America Magazine: The dawning of America's imperial ambitions

The debate that followed, Stephen Kinzer writes, was “arguably even more momentous than the debate over slavery.” Leading those who believed it was America’s destiny to acquire an empire were Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts and Theodore Roosevelt, a newly minted war hero. Intimate friends and political partners, the two advocated a global strategy of overseas markets secured by a powerful navy. Although America was at peace during the 1890s, Roosevelt wrote in 1895 that he “would welcome any war, for I think this country needs one.” Within three years, pushed by inflammatory reporting by William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal, the country was consumed by war fever against Spain. The “splendid little war,” lasting only ten weeks, fulfilled the expansionists’ dreams of new colonies.

Opposed to the acquisition of colonies was the Anti-Imperialist League, led by Andrew Carnegie, William Jennings Bryan, Mark Twain, Carl Schurz and two former presidents. The League believed that the United States should allow foreign peoples to govern themselves. Carnegie and Twain supported the war with Spain in the hope that it would liberate the Cuban people from colonial rule. Their hopes were soon dashed, however. In 1901, Congress adopted the Platt Amendment, which became the template by which the United States dominated countries that it did not formally annex, especially in Latin America. Instead of granting Cubans their independence outright, the legislation stipulated that the United States would “exercise the right to intervene for the preservation of Cuban independence.” The interventionists won other victories. In a political fight that lasted six years, they won every major vote in Congress, soundly defeated the League at the polls and dominated foreign policy for the rest of the 20th century. [...]

Denied independence, the Filipinos rebelled against the American military. A war that lasted 41 months killed more Filipinos than three and a half centuries of Spanish rule. Americans practiced water torture, killed civilians, burned villages and slaughtered farm animals to crush an insurgent rebellion. By the time Roosevelt won the presidency in his own right in 1904, the rebellion was crushed. [...]

The urge of the United States to intervene reflects a deep ambivalence, Kinzer believes. On the one hand, Americans believe that nations should decide their own destinies. On the other, Americans see themselves as the indispensable nation unique in its capacity to change the world for good. McKinley exemplifies this conflict. Initially opposed to war and acquisition of territory, he saw a vision, after prayer, that the United States must “uplift and civilize and Christianize” the Filipinos. Kinzer documents, however, how these best of intentions made things worse.

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Political Critique: There is No End to Decommunisation

But even these seemingly progressive voices who call for more moderate and better designed decommunisation, even those who are worried about the Institute of National Memory’s monopoly on historical truth, or encourage it to seek the approval of local communities’ over any renaming, share the belief in one very questionable claim: that decommunisation actually makes any sense. That it could change anything. [...]

Members of nationalist parties like saying that nothing will change in Ukraine until former Communist apparatchiks die out or are completely removed from the government. They say that the blame for all the problems of the Ukrainian state lies on the Soviet government and the “Soviet mentality,” which, supposedly, is completely lacking in the heads of the young generation. And anything that reminds us of the Soviet government only reproduces totalitarian discourse and prevents the country from developing. Therefore, the omnipresent Soviet symbols and toponyms hold the Ukrainian people in the trap of collectivisation and “communism,” which we, of course, have already seen before. This discourse seems to lead logically to the ‘wrong flag’ theory, according to which Ukraine will remain miserable until the yellow and the blue in its flag are swapped. [...]

But is that actually possible? The Communist Party of Ukraine, the Progressive Socialist Party of Ukraine and other parties which, due to some weird misunderstanding, are habitually called “the left wing” of Ukrainian politics, have catered to the needs of the parties of big capital for most of Ukraine’s independent history, giving them extra votes in the parliament or nominating a convenient candidate for the presidential election. Meanwhile, in the ideological dimension, they became infinitely remote not only from Marxist ideas, but even from the Soviet experience, which they have always used as the nostalgic cornerstone of their rhetoric. These parties have finally turned into strongholds of conservatism and Orthodox Christianity without any realistic claims or prospects. And the events of recent years have demonstrated this clearly.

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Terrain: Observations on Urban Form: Architecture + Iconography

In the place of traditional elaborations of structure or decorative naturalistic motifs, the designer chose instead to celebrate the wonders of an emerging technology and its distribution to the urban populace. Every piece of the carved decoration is derived from the technical parts of an early electrical power system. The pilasters are decorated with braided wires, the archivolts with banded cables, the capitals with transformers. Moldings are made with capacitors and transformers, and light bulbs replace traditional egg and dart motifs. [...]

The modernist dictum that form follows function assumed a close permanent fit between building form and a specific use. But expecting a building’s form to articulate use can be inappropriate in two ways. First, an urban building should continue to contribute to the city long after its initial client and program have moved on. And second, buildings with a “loose fit” to their program are more durable, sustainable, and responsive to the evolution of human uses. Furthermore, great public realms are often formed from simple buildings that contribute to a harmonious street wall.

Another dictum of modernism was the removal of explicit decoration on buildings unless it expressed structure. But in adopting that ideology we have lost the ability to craft an architecture that speaks overtly and explicitly about function—or more importantly—purpose through its detail. If one assumes that architectural honesty and integrity are linked to an explicit articulation of the building’s content, then the lifespan of the building is limited to the period of its original occupation. But when a building can tell us stories about its occupants and their role in society, those stories inform the passersby about the aspirations of a moment in the history of their city. The transitional architecture of the early modern era and specifically the Works Progress Administration are among the best American examples of using iconography in architectural detail. This pre-modern example in Stockholm is remarkable for its confident ingenuity and exuberance.

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Vintage Everyday: 40 interesting Vintage Photographs That Show Everyday Life in Russia in the Early 20th Century

During the 1900s and 1910s, bad living- and working-conditions, high taxes, and land hunger gave rise to more frequent strikes and agrarian disorders. These activities prompted the bourgeoisie of various nationalities in the Russian Empire to develop a host of different parties, both liberal and conservative. These interesting photographs were taken from between 1900s and 1910s.

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Vox: Milo Yiannopoulos resurrected a dangerous old myth about gay men and pedophilia

One of the reasons Yiannopoulos’s latest comments are so abhorrent is that he, as a gay man, is tapping into a pernicious myth that has been historically used to oppose the rights of the LGBTQ community: the idea that gay men are sexual deviants who approve of all sorts of abhorrent behavior, including pedophilia and child sexual abuse. Yiannopoulos, perhaps inadvertently, played into this myth by arguing that there’s an upside to sexual molestation. [...]

The myth of a link between homosexuality and pedophilia is far from new. Retired University of California Davis professor Gregory Herek explained: “Back in 1977, when Anita Bryant campaigned successfully to repeal a Dade County (FL) ordinance prohibiting anti-gay discrimination, she named her organization ‘Save Our Children,’ and warned that ‘a particularly deviant-minded [gay] teacher could sexually molest children.’” [...]

Before trans people faced this myth, other minority groups were attacked on the basis of bathrooms as well. Fears of bathroom attacks were used to defend segregation — by invoking fears that black men would attack white women in bathrooms. And fears of gay men in bathrooms were constantly perpetuated to demonize gay people, such as the 1961 anti-gay PSA “Boys Beware” that warned that “public restrooms can often be a hangout for the homosexual.”

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Al Jazeera: State of the media in Zuma's South Africa

In a way, the political sideshow that now accompanies the annual state of the nation address is of the president's own making: Zuma moved the speech from its traditional Friday morning slot to 7pm - taking South African politics into prime time - in search of larger TV audiences.

However the opposition wants those audiences, too - and the EFF's penchant for co-opting the event, upstaging the president with its parliamentary antics, has now been met with an unprecedented show of security that affects the coverage in and around the houses of parliament.

"We're not used to that. Parliament has always been a parliament of the people from the era of Nelson Mandela to the presidents who came after him. And ... now the use of the soldiers - it's very intimidating when you see people with big guns ... walking around the red carpet. It's very difficult to do your job in a case like that where you can't walk around freely," says Sam Mkokeli, chairman of the South African National Editors' Forum (SANEF). [...]

Journalists there say that, during the 2014 elections, they were told that 70 percent of their coverage of the government had to be positive.

Two years later, during local elections, the use of any video of violent protests was reportedly banned - on the orders of executives loyal to Zuma's ruling African National Congress.

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Bloomberg: A Le Pen Win Would Be Dangerous for Putin and Russia’s Economy

Far-right French presidential contender Marine Le Pen’s party has received financing from a Russian bank and gets positive coverage in Russia’s state-run media. Does that mean the Kremlin actually wants to see her elected? Not necessarily: Le Pen’s promise to take France out of the euro zone — which could break up the European single currency — might well devastate Russia’s economy and financial stability. [...]

The 28-member European Union remains by far Russia’s largest commercial partner despite a contraction in trade in recent years after the longest Russian recession in two decades and sanctions imposed because of the Ukraine conflict. Russia’s exports to the euro zone ($91 billion) are almost four times what it sells to China and nearly 11 times the amount of Russian imports in the U.S. [...]

Russia appears most concerned to shore up support for former Prime Minister Francois Fillon, a pro-Kremlin figure who's been hit by a family finance scandal. His presidential rival Emmanuel Macron this week accused Russia of meddling in the French election by putting out fake news through its media outlets.

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FiveThirtyEight: Why Polls Differ On Trump’s Popularity

But beyond that, there’s a lot of seeming disagreement in the polls about exactly how unpopular Trump is — and even whether his disapproval rating exceeds his approval rating at all. Moreover, the differences between Trump’s best surveys and his worst ones span a critical range. Take one group of polls, and the country looks about evenly divided — a lot like it did during the 2016 election, when Trump narrowly lost the popular vote but nonetheless won the Electoral College. Take another group, and his electoral fortunes look much bleaker, with Trump already unpopular enough that the House of Representatives could be in play despite Republicans’ advantages from gerrymandering and the geographic distribution of their voters. [...]

Trump has a fairly poor 43 percent approval rating — and a 51 percent disapproval rating — among polls of all American adults, but he improves to a 47 percent approval rating and a 49 percent disapproval rating among polls that survey registered voters or the narrower group of likely voters. That’s a reasonably big difference. So which polls should you use? [...]

One theory about this is that the online and automated polls reveal “shy” or “hidden” Trump support, with people more willing to reveal their true feelings about the “politically incorrect” Trump in online or automated polls where they have greater anonymity. It’s a plausible theory, but I’m not sure it’s really supported by the evidence. Trump didn’t overperform his polls overall during the Republican primaries, and while he did so in the general election, the overperformance was concentrated among white voters without college degrees, not the group you’d expect if the “shy Trump” theory is right.

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The Guardian: There are reasons to be cheerful... LGBTI rights gains in unlikely countries

Nauru and Belize decriminalised homosexuality and the Seychelles parliament passed a bill ending the ban on same-sex relations. In India, the supreme court said it will review its 2013 judgement that upheld the colonial-era law criminalising “carnal intercourse against the order of nature”.

More reasons to be cheerful: Greece, Slovenia and Bosnia-Herzegovina enacted new statutes to protect sexual and gender minorities from discrimination. Same-sex marriage was legalised in Colombia, Gibraltar, Isle of Man, Guernsey and the British Antarctic Territory. Italy became the 27th country in Europe to officially recognise same-sex couples, approving the law on civil unions. Similar civil unions were agreed by lawmakers in the Caribbean island of Aruba.

Meanwhile, a cross-party coalition of Guatemalan politicians began pushing for marriage equality and Taiwan’s legislature passed the first draft of a bill for same-sex marriage. Voices have also been raised for equal marriage in Cuba, Nepal and Vietnam. [...]

Both in countries that do and don’t criminalise same-sex behaviour, hundreds of millions of LGBTI people are at risk of “honour” killing by family members, mob violence and discrimination in housing, employment, healthcare, education and the provision of goods and services – much of it orchestrated by religious zealots and opportunistic politicians, as witnessed in Russia and Nigeria.

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