Jacobin Magazine: Germany Is Not an Island

The other big story, and the precondition for the AfD’s surge, is the ongoing erosion of the political center. Germany has yet to witness a spectacular implosion of the center-left like in France or Greece, but the Social Democratic Party (SPD) ended the night with 20.5 percent, its worst postwar result and a humiliating defeat for its renewal candidate Martin Schulz. [...]

Though the German elections may seem relatively “normal” by contemporary European standards, a second peculiar fact stands out in the exit poll data: 84 percent of eligible voters described Germany’s economic situation as “good” — the highest number in decades. This makes sense given the country’s moderate but sustained economic growth and declining unemployment, particularly in light of conditions elsewhere in Europe. Although wages have stagnated for decades and job growth is concentrated primarily in precarious, low-wage employment, in the eyes of most German voters their country and economy now appear as an island of relative stability, making it understandable why many would be willing to “act satisfied and shut up,” as Oliver Nachtwey put it. [...]

This should come as little surprise, as the AfD stitches together a coalition between deeply conservative, former CDU voters repelled by Merkel’s shift towards the center on many social issues, and dissatisfied working-class and unemployed voters, where economic and social anxieties intermingle with racist and chauvinistic sentiments in a jumbled assortment of anti-establishment posturing. These constituencies, and other segments of the population who voted for the AfD, are united at the ballot box under a xenophobic, protectionist banner, despite the fact that the AfD’s economic program would be disastrous for many of its lower-income supporters if ever implemented. [...]

All qualifications aside, the AfD’s rise represents a true watershed in postwar German politics and a warning of what the future could bring. Germany is not an island surrounded by a crisis-prone Europe, but rather part and parcel of this crisis. Its centrifugal nature may have insulated the country from its most devastating economic effects and dramatic political shifts thus far, but as last Sunday demonstrated, nowhere in Europe is immune to the threat of right-populism today. Should present trends continue, a radical right-wing force will stabilize and consolidate itself as a permanent presence in German politics — whether in the form of the AfD or another, potentially more radical formation after it.

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Foreign Affairs: When Is It Time to End Sanctions Programs?

Sanctions have become popular with U.S. policymakers in recent years thanks to their success in changing Iran’s behavior. First implemented against Iran in 1996 but significantly stepped up between 2010 and 2012, U.S. sanctions helped shrink GDP by nine percent between 2012 and 2014, depress the value of its currency, and deepen its unemployment rate. Those effects convinced Tehran to enter into negotiations over its nuclear enrichment program. Successes such as this have encouraged U.S. officials to use so-called smart sanctions—or highly targeted sanctions programs against specific individuals, entities, and transactions as opposed to broader, less-focused programs—which leverage the United States’ primacy in the global financial system to shut down targets’ ability to do business. The most recent U.S. programs build on this success. Each, however, fails to offer a road map for its own end, a potentially fatal flaw.

Without clear goals, the United States risks enshrining sanctions indefinitely and making negotiations fruitless. The sanctions imposed on Russia in August 2017 are the worst among the new programs in this respect. Lawmakers’ desire to block President Donald Trump from unilaterally lifting the sanctions led them to create checks on the executive branch’s sanctioning authority. The new legislation codified into statute previous White House-created executive orders—including restrictions on the country’s energy, financial services, and munitions sectors—from 2014, in response to the Ukraine conflict, and from the end of 2016, in response to malicious Russian cyber activity. This codification means that Congress, not the president, will have the ultimate power to repeal the measures. The legislation also instituted a review process that allows Congress to reject even minor changes to the sanctions. [...]

Political considerations often complicate plans to lift sanctions. U.S. officials invariably call for further economic pressure during crises—for example, after a North Korean missile launch—without thinking about how to eventually ease that pressure down the line. In these situations, politicians present an aggressive sanctions posture to confront the enemy and to appeal to constituents demanding a strong response but underplay planning for the end of sanctions for fear of signaling weakness or lack of resolve. Policymakers also must be disciplined in distinguishing the conditions the United States’ targets must meet for Washington to lift sanctions. If Russia complies with the Minsk agreements, for example, U.S. policymakers should lift the sanctions, regardless of the country’s continued human rights abuses. And more missile tests by Iran should not be not a basis to reimpose sanctions meant for its nuclear program.

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The Atlantic: Is Saudi Arabia Really Changing?

Perhaps anticipating yesterday’s news, last week a Saudi cleric said that the ban on women driving should remain in place. He argued that women had only half the brainpower of men; when they went shopping, it was reduced to a quarter, he said. The uproar was instantaneous. The cleric was banned from preaching, though he probably still remains on the government payroll.

Saudi society traditionally venerates age and at least publicly respects Islamic preachers. But all this might be changing. The decision to remove the ban was nominally King Salman’s, but it is clear the driving force was his son, Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman. The 32-year-old wunderkind is trying to transform the kingdom’s economy. His Vision 2030, a grand plan announced last year to bring the Saudi economy and society into the 21st century, envisages an economy with a broader industrial base less tied to oil. He also has a much less conservative view of social mores. Authorities allowed women to attend a celebration of Saudi Arabia’s Independence Day in a sports stadium this week. Part of his economic plan involves the development of tourist resorts along the Red Sea coast, a paradise for divers. The facilities will be built to “international standards,” a term widely interpreted as allowing not only gender-mixed bathing, but also bikinis and probably alcohol. [...]

In reality, the driving ban has never been enforced 100 percent. Out in rural Saudi Arabia, tribal women have been driving for decades to look after animals and perform other farm chores. In the cities, expatriate compounds where many foreigners live have allowed women to drive, safe in the knowledge that the Saudi police, or worse still the religious police, are not allowed inside the gates. Saudi Aramco, the state oil company, has allowed women drivers inside its “little America”-style townships since the days when it was owned by American oil companies. [...]

The credit for the breakthrough may go to the crown prince, or MbS as he is known, but the ground has been well-prepared. Brave Saudi women have been tempting arrest in organized groups protests since at least the 1990s. In 2005, it was once again a live issue when Barbara Walters interviewed King Abdullah. “In time, I believe it will be possible. And I believe patience is a virtue,” he said. The brake at that time was identified as the now-dead Prince Nayef, then Abdullah’s interior minister and rival, who notoriously alleged that Jews had perpetrated the 9/11 attacks. Abdullah’s daughter, Princess Adela, was known to support women driving.

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Political Critique: Nostalgia for the present in Tunis’s belle-époque downtown

The people and buildings in these photos no longer exist. One postcard features an Arcadian-looking Benghazi in what is today Libya, all pergola-lined walkways and skillfully-carved Italianate stone arcades – a far cry from the mounds of rubble that years of post-revolutionary fighting have reduced the city to. [...]

Once the French project got under way, the colonial power expanded the city by dredging the marshland, lapping up against the Medina walls and laying down Haussmannian boulevards. First among them was the Boulevard Marine known today as Bourguiba after the country’s first post-independence leader, which formed the background to media coverage of the 2011 Tunisian revolution. Apartments with elaborate façades fronted such boulevards and electric trams coursed along them. To the pre-modern locals, it must have looked like a spell had been cast on their city. [...]

Like Istanbul, Thesssaloniki, Cairo and many other once-upon-a-time metropolises whose cosmopolitanisms were pulverized by geopolitics and the reductionist founding myths of the nation-state, Tunis is a city of absences. These are most felt in La Goulette, the pleasant seaside neighborhood now deserted by its Jewish and Catholic residents; the suqs in the Medina abandoned by Jewish traders and Muslim aristocrats alike; the decaying, high-ceilinged apartments, bars and synagogues of Lafayette, once rowdy with the sound of Italian and French; the soaring bell-towers of the Cathedral and St Croix, or the onion domes of the Greek Orthodox church close to Bab al-Bahr, the Gate to the Sea.

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Financial Times: Saudis lift driving ban on women

Haaretz: Israel Is Arming Criminals

Despite the UN stating that Myanmar’s army is carrying out “a textbook example of ethnic cleansing” of the Rohingya Muslim minority, Israel refuses to stop selling arms to the country’s military. Israel is doing so despite the fact that the European Union and the United States have both banned arms sales to Myanmar, making it the only Western nation supplying the country formerly known as Burma with weapons. [...]

In the part of the hearing held behind closed doors, the state’s representatives explained Israel’s relations with Myanmar to the justices. It is unclear why the state is concealing information from its citizens about the factors it uses to conduct trade. Even in the open part of the hearing, the state refused to say that Israel would stop selling weapons to Myanmar. [...]

Lieberman is lying. This is not the first time that Israel has taken such a course of action. It lied when it supported war crimes in Argentina, ignoring the American embargo, and it lied when it armed the Bosnian forces that perpetrated massacres, ignoring a UN embargo. It armed the military dictatorships in Chile and Argentina and the Contras in Nicaragua, and it is arming the forces of evil in South Sudan. 

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Jakub Marian: Average hours worked per worker per week in Europe

The following map shows the number of hours workers in each country work per week, on average, including both full-time and part-time workers. It based on the following table by OECD (2016).

Here’s the methodology used: The total number of hours worked in the year 2016 in each country is divided by the number of people who worked during that year (which is what the OECD table shows) and then it is divided by 52.14 (the number of weeks in a typical year). The result is then rounded. 

The quantity shown in the map is unusual in that it is not immediately clear whether higher or lower numbers are better. However, since the number of hours worked is negatively correlated with other economic indicators that are generally considered positive, such as GDP per capita, I decided to show low numbers in green and high numbers in red: [...]

For comparison, other OECD members scored as follows (with the same methodology): Canada 33, Japan 33, United States 34, New Zealand 34, Israel 36, Chile 38, Korea 40, Mexico 43.

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IFLScience: The Mystery Of The Vanishing People Of Easter Island Just Got A Lot Weirder

When the Dutch arrived on Easter Island in 1722, they estimated a population size of 1,500 to 3,000 people. Even then, they expressed bewilderment at how such a tiny population could create the giant stone statues that the island is famous for.

But current ethnographic and archeological evidence suggests the population wasn't always as small as it was when the Europeans found it, and just last week a group of academics gave us the best estimate so far. Based on the island's farming potential, they calculated a peak population size of 17,500. The results were published in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution.  [...]

The team discovered that 19 percent of the island could have been used to grow sweet potatoes, the Islanders' primary food crop. By looking at birth and death rates and how they are affected by food availability, the researchers worked out how many people could have survived on the island.

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The New Yorker: What Happened to Myanmar’s Human-Rights Icon?

Recently, I travelled to Myanmar and interviewed dozens of people to assess what had gone wrong. Many of them pointed out that Suu Kyi’s power is sharply limited. She has no authority over the Army, while military officers still control key areas of government and have the power to reverse democratic reforms. Some believe that she has made a political calculation not to risk domestic popularity for the sake of a hated and powerless minority; others regard her as lacking political skills. There are also those who think that she shares the Army’s authoritarian reflexes and the anti-Muslim prejudices of the Buddhist Bamar majority. But almost everyone I talked to expressed surprise at the speed and the scale of her transformation. “We never expected that Aung San Suu Kyi would get us this far,” a former student activist and political prisoner who once served as her bodyguard told me. “But, at the same time, we never expected that Aung San Suu Kyi would have changed so much herself once she got into power.” [...]

Last week, I met with Wai Wai Nu again, but outside Myanmar. She now believed that her people might be facing extinction. She told me she worried that there was a plan to drive the entire Rohingya community from the country. She had been monitoring Burmese social media, and was horrified by what she read. Burmese officials were saying that mass rape couldn’t have occurred because Rohingya women were too filthy. “Because the civilian government is saying these things, people are becoming more and more full of hate,” Wai Wai Nu said. “Before, it was a military dictatorship, so no one believed them when they said awful things. But now it’s the civilian government of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi saying these ignorant things and that legitimizes the hate.”  [...]

Buddhist ultranationalism has eroded the center ground of Burmese politics. In the 2015 elections, the N.L.D., anxious to avoid accusations that it was a “Muslim party,” refused to field a single Muslim candidate. For the first time since independence, no Muslims currently serve in parliament. And Suu Kyi’s government has made no attempt to revoke laws that limit the number of children Muslims can have and that create obstacles for marriages between Muslim men and Buddhist women. [...]

He was right that Suu Kyi has little alternative but to work with the people she once campaigned against. The euphoria that surrounded her ascent obscured how extensive the military’s power remains. The Army controls the ministries for defense, home affairs, and border affairs, and a quarter of the seats in parliament are reserved for men in uniform. Even ministries that are in civilian hands, such as finance, are full of holdovers from the previous regime, and much of the country’s budget is reserved for military use. Myanmar’s constitution, written by the military in 2008, presents additional difficulties. It allows the Army to declare a state of emergency and seize power, and it also contains a clause that makes Suu Kyi ineligible for the Presidency. (Her current official title, State Counsellor, is a workaround.) Suu Kyi wants to amend the Constitution and become President, but this requires military support. Her defenders often cite the precariousness of her constitutional position as a reason for her reluctance to speak out about Army abuses. While pushing the military for constitutional reform, she must also avoid antagonism and a return to military rule. [...]

“Aung San Suu Kyi has the benefit of having become an icon without saying a whole lot,” Kenneth Roth, of Human Rights Watch, told me. “Havel came to his position by saying a lot, by being a moral voice. Aung San Suu Kyi didn’t say much at all. She was a moral symbol, and we read into that symbol certain virtues, which turned out to be wrong when she actually began speaking.” Suu Kyi was not an intellectual, like Havel, or a freedom fighter, like Mandela, or an organizer, like Walesa. And, unlike her father, she did not die before her legend could be tarnished.

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The New York Review of Books: Afghanistan: What Troops Can’t Fix

The war has gone on for sixteen years, and as recent meetings at the United Nations General Assembly demonstrated, it has become even more complicated than the one fought by Bush or Obama. Afghanistan faces a number of growing internal threats: terrorist attacks, loss of territory to the Taliban, economic collapse, corruption, growing public disenchantment, and an internal political crisis as warlords and ethnic politicians challenge the government of President Ashraf Ghani. But the gravest new threat is regional. At least three nearby states—Pakistan, Iran, and Russia—are now helping the Taliban, according to US generals, Western diplomats, and Afghan officials I have spoken to. [...]

At the same time, President Trump has ruled out “nation building” and made no mention of economic or diplomatic support for the Afghan government. America’s NATO allies now emphasize a political solution to the war and peace talks with the Taliban, but there was no hint of compromise or interest in negotiations by Trump. The only avenue left for negotiation is the Taliban office in Qatar, which has been used for the past six years by multiple mediators, including representatives of the United Nations, the US, and several European countries. Now, however, according to The Guardian and diplomatic sources, it appears that Presidents Trump and Ghani agree that the office should be shut down. That would mean closing the last open access to some Taliban leaders, and it would make any future negotiations with the Taliban movement even more difficult and entirely dependent on Pakistan. [...]

In the past, Afghan-related initiatives taken by US presidents, whether at the UN or at NATO summits, met with immediate backing from European and other allies. This time, there was not a single ally who publicly praised or endorsed Trump’s Afghan policy. The tepid applause from world leaders for his UN speech spoke volumes. Only NATO’s secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, belatedly welcomed the sending of more US troops in an interview with a wire service. (NATO’s own deployment of some four thousand troops in Afghanistan will continue.)  [...]

In reality, the US strategy offers little help to Ghani with the multiple crises he faces at home, where politicians and warlords who once supported him are in revolt and demanding that he either carry out promised reforms and hold elections or step down. The country is in the throes of a severe economic crisis, and there is no apparent plan for dealing with either the tens of thousands of internal refugees who have been displaced by the war or the nearly one million refugees who have arrived in Afghanistan penniless after being forced out of Pakistan and Iran.  

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The Atlantic: Gay and Mennonite (MAR 18, 2015)

Since the first Mennonites arrived in America from Germany in 1683, the denomination has gone through many schisms, often over issues of tradition and modernity. At one time, it was buttons vs. eyehooks on blouses, and whether women should have to wear bonnets; more recently, it’s been women’s leadership in the church and acceptance of those who identify as LGBTQ. Each time a split happens, a new version of the faith is created, while an older version is preserved as if in amber—even now, many people associate Mennonites with anachronisms like horses and buggies, when in reality, this kind of traditional lifestyle is only followed by roughly 13,000 American adults, called Old-Order Mennonites. (People often confuse Mennonites with the Amish, too; although both groups are part of the Anabaptist tradition, meaning that they baptize believers as adults rather than infants, Mennonites were historically followers of Menno Simons, a 16th-century preacher.) [...]

Since 2005, nine churches in the Allegheny Conference have made the choice to walk away—mostly over the issue of women’s leadership in the conference. Currently, the conference is led by a woman, Donna Mast, and many of the churches that left over this issue did so before she became the leading minister. “Do I take it personally? No I don’t,” she told me. “I grew up with the understanding that women should not be in pastoral leadership positions. I ran from the call that I was sensing from God. I ran as hard as I could, until the day when I decided that it was more difficult to be ostracized from God than to follow God into areas where I didn’t understand where God was leading.” [...]

Mennonite Church USA, has seen declining membership over the past half decade—a drop of roughly 16,000 adult members and 45 congregations, or 15 percent of its members. This doesn’t necessarily reveal what’s going on in the denomination as a whole. According to 2010 research by Donald Kraybill, a professor at Elizabethtown College, American Mennonites belong to roughly 60 different organizing bodies, and some of the more traditional groups are growing rapidly because of their high birth rates. [...]

“Sometimes I think those Lancaster Conference bishops had it right in the 1920s and 30s when they said no radios—nobody’s allowed to listen to the radio, because you’re going to get influenced by worldly music,” Lapp said. “Our congregation is quite traditional in our worship: We sing out of hymnals, we have an order of worship, and yet we’re seen as progressive theologically. I think that is actually true in many areas of the Mennonite church: The folks who have progressive theology are holding onto the tradition in terms of worship, wanting to get back to what it means to be Anabaptist.”

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Quartz: The far right is reeling in professionals, hipsters, and soccer moms

Last Sunday (Sept 24), German voters put a far-right party into parliament for the first time since the Second World War. Right-wing nationalists Alternative for Germany (AFD) won 13% of the vote, easily overcoming the 5% threshold needed to enter the German Bundestag. A previous study (link in German) showed that AFD supporters come from different social classes, including workers, families with above-average incomes, and even academics. The study concluded that what was common among AFD voters was their dislike for Angela Merkel’s so-called open-door policy to refugees. [...]

In France, the far-right Front National (FN) enjoyed support from almost 40% of voters aged 18-24-year-old in the run up to the election. Marine Le Pen, the leader of the FN, courted young voters by taking up traditionally left-wing causes, such as women’s rights, and championing the welfare state (albeit for French citizens, and not foreigners). At the end of the first round of the election, 21% of young people cast their vote for Le Pen (young voters had broken for the far left candidate Jean-Luc Melenchon in the first round). But by the second round of voting, which saw Le Pen against Emmanuel Macron, the former won 34% (paywall) of the vote among 18-24-year-old. [...]

It’s not just men shoring up right-wing populists. Le Pen was backed by a quiet army of women. Le Pen’s attempts to rebrand her party has clearly had an effect on women; a study by French pollster Ifop found that women made up 48% of voters who have voted for the FN previously. Women played an important role in the US too. While women did vote overwhelmingly for Hillary Clinton, white women did not. Overall, 52% of white women voted to elect Donald Trump. That figure jumps to 62% when looking at non-college-educated women. [...]

Yes, angry, working class men disillusioned by globalization have supported right-wing populism. But so did the hipsters, the soccer moms, and well to do suburbanite, highlighting the deep chasms in societies across the Western world.

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Al Jazeera: Emmanuel Macron wants reforms for post-Brexit EU

Macron used the speech at Sorbonne University in Paris on Tuesday to argue the case for institutional changes, initiatives to promote the EU, and new ventures in the technology, defence and energy sectors. [...]

Macron's proposals for a post-Brexit shake-up include a Europe-wide "rapid reaction force" to work with national armies, and plans to give the 19-member eurozone a finance minister, budget and parliament.

He also called for a new tax on technology giants such as Facebook and Apple - accused of paying too little corporate tax on their businesses in Europe - and an EU-wide asylum agency to deal with the refugee crisis.

He even raised the prospect of major changes to the Common Agricultural Policy, the EU's giant farm subsidy programme, which has historically been defended by France and its powerful agricultural lobbies. [...]

Following Tuesday's speech, Juncker, head of the European Commission, the EU's executive arm, praised Macron, saying the bloc required "courage" to move ahead.

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Haaretz: Israel Is Right to Support Kurdish Independence. It Is Also Unwise

And yet, while we should all be in favor of a free Kurdistan, the support of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and many other Israeli politicians for Kurdish independence in recent weeks was both premature and unwise. For a start, the whole point of a referendum is to ask what the people think. The result is almost guaranteed to be overwhelmingly in favor of independence, but endorsing a “yes” vote in advance is blatantly interfering in the internal affairs of another country. 

Beyond the historical friendship between the two nations, it is clear why Israelis are supporting the Kurds. Kurdistan is located at the strategically critical junction of Iran, Iraq and Syria – the area where Iran is hoping to establish its “Shi’a Crescent” land corridor, which would allow it to transport arms and fighters directly to Hezbollah’s strongholds in Lebanon. A free and pro-Israel Kurdistan on Iran’s borders will not only stymie Iran’s designs but will also be a major strategic asset in the region. But Iran, along with Iraq, which is loath to lose the oil-rich region, and Turkey, which is anxious to prevent any form of Kurdish independence that could influence the much larger number of Kurds living within its own borders, is determined to stop the establishment of Kurdistan. By openly supporting the Kurds, Israel is only creating a situation in which Iran and Turkey will find independence that much harder to stomach. [...]

The Kurds in northern Iraq still won't have a state the day after they vote for independence. The land-locked autonomous region is surrounded by countries that oppose it breaking away from Iraq. The only way it can continue to trading with the world is through Iran, Iraq or Turkey, all of which have already taken steps to closing their borders and air space. At least one of those three countries will have to come to terms with Kurdish independence in order for Kurdistan to become a reality, which is why the United States and other Western nations which may support independence in principle have all counseled the Kurds to wait with the referendum.

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Social Europe: SPD: Snatching Revival From The Jaws Of Defeat

A minority government is inherently unstable but also in a Jamaica coalition Merkel will be caught between a rock and a hard place. The AfD had an unexpectedly good result in Bavaria, where the CSU (Merkel’s sister party in Bavaria) has lost substantial ground. The party chairman Horst Seehofer has already announced that he thinks that ‘leaving the right flank open’ was the main reason for this poor showing. Given that Bavarian elections are looming next year, it is predictable that he will try to pull the next German government to the right. And having a shrill extremist party like the AfD in the federal parliament will also push Merkel in the same direction. [...]

The SPD in contrast will have the opportunity to regroup in opposition facing a rather weak government. It will have the breathing space to develop an alternative politics for Germany with which it can contest the next election in 2021 (or earlier). The AfD is unlikely to be an effective opposition party as it freely admits to having no policy at all in many key areas. It is also likely to fall back into internal tribalism and conflicts between its populist and even more extreme wings. The final party in parliament, Die Linke, did not do very well in opposition against the Grand Coalition and is unlikely to play a more dominant role this time around. These dynamics could work well for the SPD. [...]

The Grand Coalition was never intended to be a permanent model and it is beyond its shelf-date now. It is time to broaden political competition within the democratic camp. If the SPD is successful in developing an alternative politics in opposition, not only might it regain a strong position soon but it might also make an important contribution to bringing AfD voters back into the mainstream fold. Yesterday’s election was a political earthquake and not every crisis provides an opportunity. This one, however, truly does.

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CityLab: Is Beige the New Black in Architecture?

Why are cafeteria walls set up in the ornate, Tiffany-domed Chicago Cultural Center, home to the biennial’s main exhibit? It turns out that Preissner and Andersen are in good company. Many of the projects here are similarly interested in elements of architecture that are boring, banal, or ugly. In various acts of image rehabilitation or re-contextualization, this festival makes a home for outcasts and weirdoes, often stigmatized in design because they just aren’t weird enough.[...]

“Visions of Another America” is one of an entire category of projects at the biennial that use collage and aggregation to tear down hierarchies and widen the circle of serious architectural consideration. This idea, of transparently re-appropriating architecture for use in other architecture, is itself outside the canon, as architects have historically dreaded admitting their ideas aren’t only peerless products of singular genius. [...]

There is a populist advantage to not explaining history from an assumed position of authority (in architecture, usually a bespectacled and suited white man). But that risks the loss of a sense of coherent narrative the broader public needs to understand. The biggest danger with exhibits on the color beige and glazed tile is that visitors will see elements of their own lives on stage, but might not know how to connect it to a larger story. The question of whether there is a larger story to tell will be, explicitly or implicitly, on the mind of many biennial curators and visitors to come.

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The Atlantic: Why Was Chad Included in the New Travel Ban?

Chad’s inclusion on the list of countries deemed security risks to the U.S. is additionally difficult to explain given its role over the past 15 years as a key counterterrorism ally. In April, U.S. forces participated in annual counterterrorism exercises with their counterparts from around the world in Chad. Chad’s inclusion in the list was met with astonishment in the country, and not only because this close counterterrorism partnership: The country has mostly managed to avoid the kinds of terrorist attacks that have afflicted its immediate neighbors like Nigeria and Mali.

“Chad sits in a very tough neighborhood,” Lauren P. Blanchard, a specialist in African affairs at the Congressional Research Service, told me. The country is a relative oasis of stability. It hosts French and U.S. forces, is engaged in fighting al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb in Mali, was critical in pushing back Boko Haram in Nigeria, and plays host to the Multinational Joint Task Force, the regional military effort to fight Boko Haram. [...]

The U.S. State Department, in its most recent country terrorism report from 2016, acknowledged Chad’s financial challenges in providing “external counterterrorism assistance in Cameroon, Niger, and Nigeria,” but noted that Chad “engaged in major external military operations in … neighboring countries,” as part of the Lake Chad Basin Multinational Joint Task Force, which includes Benin, Cameroon, Niger, and Nigeria. Chad, the State Department reported added, was also contributing to the UN Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in Mali. Additionally, the report pointed out that terrorist incidents in the country had fallen due both to “proactive security force presence” and a split within Boko Haram. [...]

Terrorism aside, Chad certainly has its problems. These include an authoritarian government under President Idris Déby, politicization of the armed forces, and widespread poverty despite the country’s oil wealth. But the country—and the wider region—remains a key focus of Western counterterrorism efforts. Brigadier General Donald Bolduc, who until recently was commander of American Special Operations Forces in Africa, called the Lake Chad Basin, which encompasses Cameroon, Chad, Niger, and Nigeria, “ground zero” of the war on extremism in Africa. Blanchard told me “Chad is very important in figuring out movement between ISIS elements in Libya and Nigeria—they have to go through Chad or Niger.”

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The New York Review of Books: Germany’s Election: Choosing the Unspeakable

The apparent calm of the election belied the real concerns of the German public, concerns evident in the election results. Merkel began her campaign late and then barely campaigned; she gave plain speeches that rarely mentioned her opponents. To the eyes of the public, the two major parties seemed nearly identical. This provided the AfD with an opening to be the opposition. If people turned to a party that said the unspeakable, it was partly because very speakable things weren’t being said at all. [...]

“Merkel and Schulz: they agree,” read a headline after the one TV debate of the election season, in which the two candidates seemed to bat canned answers back and forth. The four other parties that will enter the Bundestag, or Parliament—in addition to the AfD, the economically liberal Free Democratic Party (FDP), the Greens, and the far-left Die Linke—were relegated to a follow-up show the next evening. Merkel and Schulz barely discussed the eurozone. Education and NATO spending did not come up. [...]

The central issue of the campaign, migration, barely came up at all in most of the speeches by Merkel and Schulz. Merkel herself hardly mentioned the subject in her campaign, as if hoping the issue would simply go away. The CDU’s “strategy was to not talk about it, hoping in vain that voters wouldn’t realize it,” Dr. Timo Lochocki of the German Marshall Fund told me. 

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The Atlantic: The Misunderstood Roots of Burma's Rohingya Crisis

Tensions between the Bengali-speaking Muslims and Buddhists in Rakhine state have existed for decades—some would say centuries—but the most significant inflection point came in 1982 when Burma’s junta passed a law that identified 135 ethnicities entitled to citizenship. The Rohingya were not among them, though they had enjoyed equal rights since Burma became independent from British rule in 1948. Almost overnight, they were stripped of their citizenship.

In the years since then, the Rohingya were persecuted, steadily lost their rights, and were the victims of violence. The worst of this violence erupted in 2012 following the rape of a Buddhist woman allegedly by Muslim men. That prompted massive religious violence against the Rohingya, forcing 140,000 of them into camps for internally displaced people. International pressure resulted in the military government agreeing to grant the Rohingya a reduced form of citizenship if they registered themselves as Bengali—not Rohingya. Although many Muslims in Rakhine state were previously indifferent to how they were labeled, the years of oppression, combined with the type of citizenship they were being offered, made the offer unpalatable. [...]

For the Burmese government, the word Rohingya is particularly fraught. This is because if the government acknowledges Rakhine’s Muslims as members of the Rohingya ethnic group, then under the 1982 citizenship law—ironically, the same measure that stripped the Rohingya of their citizenship—the Muslims would be allowed an autonomous area within the country. And therein lies the crux of the problem: The Burmese fear a Rohingya autonomous area along the border with Bangladesh would come at the expense of Rakhine territory. The Burmese military, which has cracked down on Rohingya civilians, views this as a possible staging area for terrorism by groups like ARSA.

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The Atlantic: Angela Merkel Reorients Germany

Why was Angela Merkel just elected to a fourth term as German chancellor? Ahead of Sunday’s election, the German journalist Robin Alexander offered one explanation. Since the economy is thriving and the nation’s politics are relatively placid despite the disruptive rise of a far-right populist-nationalist party, many Germans think they’re living on a “ship of stability and around us it’s very stormy.” Consider: Vladimir Putin changed Ukraine’s borders by force; Donald Trump, who “in German eyes behaves like a madman,” was elected president of the United States; Britain voted to exit the European Union; and France, had Marine Le Pen won this year’s presidential race, might have left the bloc as well, destroying the entire EU project. [...]

The United States has served as a model for German democracy and as a guarantor of German security, both through NATO and America’s nuclear-weapons arsenal. The European Union has allowed Germany to become a leading power in Europe while maintaining good relations with its neighbors—as Puglierin put it, “to breathe and to feel well in our own shoes.” In Brexit, the EU will lose its second-largest economy and its strongest link to the United States. In Trump, Germans have confronted a leader across the Atlantic who has wavered on defending NATO members, demanded that Germany pay more for U.S. military protection, challenged certain aspects of liberal democracy, championed the very nationalism that European integration was designed to transcend, and dismissed the EU as a “vehicle” for German power. At first, after the one-two punch of Brexit andTrump, Germans had “the impression that our world crumbled,” Puglierin said. [...]

In a telling debate before the German election, representatives of the country’s six main parties were asked which of four nations—the United States, the United Kingdom, Russia, and Turkey—was Germany’s closest partner. Two chose the U.K. in a show of European solidarity. Two picked the U.S. because transatlantic relations were most important, though they explicitly excluded Donald Trump, the “outrageous U.S. president” who “is insulting the whole world and endangering the world with his tweets,” from the partnership. One—the emissary from Merkel’s party—wondered why he couldn’t pick France. Another made no selection whatsoever. When the moderator asked whether any audience members thought Trump was a “reliable partner for Germany,” two lonely hands went up.

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Financial Times: The end of the Chinese miracle

The School of Life: On Still Being a Virgin

Our era of sexual liberation encourages us to have sex; but at the same time, hugely stigmatises those who don’t have it, from choice or circumstances. It’s time to liberate the idea of lingering or ongoing virginity from the shame it’s currently surrounded by. 

The Atlantic: Masculinity Done Well and Poorly

It’s possible to overanalyze these sentence fragments. The jumping from one topic to the next without completing a thought makes it so Trump rarely says enough to escape plausible deniability. This manner of speaking has been noted in objective linguistic analysis to be consistent with the sort seen in early stages of cognitive decline. Though at least some of the pacing here was the result of interruption from wild applause from a crowd that would not likely have reacted with such approval to a man apologizing for the stagnant health-policy situation.

Instead he drew cheers for projecting toughness and bravado—for saying his catchphrase, “You’re fired!” The crowd responded well to the shared sense of superiority over the more familiar other: black NFL players who protest the power structure. The crowd cheered for the days when men were men and they hit each other hard—when there was no discourse on the harm that could be done from head injuries, just as there was no concern for “safe spaces” for trauma victims or “political correctness” to call attention to divisive rhetoric. This was the time when America was apparently great. [...]

In all of these statements Trump could reasonably be—and widely is—said to be engaging in racial demagoguery for political gain. Over the weekend he would go on to praise the largely white NHL and NASCAR while calling for black athletes who protest state abuses of power to be fired. He is also quite possibly not so calculating as to consciously weaponize racism and authoritarianism, but is engaging in a sort of demagoguery fueled firstly by his own impulse to gain approval. His code of masculinity dictates that this is done by saying things that incline people to perceive him as a powerful man.

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Financial Times: Germany’s election results in charts and maps

More than 1m voters shifted away from the CDU/CSU parties to the AfD — but even more went to the FDP. 

The SPD lost votes in nearly equal measure to the FDP, the Left, the Greens and the AfD.  The AfD was the big winner, drawing votes from all the big parties, especially the CDU/CSU bloc. Even more important, though, was its ability to mobilise previously disengaged voters and those who before voted for minor parties.

The FDP was the main beneficiary of the swing away from the CDU/CSU parties, while the Left offset losses to the AfD with gains from the SPD elsewhere. The Greens benefited from the decline of the SPD. [...]

Marcel Fratzscher, president of the German Institute for Economic Research, DIW said: “The SPD has lost its classic working-class voters and this explains its constant struggle in the past elections.”   

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Quartz: Germany and France thwarted far right populism—why did the US and UK fall to them?

The disruptions of the past decade, from the global financial crisis, to Brexit, and Trump, have combined to thoroughly derail the American and British governance models. In the face of crumbling infrastructure and public services, egregious inequality and stagnant policy-making, America’s reflex belief in eternal self-renewal appears somewhere between dangerously complacent and recklessly delusional. At least Britain, for its part, acknowledges that a stiff upper lip won’t suffice to salvage the country from its Brexit debacle. What is most worrying is the utter disconnect between the world-beating social and entrepreneurial dynamism of America and Britain and their total lack of plan to translate this into an inclusive future. There is simply no evidence that either country is ever going to get its act together again, period. [...]

This is the kind of long-term agenda—backed by action—that is simply unthinkable in the American and British systems today. And the reason for it is as simple as it is profound: Continental Europe actually has functional government institutions. While America and Britain are content to celebrate the theater of democratic campaigns and politics, France and Germany not only have more educated and informed voters but the candidates they have to choose from actually have experience governing cities, provinces and ministries. Equal if not more important is that they also have also strong civil services and well-funded public agencies that are seriously focused on how to expand the availability of affordable housing, create more jobs in urban services, and other long-term priorities.

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Quartz: The leader of Germany’s far-right party quit hours after its election success—because it’s too radical

This doesn’t mean Petry is a moderate, she’s far from it. A member of the AfD since 2013, it was she who put the former eurosceptic party on its new anti-immigration platform during the height of the refugee crisis in 2015. She’s made numerous controversial statements about refugees too, including that “Islam does not belong in Germany,” and saying that German border police should be allowed to fire on migrants along the Austria-German border.

Petry, who for some has been acceptable face of xenophobia, has been critical of radical statements made by others in the party as she believed it made it less attractive to moderate voters as well as for potential coalition partners when it would enter the Bundestag for the first time. [...]

Alexander Gauland stuck to his inflammatory rhetoric at the party’s first post-election press conference on Monday morning. “One million people, foreigners, being brought into this country are taking away a piece of this country and we as AfD don’t want that,” Gauland said. “We don’t want to lose Germany to an invasion of foreigners from a different culture.”

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Politico: 5 fronts in the coming eurozone battle

The possibility of the German liberal party FDP entering into a governing coalition with Chancellor Angela Merkel means Macron’s plans to overhaul the eurozone have suffered a serious setback. The FDP has made it clear throughout the campaign that it would draw a “red line” in front of any plans to further integrate the eurozone, as France advocates. [...]

As always, Macron’s speech will be loaded with symbolism. It will take place at the Sorbonne, Paris’ oldest university and once the center of France’s intellectual life, in front of European students. The choice of the date was more controversial: The French president went against the advice of some in his entourage, who cautioned that this overt attempt to set part of the German political agenda might backfire if he falls way short of his ambitious goals.

The new French leader notably wants Europe’s economic and monetary union to have some form of common budget under the authority of a so-called eurozone finance minister. Although Merkel and even her hard-line Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble have greeted Macron’s general ideas with the appearance of polite interest, many German officials and parties oppose “fiscal transfers,” or the pooling of budgetary resources, even in a limited way.

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Politico: Support grows for second Brexit vote

Just over half of those surveyed said they back some form of a second referendum, with the most popular scenario being a vote to either accept the government’s Brexit deal, or to stay in the EU — an option backed by 34 percent. That is up from 28 percent in a similar survey in March, according to new findings from Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research (GQRR). In the earlier survey, 45 percent of people backed a second referendum — although these figures include public votes that would still mean the U.K. leaves the EU under either outcome.

The pro-EU Liberal Democrats are the only U.K. political party now backing a second referendum, but they hold just 12 seats in parliament. The opposition Labour Party, which meets for its annual conference in Brighton this week, has so far ruled out the idea — and decided Sunday not to have a debate or vote on the issue during the gathering. The Scottish National Party is not formally pushing for a vote, but leader and Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon hinted it still might, telling the New Statesman last week that the case for a second vote “may become very hard to resist.” [...]

Among Labour voters who responded to the survey, support for some kind of second referendum is at 70 percent, with a referendum on accepting the Brexit deal or staying in the EU the most popular, backed by 51 percent. [...]

Overall, 39 percent of respondents reject the idea of a second referendum — and 7 percent want a “hard Brexiteer’s referendum” in which people would choose between the government’s deal and leaving the EU without a deal. Another 10 percent back a referendum that would give voters the chance to reject the government’s Brexit deal, but send it back to the negotiating table. [...]

While there is broad support for the fundamentals of the U.K. government’s negotiating position, it is the increasing interest in revisiting the entire question of Brexit that will be of most interest, particularly to the opposition Labour Party, which gained much of its support from voters drawn to its softer stance on Brexit. The Lib Dems will also take heart from the findings, after failing to cut through with voters at June’s general election with their second referendum message.

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Politico: Time for Brussels to ‘go nuclear’ on Warsaw

It should be obvious by now that PiS won’t back down easily. It is implementing a plan, devised 12 years ago, that sets Poland on the road to a one-party autocracy with the judiciary as its pawn.

The party has attacked the country’s democratic institutions and judiciary since 2005. With fervent, conspiracy-laden rhetoric, PiS blamed the country’s negotiated transition and ex-communist elite for all of Poland’s ills and took concrete steps to rid public life of them. [...]

Between 2005 and 2007, the coalition government led by PiS purged public media and pressured private outlets, under the claim by then Prime Minister Jarosław Kaczyński that they were owned by “oligarchs.” At the same time, it launched a ferocious lustration campaign against the country’s intellectuals and waged a war on the judiciary. [...]

Such a short-sighted approach is dangerous. Other members and members-in-waiting could feel emboldened by Warsaw’s renegadism, and having rogue countries in the EU’s backyard would pose a danger to the bloc — especially if those rogue countries are geographically close to Russia.

The EU has no choice but to keep pressuring Poland if it wants to prevent the risk of further contagion and the certain demise of the Union as a community of values.

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The Conversation: Attitudes to same-sex marriage have many psychological roots, and they can change

Attitudes to same-sex marriage appear more malleable than we might have expected. In a 2013 survey by US think-tank the Pew Research Center, 28% of US supporters of same-sex marriage reported they had changed their mind on the issue. Most often change occurred as a result of contact with someone personally affected by it. [...]

The idea of nature is rhetorically powerful, and the two sides in the Irish same-sex marriage debate harnessed it to advance diverging causes. Opponents focused their objections on the supposed unnaturalness of same-sex parenthood, marriage and gender relations. Proponents advocated for a more inclusive sense of what is natural. [...]

This research indicates that much of the opposition to same-sex marriage is grounded in sexual prejudice, despite that opposition often being publicly justified on different grounds. But, a modest proportion of conservatives’ opposition was not explained by prejudice. This fraction may reflect principled objections based on conservative political or religious beliefs.

One account of political conservatism proposes that it rests on two pillars: resistance to change and opposition to equality. The first values the preservation of tradition and social order. The second maintains that differences in social outcomes are natural and inevitable.

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Al Jazeera: Greece and economic recovery: Fake news in action

Indeed, now into its eighth year, Greece remains entirely dependent on international bailouts (three bailouts involving the European Union and the International Monetary Fund have been arranged since 2010), has lost a quarter of its GDP with no realistic expectations of recovering it for decades to come, experiences unemployment levels which have oscillated between a high 27.8 percent (in July 2013) and a low 21.2 percent (in June 2017), and has seen the standard of living decline to 1960s levels.

Worse, Greece's debt-to-GDP ratio has exploded since the start of the bailout programs, rising from 128 percent in 2010 to over 185 percent in 2017, and, with no debt relief in sight, the small Mediterranean nation has become truly a permanent debt colony inside the world's richest region. In the meantime, a mass exodus of young and educated people has been in motion for several years now (youth unemployment rate in Greece stands currently at 43.3 percent), a process that is bound to have long-term effects on demographic trends and a significant impact on future economic developments. [...]

First, the actual facts about the broken promises and the continuous lies of and the dissemination of fake news by the Syriza government. For starters, not only did Alexis Tsipras deceive the Greek people by winning the popular vote with passionate pleas that, if elected, he would do away with international bailouts, secure a debt write-off, and put an end to the vicious cycle of debt-austerity-recession-unemployment, but ended up signing a third bailout agreement with the country's international creditors and has even consented to the enforcement of Procrustean economics, which entail additional cuts in excess of five billion euros (about $6bn), even deeper pension reductions, and the attainment of outrageously high primary surplus targets - well into 2020. 

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CityLab: Berlin After the Elections

This stark national picture was mirrored quite clearly in Berlin, still Germany’s largest city by far. Here too the CDU’s votes fell somewhat, the Social Democrats plummeted even more steeply, and the AfD also saw large gains. Within city limits, however, there’s another trend that is deeply rooted and glaring for anyone who knows the city. Politically, Berlin remains overwhelmingly divided along the line of the Berlin Wall.

Electorally, Berlin’s East-West separation is almost as clear as ever. In the West, leafy outlying suburbs and some wealthier inner neighborhoods voted for the CDU, while citizens in the inner city voted in largest numbers for the SPD and Greens.

In the East, some suburbs also voted CDU—Merkel’s party seems unusual in having appeal across the East-West divide. Beyond that, however, the contrast is stark. By far the largest number of electoral districts voted for Die Linke, a leftist party originating partly from former communists and partly from left-wing defectors from the SPD. Meanwhile, AfD gained a footing out in the eastern suburbs. In keeping with national patterns, this anti-immigration party did better in Berlin districts that have fewer foreign-born citizens. [...]

Western boroughs have, as a whole, voted for either the CDU (represented by black) or the SPD (represented by red), while in the east they have gone for Die Linke (purple)—which has outperformed AfD when presented in terms of boroughs alone. The one exception is the central borough that voted Green (guess which color?), though on close inspection even this proves to be less exceptional than you might think. This is Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg, a borough created from one western and one eastern borough amalgamated into one. The western part of the borough, a place with a strong counter-cultural tradition, voted mainly Green, while the eastern part voted mainly for Die Linke. In other words, the East-West divide here remains essentially the same as elsewhere.

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Vox: After decades of decline, the murder rate went up in 2016

As criminologist John Pfaff pointed out, most of the increase in the murder rate in particular — which is widely considered the most accurate proxy for crime — was linked to cities with a population of 250,000 or more. Chicago alone contributed to about 22 percent of the increase in murders.

One point of caution: Crime is still below what it was several years ago. Even at 5.3 per 100,000 people, the murder rate, for example, is still below what it was in 2008 and the years before that, and it’s nearly half of what it was during its peak in 1980. [...]

There are essentially two hypothesized versions of the Ferguson effect: One is that Black Lives Matter protests have scared law enforcement officers from doing the proactive policing necessary to prevent crime, while at the same time criminals have been emboldened because they now know police are backing off from aggressive tactics. The other theory is that these protests have reinforced communities’ distrust of law enforcement, making it harder to solve and prevent crimes. It’s also possible both of these versions are playing a mixed role. [...]

It’s also possible that the murder rate alone gives a distorted view of violent crime. Since the murder rate is generally very low, it’s prone to large statistical fluctuations. As one example, New Orleans–based crime analyst Jeff Asher previously told me he expected the 2016 mass shooting at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, in which 50 died, to lead to a massive increase in the murder rate in the city, even though it was just one particularly bad event.

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Political Critique: This German election marks a tidal change in European politics

Germany voted. Almost 13% of the electors chose the Alternative für Deutschland. Another populist victory, another success for the right wing, as so many before since last June’s fateful Brexit referendum. With a voter participation rate of over 76%, we cannot even say that people didn’t care. Voters cared, they were fed up, and disillusioned with the established parties. 13 % demonstrated that they want the future of their country in the hands of a racist, reactionary troop. [...]

But while the AfD was celebrating its victory –greeted by 1000 protesters outside their election night party – the CDU and SPD were starting to grasp their losses. The SPD has suffered its worst election result in its history with 20,5% of the vote. The biggest loser of the last four years, however, seems to be the CDU/CSU coalition. Their results dropped by over 8% compared to the 2013 elections. [...]

As a leader of the opposition, Martin Schulz could show where his power truly lies: as an experienced European politician. A freed Schulz could defend the values of an open-minded continent in the face of xenophobic hatred.

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Haaretz: Behind Far-right German Party’s Successful Scare Campaign: Adviser to Netanyahu, Trump

The far-right Alternative for Germany party, which will soon enter the Bundestag for the first time after Sunday’s elections, hired the services of an American media consultant who has worked for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and U.S. President Donald Trump. [...]

Its election campaign stood out on social networks and used prominent billboards, focusing on a threat of an Islamic takeover of Germany. 

Behind the scenes, the AfD used the services of Vincent Harris, CEO of Harris Media, an online communications consulting firm founded in 2008. The company is based in Austin, Texas and is known for its provocative campaigns. It has also worked for a number of conservative Republican candidates, such as senators Ted Cruz and Mitch McConnell, former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin. Harris also worked with the right-wing UKIP party in Britain. [...]

Harris has used the growing “Muslim threat” before online. During Trump’s presidential campaign Harris produced a video clip warning of the dangerous implications of electing Hillary Clinton. Germany lost control of its borders, we must not let that happen in the United States, he said. The clip shows a Germany in the not distant future that has become part of Islamic State. The Cologne Cathedral, one of the symbols of Germany and German Christianity, has become a mosque and the Oktoberfest festival, another major symbol, now bans the sale of beer and pork.

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Politico: In pictures: For ‘the dispossessed,’ a safe loneliness in Germany

For more than six months, from late 2015 into 2016, I followed thousands of migrants along the Balkan route into Europe — photographing desperate people fleeing from war, poverty and persecution. Most came from Syria and Afghanistan. Through it all, I couldn’t shake the thought that, had I been born in a different country, I could easily have been on the other side of the lens.

More than a year later, I used social media to track down some of these subjects, now settled in Germany. Though I’d only exchanged a few words with some of them initially, seeing them again strengthened our bond: I didn’t know them well, but we’d shared some of the most trying moments of their lives.

 Everyone I spoke to was grateful to have ended up in Germany. That gratitude, however, is tempered by growing distrust toward refugees and asylum seekers. Times have changed and the open arms they were welcomed with in 2015 have closed a little.

All these young men came from war zones, where they left behind their lives — and their families. While they’re relieved to be out of war-torn environs, there’s a shared sense of deep loneliness in their new homes.

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The Atlantic: Love in the Time of Individualism

Mark Regnerus, a sociologist at the University of Texas at Austin, thinks a lot about the price of human relationships. His new book, Cheap Sex, is all about how the modern dating scene has been shaped by sexual economics, a theory which sees human mating as a marketplace. His idea, as you might suspect from the title, is that sex is not as costly to access as it once was—in terms of time, effort, and risk. Contraception makes sex less risky; online dating platforms make it more accessible. If that doesn’t work out, there’s always porn, which requires next to no effort to find. These factors, Regnerus argues, “have created a massive slowdown in the development of committed relationships, especially marriage.”

Marriage rates have indeed plummeted among young adults, to the point that a demographer cited by  Regnerus estimates that one-third of people currently in their early 20s will never get married. But another new book about modern relationships, Eli Finkel’s The All-or-Nothing Marriage, contends that while “the institution of marriage in America is struggling ... the best marriages today are better than the best marriages of earlier eras; indeed, they are the best marriages that the world has ever known.” [...]

Still, there is a lot in Regnerus’s analysis that is uncomfortably astute. He’s right that it can be hard to escape these old gender dynamics when dating, especially online dating. Popular dating apps put women in the position of gatekeeping, whether deliberately or not. It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a smartphone will swipe right on basically everyone. This forces women to be choosier about who they say yes to. Even if they also swipe with abandon, they end up with more matches to sort through—yet more gatekeeping. On Hinge and OkCupid, which don’t require a mutual opt-in before people can send messages, women’s inboxes are deluged with men whom they must then sort through. Bumble just went all-in and made gatekeeping a selling point: Women have to message men first, putting them in control of who has access to their attention. [...]

What Americans want from their marriages nowadays, Finkel argues, is love, yes, but also someone who will give their lives meaning, and make them into the best versions of themselves. “Marriage has a self-expressive emphasis that places a premium on spouses helping each other meet their authenticity and personal-growth needs,” he writes. “The pursuit of self-expression through marriage simultaneously makes achieving marital success harder and the value of doing so greater.”

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Quartz: Humans have way less agency than we think. Be grateful for the illusion

It certainly doesn’t come from having access to the brain processes that underlie our actions. After all, I have no insight into the electrochemical particulars of how my nerves are firing or how neurotransmitters are coursing through my brain and bloodstream. Instead, our experience of agency seems to come from inferences we make about the causes of our actions, based on crude sensory data. And, as with any kind of perception based on inference, our experience can be tricked. [...]

These observations point to a fundamental paradox about consciousness. We have the strong impression that we choose when we do and don’t act and, as a consequence, we hold people responsible for their actions. Yet many of the ways we encounter the world don’t require any real conscious processing, and our feeling of agency can be deeply misleading. [...]

The bond between agency and mutual accountability goes back at least as far as 300 BCE. The Greek philosophers, Epicurus and the Stoics, wanted to defend the idea of free will despite believing the universe to be pre-determined by the laws of nature. Free will has two fundamental features, they said. The first is the feeling of being in control: “I am the cause of this event.” The second is a grasp of the counterfactual: “I could have chosen otherwise.” Pangs of regret – something we’ve all experienced – make no sense unless we believe that we could have done something differently. Furthermore, Epicurus believed that we acquire this sense of responsibility via the praise and blame we received from others. By listening to our peers and elders, we become attuned to our capacity to effect change in the world. [...]

What’s more, by considering our experiences and sharing them with others, we can reach a consensus about what the world and we humans are really like. A consensus need not be accurate to be attractive or useful, of course. For a long time everyone agreed that the Sun went round the Earth. Perhaps our sense of agency is a similar trick: it might not be “true,” but it maintains social cohesion by creating a shared basis for morality. It helps us understand why people act as they do – and, as a result, makes it is easier to predict people’s behavior.

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Social Europe: The Euro’s Narrow Path

But the two sides remain deeply divided. Macron, in long-standing French tradition, insists that the monetary union suffers from too little centralization. The eurozone, he argues, needs its own finance minister and its own parliament. It needs a budget in the hundreds of billions of euros to underwrite investment projects and augment spending in countries with high unemployment.

Merkel, on the other hand, views the monetary union’s problem as one of too much centralization and too little national responsibility. She worries that a large eurozone budget wouldn’t be spent responsibly. While not opposed to a eurozone finance minister, she does not envision that official possessing expansive powers.  [...]

The solution lies in bulletproofing the banks by strictly applying the demanding capital standards of Basel III and limiting concentrated holdings of government bonds. The paradox here is that European regulators, including German regulators, have in fact been arguing for looser application of those regulations in negotiations with the United States. In doing so, they have been arguing against their own best interests.  [...]

The EMF could then take the place of the ECB and the European Commission in negotiating the terms of financing programs with governments. The final decision of whether to extend an emergency loan would no longer fall to heads of state in all-night talks. Rather, it would be taken by a board made up of eurozone representatives, including from civil society, nominated by the European Council and confirmed by the European Parliament, giving the process a legitimacy it currently lacks.  

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Katoikos: Schulz’s original sin

“The initial enthusiasm around Martin Schulz’s candidacy was the result of two facts. He never took part in a grand coalition and he inspired a great hope,” commented SPD MEP Tiemo Wölken during a debate on the future of the French-German motor for the EU after the German elections, held at the European Parliamentary Association in Strasbourg on Wednesday 13 September.

“Schulz disappointed the hope he inspired. Europe and its future should have been more at the centre of his campaign. Who if not the former president of the European Parliament is the most legitimate person to talk about Europe?” continued Wölken.

Schulz missed a great opportunity when he chose not to champion openly for “red-red-green” – the name normally given to a coalition between the SPD, the Linke and the Greens. This platform is the only one capable of proposing an “alternative” vision to the one of Merkel’s CDU. And this time, more than in the past, the three parties’ programmes had enough similarities to converge around a common project.  [...]

In this regard, the SPD proposes the creation of an economic government for the eurozone, endowed with a budget financed by taxes on the financial markets, which “were saved with public money and have not even paid a part of the costs for this intervention”. This plan is much more ambitious than the monetary fund Merkel promised Emmanuel Macron.

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Jacobin Magazine: A Shift to the Right?

The campaign has been excruciatingly boring. Most observers take Angela Merkel’s victory as a foregone conclusion. The televised debate between the current chancellor and the Social Democratic Party’s (SPD) lead candidate Martin Schulz on September 3 got mixed, but altogether negative, reviews, ranging from pure indifference to bewilderment and anger at the candidates’ painfully inoffensive style. This reaction is all the more remarkable given that German politics isn’t known for its confrontational style. [...]

The right-wing populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) casts its shadow not only over Merkel and Schulz but also over the resurgent liberals of the Free Democratic Party (FDP). For example, approximately 47 percent of the Merkel-Schulz debate concerned migration and refugees. No AfD spokesperson participated, but the party’s presence nevertheless permeated the room. [...]

We should not take such equations lightly. In recent months, Germany has been rocked by a series of neo-fascist scandals, including the discovery of Nazi cells within the army. Furthermore, the trial of the National Socialist Underground group, responsible for deadly attacks on Turkish and Greek residents over several years, has produced a constant stream of evidence that demonstrates authorities’ chronic negligence in response to the threat of far-right terrorism. [...]

Unfortunately, the CDU isn’t the only party that has tried to weaken the AfD by attacking the Left. In recent months, the liberal — but fiscally much more neoliberal — FDP has experienced a remarkable resurgence after being kicked out of the Bundestag during the last elections. [...]

The SPD has also joined this race to the right. When Schulz announced his bid for the chancellorship, he appeared somewhat popular: more honest than Gerhard Schröder and less tainted with the legacy of the Agenda 2010 neoliberal reforms than the rest of his party. But this image soon began falling apart. Trying to appeal to both the bosses and the German workers, Schulz pleased no one. While talking about scaling back some elements of Agenda 2010 at the start of his campaign, a series of electoral defeats on the state level saw Schulz orienting himself towards the center and proclaiming Emmanuel Macron his role model. This was a hopeless move, and not only because this political space is already occupied by Angela Merkel. The SPD has problems beyond its candidate. Most importantly, it belonged to a coalition with the CDU between 2005 and 2009 and another from 2013 until the present, a history that prevents the party from assuming a plausible anti-establishment posture.

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Political Critique: Theresa May in Florence, or an old-style socks-and-sandals Brit abroad

More significant was the fact that she yet again failed to say anything meaningful about citizen rights, freedom of movement or the contentious issue of the exit fee, all of which are high up the European Commission’s list of priorities and preconditions for the negotiations to continue. Even her audience of just over thirty, most of whom were flown over from London anyway, yawned their way through a speech whose final, edited version actually contained the sentence “Britain’s future is… bright”. No wonder nobody from the EU27 bothered to turn up. [...]

In reality, of course, and I can’t resist just one example, pre-EU Anglo-Tuscan history is hardly so rose-tinted. In the 14th Century the Tuscan Bardi and Peruzzi families leant a vast sum of florins to the English King Edward III to pay for his wars. After a string of defeats he failed to pay the sum back, ultimately leading to the collapse of both institutions, which in turn resulted in a serious Europe-wide economic crisis. Oops! Most Brits have forgotten this, but, as a resident, I can tell you, the Florentines most certainly haven’t. In a speech about these ambiguous creative trade deals this faux pas was carrion for the Italian media. [...]

May spoke passionately, for example, about British people caring about sovereignty and democracy and in the process managed to somehow imply that this wasn’t true for other European countries. To make such an earnest gaff in one of the birthplaces of modern republicanism whose citizens are by and large proud European democrats, and worse still to do so as the representative of a country that still has a monarchy and no constitution, was nothing short of absurd.

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Al Jazeera: What Germany's refugees think about the elections

It will, however, represent continuity only at a surface level. The narrative that this is an uneventful election belies the deeper rumblings in the German political landscape. Polls predict that on Sunday the far-right party Alternative for Germany (AfD) will enter parliament for the first time. The party has used Merkel's policy around refugees to bolster the anti-immigration vision at the heart of their campaign.

Anxiety around the rise of the far right in the country is felt particularly acutely by many refugees. The topic of refugee policy and integration has been a centre of gravity for parties across the political spectrum. Yet with no right to vote, many of the thousands of refugees in the country feel without a voice - objects, and not participants in the political discourse.

Al Jazeera spoke to some refugees in the capital about what the election means to them.

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The Economist: Angela Merkel’s rise to power, in five steps

Angela Merkel is expected to win her fourth term as German Chancellor. In doing so she would become Europe's most successful elected female politician. Her biographer, Jacqueline Boysen, tells us why Mrs Merkel is a political force with staying power. 

How do you survive in modern-day politics? You might want to follow the example of Angela Merkel. Jacqueline Boysen is a journalist and writer, who's covered German politics for the past two decades. She's known Angela Merkel since the 1990s and has written a biography on Germany's first female chancellor.

Here are the tips Jacqueline Boysen has learned from Angela Merkel. 

The California Sunday Magazine: The Political Awakening of Silicon Valley

Silicon Valley’s leaders were experiencing a rare and remarkable paroxysm of self-doubt. It wasn’t just their sense that they’d poorly deployed their wealth or that, cloistered on the West Coast, they’d misjudged the electorate. They were also coming to wonder if they’d helped create the circumstances that led to Trump’s rise. After the election, Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged Facebook’s role in polarizing citizens by surfacing articles that reinforced their worldviews. Faced with accusations that Twitter had helped Trump set up a one-man propaganda machine, Ev Williams, the company’s co-founder, told The New York Times, “If it’s true that he wouldn’t be president if it weren’t for Twitter, then yeah, I’m sorry.” As it became clearer that Silicon Valley’s incessant disruption of older industries contributed to the numbers of underemployed, underpaid Rust Belters who’d helped put Trump in office, Altman posted on Facebook, asking his friends for introductions to Trump supporters who might help him understand what had happened. He then interviewed a hundred of them. On his blog, he offered a pithy Altmanism to summarize their perspectives: “You all can defeat Trump next time, but not if you keep mocking us, refusing to listen to us, and cutting us out. It’s Republicans, not Democrats, who will take Trump down.”

In the past, there’d been a dutiful bent to Silicon Valley’s involvement in politics. Those with means had given to the Clinton and Obama campaigns and had even lent some strategic advice — enough to make Silicon Valley a crucial fundraising stop. But besides supporting a liberal (and in some cases, libertarian) agenda, they’d left the policy details to the politicians. They lobbied for their corporate interests, of course, which sometimes intersected with mainstream issues like immigration reform. But for the most part, they thought they could fix the world’s problems better, faster outside the messy, internecine fighting of Washington, D.C. By early summer, that had changed. The CEOs of the biggest tech companies, including Apple and Google, censured Trump for his policies on immigration and climate change. Musk and Travis Kalanick, then the CEO of Uber, quit a Trump advisory council; later in the summer, after Trump’s controversial comments about violence between white nationalists and counter-protesters in Charlottesville, other high-profile CEOs would do the same. Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, brought on several high-profile political operators, including Obama strategist David Plouffe, George W. Bush adviser Ken Mehlman, and the research firm of Democratic pollster Joel Benenson. Zuckerberg also embarked on his own listening tour covering all 50 states. (This inspired speculation that he was eyeing a run for office, which he denied.) Zynga’s Mark Pincus announced that he and Reid Hoffman, a co-founder of LinkedIn, had committed to invest in a project called Win the Future, for which they hoped to crowdsource an agenda through the internet, and Hoffman told the audience at a tech conference that, over time, his political spending could reach into the hundreds of millions. [...]

To Altman’s mind, the most urgent problem we’re facing — one that Trump exploited to become president — is a widening gap between the rich and the poor and, by extension, a profound feeling of disenfranchisement. He believes we should extend Medicare to people of all ages. We should make college free in exchange for civic service. He also predicts that in the future, artificial intelligence will make blue-collar jobs even scarcer and worsen inequality, at which point he thinks the government could enact a universal basic income — a regular, no-strings-attached payment to every American. The concept has become popular in Silicon Valley, both in progressive and libertarian circles, and YC Research is in the middle of a secretive pilot project in Oakland to test its potential. Altman believes that a universal basic income might be the most equitable, efficient method of expanding the social safety net “when the AI comes.” [...]

“The thing a lot of people forget is that we’ve been losing jobs at the same rate for, like, 300 years,” Altman said. He didn’t expect that rate to accelerate, at least not anytime soon, and when AI does replace some jobs, he said, people will invent new ones. But then he equivocated: Another case, he acknowledged, could be made. People used horses to transport us from place to place until cars came along. “For a while, horses found slightly different jobs,” he said, “and today there are no more jobs for horses.” For a moment, he and the entrepreneurs considered this in gloomy silence. Then he moved on. “All right,” he said. “How can I help?”

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