, preferring instead that it focus on Polish suffering and heroic resistance to Nazi Germany. It is a stance in line with the party's efforts to use the power of the state to develop stronger nationalism and pride.
Shortly after the PiS swept to power in late 2015, Culture Minister Piotr Glinski tried to take over the museum by merging it with the Museum of Westerplatte and the War of 1939, which has not even been built.
The Telegraph: 'Finding out my priest husband was gay was devastating. It was a death'
13 January 2000 was the date that turned Ruth McElroy's life upside down. On a bleak weekday afternoon her husband of 16 years came home from work to deliver the news that their relationship was not what she had thought. [...]
For many, the new recommendations encourage secrecy, rather than honesty. It's a subject on which Ruth McElroy feels especially strongly, as Larsen's position within the church was another reason he felt compelled to lie to his family for so long.
"No, it isn't right to suppress or ignore it," she says. "It only makes things worse."
The week after Larsen broke the news, McElroy spent three hours a day on the phone to charity Changing Attitude who helped her realise that she didn’t “turn” him gay. Her emotions ranged in the early days and months from seething rage and denial to a profound sadness.
Quartz: “Mr. President, don’t build this wall”: The Berlin mayor’s powerful message for Donald Trump
In 1987, US president Ronald Reagan famously stood at the Berlin Wall separating the German city—and, symbolically, the world during the Cold War—and spoke to the Soviet Union of peace, prosperity, and liberalization. [...]
Now Berlin’s mayor has invoked that iconic moment in a message for US president Donald Trump, who has vowed to build an expensive wall to keep out immigrants at the US border with its southern neighbor, Mexico. [...]
“Now, in the early years of the 21st century, we cannot let all our historical experience get trashed by the very people to whom we owe much of our freedom: the Americans,” Müller wrote. “I call on the president of the USA not to go down that road to isolation and ostracism. Wherever such divides exist, like in Korea and Cyprus, they cause slavery and pain. I call on the American president: remember your forerunner, Ronald Reagan. Remember his words: ‘Tear down this wall.’ And so I say: ‘Mr. President, don’t build this wall.'”
JSTOR Daily: The History of the KKK in American Politics
White supremacism is on the rise again. The Ku Klux Klan supported Donald Trump for president. Former Klansman David Duke made a bid for the Louisiana Senate, hate incidents followed the election, and Trump named as White House senior counselor Steve Bannon, former head of Breitbart.com, a website popular with white supremacists. This isn’t the first time that so-called white nationalists have been involved with American politics. In the 1920s, during what historians call the Ku Klux Klan’s “second wave,” Klan members served in all levels of government.
The Klan didn’t start as a political force, but as a lark. Shortly after the Civil War ended, some Confederate veterans got together and played around with hoods and robes, wearing them while riding horses through town in Pulaski, Tennessee. They formed a secret group with outlandish names for its officials, like “Grand Cyclops” for the leader. When they saw how their costumed rides scared blacks, the group turned to vigilantism. [...]
The Klan was a big issue in the 1872 presidential election, but the group was in its death throes. It rose again after the 1915 release of D. W. Griffith’s pro-Klan movie, The Birth of a Nation, when the country was reacting to many societal changes brought on by the temperance movement and World War I. This second-wave Klan emerged as a morality police to fight immigration, minorities, and the loose morals of speakeasies, bootlegging, and political corruption. While the first Klan focused on blacks, this wave also fought Catholics, Jews, intellectuals, and anybody else it felt was hurting America. At heart, it was a nativist movement that drew sympathy from those who still saw blacks as unequal to whites.
Heavy marketing drove membership in the second Klan to between 3 and 7 million; that added up to a lot of commissions for recruiters, who got a percentage of member fees. The majority of this KKK were mainstream, mostly Protestant, citizens. A portion of the second-wave Klansmen murdered or beat those they considered un-American, but a majority saw the group as a social or even charitable club. Klaverns gave money to churches and helped other community groups such as baseball teams. Members celebrated holidays together and attended one another’s funerals.
28 January 2017
Vox: The abortion rate is at an all-time low — and better birth control is largely to thank
US women are having abortions at the lowest rate on record since Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court’s landmark 1973 decision that legalized abortion, according to a new report. In fact, contrary to popular opinion, the abortion rate has been steadily declining for decades.
The new report comes from a massive census of US abortion providers taken every three years by the Guttmacher Institute, a nonprofit research organization that supports legal abortion. It’s surprisingly difficult to get accurate data on abortion in the US (more on that later), but Guttmacher’s census is the most comprehensive available on the subject. [...]
The abortion ratio — the proportion of abortions to live births — is also down to historic lows. In 1995, the abortion ratio was about 26 abortions for every 100 live births; in 2014, it was 18.8.
The abortion rate and the abortion ratio tell us different things. The abortion rate is a bigger-picture snapshot of how common abortion is among women every year, while the abortion ratio gives us a sense of how many women who get pregnant decide to stay pregnant. [...]
Abortion rates have been falling for three decades in the developed world, as Vox’s Sarah Kliff has explained. But in developing African, Asian, and Latin American countries, rates have either held steady or increased since the 1990s. That’s because women in developed countries, such as in Europe and North America, have much better access to higher-quality methods of birth control, and live in a culture that treats contraception as less of a taboo.
Quartz: This Holocaust remembrance project is tweeting the names of refugees who died because the US turned them away
The United States’ approach to immigration is changing dramatically under president Donald Trump. On Wednesday, Trump signed an executive order targeting illegal immigrants, and is soon expected to sign another that could indefinitely block certain refugees.
A new Twitter account is highlighting another example of the US denying entry to refugees. Using data from the United States Holocaust Memorial and Museum (USHMM), a Holocaust Remembrance Day project is tweeting out the names and stories of passengers from the St. Louis Manifest, a German transatlantic liner carrying 937 passengers, the vast majority of whom were Jews fleeing the Third Reich. The ship was forced to return to Europe after Cuba and the United States denied its passengers entry.
The Manifest was originally headed for Cuba, where most of its passengers planned to stay until the US approved their visas. But by the time they arrived, the Cuban president had issued a decree invalidating passengers’ recently issued landing certificates, forcing the ship to turn around with most of them still on board. Although the liner sailed close to the United States, and some passengers had contacted president Franklin D. Roosevelt to ask for refuge, the US did not take measures to permit the refugees to enter the country.
Politico: Theresa May Is a Religious Nationalist (DECEMBER 6, 2016)
As a Conservative politician, May’s appeal depends largely on her apparently apolitical common sense. Her manner and rhetoric always suggest that things are pretty much all right as they are, that reasonable people don’t want to rock the boat, and that there is something wrong with the people who want large change. She expresses distrust of ideologues and chancers — the two labels that most naturally attach to her political rivals at the moment. [...]
The link with May should be obvious. The lack of explicit theological distinctiveness in her church coheres with an almost complete lack of ideology in her politics. She seems to have no large vision of how society should be organized or the economy run: She sees problems in her nation and fixes them, without worrying too much about how everything might fit into a grand scheme. If she had a slogan, it might be “common sense without stupidity.” The Brexit vote would seem to contradict both halves of the slogan. But we still have no clear idea how she intends to deal with it — except that she does not intend to let anyone outside the government know anything until the last possible moment. The attempt to negotiate what is supposed to be a return to parliamentary sovereignty without a vote in Parliament is one example. Another is her repetition of the phrase “Brexit means Brexit” until its lack of meaning became embarrassingly obvious. [...]
Generally, however, May’s political career is given coherence by her supposition that her Christian duty is to the people of England rather than to humanity in general or even to other Christians. This is another thing that distinguishes state churches, on the European model, from congregational ones, on the American model. The state church is not something you join, or leave, any more than the nation is. It is run as a kind of public utility: a national spiritual health service, if you like. In Germany and Scandinavia, the churches are paid for out of taxation collected by the state, as the English church once was, even if the church taxes in Europe are now voluntary. Because there is no special membership status, no one is excluded either, and there is an obligation to serve everyone. May’s father was legally obliged to marry or bury any resident of the parish who demanded this service — the assumption being that they were members of the church.
CityLab: Finding the Poetry in 'Paterson'
All of those “Patersons” may seem like an indie film affectation, but they’re an homage. Paterson, who writes poetry when he’s not ferrying passengers, has a favorite poet: William Carlos Williams, who worked in the nearby town of Rutherford during the first half of the 20th century. Williams is probably best known for his simple, elegant poem, “This is Just to Say.” But he also wrote an epic, five-part poem called, yes, “Paterson.” In a 1943 letter to the author and poet Robert McAlmon, Williams declared that “Paterson” the poem would be “a psychological-social panorama of a city treated as if it were a man, the man Paterson.” [...]
Paterson has been accused (not unaffectionately) of depicting an unrealistic utopia, particularly in terms of racial harmony. Indeed, Paterson the man is friendly with everyone, and aside from a young white girl with whom he converses briefly, he is the only white character in the movie. (His wife, Laura, is Iranian, his friends at the bar are black, his colleague at the bus depot is Indian.) Jarmusch’s city is also a utopia of post-industrial working class life. The mills are long gone, and they’re not coming back; still, Paterson’s life is a good one. [...]
Paterson leaves one with a feeling of appreciation, if not hope. Not just for America, for the working class, and for race relations—but for walkable, dense, public-transport-loving, inclusive cities. If CityLab gave out movie awards, it might very well get Best Picture.
Political Critique: Seeking a New Metanarrative
The search for the “real” within the paradoxical Russia persists five centuries later. But what is this “real” in the Russian context? For many European travelers, past and present, the “real” stands for the “Russian people” as opposed to the repressive Russian state and its corrupt officialdom. Or the “real” Russia is somewhere out there in the countryside and not in the twin capitals of Petersburg and Moscow. The “real” Russia is also something concealed by the modern facades of the capitals, obscured by the state’s propaganda machine, or silenced by the whims and interests of the foreign observer. More recently the “real” Russia is garbled by a postmodern veneer, absent of grand narratives, and where life is “surreal.”
Two recent books, Anne Garrels’ Putin Country: A Journey Into the Real Russia and Peter Pomerantsev’s Nothing is True Everything is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia, both, in their own way, seek to capture the “real” Russia. Garrels wants to understand Russians’ relations to Putin and Putinism from the ground up. She paints portraits of real Russians dealing with real problems. Pomerantsev shuns digging too deep since to him, Putin’s Russia is akin to a surrealist painting where pulling back the curtain only reveals more curtains. His subjects are actors in a big reality show. [...]
This begs the question of what to do with Putin. Garrels’ book is about Putin country, after all. It’s worth noting that for her interlocutors, Putin represents “stability.” Here, stability can be read as more than just economic, but in the figure of Putin a new metanarrative. It’s telling that over the last five years Putin has increasingly concentrated on Russia’s great power status, nationhood, Russian identity, history, and other remedies for fragmented national souls. In this sense, perhaps Garrels and Pomerantsev are not so much pointing to a Russia that is, but one that was as we witness the twilight of the shattered post-Soviet man and the dawn of a consolidated Russian one.
Al Jazeera: Roma in Kosovo: The justice that never came
Although Milosevic's army began its withdrawal on June 11, 1999, the violence continued in the months that followed. Despite the presence of NATO troops, members of the KLA and other organised groups launched a series of revenge attacks on the Roma community, who were suspected of siding with Serbia.
These attacks varied from harassment and theft to arson, rape and murder. In 2001, Human Rights Watch (HRW) reported that up to 1,000 Serbs and Roma were missing or unaccounted for since the end of the conflict. [...]
A 1999 report by the European Roma Rights Centre (ERRC) also questioned the idea of a community-wide allegiance. The Roma community was caught in the middle of a conflict that allowed no neutrality, the report suggested, as a consequece of which, the community was targeted by both sides. [...]
Last week, thousands of Kosovar Albanians took to the streets of Pristina to protest against the arrest of Ramush Haradinaj - a former KLA commander. Haradinaj, who was briefly prime minister, had been detained in France on a war crimes warrant issued by Serbia.
Politico: Theresa May has no good options
The special relationship, after all, is in a very special quandary. Trump’s “America First” rhetoric has horrified almost all of America’s traditional European allies. His suggestion that NATO is “obsolete” and his happiness to countenance the complete collapse of the European Union threatens to abandon more than a half-century of U.S. foreign policy. Even though Trump has endeared himself to the Brexiteers, who cheered his recent declaration that Britain was “so smart” to leave the EU, Trump is far less popular in Britain than even George W. Bush was at his worst. During the campaign, May herself complained that Trump’s rhetoric about Muslims was “divisive, unhelpful and wrong”; one of her chiefs of staff called Trump a “chump,” and the other said he had no interest in “reaching out” to Trump. [...]
True, there are risks for Trump. If he cannot establish a strong working relationship with Britain, his chances of doing so with any other country (well, except maybe Russia) must be reckoned negligible. A meeting with the British prime minister is, as far as Trump is concerned, diplomacy steadied with training wheels. If he still falls, it will be telling. Americans and foreigners alike will further doubt his statesmanship, and his less-than-steady start in office could get even shakier.
The dangers for May, however, are more significant. It’s not just the clash between Britain’s national interest, which demands a good working relationship with the new American administration, and its national pride, which demands that she keep her distance from Trump. Making matters more awkward is the fact Trump thrives on, and indeed may only respond to, unctuous flattery. May, who has relished being described as “a bloody difficult woman,” is at risk of seeming Trump’s patsy. At the Republicans’ congressional retreat in Philadelphia on Thursday, she already seemed to go all-in for Trump, declaring that it was an honor to be present as “dawn breaks on a new era of American renewal.” “Haven’t you noticed? Opposites attract,” she quipped earlier to reporters. If May has to eat an uncommonly gristly sandwich, then so be it.
Politico: ‘Penelopegate’ hits François Fillon’s approval ratings
François Fillon’s bid for the French presidency is already suffering from the fallout of a scandal over disputed payments to his wife, according to opinion polls.
According to a poll carried out since the scandal broke, 61 percent of French voters have a “negative” or “very negative” view of the conservative former prime minister, while the proportion of “positive views” of Fillon plummeted to 39 percent from 54 percent before “Penelopegate” became top news.
Fillon, who until recently was the hands-down favorite to win May’s presidential election, is struggling to draw a line under the scandal. On Thursday, he was placed under preliminary investigation on suspicion that he may have abused public funds by paying his wife €500,000 over eight years for a parliament job that she did not actually do. [...]
With the scandal just three days old, Odoxa’s poll is the first sign that Penelopegate is having an impact on the public view of Fillon, so far the favorite for the presidency. It also highlighted widespread frustration with the cozy practice of hiring spouses in parliament, with 76 percent of respondents saying they would like to see the practice banned.
IFLScience: Website That Tracked Fake Science Journals Has Suddenly Vanished
A website that has kept track of publications falsely claiming to be peer reviewed has vanished, and many scientists are alarmed. In recent years pseudo-peer reviewed journals have become a growth industry. Jeffrey Beall, a librarian at the University of Colorado had been leading the fight back, working to expose such journals. Suddenly, last week, Beall's website was shut down, reportedly because of legal threats and political attacks.
Science relies on evidence and the capacity to replicate research. Peer review acts as a filter, keeping out many of the most unsubstantiated claims from scientific publications, and providing an indication of credibility for those lacking the skills or time to investigate the quality of research. However, the Internet has opened up space for fake journals, which claim to be peer reviewed but allow anyone willing to pay to have their work published.
Beall refers to this as “predatory open access publishing”, allowing bad scientists to pad their CVs and people pushing dangerous pseudo-science to make their claims look credible. The publishers make a profit, while the community that gets taken in by the lies, and honest scientists who won't engage, lose out. The extent of the situation was highlighted when a paper entirely consisting of the words “Get Me Off Your Fucking Mailing List” repeated 863 times was accepted for two such journals.
25 January 2017
Stay Tuned!
The blog will resume on 28 January 2017.
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| Image source: http://rideforlifechallenge.com.au/stay-tuned-for-2017-news/ |
24 January 2017
The Los Angeles Review of Books: Philosophes sans Frontièrs
AS ACADEMIC PHILOSOPHY becomes ever more specialized, a number of philosophers have sought to bring philosophizing out of the ivory tower and into the street. Specialized cafes, book clubs, and “philosophy of everyday life” courses, like those in Alain de Botton’s School of Life enterprise, all point to the same cultural and social desire for high-quality intellectual conversation. In Teaching Plato in Palestine, Canadian-Brazilian philosopher Carlos Fraenkel pushes this democratizing impulse in a radical direction, traveling to some of the more conflicted communities across the globe with the aim of showing how philosophy can contribute to what he calls a “culture of debate.” His fascinating experiences as an itinerant philosopher, discussing classical philosophical texts (Greek, but also Jewish and Islamic) with students from Palestine and Makassar (Indonesia), Hasidic Jews in New York, high schoolers in Brazil, and members of the Mohawk community in Canada, demonstrate how philosophy can educate citizens and cultivate an ethos of mutual understanding. If one ever needed a book to suggest to those skeptical about the social benefits of philosophy, Teaching Plato in Palestine would be one to recommend.
The volume emerged out of Fraenkel’s experiences as a doctoral student working on Arabic and Hebraic texts while studying in Cairo. He soon discovered there was more to philosophy than analyzing arguments and devising objections. Muslim students he met became concerned with saving his soul by converting him to Islam, while Fraenkel, in turn, wanted to “save them from wasting their real life for an illusory afterlife” by converting them to a secular worldview. The result was a lively philosophical exchange over arguments for God’s existence, which did not lead to any definite conclusions (or conversions) but did prompt Fraenkel to pose two questions: Can philosophy be useful beyond the academy? And can it contribute to the transformation of conflicts over diversity into an ethical “culture of debate,” that is, a practice of rational discussion over conflicting values in a divided world? [...]
A recurring issue throughout is the tension between a commitment to religious faith and pursuing the philosophical maxim of leading a rationally examined life. As Fraenkel remarks, while most students accept the idea of examining religious views in a Socratic manner, “their commitment to the truth of Islam leaves no room for confusion.” Some of them attempt to turn the tables on their teacher, asking Fraenkel how a secular citizen could live an examined life; according to one student, many Westerners are moral relativists who equate freedom with individual choice but also view “all choices as equal.” While acknowledging that relativism makes questioning futile, Fraenkel points out that such interrogations should also be applied to the Islamic faith, which leads to a rather one-sided discussion of the differences between Sunni and Shī‘ite Muslims. The debate ends inconclusively but prompts Fraenkel to remark that one way beyond dogmatically asserting the superiority of one’s moral beliefs is to explore the shared traditions between the West and the Muslim world in order to “conduct an open discussion on an equal footing.” Despite the ongoing conflicts in Israel, Fraenkel leaves his students to ponder how philosophy might help resolve these moral-political disputes via ethical questioning and rational discussion.
Katoikos: Can Europe afford to copy Japan on immigration?
More essentially, do we understand why Europe’s leaders have chosen apparently the multiculturalism option, rather than trying to keep Europe ethnically “European”?
Apart from our continent’s colonial legacy, Europe became multicultural because it chose to follow the USA in its financial and social policies. After WW2 the European economy was in tatters and so it was forced to copy the American model, whose economic boom was based on immigrants from all over the world, including Europe.
One by one, eventually, most European nations adopted this model and for many years it proved acceptable and successful. That is, until the EU’s 2004 big-bang expansion to the East, combined with the eurozone and refugee crises. [...]
The debate over whether the country should loosen its immigration laws is becoming more vocal. Shigeru Ishiba, in charge of revitalising regional economies, stated in 2015 that since Japan’s population is in decline, the government should promote policies to accept immigrants into Japan. “It is wrong to think that foreigners must not come to Japan,” he said. [...]
Today just 0.7% of the population receives benefits – compared with the 4.8% of Americans who get grants from Aid to Families With Dependent Children or the 9.7% who receive food stamps. About 2.3% of Americans receive grants through the Supplemental Security Income programme, which serves the elderly, blind and disabled.
To be sure, Japan’s welfare system operates in a very different context to America’s. Only 1% of Japanese births are to unwed mothers. By comparison, the rate in the United States has now reached 30% and keeps climbing.
The Atlantic: The Return of Syphilis (DEC 3, 2015)
Today, syphilis can seem like a historical relic, more likely to appear in period movies than in one’s next-door neighbor. But after more than a decade of increases in syphilis cases, the United States is looking at its highest rate in recent memory.
According to a report released on November 17 by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, syphilis rates rose for both genders in every region of the U.S. in 2014. The rate of reported primary and secondary syphilis (the earliest symptomatic stages of the disease) increased by 15.1 percent from 2013 to 2014, to 6.3 cases per 100,000 people. The rate of reported congenital syphilis (passed by an infected mother to her child during pregnancy) increased by 27.5 percent, to 11.6 cases per 100,000 live births. [...]
The new wave of syphilis shows no signs of slowing down. In New Orleans, the number of syphilis cases tripled between 2012 and 2014. Central New York, which two years ago reported 27 syphilis cases, most recently reported 110, and some health clinics are now offering free syphilis testing. Health officials in Oregon, where syphilis rates have increased by more than 1,000 percent from 2007 to 2014, have created a new website, syphaware.org. The site's homepage reads, “Oregon is known for many things: natural beauty, coffee, beer, and Pinot Noir. Did you know that Oregon is also known for syphilis?”
Researchers are still trying to work out why these increases are happening now, but the CDC’s report offers a few clues. For one, syphilis isn’t the only sexually transmitted disease becoming more common. Syphilis, chlamydia, and gonorrhea—the three STDs that comprised the focus of the report—rose simultaneously for the first time on record, which suggests an underlying cause that isn’t syphilis-specific.
Thrillist: Why the Hell Did Humans Evolve to Be Ticklish?
What researchers who did just that found is that when tickled people laugh, it's an entirely different function than "social laughter," the noises you make when you find something funny, or even "taunting laughter," which is apparently a thing that needs studying.
For one, tickling laughter sounds different -- it has a "higher acoustic complexity" -- and activates parts of the brain that process auditory information, as well as a part of the brain related to language comprehension. In short, tickling laughter has meaning. But what?
Well, the researchers describe tickling laughter as an "unequivocal and reflex-like social bonding signal," related in part to how your brain processes language and working memory. It helps you form bonds with those close enough to tickle you, and your response signals that you have a relationship with the tickler. Social laughter grew out of this basic bonding response, but it can appear in scenarios that have nothing to do with touch; we humans have evolved to laugh at movies, for example, while chimps remain totally ignorant of Hollywood. [...]
So tickling serves a twofold purpose by identifying you as an individual, but also an individual in need of social interaction. "Laughter," Provine says, "reveals us as a social mammal, stripping away our veneer of culture and language, challenging the shaky hypothesis that we are rational creatures in full conscious control of our behavior."
The Atlantic: Why Some People Take Breakups Harder Than Others
In these types of stories, rejection uncovered a hidden flaw, one that led people to question or change their own views of themselves—and, often, they portrayed their personalities as toxic, with negative qualities likely to contaminate other relationships. One study participant wrote: “I learned that I have a part of my personality that sabotages my happiness.” Another confessed: “I just feel hurt and rejected. I try to tell myself that it wasn’t my fault and that it was that person’s loss but I can’t help but feel inadequate.” [...]
But the loss of a partner can make it easy to fall into the self-deprecation trap. Research by the psychologist Arthur Aron and his colleagues shows that when people are in close relationships, their self becomes intertwined with their partner’s self. In other words, we begin to think of a romantic partner as a part of ourselves—confusing our traits with their traits, our memories with their memories, and our identity with their identity. In a measure designed to capture the closeness of a relationship, Aron’s team ask people to consider themselves as one circle, their partner as another, and indicate the extent to which the two overlap. [...]
So separating rejection from the self tends to make breakups easier, and linking the two tends to make them more difficult. But what makes people more likely to do one or the other? Past research by Dweck and others shows that people tend to hold one of two views about their own personal qualities: that they are fixed over the lifespan, or that they are malleable and can be developed at any point. These beliefs impact how people respond to setbacks. For example, when people consider intelligence to be something fixed, they’re less likely to persist in the face of failure than people who believe that intelligence can be developed.
FiveThirtyEight: The Electoral College Blind Spot
Donald Trump’s victory in last November’s election victory came despite the fact that he lost the popular vote by 2.1 percentage points, making for the widest discrepancy between the popular vote and the Electoral College since 1876. So one measure of the quality of horse-race analysis is in how seriously it entertained the possibility of such a split in Trump’s favor. This is one point on which the data geeks generally came closer to getting the right answer. FiveThirtyEight’s statistical model, for example, saw the Electoral College as a significant advantage for Trump, and projected that he’d be about even money to win the Electoral College even if he lost the popular vote by 1 to 2 percentage points. Overall, it assigned a 10.5 percent chance to Trump’s winning the Electoral College while losing the popular vote, but less than a 1 percent chance of Hillary Clinton’s doing the same. [...]
But the “emerging Democratic majority” had a lot of flaws, some of which had been pointed out by data-savvy journalists for years. (See for example Real ClearPolitics’s Sean Trende, The Upshot’s Nate Cohn, and FiveThirtyEight contributor David Wasserman.) One basic problem with the theory is that while white voters without college degrees might have been declining as a share of the electorate, they still represented a hugely influential group and significantly outnumbered racial minorities in the electorate. According to Wasserman’s estimates, 42 percent of voters are whites without college degrees. By comparison, 27 percent of voters are nonwhite. If white noncollege voters were to start voting Republican by the same margins that minorities voted for Democrats, Democrats were potentially in a lot of trouble, even if they also made gains among college-educated whites.
Furthermore, whites without college degrees are overrepresented in swing states as compared to the country as a whole. Sure, there were some exceptions, such as Virginia. But in the average swing state — weighted by its likelihood of being the tipping-point state — whites without college degrees make up an average of 45.3 percent of the electorate, higher than their 41.6 percent share nationwide. That’s a big part of why Clinton won the popular vote while losing the Electoral College.
JSTOR Daily: Does Street Protest Matter?
In 2012, Daniel Q. Gillion looked into the question of whether protests “work” in a very specific, quantifiable way: checking to see if they change how elected representatives vote. He did this by looking at civil rights protests between 1961 and 1995 and then considering the subsequent roll-call votes of the House representatives from the districts where the protests took place.
What he found was that representatives of districts with just the occasional protest weren’t likely to be swayed. But, in places where there were 50 protests over the course of two years, the typical representative became 5 percent more likely to take liberal positions on civil rights issues. If there were 100 protests in a district, the representative became 10 times more likely to take those positions. [...]
What that means is that, even in largely black and Latino areas where politicians might assume that their constituents were generally in favor of civil rights laws, protests made a difference in how politicians acted.
What he found was that representatives of districts with just the occasional protest weren’t likely to be swayed. But, in places where there were 50 protests over the course of two years, the typical representative became 5 percent more likely to take liberal positions on civil rights issues. If there were 100 protests in a district, the representative became 10 times more likely to take those positions. [...]
What that means is that, even in largely black and Latino areas where politicians might assume that their constituents were generally in favor of civil rights laws, protests made a difference in how politicians acted.
Slate: Trump Sold America a Miracle Cure
There are many who hope Trump’s supporters will hold him accountable. That they will insist he fulfill his promises about jobs or universal health coverage—and when those promises are broken, that their fervent support will turn into rage at having been duped, causing Trump anguish and eventually costing him re-election.
This is wishful thinking. Trump’s rise to power has followed a similar trajectory to that of quacks who peddle panaceas to the desperate—a bizarre and heartbreaking world I’ve long studied. Just like them, Trump will fail to deliver. But his supporters will find a way to exonerate him. Consider the ability of one “Archbishop” Jim Humble—a former gold prospector who claims extraterrestrial lineage—to persuade parents to pump their autistic children full of Master Mineral Solution, even though MMS, when activated by citric acid, becomes a dangerous form of industrial bleach. Or “Gerson” therapy evangelists, who talk cancer patients into paying thousands to detoxify with organic juice at a Tijuana, Mexico, clinic, despite studies showing the therapy is ineffective (unsurprising given that it was developed not by oncologists, but an early 20th-century Viennese doctor named Max Gerson as an unsuccessful tuberculosis treatment).
When people make big bets on miracle cures that fail to work, they rarely turn against the treatments or their merchants. Instead, they rationalize their misplaced faith, in order to save face, remain hopeful, and preserve an identity that’s defined by their courageous ability to reject the status quo. [...]
The process of embracing a charlatan’s empowering vision is not rational, which means that rational arguments are unlikely, in isolation, to dispel it. Studies have repeatedly demonstrated that people cling tenaciously to their worldviews, and conflicting data may actually strengthen their beliefs. (Just look at this family who thinks Trump is “a man of faith who will bring Godliness back.”) To renounce Trump would mean admitting that one’s worldview—of a country wracked by carnage, as the president put it in his inaugural address, and a truth-telling hero who can heal it—is fundamentally mistaken. And that can also mean confronting existential panic without a panacea. It is much easier to forgive Trump for not locking her up than to wrestle with such truths.
23 January 2017
VICE: How to Have Gay Sex Without Being Gay (Aug 9 2015)
Each chapter in the book explores a different framing device that our culture uses to understand sex between straight white men: frat house or military hazing rituals, boys-will-be-boys summer camp circle jerks, or the "situational homosexuality" of sailors at sea, for instance. Women, Ward contends, are allowed (or, increasingly, expected) to be more sexually fluid and "open," while the concept of the "down low" has prompted many recent discussions on the supposed sexual fluidity (and duplicity) of men of color. But straight white men are generally held up as the paragons of our sexually normative culture, oriented in one rigid direction, unwavering and in fact disgusted by any other kind of sexuality.
In particular, Ward pays close attention to the ways in which white straight men justify their own sexual behaviors with other men. She neatly breaks down common defenses given to "explain" such actions. For example, sexual contact between men is often seen as a kind of heterosexual bonding if the participants loudly declare how disgusting the activity is (think frat boys "forced" to insert things into each others' assholes—a frequent occurrence in the pages of Not Gay). Yet she points out that many straight men openly express disgust about women's bodies, showing that disgust and desire can easily exist in the same moment. [...]
There's a great book written by this historian George Chauncey about precisely that. It's called Gay New York. I remember very clearly excerpts in it from an interview with a gay man who says, "It was really a bummer when the gay liberation movement started pushing people to come out because it meant that straight men were far less willing to have sex with us." All of a sudden, there are all of these identitarian consequences.
The Conversation: What ‘walkies’ says about your relationship with your dog
In many ways, the walk reflects the historical social order of human domination and animal submission. But research suggests that it also allows humans and dogs to negotiate their power within the relationship. In fact, our recent study found that the daily dog walk involves complex negotiation at almost every stage.
The UK, like many countries, is a nation of pet lovers – 40% of UK households are home to a domestic animal. And for dog owners (24% of UK households) that means a lot of walking. Dog “owners” walk 23,739 miles during an average dog’s lifetime of 12.8 years and reportedly get more exercise from walking their dogs than the average gym goer. Despite this, we actually know very little about how walking and the spaces in which we walk help forge our relationships with dogs. [...]
But dog owners also adapt the timing, length and location of the walks depending on the perceived personality of the dog and what they think the dogs like and dislike the most. One respondent felt that as her dog had been rescued she had a “right” to a good life and giving her a long walk daily was part of this care-giving. There was also the sense that people knew where their dogs liked to walk and walkers spoke of “their stomping ground” and “favourite park”, suggesting that over time, dogs and their companions find spaces that work for them as a partnership or team. [...]
Third parties also influence the nature of the walk. A popular image of dog walkers sees them out and about, chatting with other walkers, their dogs engaging in similar “conversations”. But the social nature of the walk is certainly not a given. Many people simply do not want to socialise with other humans (or their dogs); and some believe their walk would be easier and less stressful if their route was human and dog-free. Participants who had busy lives wanted to get the walk done without distraction. Another respondent, who walked a large pack of dogs, recognised that this would be intimidating for others, so preferred to find quiet places for walks to allow the dogs the freedom to run uninterrupted.
Politico: Bring back the draft. No, really.
f Sweden reinstitutes the draft, as it is expected to do within a couple of months, many will report the move as a return to a previous era. For centuries, young men in Europe were conscripted for military service to protect countries from invasion. Then came the 1990s and the presumed end of history. With territorial wars considered a thing of the past, large European powers scrapped compulsory military service in favor of smaller professional armed forces.
The return to conscription is both a sign of more uncertain times and the result of difficulties Sweden has had in filling its military roster with only volunteer forces. But it would be a mistake to write off the effort as a rollback of progress. Sweden’s initiative will show the draft in its modern incarnation: targeted, highly selective, and applied to both men and women. [...]
In Sweden, the annual number of conscripts will gradually grow from next year’s 4,000 to 6,000 by 2021. With some 90,000 Swedes born each year, that means only 4.4 percent of Swedish 19-year-olds will be drafted next year. Even when the draft reaches 6,000 conscripts each year, that’s an acceptance rate of less than seven percent. [...]
Indeed, the modern military employs sophisticated equipment that should not be entrusted to youngsters who’d much rather be somewhere else. “When I did my military service everybody had to serve, and if you were less able you worked in support functions like postman,” recalled Eksell. “The selective draft will help us move from military service as something you’re forced to do to something you’re selected to do.”
Jacobin Magazine: The Politics of Nostalgia
Throughout the advanced capitalist world and beyond, a xenophobic, nostalgic nationalism is taking shape. A flock of old and new leaders are rising up, declaring that our best days are behind us and that they are the most qualified to build a better yesterday. Forget about the future, they say, the past is now the place to be — but not everyone is invited. [...]
Around the world — from Britain to Turkey to the Philippines — we see variants of the same theme: a nostalgic fervor for a proud past, coupled with a hostility toward “outsiders.” Imaginations of this past differ depending on the nation but, ultimately, they amount to the same thing: a phantom homeland with a strong sense of belonging. [...]
Only through the marginalization of others — foreigners, immigrants, LGBTQ people, all those who “don’t belong” — can the reactionary nostalgists turn their remembered past into a site of empowerment. To turn back the clock, others must be turned out. With little else to latch on to, excluding others makes their past feel all the more precious, a thing that can truly be claimed as their own.
This is the dark irony beneath the nativist’s angry refrain to the immigrant “Go back to where you came from”: it is the xenophobe who, more than anyone, wants to go back to where they came from — to an imagined, pure point of origin, a moment in history where their country was a homogenous mass. The racist, like all great nostalgists, is homesick for a home they never had.
The New York Review of Books: Embracing the Vulgar
What is vulgar? These days a certain president-elect comes to mind. But there’s more to it than the gilded rooms at Mar-a-Lago. The word’s many meanings and many forms are at the heart of “The Vulgar: Fashion Redefined,” an expansive exhibition at the Barbican Centre in London. The show takes shape around eleven categories of vulgarity conceived by writer and psychoanalyst Adam Phillips, like “Puritan,” “Impossible Ambition,” and “Showing Off.” Each is explored through clothing, shoes, and texts spanning the eighteenth century through the present.
At first glance, several of these items are not obviously vulgar—a prim twentieth-century Christian Dior cocktail dress, for example—while others flaunt their vulgarity with bedazzled, slinky, excessive fervor. But to call something vulgar may say more about oneself than the thing in question, Phillips argues. One employs the word, he writes, to “reassure oneself of one’s own good taste” and to reaffirm “the fact that there is such a thing as good taste, and that it protects us.” [...]
Though not explicitly included as one of the exhibition’s organizing categories, pleasure is a central theme. We see this in Vivienne Westwood’s playful “Eve” bodysuit, adorned only with a gleaming mirrored leaf affixed to the crotch, and her “Watteau” evening gown, displayed with a white leather glove poised to slip off the mannequin’s arm at any moment. The play on Genesis and the subversion of opulent eighteenth-century dress both sit just on the edge of propriety—they are just an apple’s bite or a glove’s drop away from the overt, vulgar display of money or sex.
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