Union membership is in decline whilst structural changes in the economy - including the rise of the so-called gig economy - are putting downward pressure on wages, and creating fertile conditions for exploitation by unscrupulous employers. So who is going to ensure that workers get a fair deal? Sonia Sodha, chief leader writer for the Observer, investigates.
30 June 2017
BBC4 A Point of View: After Grenfell
Will Self gives a very personal view of high-rise buildings in the aftermath of the Grenfell Tower disaster.
"As a commentator on the built environment", Will writes, "I've been too wry, too cynical and too disengaged over the past twenty years".
"Grenfell Tower", he says, "was the bonfire of any remaining civic vanity in London ".
Quartz: Why Americans have become much more liberal about same-sex marriage, but not abortion
The trend has been across all age groups: Even in the so-called silent generation (born between 1928 and 1945) approval has nearly doubled, from 21% in 2001 to 41% in 2016. It’s also gone up regardless of religious or political affiliation, and race. Even amongst supporters of the Republican party, which, from the mid-1970s on has aligned itself with the Christian right, approval for gay marriage went up from 21% in 2001 to 40% in 2017.
But while the pro-LGBT message has gained support, that’s not the case for abortion. Though a majority of Americans (56%) still think it should be legal in all or most cases, that percentage has gone down from 60% in 1995, and has been even lower for some of the intervening period. [...]
“It is a very interesting question that no one has been able to answer fully that I know of” says Sarah Cowan, a New York University sociologist who researches attitudes towards abortion. One reason, she says, is that LGBT people are increasingly visible: The vast majority of Americans say they know someone belonging to a sexual minority. The more people feel directly connected, the more open their attitude, which in turn makes it easier to come out. Relationships are also something that comes up frequently in casual conversation. Ending a pregnancy—though much more frequent than homosexuality—typically does not. Moreover, Cowan notes “the consequences of concealing [abortion] are likely less than those of concealing who you love, whom you’re attracted to, how you spent Saturday night.” [...]
Abortion is the complete opposite. Choice is at the core of the right to abortion; deciding when and whether to become a mother is, for pro-choice advocates, a fundamental expression of human freedom. And so, for abortion opponents, the blame is fully a woman’s. “I don’t see the rhetoric about abortion in America leaving behind choice and victim,” Cowan says.
Al Jazeera: Discovering the spirit of Ramadan in Morocco
With long, hot afternoons spent awaiting nighttime festivities, and the rhythm of the day ceremoniously thrown upside down, it is unmistakably Ramadan.
The Muslim holy month, the ninth month of the Islamic calendar, moves 11 days earlier each year due to the disparity between lunar and Gregorian calendars, causing it to shift throughout the year as decades pass. This year, the holy month straddled the months of May and July.
During Ramadan, Muslims must observe "sawm", which entails fasting from dawn until dusk, abstaining from food, liquids, smoking or engaging in sexual relations. It is a time for prayer, reflection, atonement and charity - when rewards for good deeds are multiplied.
In Morocco, the true spirit of Ramadan could not be clearer.
On a sweltering day in Marrakech, Rahma, an engineering student, said appreciation is at the heart of Ramadan.
“God asks us to fast so we can feel the importance of what we take for granted, to feel the hunger of the poor and encourage us to live with gratitude and empathy.”
From the taxi drivers who shared iftar from the boot of their car, to the Amazigh Bedouins who prepared mint tea on an open fire, one enjoys the hospitality that epitomises Ramadan, and which is fundamental to Islam, all 13 months of the year.
Vox: Donald Trump's refugee ban, explained
The Supreme Court allowed a partial version of Trump's executive order banning travel from 6 Muslim-majority countries to go into effect this summer. But the full order could have a lasting impact on how the US treats refugees.
Vox: Why Pope Francis just called labor unions “prophets”
Francis praised unions on spiritual grounds, calling them “prophetic" institutions that give "a voice to those who have none, denounces those who would [as in the Biblical Book of Amos] ‘sell the needy for a pair of sandals’ … unmasks the powerful who trample the rights of the most vulnerable workers, defends the cause of the foreigner, the least, the discarded. … But in our advanced capitalist societies, the union risks losing its prophetic nature, and becoming too similar to the institutions and powers that it should instead criticize.”
He also criticized the idea of a purely “market economy,” praising instead a “social market economy” balancing the goals of business with care for those “outside the walls” of industry, meaning those denied work by physical infirmity or condition, or those who, as immigrants, do not have the right to work. [...]
Francis’s open critiques of capitalism have caused their fair share of controversy within church circles, even before the election of capitalist in chief Donald Trump, previously known mostly as a real estate developer and deal-making businessman. Back in 2012, New York’s Cardinal Timothy Dolan contributed a pointed op-ed to the Wall Street Journal, walking back any suggestion that the then-newly elected Francis might be a threat to capitalism. [...]
So while young Bergoglio seems to have been vocally opposed to the movement — for reasons that may be as political as they were religious — he’s grown much more openly sympathetic to its theology in recent decades. In 2012, just six months after becoming pope, he invited one of the liberation theology movement’s major proponents, Gustavo Gutiérrez, to the Vatican and declared another, Oscar Romero, a “martyr.”
29 June 2017
Jacobin Magazine: Tearing Down the Walls
While people have been sexually intimate with others of the same sex since the beginning of time, the social construction of a gay identity is a new phenomenon. It was only through the development of capitalist industrialization and the accompanying emergence of large urban centers, and the transformative effect this process had on social life, that the material conditions for the development of an LGBTQ identity and community became possible.
The personal autonomy and privacy afforded by city life allowed for the exploration of non-heterosexual desires and greater gender expression, as well as the development of a community based on those shared interests in a way that was generally not possible under previous modes of production. [...]
On the other hand, American society was more concerned with homosexuality than ever before. This began in 1948 with the publication of Alfred Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, which fundamentally transformed the way society understood sexuality and quickly became a media sensation. The Kinsey reports showed that homosexual acts were far more widespread among men than previously assumed and concluded that such behavior was perfectly normal and would be more openly practiced if it weren’t for societal restrictions and prejudice.
During the 1950s and early ’60s, there was an unparalleled outpouring of representation and discussion of gay people in literature and the media. Mainstream newspapers and magazines carried exposés on the underground gay world, and there was a proliferation of pulp novels with gay characters and themes. [...]
At the beginning of the decade, laws across the US were more repressive against homosexuals than any of the Soviet regimes the US criticized. A consenting adult who was caught having sex with another person of the same sex could face decades or even life in prison, or could be confined to an insane asylum and given electroshock therapy, castrated, or lobotomized. Adults who were charged with a sex offense could lose their professional license and were often terminated from their jobs and barred from future employment.
The New York Times: There Goes the Gayborhood
Similar culture clashes are playing out across the nation in historically gay districts, nicknamed gayborhoods. Places like Greenwich Village in Manhattan and the Castro district in San Francisco, once incubators for the gay rights movement, have “straightened” in recent decades, leading to incidents of resistance and some angst about the effects on the L.G.B.T.Q. community.
The changes are due in large part to the increased expense that comes with the rising popularity and gentrification of many inner cities. But growing acceptance, legally and societally, of the L.G.B.T.Q. community is also responsible. Less discrimination means more options of where to live, and many residents, especially millennials, no longer believe they must huddle among their own kind to survive and thrive. [...]
“When I came to San Francisco, all of us, regardless of skin color, or ethnicity, or economic status or gender, we were all criminals — in the eyes of the law, we were all unapprehended felons,” Mr. Jones said in an interview. “In many cities it was illegal for us to even gather. That outlaw status broke down many of the barriers that exist in the larger society.” [...]
The Castro, in San Francisco, for example, had been somewhat abandoned by a working class exodus to the suburbs, creating an opening in the 1970s for gay and lesbian residents. Today the area is one of the most expensive residential districts in the nation. The average single-family home there sells for more than $2 million, according to a 2016 report compiled by the Paragon Real Estate Group, which studies the neighborhood. Market-rate two-bedroom apartments rent for about $4,400 a month, according to Rent Jungle, a company that tracks rents.
Jacobin Magazine: The Qatar Crisis
Former American government officials and think tanks — notably the neoconservative, pro-Israel Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD), a prominent supporter of the 2003 invasion of Iraq — have taken up this anti-Qatari crusade. On May 23, the FDD convened a high-profile seminar to discuss the Gulf nation’s relationship with the Muslim Brotherhood and how the Trump administration should respond. There, former secretary of defense Robert Gates called on the American government to relocate its massive airbase in Qatar unless the country cut ties with such groups. [...]
Not everyone in Washington, however, fully supports Saudi Arabia and the UAE. Other officials — notably Rex Tillerson — are calling for an easing of the blockade and a peaceful solution. The United Kingdom’s foreign secretary, Boris Johnson, also weighed in, calling for an end to the conflict while also stating that Qatar “urgently needs to do more to address support for extremist groups.” [...]
Not only do these states have rich oil and gas resources — the ultimate explanation for the United States’ interest in such an alliance — but they also share similar structures, marked by authoritarian ruling families and a labor force that primarily consists of largely rightless temporary migrant workers — a feature often forgotten in the flurry of media discussion about the Gulf over the past few weeks. The GCC’s integration project reflected these states’ collective interests, which are uniquely aligned with Western powers. [...]
The key point, often overlooked in the media commentary on the blockade, is that there are no principled political positions involved in these alliances — this is about calculated expediency and a pragmatic assessment by each state of how best to further their regional influence, always within the framework of reordering the region in a way amenable to their collective political and economic power.
Slate: Traditional Families—Who Also Happen To Be Gay
That’s what Alix Smith is hoping, with her project “States of Union,” a six-year series that focuses on photographing gay families through traditional portraiture.
“Initially, I conceived of “States of Union” as a way to show America who and what they were voting against,” Smith explained via email. “I felt the most effective way to change people’s perception was through the power of images. I wanted those who condemn legal recognition of loving families to see the faces of those people they would deny.”
Smith studied art history in college and drew upon her memory of classical imagery when she initially began shooting her subjects, focusing on gestures, lighting, size, and formality, which are markers of classic paintings.
“By using this technique, I offer the viewer something vaguely familiar about the image in hope that they might feel a kinship with families that might otherwise look and seem unrecognizable,” Smith wrote.
Motherboard: Universal Basic Income Is the Path to an Entirely New Economic System
Across the country, 42 percent of the workforce is at high risk of being automated out of a job, according to a recent report from the Brookfield Institute, a Toronto think tank. The time seems is ripe for a fresh debate about basic income, and Canada's 150th anniversary isn't just a time to reflect on the country's past—it's an opportunity to look towards the future. [...]
It's extremely important to note is that a basic income won't necessarily result in one outcome or another on its own. There are external factors—including legislation governing how automation will be implemented—that will determine things like how many jobs are available, or if there is a job market to speak of. [...]
As capitalist industry has already done over the last century of automation, new jobs will be created, but they won't necessarily be better jobs. Basically, our unending march of misery toward the heat death of the universe will continue apace as long as the state continues to prop up capitalism, but with robots manufacturing our running shoes instead of people. [...]
So, proponents of this second, more radical path would say, "Hell yeah, automate those jobs. In fact, automate every job, or as many as possible." Let the robots do the work, and let society enjoy the benefits of their unceasing productivity and the wealth it generates, in the form of a basic income. This is the basic thinking behind the idea of "fully automated luxury communism," which argues that robots, collectively owned by the state, can take care of most of our basic needs while humans hang out and do whatever we feel like.
The Washington Post: For Russians, Stalin is the ‘most outstanding’ figure in world history, followed by Putin
The poll by the Levada Center asked a representative sample of 1,600 Russians to name the “top 10 most outstanding people of all time and all nations.” It also compiled a list of all 20 names that received more than 6 percent of the vote.
Without prompting, 38 percent named Stalin, followed by Putin at 34 percent, in a tie with Alexander Pushkin, the renowned 19th-century poet often referred to as “the Shakespeare of Russia.”
Putin's 34 percent is his highest ranking on this list since he came to power 17 years ago. Stalin has actually slipped a few notches: He polled 42 percent in 2012, the first time he topped the survey of the world's most influential people, which has been conducted by Levada and its predecessors since 1989. [...]
The defeat of Nazi Germany is central to the Putin regime's portrayal of itself as the logical outcome of Russian history. In the Kremlin’s view, saving the world from fascism was the greatest achievement of the 20th century. Russia inherited this legacy, and thanks to Putin, it has returned to its proper place as a global power, his supporters say. [...]
The defeat of Nazi Germany is central to the Putin regime's portrayal of itself as the logical outcome of Russian history. In the Kremlin’s view, saving the world from fascism was the greatest achievement of the 20th century. Russia inherited this legacy, and thanks to Putin, it has returned to its proper place as a global power, his supporters say.
The New York Times: Canada’s Secret to Resisting the West’s Populist Wave
The raw ingredients are present. A white ethnic majority that is losing its demographic dominance. A sharp rise in immigration that is changing culture and communities. News media and political personalities who bet big on white backlash. [...]
Canada is a mosaic rather than a melting pot, several people told me — a place that celebrates different backgrounds rather than demanding assimilation. [...]
Mr. Trudeau’s solution was a policy of official multiculturalism and widespread immigration. This would resolve the conflict over whether Canadian identity was more Anglophone or Francophone — it would be neither, with a range of diversity wide enough to trivialize the old divisions. [...]
That creates a virtuous cycle. All parties rely on and compete for minority voters, so none has an incentive to cater to anti-immigrant backlash. That, in turn, keeps anti-immigrant sentiment from becoming a point of political conflict, which makes it less important to voters. [...]
Political science research suggests that this dynamic may have also made Canada resistant to political extremism and the polarization plaguing other Western countries.
Lilliana Mason, a professor at the University of Maryland, has found that when group identity and partisan identity overlaps, that deepens partisan polarization and intolerance against the opposing party. [...]
Virtually every immigrant to Canada is brought here deliberately. Research suggests that uncontrolled immigration, for example the mass arrival of refugees in Europe, can trigger a populist backlash, regardless of whether those arrivals pose a threat.
Vox: Slowly but surely, Republicans are coming around to same-sex marriage
Pew’s latest poll, which surveyed more than 2,500 adults earlier in June, found that support for marriage equality has grown — even among groups that were previously staunchly opposed to same-sex marriage rights, including members of the GOP.
Although Republicans are still more likely to oppose marriage equality than favor it, Pew found that a majority — meaning more than 50 percent — no longer oppose it.
“For the first time, a majority of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents do not oppose allowing gays and lesbians to marry legally,” Pew noted. “Today, 48% of Republicans and Republican leaners oppose same-sex marriage, while 47% favor this. As recently as 2013, Republicans opposed gay marriage by nearly two-to-one (61% to 33%).” [...]
Not everyone has come around to marriage equality. As Pew noted, white evangelical Protestants are still mostly opposed — with 59 percent opposing marriage rights for same-sex couples. Although support among younger white evangelicals (particularly millennials and Gen X-ers) grew from 29 percent in March last year to 47 percent in the latest poll, there has been virtually no movement among older white evangelicals, who reported 26 percent support this year and 25 percent the year before.
Political Critique: Poland’s Immoral Refugee Policy
On June 13, the European Commission filed a lawsuit against Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary, accusing them of violating European Union law by refusing to admit refugees. The next day, Polish Prime Minister Beata SzydÅ‚o gave a speech at the site of the Auschwitz death camp to mark the 77th anniversary of the first deportation of Polish prisoners there. “In today’s turbulent times,” she said, Auschwitz is a reminder of “how important it is for a country to do everything possible to protect the safety and the lives of its citizens.”
One wonders what SzydÅ‚o was talking about, and from whom she wants to protect Poles. Her remarks seemed to compare today’s Poles to the Holocaust’s Jewish victims, and today’s refugees to the Nazis. In response, European Council President Donald Tusk, who previously held SzydÅ‚o’s current post, lamented that, “A Polish prime minister should never utter such words in such a place.” [...]
In the United States, the decision to turn away ships bearing Jewish refugees just before the start of World War II has become a source of national shame. Just when Jews were being murdered in Europe, the US experienced an unprecedented wave of anti-Semitism. Over the course of the war, the US admitted just 21,000 Jewish refugees – a mere 10% of the maximum number allowed by law. Worse still, many Americans favored a complete ban on all refugees; and, according to opinion polls from 1938-1945, 35-40% of Americans would have supported legislation directed against Jews in particular.
28 June 2017
BBC4 Thinking Allowed: Heritage and preservation
Heritage beyond saving: Laurie Taylor talks to Caitlin DeSilvey, associate professor of cultural geography & author of a new book which journeys from Cold War test sites to post industrial ruins. Do we need to challenge cherished assumptions about the conservation of cultural heritage? Might we embrace rather than resist natural processes of decay and decline? They're joined by Haidy Geismar, reader in anthropology at University College, London & Tiffany Jenkins, sociologist & cultural commentator.
Reveal: Home is where the hate is
From January 2008 to the end of 2016, we identified 63 cases of Islamist domestic terrorism, meaning incidents motivated by a theocratic political ideology espoused by such groups as the Islamic State. The vast majority of these (76 percent) were foiled plots, meaning no attack took place.
During the same period, we found that right-wing extremists were behind nearly twice as many incidents: 115. Just over a third of these incidents (35 percent) were foiled plots. The majority were acts of terrorist violence that involved deaths, injuries or damaged property.
Right-wing extremist terrorism was more often deadly: Nearly a third of incidents involved fatalities, for a total of 79 deaths, while 13 percent of Islamist cases caused fatalities. (The total deaths associated with Islamist incidents were higher, however, reaching 90, largely due to the 2009 mass shooting at Fort Hood in Texas.) [...]
More than a million violent crimes are committed each year in the United States, while annual domestic terrorism incidents number in the dozens. Yet acts of terrorism have a special significance, said former FBI agent Michael German, because each one not only targets particular victims, but also “is an attack on civil society itself.” [...]
While a majority of the incidents were perpetrated by right-wing extremists (57 percent), the database indicates that federal law enforcement agencies focused their energies on pre-empting and prosecuting Islamist attacks, which constituted 31 percent of all incidents, a finding confirmed by counterterror experts. [...]
Yet even though most Islamists were charged only in connection with plots, they often were sentenced as harshly as or more harshly than right-wing extremists, who mostly succeeded in committing acts of terror. Among the Islamist cases, 8 percent got life sentences, 2 percent got death sentences, and the average sentence for the other cases was 21 years in prison. Among far-right cases, 12 percent got life sentences, 5 percent got death sentences, and the average sentence for the rest was eight years.
openDemocracy: Disconnected society: how the war in the Donbas has affected Ukraine
The stigmatisation of people from the Donbas often happens precisely on the everyday level, with everyday people, in everyday life. People take the example set by politicians, who have never said publicly: “We are all residents of one country and we are all needed here, every person who has a Ukrainian passport is worth the attention and care of our state, whichever part of the world they might be in.” [...]
But it wouldn’t be quite accurate to call this protest “pro-Ukrainian”. For the people on Lenin Square, the most important motivating factor wasn’t the Ukrainian national idea (although that was also present), but resisting the spontaneous violence that had begun to spread not only through the city’s streets, but its institutions too, thus alienating the city’s residents. It was precisely opposition to violence that became an important element for people trying to assert humanist ideals and democratic principles in April 2014. All of this helped reinvigorate Donetsk’s local community for a time, its importance and faith in the idea that city residents could defend their city. [...]
The subject of internally displaced people is one of the most divisive in the western and Ukrainian press. At the beginning of the conflict, displaced people encountered constant discrimination. In conditions of war, the power of stereotypes has only grown stronger. Despite the fact that many articles on tolerance appeared in the Ukrainian press, people displaced from the Donbas were still represented negatively in mass consciousness — poor, uneducated, politically naive and so on. On a personal level, I have encountered similar claims: “You’re an exception. But there are others, the majority. After all, it was your region that chose [Viktor] Yanukovych, and now we’re going through all of this.” [...]
The emergence of a negative image of the Donbas is connected to the fact that no one outside the region knew much about it, its character, its life, or the people who lived there. People only remember the fact that the Donbas was the heart of Soviet industrialisation, and that people from across the Soviet Union (including some with a criminal past) traveled there to build and restore it after the Second World War. The myth about the down-at-heel Donbas was fed further by gang wars in the early 1990s, as well as the background of its political elite — the majority of them (for example, Rinat Akhmetov or Viktor Yanukovych) had criminal backgrounds. The fact that the region remained conservative and nostalgic for the Soviet past didn’t help either.
Broadly: ‘We Exist’: Inside India’s Secretive Gay Nightlife Scene
Being gay isn't technically a crime in India, but it is illegal to engage in "carnal intercourse against the order of nature," according to Section 377, a controversial part of India's penal code that specifically lists anal and oral sex. This colonial-era law was reinstated by India's top court in 2013, and threatens up to 10 years in jail for those who breach it. Unsurprisingly, it was poorly received by India's LGBTQ community, as well as large numbers of the country's young heterosexual people. [...]
Although there are no exclusively gay bars or clubs in India yet, most straight bars in metropolitan cities such as Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore, and Chennai regularly host gay nights. Websites and groups such as Gay Bombay, Salvation, and Gaysie Family are amongst the top online resources involved in both organizing and promoting queer friendly events, as these remain some of the few "legal" ways for the gay community to interact with each other in the open. [...]
But to Sridhar Rangayan, a filmmaker whose work has highlighted queer issues, there still isn't enough visibility when it comes to LGBTQ events. "Despite the huge gay clientele that come to these parties, the community and the party circuit are still very invisible," he says. "If you are new to the city, you wouldn't know [the scene] even exists. It all depends on how connected you are." This is because most of LGBTQ events cannot be advertised openly due to the fear of being misinterpreted as dating events. Invites are therefore usually word of mouth or shared through closed Facebook groups. [...]
Also largely absent from the gay social scene are lesbian women, who often choose not to attend. Since a majority of the public events are open to everyone, including the heterosexual crowd, most women attending these parties are straight and simply there because they feel comfortable in the company of gay men. This is an obvious deal breaker for women looking to meet other women, who now only show up at private house parties. "I don't go to most open LGBTQ events because they largely cater to gay men or straight women looking to have a good time without being hit on," says Akanksha. "I've met almost each one of my exes at a friend's party or online. It's disappointing to see one portion of the community getting so much attention while lesbian women are just ignored."
Haaretz: Ultra-Orthodox Judaism Is Taking Over Israel. Netanyahu Just Made Sure
The two initiatives by the ultra-Orthodox are both designed as roadblocks to Supreme Court decisions which would harm their control over matters of religion and state. Both involve subjects that have been fiercely debated for decades: the ability to dictate the nature of prayer at Western Wall, and who can perform recognized conversion to Judaism in Israel. On both measures, the two ultra-Orthodox parties on which Netanyahu’s governing coalition depends, Shas and United Torah Judaism, have indicated a willingness to cripple Netanyahu’s government by pulling out if they don’t get their way.
Netanyahu’s concession in both cases is, first and foremost, a cold calculation of political survival. But the consequences of his actions are far less acute than they would have been a year ago. The government’s acquiescence to ultra-Orthodox hardball represents a slap in the face to liberal American Jews, in what may reflect the changed political map in the United States. Under President Obama and his Democratic allies, U.S. Jews committed to Reform and Conservative movements held far greater political sway than President Donald Trump, whose Jewish ties – familial, political and professional – are with Orthodox Jewry. Netanyahu has significantly less to lose now in the White House and other U.S. corridors of power by angering non-Orthodox Diaspora Jewish leaders than he did over the past eight years.
First, the government announced Sunday it was suspending the plan to establish an egalitarian prayer space at the Western Wall that had taken years to negotiate and which Netanyahu has repeatedly assured Diaspora Jewish leaders would come to pass, even as he refused to take action on it for fear of angering the ultra-Orthodox. But ultimately, the fear of losing support from the ultra-Orthodox parties took precedence and political survival trumped his promises. [...]
The second blow to pluralism came in a bill – pushed by the ultra-Orthodox onto the agenda of the Ministerial Committee for Legislation, and passed – that guarantees a monopoly for the Chief Rabbinate on conversions to Judaism. The legislation invalidates conversions performed in Israel outside the Orthodox-sanctioned state system, denying citizenship under the Law of Return to Jews converted in Israel by Conservative, Reform or privately-run Orthodox rabbinical courts.
Haaretz: The Biggest Enemies of ISIS Are the Iranians. So Why Did They Leave Them Alone Until Now?
Even Iraqi Arab Shi’ites, whom Islamic State views as loathed enemies that must be annihilated, aren’t its principal enemies. Its principal enemies are the Persian Shi’ites, whom it calls Safavids, after the Safavid dynasty that forcibly imposed Shi’ite Islam on Iran in the early 16th century. After all, the political and strategic leadership of the global Shi’ite community is located in Iran, not Iraq, so logic demands that Iran be attacked first and foremost. But that isn’t what happened.
Islamic State’s hatred of Shi’ite Islam stems from two complementary sources. The first is religious and theological. The organization is a Salafi Sunni movement that is close to Wahhabi Islam, which comes from Saudi Arabia, and to this day, the Wahhabi movement sees Shi’ites as people who left the fold of Islam. [...]
The second source of hatred is modern politics. Islamic State is above all an Iraqi Sunni movement with a dual leadership — religious and semisecular — whose main shared goal is restoring the Sunni Arab community to power in Iraq. This isn’t to discount the radical Salafi wing’s dream of imposing Islam on the entire world, but the common denominator of the two wings is a clear order of priorities topped by restoring Iraq to Sunni rule. [...]
What can we expect in the future? The Iranians blame the Saudis for the terror attacks, but neither country is beating the war drums. A Saudi-Iranian war would drag in the entire Gulf. The various emirates, aside from Qatar and Oman, would side with the Saudis, and most likely Jordan and Egypt would too. Iraq would presumably aspire to remain neutral, but Iran could force it to take its side, and the United States would be drawn into the turmoil against its will. This is a nightmare scenario that nobody wants.
Politico: Britain just can’t shake the ECJ
The U.K. Conservative Party’s base won’t rest until all traces of the European Court of Justice are erased from British life. High profile Brexiteer and former minister Iain Duncan Smith referred to it ahead of the Brexit referendum vote last year, for example, as an “illegitimate challenge to our sovereignty.” [...]
The first is that anyone living or doing business in the EU, including any government body, is subject to ECJ jurisdiction. To be free of it would be to reject the rule of law. So unless the U.K. proposes to stop doing business with Europe altogether it cannot escape the ECJ.
More significantly, the Brexiteers reserve a special hatred for the ECJ while forgetting those other supranational judicial bodies the U.K. is signed up to. Britain is a member of many international law bodies, most prominently as a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council (Britain is hardly about to give up its Security Council seat on sovereignty grounds).
The U.K. is also a member of the World Trade Organization, a body whose rules it will rely upon in case it fails to strike a Brexit deal with the EU. The irony there is that if the U.K.’s hard-line stance on the ECJ derails Brexit talks, it will force the U.K. into the arms of another international body with the power to dictate its affairs.
27 June 2017
Places Journal: Bird on Fire: Lessons from the World’s Least Sustainable City
Growthmanship spread abroad, too, along with the internationalization of production, and soon growth in GDP became the most important yardstick for nations in the advanced or developing world. Slowing growth rates provoked concern, while falling numbers indicated that something was awry and that close scrutiny, even intervention, from the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund was in the offing. Those who believed otherwise were not wrong; they were simply treated as dropouts from modernity. So entrenched was this orthodoxy that The Limits to Growth, the momentous 1972 Club of Rome report that concluded that current rates of industrial growth could not be sustained ecologically in the long term, was received among business and policy elites as a genuinely heretical document that had to be publicly pilloried. [...]
Top-level resistance to absorbing and acting on this information has been profound, and is often compared, with some reason, to the force of religious dogma. Looking back on decades of widely publicized and verified warnings, Dennis Meadows (one of the authors of Limits to Growth) reflected on why they “did not prompt any fundamental changes in the policies that govern growth in population or industrial activity and that are driving this planet to major ecological disruptions.” Breaking with the growth gospel, he concluded, has been equivalent to overturning a deeply rooted belief system: “Think of the Catholic Church condemning Galileo to life imprisonment for his suggestion that the universe does not revolve around the earth.” 3 [...]
Nor, despite the improvements in environmental policymaking it introduced, did the Obama administration come close to pushing an alternative to carbon-based GDP growth as the lodestone of economic policymaking. Larger federal investments in clean energy, mass transit and smart grids were dwarfed by the subsidies handed out to high-carbon industries; nor was climate change legislation accorded priority attention, not even during the long nightmare of British Petroleum’s oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico — surely an optimal moment for any president to sue for divorce from fossil-fuel dependency. The time could not have been riper to reset industrial policy, but the will to do so was up against the stronger (and easier) belief that a return to positive short-term growth figures would be the panacea for the recession’s ills. And feeding the GDP beast meant turning away from the dictates of healthy living — good health actually equates with negative GDP because it does not lead to medical expenditures that show up as monetary exchanges. 4 [...]
In truth, and as many historians have noted, the free enterprises continued to rely on federal funding. 15 The money just flowed less directly, and, most importantly, it was channeled into and through the large corporations that used Phoenix’s secure federal ties to make it a profitable branch town. The major firms that built plants in Phoenix in the postwar era — Motorola, Honeywell, Sperry Rand, General Electric, Kaiser, Unidynamics, and AiResearch — subsisted on Cold War defense contracts, and their decisions to locate in the region were shaped by the Pentagon’s policy of decentralizing military production away from the more vulnerable East Coast population centers. In this respect, their arrival was simply an extension of the wartime production programs that had drawn Goodyear, Alcoa, and others to Phoenix’s arsenals, ordnance plants and flight training facilities in the 1940s. These firms were pillars of the military-industrial complex, and the Sunbelt, or “Gunbelt” as Ann Markusen labeled it, became its homeland. 16 At the height of the Cold War, federal income for Arizona amounted to between 16 percent and 24 percent of the state’s economy, after which there were sizable upswings during the Vietnam War and the rearmament of the Reagan years. 17
The California Sunday Magazine: Urban Dreams
The officials wanted me to imagine this land replaced by a futuristic megacity called Amaravati. By 2035, they projected, it would be home to 11 million people and cover 3,322 square miles — ten times the area of New York City. The government had already acquired 90 percent of the land they’d need for the first major phase of the project, and as we drove farther, the fields were increasingly brown and fallow, because the government had already started paying the farmers to cease farming. [...]
Gandhi is losing this argument badly. The consulting firm McKinsey & Company has estimated that at its current rate of urbanization, India will need to build the equivalent of “a new Chicago every year.” Most of those Chicagos will materialize by expanding already existing cities. A handful will be built from scratch, and Amaravati is one of them. So why this particular Chicago, at this particular time, in this particular place? The short answer is that in 2014, the state of Andhra Pradesh split in two, and the new state, called Telangana, got the capital. So what’s left of Andhra Pradesh needs a new capital city ASAP. [...]
Many have asked why Vijayawada couldn’t just have been refurbished to serve as the capital. The advantages of a “greenfield” project, as cities from scratch are called, are huge. “You can draw any kind of picture you like on a clean slate and indulge your every whim in the wilderness of laying out a New Delhi, Canberra, or BrasÃlia,” the American megabuilder Robert Moses once said. “But when you operate in an overbuilt metropolis, you have to hack your way with a meat ax.” Many Indian cities are currently struggling with the logistical agony of adding critical new metro lines to narrow old streets. [...]
A greenfield plan, though, also comes with no shortage of risks. Critics have pointed out that Amaravati’s chosen site is prone to flooding, unbearably hot for much of the year, and susceptible to earthquakes. These are technical problems with technical solutions. But there are much bigger risks.First is that planned cities often fail to come to life the way their planners hope. They are always a gamble — with the exception of war and space exploration, they are the costliest gamble humans make. South Korea hasn’t even finished building a $40 billion planned city called Songdo — which, like Amaravati, was conceived as a model “smart city” — and it’s already been dismissed, even by some techno-optimists, as a failure. China, despite an urbanization rate faster than India’s, has built several planned cities that are ghost towns. The danger with a planned capital is that it will be strictly administrative, without the spontaneity that makes a city thrive — an accusation that is often levied against the planned capitals India has already built.
Jacobin Magazine: France Is Transformed
The second round marked a moderation of the results of the first round. Many surveys recorded that a majority of those interviewed did not want the newly elected president to be able to rely on a compliant majority in the future National Assembly. The En Marche! tactic that might have proven devastating — seeking to mobilize right-wing voters to wipe out the Left, and then to mobilize the Left to wipe out the Right — was in fact only a moderate success. [...]
When almost 60 percent of eligible voters abstain from casting their ballot — that is to say, when they are given the opportunity to vote in what is meant to be a decisive contest — this means that politics is in crisis and that democracy is ill. All the indices — structural abstention, the discredit that the parties have fallen into, distrust of elected officials — indicate that we have reached the point where in most people’s minds the political institutions have lost their meaning. [...]
If we do not free ourselves of this crisis, the very basis of any democracy will be under threat. Discontent and anxiety will not lead to concerted collective action, but to resentment, bitterness, and hatred. Combativeness will give way to the stigmatization of scapegoats, to flare-ups of violence followed by resignation. There is nothing to be won for emancipation in this game, where in the last instance it is always the dominant who will remain the strongest. [...]
By virtue of its majoritarian principles, the Fifth Republic reinvigorated the binary of left and right. But the centrist temptation persisted, insofar as both the Right and Left in power gave an appearance of fragility. In the mid-1960s the rise in opposition to Gaullism revived political centrism as a possible alternative to historical Gaullism. At that time, it took the “American form” of Jean Lecanuet’s Democratic Center and then the Union for French Democracy (UDF) under Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, which sought to replace Gaullism by setting itself the ambition of rallying “two in three French people.”
Haaretz: A Turkish Fantasyland and an Israeli Nightmare
Turkish gross domestic product officially grew 5% year on year in the first quarter, a rate of growth far in excess of what economists expected, and, on the surface, a remarkable comeback for an economy hit hard by last year’s coup. [...]
Last year, the government’s statistics bureau suddenly announced it was changing the way it calculates economic data, throwing away the conventional tools statisticians use for others that suddenly made the economy a fifth bigger than it had been. For Erdogan, however, that wasn’t enough, especially as real growth remained sluggish. To get the numbers that would make the Turks continue to feel good, he’s turned to a dangerous game of deficit spending and easy credit. [...]
The president insists he needs that power to defend the country, but the use he has made of it is actually destroying the Turkish economic miracle that began about the time he came to power. Foreign investors, who Turkey desperately needs to help offset a gaping current account deficit, have shunned the country. [...]
But there was a time not too long ago when Erdogan was hailed as a responsible leader and an example of how Islam and democracy could go hand in hand. It all changed in the space of a few years, into a Turkey of repressive politics and crony capitalism, which are more natural partners than Islam and democracy.
Deutsche Welle: What does China want to achieve in Afghanistan?
China is already part of a Quadrilateral Coordination Group - comprising Afghanistan, China, Pakistan and the United States - that was established to end the protracted Afghan crisis. The grouping has not achieved any significant breakthrough so far, with Islamabad and Kabul at loggerheads over the militancy issue, and Beijing and Washington lacking trust.
Experts say that China has heavily invested in Pakistan and that is why it wants peace in at least those areas where its "One Belt One Road" project is being implemented. China has built a port in the southwestern Pakistani province of Baluchistan as part of its nearly 60-billion-dollar project to establish overland and sea trade routes to reach Middle Eastern, European and African markets.
While Chinese authorities enjoy tremendous influence on Pakistan's civilian and military establishments, Afghanistan is still closer to the United States. Thus, bringing Kabul and Islamabad onto the same page over an Afghan solution won't be easy for Beijing. [...]
"China's counterterrorism measures exclude the US and India. Chinese authorities have historically treated New Delhi as a geopolitical rival. India's close ties with the US are also perceived as a threat in Beijing, therefore China prefers not to cooperate with India. It appears that Beijing is trying to construct a new security bloc in Asia. This, however, does not involve the Sino-Indian security cooperation," underlined Wolf.
The Washington Post: Europe has been working to expose Russian meddling for years
In the recent French elections, the Kremlin-friendly presidential candidate lost to newcomer Emmanuel Macron, who was subjected to Russian hacking and false allegations in Russian-sponsored news outlets during the campaign. In Germany, all political parties have agreed not to employ automated bots in their social media campaigns because such hard-to-detect cybertools are frequently used by Russia to circulate bogus news accounts. [...]
Methods vary. Sweden has launched a nationwide school program to teach students to identify Russian propaganda. The Defense Ministry has created new units to seek out and counter Russian attempts to undermine Swedish society.
In Lithuania, 100 citizen cyber-sleuths dubbed “elves” link up digitally to identify and beat back the people employed on social media to spread Russian disinformation. They call the daily skirmishes “Elves vs. Trolls.” [...]
Russia has not hidden its liking for information warfare. The chief of the general staff, Valery Gerasimov, wrote in 2013 that “informational conflict” is a key part of war. Actual military strength is only the final tool of a much subtler war-fighting strategy, he said. This year, the Defense Ministry announced the creation of a new cyberwarrior unit.
Politico: Trump allies push White House to consider regime change in Tehran
“The policy of the United States should be regime change in Iran,” said Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), who speaks regularly with White House officials about foreign policy. “I don’t see how anyone can say America can be safe as long as you have in power a theocratic despotism,” he added.
Cotton advocated a combination of economic, diplomatic and covert actions to pressure Tehran’s government and “support internal domestic dissent” in the country. He noted that Iran has numerous minority ethnic groups, including Arabs, Turkmen and Balochs who “aren’t enthusiastic about living in a Persian Shiite despotism.”
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson appeared to endorse subverting the Iranian regime during recent testimony about the State Department’s budget when Rep. Ted Poe (R-Texas) asked the diplomat whether the Trump administration supports “a philosophy of regime change” in Iran. [...]
National Security Council spokesman Michael Anton said that manipulating Iran’s internal politics is not currently a U.S. goal — nor among the “objectives” set in the initial stage of the White House’s routine Iran policy review. “An explicit affirmation of regime change in Iran as a policy is not really on the table,” Anton said. [...]
As a member of Congress, Trump’s CIA director, Mike Pompeo, last year publicly called for congressional action to “change Iranian behavior, and, ultimately, the Iranian regime.” And Derek Harvey, the Trump National Security Council’s director for Middle East affairs, told an audience at the conservative Hudson Institute in August 2015 that the Obama administration’s hope of working with moderates to steer Iran in a friendlier direction was a “misread” of “the nature and character of the regime,” whose structure he said he has carefully studied.
The California Sunday Magazine: Postcards from America
When the photo agency Magnum embarked on its Postcards from America project in 2011, it was evoking a tradition that goes back at least to the 1930s, when the Farm Security Administration hired photographers like Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, and Gordon Parks to wander back roads and big cities and document what they found. The Farm Security Administration’s aim was to chronicle the Great Depression, and it believed that the lone photographer — solitary, almost invisible — was the best instrument to portray a nation coming apart.
Magnum was responding to another economic catastrophe, one that saw, among other things, the collapse of many of the commercial outlets that once proudly assigned and published photography. But rather than dispatching photographers on their own, Magnum sent them in groups, as if they were rock bands barnstorming the country. The first group, a quintet, bought an RV and started out on May 11, 2011, from San Antonio, Texas, and arrived in Oakland two weeks later, where they mounted a pop-up show at the Starline Social Club.
Since then there have been five more excursions, and the number of photographers rotating in and out of the band has expanded to 14. The most recent project took place in the Inland Empire, the vast expanse of desert, mountains, and sprawl east of Los Angeles that encompasses the third-largest metropolitan area of California. Instead of buying an RV, Jim Goldberg, Mark Power, Moises Saman, and Alessandra Sanguinetti rented a house in San Bernardino, overlapping with one another for two weeks. As with the previous projects, they employed students from local colleges as their assistants. Then they set out to look for what Evans, Lange, and Parks were in search of 80 years ago: images of hope and desolation, beauty and despair, that might help explain what kind of country we are and might become.
26 June 2017
BBC4 In Our Time: The American Populists
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss what, in C19th America's Gilded Age, was one of the most significant protest movements since the Civil War with repercussions well into C20th. Farmers in the South and Midwest felt ignored by the urban and industrial elites who were thriving as the farmers suffered droughts and low prices. The farmers were politically and physically isolated. As one man wrote on his abandoned farm, 'two hundred and fifty miles to the nearest post office, one hundred miles to wood, twenty miles to water, six inches to Hell'. They formed the Populist or People's Party to fight their cause, put up candidates for President, won several states and influenced policies. In the South, though, their appeal to black farmers stimulated their political rivals to suppress the black vote for decades and set black and poor white farmers against each other, tightening segregation. Aspects of the Populists ideas re-emerged effectively in Roosevelt's New Deal, even if they are mainly remembered now, if at all, thanks to allegorical references in The Wizard of Oz.
The caricature above is of William Jennings Bryan, Populist-backed Presidential candidate.
With
Lawrence Goldman, Professor of History at the Institute of Historical Research, University of London
Mara Keire, Lecturer in US History at the University of Oxford
And
Christopher Phelps, Associate Professor of American Studies at the University of Nottingham
Foreign Affairs: Anbar's Illusions
One of the United States’ greatest successes in the Iraq war was in Anbar, where U.S. military forces and a remarkable tribal uprising inflicted a stunning defeat upon al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), the forerunner of today’s Islamic State (or ISIS). From shortly after the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 until 2006, Anbar, the country’s westernmost province and a Sunni stronghold, was the center of an entrenched insurgency, which by early 2006 was threatening Baghdad. Then in the fall of 2006, just as U.S. leaders were considering the prospect of defeat, Sunni tribes in Ramadi, the capital of Anbar, formed a movement to partner with the Americans against AQI. This movement came to be known as the Anbar Awakening. Over the course of seven months of heavy fighting, the tribes, together with U.S. forces, overcame AQI in Ramadi, the provincial capital of Anbar. The awakening spread to the rest of the province and then to elsewhere in Iraq. AQI was pushed back, violence dropped, and the country witnessed a period of uneasy stability. [...]
Yet from today’s perspective, the victories of Anbar look fleeting. In January 2014, after years of preparation and growth, AQI’s successor, ISIS, conquered most of the province. The tribes that had formed the awakening movement were too divided and isolated to mount an effective resistance. From Anbar, ISIS went on to take Mosul and the rest of Sunni Iraq. Almost everything the United States had fought for from 2003 to 2007 was lost. And with Baghdad in danger, U.S. troops found themselves back in Anbar trying to help the Iraqi government recapture the province. Why did an apparent success turn out to be so fragile? [...]
What made these leaders decide to stand up against the insurgency? Publicly, they spoke of the need to bring peace to Ramadi and said they were tired of AQI’s violence. Sattar, for instance, said in a September 2006 interview that the “terrorists claimed that they were fighters working on liberating Iraq, but they turned out to be killers. Now all the people are fed up and have turned against them.” But the reality was less idealistic. AQI was brutal, but it had real support in Anbar, and the resistance to it began before it had committed its worst atrocities. The problem for the tribal leaders was that AQI was threatening their position in society—it had begun to push them aside, edging in on their territory and cutting into their smuggling business. A willingness to believe that Anbar rejected AQI for its violence, moreover, partly explains why Western observers were so surprised by the organization’s return in the guise of ISIS. [...]
After the U.S. departure, the Iraqi government became progressively more anti-Sunni. Although sectarianism had been evident throughout the time of the awakening, Maliki and the Anbar tribal leaders had reached a modus vivendi that shielded the province from its full force. Once the Americans were gone, however, Maliki began arresting Sunni politicians. In December 2012, government forces raided the home in Baghdad of the Iraqi finance minister, Rafi al-Issawi, an Anbar native and Sunni hero who had treated wounded Iraqis at the Fallujah hospital during the worst days of 2004. The raid sparked protests throughout the province, which persisted over the next year and sometimes led to clashes with the army. Most of Anbar’s tribal leaders backed the protests, yet in doing so they weakened their own control. They depended on the government for money, salaries, and privileges, but the protests forced them to choose between abandoning these perks or being discredited in the eyes of their tribesmen. And by accepting the legitimacy of mass political activity, the tribal leaders implicitly undermined their own authority. This enabled AQI supporters who had formerly been under the tribal thumb to come out, rally the people, and implicitly challenge the leaders who were now bereft of government support.
Scientific American: You Do Not Think Alone
People overestimate how well they understand how things work. Direct evidence for this comes from the psychological laboratory. The great Yale psychologist Frank Keil and his students first demonstrated the illusion of explanatory depth, what we call the knowledge illusion. He asked people how well they understand how everyday objects (zippers, toilets, ballpoint pens) work. On average, people felt they had a reasonable understanding (at the middle of a 7-point scale). Then Keil asked them to explain how they work. People failed miserably. For the most part, people just can’t articulate the mechanisms that drive even the simplest things. So when he again asked them to rate their understanding, their ratings were lower. By their own admission, the act of attempting to explain had pierced their illusion of understanding. We have replicated this basic finding many times, not only with everyday objects, but also with political policies. Matthew Fisher has shown that people overestimate their ability to construct logical justifications for their beliefs. [...]
Human reasoning takes a couple of forms. Most of the conclusions we come to are the products of intuition. Intuitive processes can be identified because we have no introspective access to how they work; we are only conscious of their output. For instance, intuitive processes deliver stored conclusions from memory. We can’t introspect to see how memory retrieves information; it just serves it up to consciousness. [...]
People fail to distinguish the knowledge that’s in their own heads from knowledge elsewhere (in their bodies, in the world, and—especially—in others’ heads). And we fail because whether or not knowledge is in our heads usually doesn’t matter. What matters is that we have access to the knowledge. In other words, the knowledge we use resides in the community. We participate in a community of knowledge. Thinking isn’t done by individuals; it is done by communities. This is true at macro levels: Fundamental values and beliefs that define our social, political, and spiritual identities are determined by our cultural communities. It is also true at the micro-level: We are natural collaborators, cognitive team-players. We think in tandem with others using our unique ability to share intentionality.
Vox: We called random Swedes. They told us about ... foraging? (Apr 19, 2016)
Sweden became the first country with its own national phone number. We called it to talk about Allemansrätten, the Swedish policy of foraging for all.
Motherboard: Facebook Celebrates Pride, Except Where Homosexuality Is Illegal
Such measures are important, and can help queer Facebook employees and users of the platform to feel included and seen. One feature, a rainbow "reaction" ("like") button, allows users to express their pride, or solidarity, in response to posts. But as Sarah Kessler pointed out at Quartz, that feature was only rolled out to users in certain markets...namely, "major markets with Pride celebrations." Other users are able to opt in to the feature by liking Facebook's official LGBTQ@Facebook page. [...]
After sending out some messages to friends in other places, I discovered that the feature was unavailable in a number of countries, including Egypt, Palestine, Bahrain, Lebanon, Singapore, Russia, and the UAE. While Facebook admits—in both its press release and in response to a question posed by a Singaporean user on its official LGBTQ page—that the feature isn't available everywhere yet, my testing demonstrated that it's widely available throughout the world...except in places where homosexuality is either illegal or of questionable legal status.
Facebook hasn't said why the feature is restricted to those particular countries, but the company is likely worried about putting users at risk. That's a fair concern, to be sure—gay and bi men are being rounded up and killed in Chechnya, for example—but it's worth noting that Facebook's "authentic name" policy is part of why such users are at risk to begin with. Despite protests from queer users for nearly a decade, Facebook has continued to reaffirm the value of the policy in promoting "civility," despite evidence to the contrary. [...]
"Facebook policies have [contained] a lot of discrimination in so many aspects," Aoun told me. "It's the same when a certain terrorist attack happens in Lebanon, we don't have the safety check. Unfortunately, the world nowadays is built on the priorities of … people who are living in Western countries, especially white people who are living in those countries."
Bloomberg: Angela Merkel Embraces German Nationalism With a Twist
This, of course, is something of an election campaign gimmick. During the 2013 campaign, a video that quickly went viral showed Merkel angrily taking a German flag away from a fellow party member who had tried to wave it while standing next to her. This year, the flags are back, and the flag colors get a mention on Merkel's list. Her Christian Democratic Union is trying to reclaim the patriotic ground from the Alternative for Germany populists. Affirming the German Leitkultur, lead culture, is one of the CDU strategies. Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere, a Merkel ally, published his own "Top 10" of the Leitkultur's features in April, and it included Christianity but not any other religions; the Judeo-Christian tradition makes an appearance on Merkel's list, too.
But, for everyone who might think she regrets letting in more than a million refugees into the country in 2015 and 2016, Merkel's list also includes "Muslims" and "migration background" -- something that 21 percent of Germany's residents have today. In that, Merkel echoes a campaign speech by France's new president Emmanuel Macron in Marseille, in which he held forth on how French national identity is driven by its diversity of immigrants: "Armenians, Comorans, Italians, Algerians, Moroccans, Tunisians, Malians, Senegalese, Ivorians." It amounted to a challenge to his far-right rival, Marine Le Pen.
The way these two leaders see national identity is a step away from the slogans of diversity, multiculturalism and supranational federalism. They're talking about a deep-rooted, old culture taking on some new flavors without straying too far from its traditional mainstream. It only looks progressive compared with the alternatives -- for example, the stump speeches of Le Pen or other nationalists across Europe.
At the same time, it's somewhat similar to the vision of Russian national identity that Vladimir Putin laid down in a 2012 article. He described ethnic Russians and the Russian culture as a "binding fabric" for historically multiethnic society. Putin quoted Ivan Ilyin, his favorite emigre philosopher whom many consider an early fascist ideologue (despite his troubles with the Nazi regime in Germany): "Not to eradicate, not to suppress, not to enslave outsider blood, not to strangle foreign and non-Orthodox life but to let everyone breathe and give them a great Motherland; to watch over everyone, make peace, let everyone pray in their own way, work in their own way and involve the best from everywhere in building a state and a culture."
The Atlantic: The Gulf's Demands on Qatar Look Designed to Be Rejected
Yet, the extent and scale of the demands appear designed to induce a rejection by Qatar, and a possible justification for a continuation, if not escalation, of the crisis. The list, if accurate, represents an intrusion into the internal affairs of Qatar that would threaten its very sovereignty. Because Qatar forms a cornerstone of the U.S. military presence in the Middle East, America has a stake both in its domestic security and regional stability. So, too, do the emerging and industrial economies around the world that rely heavily on its liquefied natural gas exports, whose security would be imperiled in the event of a full-blown crisis in Doha. [...]
All along, a key objective of the anti-Qatar campaign appears to have been winning the battle for hearts and minds in Washington, and, in particular, within a White House deemed sympathetic to the Saudis and Emiratis. One imagines that the articles associating Qatar with Iran and various Islamist groups across the Middle East were tailored with Trump officials like James Mattis and H.R. McMaster in mind—their hawkish views are aligned closely with those in Riyadh and Abu Dhabi. That the media campaign against Qatar began two days after Trump’s visit to Riyadh may have encouraged officials in regional capitals to believe that the White House would take sides in the dispute.
Initially, Trump appeared to back the Saudi-Emirati position in a series of characteristically direct tweets posted on June 6 that suggested that Qatar was indeed a funder of “radical ideology,” and implied that he had discussed the issue with regional leaders during his visit to Saudi Arabia. But in the days since, the Departments of State and Defense have reaffirmed the strategic and commercial value of the Qatar partnership to U.S. interests. The June 14 confirmation of a $12-billion sale of F-15 jets to Qatar signaled that Washington was not about to abandon the country that has hosted the forward headquarters of U.S. Central Command since 2003. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson also advocated for a negotiated solution to the standoff, and is well aware, from his tenure at ExxonMobil, of Qatar’s importance both to global energy markets and U.S. energy companies.
Vox: The Cambodian prime minister just told his political opponents to “prepare coffins”
“Your tongue is the reason for war. If you still make insults and threats to kill, you have to prepare your coffin,” Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen said on June 21. “To protect the peace for millions of people, if necessary, 100 or 200 must be eliminated. Please listen carefully. ... Whoever intends to undermine peace will receive what you deserve.”
The prime minister delivered the speech at a 40th-anniversary commemoration of the day he decided to defect from the Khmer Rouge army and organize rebel forces that eventually defeated the genocidal regime of Pol Pot. Hun made the speech wearing his military uniform — a rarity for him — and while flanked by his top military commanders.
Hun, who has ruled Cambodia for 32 years, also made clear that power over Cambodia is, and will continue to be, in the hands of his family. This remains to be seen, especially given the upcoming general election in 2018, which could pose a serious threat to Hun’s Cambodian People’s Party. [...]
Cambodia has organized national elections since 1993, though it has been virtually impossible for any other political party to challenge the CPP’s rule, until now. In 2013, despite even more intimidation and electoral manipulation than in previous years, the Cambodia National Rescue Party, which is the main opposition party, managed to take 22 seats from the CPP in the National Assembly, giving them a total of 55 out of 123 positions. [...]
Local elections in Cambodia aren’t typically seen as that important, but the buildup of opposition forces in the past few years made this one markedly different. Close to 90 percent of registered voters participated in these elections — the highest turnout in Cambodia’s history. Hun even hit the ground to campaign, attending his first political rally since 1998.
Vox: Study: when it comes to detecting racial inequality, white Christians have a blind spot
The AVA is based on 40,000 telephone interviews conducted across all 50 states. On average, the study found that 63 percent of Americans acknowledged “a lot” of discrimination against immigrants, 57 percent against black people, and 58 percent against gay and lesbian people. Overall, about two-thirds of Americans see discrimination against at least one minority group as an issue, with 42 percent identifying discrimination as an issue among all three groups.
But among white Christians, those figures dropped significantly: Only 36 percent of white evangelicals, 50 percent of white mainline Protestants, and 47 percent of white Catholics reported perceiving discrimination against black people (the survey did not ask about other races). For contrast, 86 percent of black Protestants reported perceiving “a lot” of discrimination against black people in America, as did 67 percent of the religiously unaffiliated. Even higher proportions of Buddhists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Unitarians reported discrimination. [...]
Jones noted that among white Christians, there’s "a difference in degree, though not a difference in kind” between the responses of mainline Protestants, who have traditionally been more progressive, and white evangelicals. To explain these differences, Jones pointed to historic divisions between these camps in both geography (mainline Protestants tend to be clustered in the Northeast; evangelicals in the South) and positions over race issues (many mainline Protestant churches were deeply involved in both the abolitionist and civil rights movements, while many Southern evangelical churches had roots in pro-slavery and segregationist causes). [...]
Many white evangelicals who do not perceive discrimination against minority groups in fact perceive discrimination against themselves, Jones said, referring to a question in a previous PRRI study about whether discrimination against white people was as serious a cultural problem as that against black people. White evangelicals overwhelmingly said it was. “[White evangelicals are] more likely to see discrimination against themselves than against minority groups, and that is, I think, a reflection of that sense that they really have lost their power, their influence, they’ve lost the cultural center and the demographic dominance they once had — that, oh, no, we’re the ones being persecuted,” he said.
24 June 2017
Jacobin Magazine: The Bolsheviks and Antisemitism
The February Revolution transformed Jewish life. Just days after the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II, all legal restrictions on Jews were lifted. More than 140 statutes, totaling some thousand pages, were removed overnight. To mark this historic moment of abolition, a special meeting was convened by the Petrograd Soviet. It was the eve of Passover, March 24, 1917. The Jewish delegate who addressed the meeting immediately made the connection: the February Revolution, he said, was comparable with the liberation of Jews from slavery in Egypt. [...]
Without doubt, the soviets had become, by mid-1917, the main political opposition to antisemitism in Russia. An editorial in the newspaper Evreiskaia Nedelia (the Jewish Week) captured this well: “It must be said, and we must give them their dues, the soviets have carried out an energetic struggle against [pogroms]. In many places, it has only been thanks to their strength that peace has been restored.”
It is worth noting, however, that these campaigns against antisemitsm were aimed at workers in factories and sometimes activists within the broad socialist movement. In other words, antisemitism was identified as a problem within the social base of the radical left, and even sections of the revolutionary movement itself. What this revealed, of course, is that antisemitism did not simply emanate from “above,” from the former tsarist establishment; it had an organic base within sections of the working class, and it had to be confronted as such. [...]
What underscored moderate socialist concern about the capacity of antisemitism and revolution to overlap was the way Bolsheviks mobilized the masses, and channeled their class resentment. On October 28, when the revolution was in full flow, the Mensheviks’ Petrograd Electoral Committee issued a desperate appeal to workers in the capital, warning that Bolsheviks had seduced “the ignorant workers and soldiers,” and the cry of “All power to the Soviets!” would all too easily turn into “Beat the Jews, beat the shopkeepers.” For the Menshevik L’vov-Rogachevskii, the “tragedy” of the Russian revolution lay in the apparent fact that the “the dark masses (temnota) are unable to distinguish the provocateur from the revolutionary, or the Jewish pogrom from a social revolution.”
The New Yorker: Saudi Arabia's Game of Thrones
On Wednesday, King Salman, who is eighty-one and frail, ousted his more seasoned heir—a fifty-seven-year-old nephew who crushed Al Qaeda cells in Saudi Arabia during decades as the counterterrorism tsar—in favor of Prince Mohammed, the monarch’s seventh and favorite son. The sprawling royal family has traditionally shared power among the first generation of sons of Abdul Aziz ibn Saud, the founding father of modern Saudi Arabia. When he died in 1953, he had fathered forty-three sons and even more daughters. Since then, an artful balancing act has distributed politics, privilege, and financial perks among the royal family’s many branches. The arrangement preëmpted serious dissent.
Now, in a royal decree, the king’s move has bypassed his own brothers, hundreds of royals in the second generation who thought that they had a shot at the kingship, and even his own older sons. Prince Mohammed is the youngest heir apparent in Saudi history—by decades. In a country long ruled by men who grew up without air-conditioning or direct-dial phones, the new crown prince talks of growing up playing video games, carries an iPhone, and talks openly about idolizing Steve Jobs. [...]
The transformation happened overnight. Upon King Salman’s ascension, he appointed Prince Mohammed, still in his twenties, to be the country’s top decision-maker on defense, oil, and economic development, with total control over the royal court and the king’s agenda. He became the youngest defense minister in Saudi history—and the “youngest holder of this position in the world,” according to the House of Saud Web site, despite no military training. He was also chosen to head a newly formed Council for Economic and Development Affairs and to chair a new Supreme Council for Saudi Aramco, the body that oversees the world’s largest oil-producing company. The last title alone provides influence well beyond Saudi borders. Aramco pumps some ten million barrels of oil a day—or about one in nine barrels consumed daily worldwide, according to the Financial Times. [...]
The new crown prince also has Trump on his side. The President called Prince Mohammed within hours of his appointment. They committed, the White House said, to “close cooperation to advance our shared goals of security, stability, and prosperity across the Middle East and beyond.”
Politico: Battered and bruised, Theresa May limps into enemy territory
In the queen’s speech setting out the government’s policy agenda Wednesday, much of the prime minister’s planned legislative program as outlined in the Conservative Party manifesto was either ditched or kicked into the long grass. The bulk of what remained was all about Brexit. [...]
Should she survive the queen’s speech vote next week, her next major test will be the “Repeal Bill,” without which there can be no Brexit. The bill repeals the act of parliament which gives EU law its legal status in Britain. It also downloads the entire body of EU law onto the U.K. statute book. [...]
Such is the precariousness of May’s situation that any of her top team of ministers could oust her with one well-timed public intervention. “If DD [Brexit Secretary David Davis] said her lack of authority was stopping him negotiating Brexit she would be gone in minutes and he would be PM,” one senior former government aide said on condition of anonymity.[...]
Labour MP Wes Streeting gave the most brutal of many brutal put-downs during the debate on the queen’s speech. “She asked for a personal mandate in the election and didn’t get one,” he said to cheers. “The only question is, why is she still here?”
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