Vox: Why Trump's "Muslim ban" is a moral failure, explained by a political theorist

I think there are at least three overlapping bases for these obligations. The first is that the US is sometimes responsible for the fact that someone has become a refugee. For example, people in Iraq and Afghanistan who have helped American forces by serving as translators or in other capacities have sometimes been put at risk because of this service. There are already stories of such people being excluded from admission (and hence, safety) as a result of Trump’s policy.

The second basis for the obligation to refugees is simply the humanitarian duty to help people in desperate straits when one can do so. This duty has its roots in many different religious and secular ethical traditions. The United States has traditionally admitted more refugees than any other country (although Germany has clearly passed the US in this respect in the past few years). The complete ban on refugee admissions for four months and the subsequent reduction (by half) of the number who will be accepted is a failure to meet America’s humanitarian obligations.

The third basis for the obligation to refugees is that the United States and most other countries have acknowledged that the international state system has a duty to protect refugees. In the wake of the failure of democratic states to protect Jewish refugees from the Nazis, the United States led the effort to create institutions that would prevent such a moral failure in the future. That regime already suffers from severe limitations, and the new Trump policy will undermine it further. [...]

First, in imposing restrictions on entry that take immediate effect, it violates norms of fairness. As everyone knows, the policy has stranded people abroad who had already been living in the United States as well as people who had been given permission to come and had made life plans on that basis. To deprive people of a right to enter the United States that they had previously been granted and which they have done nothing to forfeit is unfair. [...]

Second, the policy violates the moral principle that it is wrong to discriminate on the basis of religion. The seven states whose citizens are not permitted entry are all overwhelmingly Muslim. Trump himself has implicitly acknowledged that it is wrong to discriminate on the basis of religion by denying that he is doing so. This recalls the old saying that hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue. In this case, however, the hypocrisy is so blatant, given Trump’s past and present statements about Islam, that no one who cares about reality can take his protestations seriously. This policy is clearly and deliberately aimed at restricting the entry of Muslims.

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Atlas Obscura: The Mystery and Occasional Poetry of, Uh, Filled Pauses

Nearly every language and every culture has what are called “filled pauses,” a notoriously difficult-to-define concept that generally refers to sounds or words that a speaker uses when, well, not exactly speaking. In American English, the most common are “uh” and “um.”

Until about 20 years ago, few linguists paid filled pauses much attention. They were seen as not very interesting, a mere expulsion of sound to take up space while the speaker figures out what to say next. (In Russian, filled pauses are called “parasite sounds,” which is kind of rude.) But since then, interest in filled pauses has exploded. There are conferences about them. Researchers around the globe, in dozens of different languages, dedicate themselves to studying them. And yet they still remain poorly understood, especially as new forms of discourse begin popping up. [...]

But researchers digging into the weird world of filled pauses have turned up some crazy, fascinating stuff. Some have taken sentences full of “ums” and “uhs” and edited them out to find out if people react more positively to someone who doesn’t use them. (They do.) Some are putting people in MRI machines to find out what weird neural stuff is going on when people use filled pauses. (Definitely some stuff.) And in Japan, researchers are trying to puzzle out how and why Japanese filled pauses are so unusual.

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Nautilus Magazine: The Multiple Multiverses May Be One and the Same

But that is almost quotidian compared to what quantum mechanics reveals. It is not just a new opening in the dome, but a new kind of opening. Physicists and philosophers have long argued over what quantum theory means, but, in some way or other, they agree that it reveals a vast realm lying beyond the range of our senses. Perhaps the purest incarnation of this principle—the most straightforward reading of the equations of quantum theory—is the many-worlds interpretation, put forward by Hugh Everett in the 1950s. In this view, everything that can happen does in fact happen, somewhere in a vast array of universes, and the probabilities of quantum theory represent the relative numbers of universes experiencing one outcome or another. As David Wallace, a philosopher of physics at the University of Southern California, put it in his 2012 book, The Emergent Multiverse, when we take quantum mechanics literally, “the world turns out to be rather larger than we had anticipated: Indeed, it turns out our classical ‘world’ is only a small part of a much larger reality.” [...]

MIT cosmologist Max Tegmark made this idea concrete during a talk he gave in 2002, which evolved into his 2014 book, Our Mathematical Universe. He describes several “levels” of multiverse. Level I simply refers to very, very distant regions of our own universe. Level III is his term for the quantum many worlds. (He also has levels II and IV, but we don’t need to worry about them here.) To see the similarity between levels I and III, you have to think about the nature of probability. If something can have two different outcomes, you only see one of them, but you can be sure that the other one has also happened—either in some other part of a giant universe or in a parallel world right here. If space is sufficiently large and filled with matter, events that occur here on Earth will also occur elsewhere, as will every possible variation of those events. [...]

The key, Bousso explains, is to think carefully about your point of view. Imagine taking a God’s-eye view of the multiverse in which you see all of the possibilities unfolding at once. There is no probability; everything happens with certainty, in some location. But from our own limited perspective, rooted here on planet Earth, various events unfold with various probabilities. “We trade a global picture, in which everything happens somewhere but nobody can see it all—for a local picture, where you have one patch, that could be in principle explored,” Bousso says.

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The Atlantic: Where America's Terrorists Actually Come From

But after sifting through databases, media reports, court documents, and other sources, Alex Nowrasteh, an immigration expert at the libertarian Cato Institute, has arrived at a striking finding: Nationals of the seven countries singled out by Trump have killed zero people in terrorist attacks on U.S. soil between 1975 and 2015.

Zero.

Six Iranians, six Sudanese, two Somalis, two Iraqis, and one Yemeni have been convicted of attempting or executing terrorist attacks on U.S. soil during that time period, according to Nowrasteh’s research. (Nowrasteh focused on plots against the U.S. homeland, which presumably Trump cares most about, rather than other terrorism-related offenses, like supporting a foreign terrorist group or trying to join a jihadist organization overseas.) Zero Libyans and zero Syrians have been convicted of doing the same. “Foreign-born terrorism is a hazard,” Nowrasteh argues, “but it is manageable given the huge economic benefits of immigration and the small costs of terrorism.” [...]

Still, it’s worth noting that the countries at the top of the list, including Saudi Arabia and Egypt, are not included in Trump’s ban. I’ve bolded the countries included in Trump’s executive order.

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Slate: Making Italy Great Again

As Ethiopian resistance continued after the proclamation of empire, the Italians combined old-fashioned savageries (decapitations, castrations, and burning and razing of civilian quarters) with industrial killing methods (aerial gas bombings and efficient open-grave executions) that are more commonly associated with Hitler’s and Stalin’s soldiers than with Mussolini’s rank and file. Indeed, the slaughter in Ethiopia was so out of keeping with Italians’ self-perception as the more “humane” dictatorship that it has been edited out of popular and official memory. Until 1995, the Italian government, and former combatants such as Indro Montanelli, denied the use of gas in East Africa. [...]

Fascist officials envisioned Ethiopia as a laboratory of another sort. For this generation of men, whose lives had been irremediably marked by their participation in World War I, the battlefield remained the supreme arena for the refashioning of Italians. Calling the Ethiopian invasion the start of a “gigantic work … of human reclamation [bonifica umana],” Mussolini posited the war as a practicum for the disciplinary education received in schools and fascist mass organizations. Combat and the collective nature of military life, his followers asserted, would eliminate tendencies toward “moodiness,” “impulsiveness,” and “romanticism” in the national character, producing a new breed of hard-edged Italians. To set an appropriately tough and virile tone, the press was forbidden to depict “sentimental and tearful” family scenes that accompanied Italian troops’ departure for Ethiopia, as well as any emotionalism shown by soldiers in Africa. [...]

In reality, racial boundaries proved difficult to police and administer, especially in the sphere of sexual relations. As we saw in the 1933 film Treno Popolare, the regime demanded that its unmarried “new men” learn the virtues both of continence and conquest and worked to reroute female sexuality into procreation. Once Italian troops invaded Ethiopia, the specter of miscegenation imparted a new urgency to ongoing state efforts to modify comportment and primal drives. Now, the true fascist was less a fearless conqueror than a man “with the attributes of his virility firmly in place.” Miscegenation thus received much media attention as a practice that caused physical and psychological decrepitude. Journalists warned Italians that many Ethiopians were of “beautiful appearance and noble bearing,” and speakers at colonial preparation courses for women reminded their audiences that heat caused the female sex to “put up less resistance to men.”

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The Guardian: Building Zion: the controversial plan for a Mormon-inspired city in Vermont

NewVistas is the name of an unusual, indeed, one-of-a-kind project led by a Mormon businessman named David Hall to build new, master-planned towns from scratch – inspired by notes written by Joseph Smith himself in 1833.

Hall says these designs, which described how ideal Mormon settlements should be laid out and were drafted almost 200 years ago, offer answers to modern-day challenges of sustainable living. And to make it happen, he has been buying land – lots of it.

The first goal is to build a NewVista community near Smith’s birthplace in Vermont, which would be home to about 20,000 people. The next step: to build more. Ultimately, Hall’s vision describes a new “city” of connected communities, with a total population of up to one million.

The fantastic story first came to light last spring, thanks to the careful eye and diligent research of a librarian in the small town of Sharon, who uncovered a series of local land purchases that she traced to the businessman and his plans. [...]

In August 2016, a church spokesman said: “This is a private venture and is not associated with The Church ... [which] makes no judgment about the scientific, environmental or social merits of the proposed developments. However, for a variety of reasons, we are not in favour of the proposal.”

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The Telegraph: Drug used to treat malaria fails for first time

A drug used to treat UK patients with malaria has failed for the first time, scientists have found.

Four patients who presented with signs of the tropical disease, which is spread by mosquitoes, had to seek alternative treatment after the drug commonly used to tackle malaria did not work.

Research by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) said the treatment failure was due to strains of the disease showing reduced susceptibility and a "potential first sign of drug resistance" to artemether-lumefantrine (AL). [...]

According to the latest statistics from the World Health Organisation (WHO), nearly half of the planet's population is at risk of malaria. [...]

Although malaria is not found in the UK, around 2,000 cases are diagnosed every year due to infected travellers returning from countries where the disease is endemic, mainly in Africa.

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The Economist: What Brexit and Donald Trump have in common

Enthusiasm for the petition is not uniform, the proportions having signed it ranging from around 1% to 10% from place to place. Here the overlap with Brexit becomes clear. The Economist has charted petition “turnout” by constituency with support for Remain in the EU referendum. The resulting graphic shows the stark correlation between the two sets of figures: it seems places that didn’t like Brexit don’t like Mr Trump. Proportions of petition signatories are highest in cosmopolitan and heavily Remain-voting cities like Brighton, Bristol and Cambridge, all with unusually large populations of university-educated, white-collar residents. And they are lowest in older, post-industrial, pro-Brexit bastions where skills are relatively low: Wolverhampton, Redcar and Doncaster, for example.

This tells us several things. First, geographical patterns of opposition to Mr Trump in America may well be reflected in other countries too. Second, the demographics of his support and support for Brexit speak to similarities between the two phenomena (their “pull up the drawbridge” character in particular). Third, Britain’s divide over Brexit was not a one-off: the political behaviour of cosmopolitan places and nativist ones remains quite distinct. And fourth: there are many thousands of British people, many of them living in or near the capital, who may be minded to line the streets, protest and generally cause disruption when Mr Trump comes to London. He should not expect a warm welcome. 

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Quartz: The secret taxonomy behind IKEA’s product names, from Billy to Poäng

Reading strange-sounding Swedish words is part of the joy of shopping at IKEA. Within the labyrinth of stylish flat pack furniture is a pänoply of ödd, åccented pröduct nämes, printed on hang tags, walls and banners. What most shoppers don’t know is that the names of those 12,000 products conform to a strict internal logic that offers a peek into Scandinavian culture.

At a Jan. 25 product showcase in New York City, IKEA designer Jon Karlsson explained that IKEA has a crack team of product namers, who assign names from a database of Swedish words. Bookcases are named after professional occupations (Expedit means shop keeper) or boys’ names (The bestselling Billy bookcase is named after IKEA employee Billy Likjedhal). Outdoor furniture is named after Scandinavian islands (Äpplarö an island in the Stockholm archipelago and Västerön is in Aaland). Rugs are named after cities and towns in Denmark or Sweden (Ådum, Stockholm, Silkeborg), while bed sheets, comforters and pillowcases are named after flowers and plants. (Häxört or circaea lutetian is an herb in the primrose family).

The rules for naming were devised by IKEA’s founder Ingvar Kamprad, who struggled with dyslexia and had trouble remembering the order of numbers in item codes. The name IKEA itself is acronym for Ingvar, Kamprad, Elmtaryd (his family’s farm) and Agunnaryd (the village in Småland where he grew up in).

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