Salon: “Moonlight” is the first LGBT movie to win best picture. Here’s why it matters

Do you remember where you were when “Brokeback Mountain” lost in the best picture category? It was in 2006, my first year in college, and I was at a crowded Oscar party. When Jack Nicholson read the contents of the envelope, he delivered the news that “Crash” had won with an implied shrug as if to say, “That’s Hollywood, Jake.” Everyone in the room with me was stunned, almost unable to move.[...]

The “Brokeback” upset wasn’t just unfair. It was a symbol of wretched homophobia (which continues to plague the film industry). Many members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, including Ernest Borgnine, refused to even watch Ang Lee’s mournful cowboy ballad. Tony Curtis opined that John Wayne, über-masculine patron saint of the Western genre, wouldn’t approve. [...]

The academy loves to give actors shiny trophies for “going gay” in a role, but seldom gives the stories they’re telling the ability to compete at the same level or even recognize queer actors who portray the stories of their own community. To date, 11 straight actors have won an Oscar for playing an LGBT character. But just two out queer people have ever even competed for an acting award at the ceremony: Jaye Davidson (“The Crying Game”) and Sir Ian McKellen (“Gods and Monsters”). Neither won. Actors like Jodie Foster as well as Anna Paquin, was was just 11 when she won the best supporting actress award, came out long after taking home Oscar gold. 

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The Guardian: 'We want action': call to return former Toledo synagogue to Jewish community

Although Santa María la Blanca has not been a synagogue since it was seized and turned into a church at the beginning of the 15th century, some feel the time has come for it to be returned to the Jewish community.

Isaac Querub, the president of Spain’s Federation of Jewish Communities, is calling on the archbishop of Toledo to demonstrate the church’s commitment to interfaith relations through the symbolic gesture of handing back the building.

More than five centuries after Ferdinand and Isabella ordered Spain’s Jews to convert or leave the country – and 42 years after Pope Paul VI repudiated antisemitism and called for “mutual understanding and respect” between Roman Catholics and Jews – Querub claims the Spanish church is lagging behind society when it comes to atoning for the mistakes of the past.[...]

And the archdiocese of Toledo shows few signs of contemplating any return of the building. In a three-page statement, it said the church’s ownership of the now-deconsecrated building was “perfectly clear” and that the government had restored Santa María la Blanca to the care of the archdiocese through a local parish in 1929.[...]

Spain’s Jewish population numbers fewer than 100,000, most of whom live in Madrid, Barcelona and Málaga. There was, Querub said, no Jewish community in Toledo today but that was not the point; the federation was not looking to reclaim Santa María la Blanca as a place of worship but to use it as museum that finally acknowledges its roots and uses its original name.

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Deutsche Welle: Botswana: Africa's model democracy?

Unlike other African countries, the southern African nation's road to independence was peaceful. There was no civil war, no shedding of blood. This peaceful atmosphere has remained until today.

"From the beginning we had free and fair elections in a multi-party democracy. Opposition parties were never forced to hide," Morima said in an interview with DW. He also praised the country's independent legal system.

"Several judges have pronounced verdicts against the government in sensitive cases and the government accepted this," he said.

For years Botswana has occupied a place in the top fifth of Transparency International's Anti-Corruption Index. It is currently ranked 35th, making it the highest-placed African country by far. In Botswana, a wealth of raw materials – which in other countries breeds corruption – seems to have had a positive effect. The revenue earned from diamond production has been put into improving the health service and diversifying the economy. [...]

Another cause of concern for observers is the treatment of the San ethnic group, often referred to as "bushmen," because of their way of life. They are increasingly being forced to abandon their traditions, said Linda Poppe, coordinator in Germany of the organization Survival International. Ten years ago, the Supreme Court passed a landmark verdict granting the San the right to live and to hunt on their traditional lands. However, said Poppe, the government persistently ignores this verdict.

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Quartz: Marine Le Pen’s plan to lure French women to the far right is working

The far right has a woman problem. A leading Dutch political scientist once famously described populist radical right parties in Europe as “genuine Mannerparteien” (men’s parties), given that their support base is overwhelmingly skewed toward men.

Austria’s recent presidential election, which began last year, is a prime example. The race, which pitted center-left candidate Alexander Van der Bellen against far right candidate Norbert Hofer, appeared to hinge on a wide gender gap. A sizable majority of women (69% of women aged 29 or under and 60% of women aged between 30 to 59, according to one poll) voted centre-left to beat out far right candidate Hofer. The same poll found 47% of men aged 29 or under and 42% of men aged 30 to 59 voted centre-left. [...]

Harteveld’s research suggested women were less likely to support a party that was stigmatized by others. “Using women’s rights and equality as a discourse surrounding FN’s nativist core message is likely to help,” he said. “For some, including many women, it reduces the signal that voting for FN is not at all acceptable.”

In breaking with her father’s extremist vision of the party, Le Pen has broken from anti-Semitic and homophobes views, while embracing historically left-wing causes, including gay and women’s rights. In doing so, the FN has become less menacing, according to an annual barometer (link in French) of the far-right party; French voters that saw the party as a “danger for democracy” dropped from a peak of 75% the late 1990s to 54% in 2015. 

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BBC: Why high-flying Singapore is scrapping grades

Reminiscent of the examinations for selecting mandarins in old China, the road to success in Singapore has always been focused on academic credentials, based on merit and allowing equal access for all.

 

This centralised system helped Singapore to create social cohesion, a unity of purpose among its schools and an ethos of hard work that many nations envy.

But the purpose of the education system has changed and Singapore in 2017 is no longer the fledgling state it was in 1965.[...]

The next update of the education system will have to ensure that Singapore can create a more equitable society, build a stronger social compact among its people while at the same time develop capabilities for the new digital economy.

Government policies are moving away from parents and students' unhealthy obsession with grades and entry to top schools and want to put more emphasis on the importance of values. 

Schools have been encouraged, especially for the early elementary years, to scrap standardised examinations and focus on the development of the whole child. [...]

An important segment of the new curriculum, at the primary level is family time, and how parents should play an important role in inculcating the right values in their children.

At the secondary and high school levels, "values in action" programmes lie at the core of educating young Singaporeans to be empathetic, socially responsible and active citizens in their community. 

For example, students work on projects that serve the elderly, reach out to migrant workers and read to latch-key children in day-care centres.

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Vox: The dark psychology of dehumanization, explained

In Kteily’s studies, participants — typically groups of mostly white Americans — are shown this (scientifically inaccurate) image of a human ancestor slowly learning how to stand on two legs and become fully human. And then they are told to rate members of different groups — such as Muslims, Americans, and Swedes — on how evolved they are on a scale of 0 to 100. 

Many people in these studies give members of other groups a perfect score, 100, fully human. But many others give others scores putting them closer to animals.[...]

“Dehumanization doesn’t only occur in wartime,” says Nick Haslam, a psychologist who is the world’s current leading expert on the topic. “It’s happening right here, right now. And every day, good people who don’t see themselves as being prejudiced bigots are nevertheless falling prey to it.”  [...]

From these experiments, and those that followed, it became clear that “it’s extremely easy to turn down someone’s ability to see someone else in their full humanity,” says Adam Waytz, a psychologist at Northwestern University who studies how people think about minds and collaborates with Kteily. Even children as young as 5 years old see the world in terms of us versus them.[...]

With the “Ascent of Man” tool, Kteily and collaborators Emile Bruneau, Adam Waytz, and Sarah Cotterill found that on average, Americans rate other Americans as being highly evolved, with an average score in the 90s. But disturbingly, many also rated Muslims, Mexican immigrants, and Arabs as less evolved. 

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Slate: Worse Than Tuskegee

The experiments were in the news because then–Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had issued a public apology to the government of Guatemala for violating its citizens’ human rights. Álvaro Colom, president of Guatemala when Clinton made reconciliation efforts, announced an investigation into the matter. Then-President Barack Obama asked the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues to commence a report investigating how these horrifying experiments came to be. The report has been completed, the apology long since issued. But for families like Frederico’s, compensation and treatment has still not come.

Clinton’s apology was spurred by the experiments’ discovery—made by Susan Reverby, a historian at Wellesley College, in 2003. Reverby had been researching the Tuskegee experiments, perhaps the most famous example of a breach of medical ethics in the United States. In those experiments, black men who had already contracted syphilis had been told they were being treated when they were actually receiving placebos as part of an experiment on the effectiveness of treatment. All the while, these men were being observed by doctors interested in learning how their bodies would degrade from the illness. When the reality of the experiment became clear, in the 1970s, it was immediately stopped and a major lawsuit was filed. [...]

Six months after Cutler arrived in Guatemala, he began his intentional exposure experiments within the Guatemalan army. He also thought he would try a way to get around the trickiness of infecting the men: prostitutes. In one early study, he infected prostitutes by moistening a cotton swab with pus carrying gonorrhea bacteria and inserting it into their genitals “with considerable vigor.” There is no evidence they were informed about the risk. All of them contracted the disease.

He then had them have sex with the men he wanted to study, first prisoners and then the army. (He had switched from prisoners to the army after realizing that despite being plied with free sex workers and alcohol, many prisoners believed they were growing weaker because of blood draws.) Army men were often lubricated with alcohol, too, before being set up with the prostitutes. The women were asked to have sex with multiple men in a row. In one case, one prostitute had sex with eight soldiers in a period of 71 minutes. The soldiers were never informed that this was part of a medical experiment, obliterating any possibility that consent was obtained and making the experiments ethically unsound.

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Al Jazeera: Jim Crow is alive and well in Israel

In Israel, Palestinian schoolchildren account for about 25 percent, or about 480,000 pupils, of the state's total student population. Palestinian and Jewish students, from elementary to high school, learn in separate institutions. [...]

In 1969, the state passed a law that gave statutory recognition to cultural and educational institutions and defined their aims as the development and fulfilment of Zionist goals in order to promote Jewish culture and education. 

In that light, in Israel, Palestinian children receive an education that is inferior in nearly every respect when compared with that for Jewish children.

Palestinian schools receive far less state funding than Jewish ones - three times less, according to official state data from 2004. In Jerusalem, it is half the funding. [...]

Under the Land Acquisition Law of 1953, the land of 349 Palestinian towns and villages, approximately 1,212 square kilometres, was transferred to the state to be used preferentially for the Jewish majority.

In 1953, the Knesset bestowed governmental authorities on the Jewish National Fund to purchase land exclusively for Jewish use. The state granted financial advantages, including tax relief, to facilitate such purchases.

Today, 12.5 percent of Israeli land is owned by the Fund, which bans the sale or lease of it to non-Jews under the admitted premise that it's a "danger" for non-Jews to own land in Israel. [...]

For example, more than 200 major rulings issued by the Supreme Court of Israel have been translated into English and published on the court's website along with the original Hebrew decisions. Although the majority of these pronouncements are relevant to Palestinian citizens of Israel, none has been translated into Arabic.

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Quartz: Officially, China’s Communist Party believes in atheism, but it makes an exception for two religions

China has for decades feared the power of organized religion. But religious suppression has intensified in recent years under the rule of president Xi Jinping—alongside a broader crackdown on civil society—according to a report (pdf) by Freedom House released yesterday (Feb. 28). For example, Chinese authorities have systematically been destroying churches and taking down crosses, while persecution against Muslims in the western Xinjiang region has become “very high.”

Buddhism and Taoism, however, are different. As “Asian religions,” the party is able to “harness China’s religious and cultural traditions to shore up [the party’s] legitimacy,” says Freedom House, and at the same time use them to “help contain” the spread of Christianity and Islam. The latter two religions are viewed as “so-called Western values” by the party, according to Freedom House.

 The preference for Taoism and Buddhism over other faiths fits with the larger crackdown by Xi against Western ideas in China. In education, the Chinese government is purging Western ideas like democracy and replacing them with Confucianism, which emphasizes obedience. Xi has also urged families to educate their children with imperatives like “love the party” while cracking down on international-style education. According to Freedom House, Buddhism and Taoism are in line with the party’s signature campaigns, the “China Dream” and the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.” Those two faiths are compatible with the government’s “Sinicization” drive, says the NGO.

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