Politico: How Russia Became the Leader of the Global Christian Right

As Moscow swamped Ukraine’s peninsula, holding a ballot-by-bayonet referendum while local Crimean Tatars began disappearing, Buchanan clarified his query. The former speechwriter for Richard Nixon and intellectual flag-bearer of paleoconservatism—that authoritarian strain of thought linking both white nationalists and US President Donald Trump—wrote that Russian President Vladimir Putin was “entering a claim that Moscow is the Godly City of today[.]” Despite Putin’s rank kleptocracy, and the threat Moscow suddenly posed to stability throughout Europe, Buchanan blushed with praise for Putin’s policies, writing, “In the culture war for the future of mankind, Putin is planting Russia’s flag firmly on the side of traditional Christianity.” [...]

It’s no coincidence that Buchanan’s column, which outlined the players within the “cultural, social, moral war” between Russia and the “hedonistic” West, mentioned a semi-obscure group called the World Congress of Families. As Buchanan wrote, the WCF listed Russia’s emergence as a “Pro-Family Leader” as one of the “10 best trends” of 2013. Indeed, in order to outline how Russia challenged—and supplanted—the U.S. role as a clarion for Christian fundamentalists, you have to parse the WCF’s role, and the group’s attendant impact on Russian policy over the past few years. [...]

But the WCF isn’t a wholly American export; this isn’t simply some effort to push Christian extremism alongside baseball and apple pie for foreign consumption. Rather, the WCF is a product of joint Russian-American homophobic ingenuity. As Christopher Stroop, a postdoctoral scholar at the University of South Florida, recently detailed, the WCF was the brainchild of Anatoly Antonov and Viktor Medkov, a pair of sociology professors at Lomonosov Moscow State University, and Allan Carlson, WCF’s current president emeritus. The two Russians, according to Mother Jones, were casting about for a means to stave off their country’s looming “demographic winter”—the idea that progressive legislation, from birth control to LGBT rights, will precipitate civilizational collapse—and stumbled over Carlson’s prior work. Gathering in the apartment of a “Russian Orthodox mystic,” the trio outlined an organization that would help oversee a global Christian right—and restore Russia to a position abdicated during the atheistic Soviet period.

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Slate: Too Close for Comfort

Again, if you look at the courts, that’s one of the most interesting aspects of what Trump has been doing. He clearly has a contempt for the courts and the law, which echoes that of the Nazis very, very clearly. The courts and the law enforcement agencies did stand up to Hitler. A very famous example is, later in 1933, the trial of the people who Hitler had alleged had burned down the Reichstag earlier in the year. The courts acquitted all but one of them, thus completely undermining Hitler’s claim that the communists started the fire. Hitler then bypassed the courts. He set up a parallel system of justice, the so-called special courts and the people’s courts. In the end, the courts knuckled under, but it was quite a fight. [...]

Absolutely, yes. Many people thought that Hitler was a buffoon. He was a joke. He wasn’t taken seriously. Alternatively, they thought that he could calm down when he assumed the responsibilities of office. That was a very common belief about Hitler. There is a major difference in the sense that Trump speaks off the cuff in a very unguarded, spontaneous way. I think that’s true with his tweets. Hitler very carefully prepared all his speeches. They might seem spontaneous, but they were carefully prepared. [...]

One of the worrying things is the poisoning of political and public discourse through lies and insults. That’s very similar to the early 1930s in Germany. During the Irving-Lipstadt trial, when I was an expert witness, I had sacksful of obscene and abusive letters, but they were just between the writers and me. I just filed them away. Now all that stuff’s out and on the internet. Now they just go onto Twitter and websites and Facebook and so on. Our public discourse has been poisoned, and that’s very true of the kind of extremism, the lies, the insults, distortions you get in public discourse in Germany in the Weimar Republic.

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The New Yorker: Václav Havel's Lessons on How to Create a “Parallel Polis”

The recent political earthquakes have found us intellectually and emotionally underprepared, even helpless. None of our usual categories (left, right, liberal, conservative, progressive, reactionary) and perspectives (class, race, gender) seem able to explain how a compulsive liar and serial groper became the world’s most powerful man. Turning away from this unintelligible disaster, many seek enlightenment in literary and philosophical texts from the past, such as Hannah Arendt’s “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” George Orwell’s “1984,” and Sinclair Lewis’s “It Can’t Happen Here.” It may be more rewarding, however, to turn to Václav Havel: a writer and thinker who intimately experienced totalitarianism of the Orwellian kind, who believed that it had already happened in America, and who also offered a way to resist it. [...]

The problems before humankind, as Havel saw it, were far deeper than the opposition between socialism and capitalism, which were both “thoroughly ideological and often semantically confused categories [that] have long since been beside the point.” The Western system, though materially more successful, also crushed the human individual, inducing feelings of powerlessness, which—as Trump’s victory has shown—can turn politically toxic. In Havel’s analysis, politics in general had become too “machine-like” and unresponsive, degrading flesh-and-blood human beings into “statistical choruses of voters.” [...]

Since Western democracies as well as Communist dictatorships had suffered a devastating loss of the human scale, it mattered little that free markets were more efficient than Communist economies. For, Havel believed, “as long as our humanity remains defenseless, we will not be saved by any technical or organizational trick designed to produce better economic functioning.” Individual freedom and social cohesion were no less under threat in the depoliticized capitalist democracies of the West. “A person who has been seduced by the consumer value system,” he wrote, and who has “no sense of responsibility for anything higher than his own personal survival, is a demoralized person. The system depends on this demoralization, deepens it, is in fact a projection of it into society.”

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The New Yorker: A Photographer's View of a Battle to Destroy ISIS

This fall, I spent six weeks with the writer Luke Mogelson, following an élite Iraqi police unit called the Mosul swat team as its members fought to take back their city from the forces of the Islamic State. The story, which Luke wrote and I photographed, was called “The Avengers of Mosul”—the men were seeking vengeance not just for the threat to their country as a whole but also for the murders of family members by ISIS. Nearly every fighter had suffered this kind of loss, and many of them had family still living in peril in Mosul. The men welcomed us on their campaign, and shared with us their provisions, their blankets and mats, their seats in the trucks, and their stories.

The fight to liberate Mosul from isis is the biggest military operation in the country since the U.S. invasion of Iraq, in 2003. I wanted the photographs I made to take readers to the front of this war, and to introduce them in an intimate way to the people fighting it, to let them know the members of Mosul swat as individuals. When times were quiet or when they were kinetic, I tried to photograph the men as characters, not just subjects. If I did a good enough job, I hoped I would make their story our story.

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Vintage Everyday: 20 Fascinating Color Photographs of Odessa, Ukraine in the early 1930s

Branson DeCou was an American traveler and photographer who traveled around the world for 30 years.

In 1931, he visited Odessa and took some of black-and-white photographs, then he painted his photos.

Obviously, he was rather an artist than a photographer. Branson tried to reproduce original colors on his photos.

Check out these colorful photos of Odessa about this time.

CityLab: Venice Fights Back

As visitors at levels reaching critical mass pummel the paving stones, housing for local residents is disappearing. The central city’s population has fallen to 54,000. While the winter months can be calm and even delightful, as my colleague David Dudley recently discovered, the city has still become an economic monoculture. Shops and businesses that provide services for residents instead of tourists struggle to survive; years of political corruption and what some locals see as official indifference have also taken their toll. Then, of course, there’s the gravest threat of all: the rising sea itself. But while Venice may be facing brutal obstacles, its peril is energizing local residents who are fighting tooth and nail to keep the city alive. CityLab talked to some of those activists who are fighting to keep Venice afloat. [...]

It’s not just a case of alienation. Day-to-day life has become more complicated, says Di Giorgio. “When I was a kid, Venice was full of historic, local shops, but now there are loads of stores selling mass-produced junk to tourists. Small silly things, like finding someone to sew buttons on to a shirt that’s lost them, are becoming impossible.” [...]

Venice’s population isn’t falling simply because people are tired of the crush. Many people who would love to live here can’t do so because apartments are in extremely short supply. Competing with tourists for finite sleeping space has long made Venetian rents on the high side, but the rise of short-stay vacation lets is making things even more difficult. This is a common refrain throughout Europe of course, but while Airbnb may stand accused in Berlin or Barcelona of pushing up rents and making available apartments scarce, some activists fear that in Venice, they’re drying up the supply altogether. [...]

The demands that local activist groups are putting forward are numerous, but sensible. At the end of January, Gruppo 25 Aprile produced a barnstorming manifesto of sorts, laying out the actions they feel the city needs. Among many demands, they want a minimum two-year halt on permits to change residential units into tourist accommodation, as well as strict controls on tourist flows. They want to see funding to diversify local jobs, promoting such sectors as maritime research and traditional artisanry. They also want to use space in the civic hospital for a medical training center linked with the nearby University of Padua.

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Vintage Everyday: 50 Sexy Vintage Illustrations of Hilda, the Forgotten Plus-Size Pinup Girl from the 1950s

The typical 1950s pin-up girl was slim and conventionally-posed. But a recently-unearthed collection of images has revealed the less familiar Hilda, a plus-sized redhead who broke the mold with her plump figure and light-hearted demeanor.

Hilda, the creation of illustrator Duane Bryers (191-2012) and pin-up art's best kept secret. Voluptuous in all the right places, a little clumsy but not at all shy about her figure, Hilda was one of the only atypical plus-sized pin-up queens to grace the pages of American calendars from the 1950s up until the early 1980s, and achieved moderate notoriety in the 1960s.

Not only was Hilda one of the only plus-sized pin-up girls of her time, but she also displayed a fun, carefree and somewhat clumsy attitude, making her all the more charming.

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VICE: Dogs Will Like You Better if You're Nice to People, Study Says

Your dog may seem all sweet and innocent, like she loves you unconditionally—but it turns out she's secretly judging you all the time. According to a new study from researchers at Kyoto University, both dogs and monkeys track how humans behave with one another and show more fondness for people who help other people than they do for jerks.  [...]

Anderson believes that these animals are having an emotional response to anti-social behavior, similar to one that a human would have. "I think that in humans there may be this basic sensitivity towards antisocial behavior in others. Then through growing up, inculturation, and teaching, it develops into a full-blown sense of morality," he told the Scientific American. The dogs' and monkeys' reactions to unhelpful people might even be a way to correct behavior. If a monkey had a similar reaction to another monkey in the wild, banishing unhelpful behavior from the social system might correct that behavior and make the group better off. Even monkeys want friends, and to make friends they have to be nice. [...]

That doesn't mean they liked to be hugged by people, though. Dogs hate to be hugged.

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The Guardian: China U-turn is latest sign Trump may turn out to be a paper tiger

Is Donald Trump turning out to be a paper tiger? China’s rulers might be forgiven for thinking so after the US president performed a U-turn on Taiwan, but the shift did not come out of the blue.

Trump’s approach to a range of key international issues has softened significantly since he took office, suggesting a lurch towards conformity and away from disruption. His acceptance of the One China policy, under which Washington does not challenge Beijing’s claim to what it deems a breakaway province, was a stunning reversal, contradicting previous suggestions he would pursue closer ties with Taiwan. [...]

But there have been a string of unmistakeable, Taiwan-like foreign policy shifts on substance, reaching beyond mere questions of tone and style. One is Trump’s revised attitude to expanded Israeli settlements. Another is his pledge to move the US embassy to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv. Israel’s government, led by Benjamin Netanyahu, plainly believed Trump’s election meant a green light for unrestricted new building. But in an interview published on Friday by the Israel Hayom newspaper, Trump performed a volte-face, saying settlement construction was “not helpful” in advancing the moribund peace process. Trump also hedged on his embassy pledge. “It’s not an easy decision. It’s been discussed for so many years. No one wants to make this decision,” he said. [...]

Is Trump learning on the job? Or is he just a bully who backs off when he encounters resistance? Given his volatility and unpredictability, it is possible he could reverse himself again on key policies, reverting to his more radical and destabilising ideas. So far, the responsibilities of office, and the complexities of the issues, do seem to be weighing more heavily on Trump’s outlook. Other national leaders and more experienced advisers like Mattis are exerting influence. And Trump, in office, is coming up against a sobering reality that faces all American leaders sooner or later: the limits of presidential power.

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