Political Critique: Poland: Sleepwalking In the EU

But when looking at his actions abroad, one can easily have quite an opposite impression. On the international level, Kaczyński and his party almost without any exception ally with unreliable partners, while they simultaneously disregard potentially natural cohorts. This attitude prompts resentment from all sides. Furthermore, the skillfulness that characterizes Law and Justice (PiS) in domestic politics is absent in the external context – seeing its leaders act either strangely or vulgarly. As many commentators claim, the problem here is two fold. Kaczyński neither likes nor understands Europe. Much indicates that he is not intending to change that attitude in the future, which creates rather a greater problem for the European political mainstream as it would mean that one of the EU largest countries will simply continue to turn its back on the Community. [...]

It is quite possible that Polish government will not have to block or distance itself from anything, as much points to the fact that the leading EU Member States will detach themselves from Poland. This is what was read in the fact that Poland was not invited to join Germany, France, Italy and Spain at the recent meeting organized in Versaille. But what may come as a surprise is that the Polish government has an actual coherent plan regarding what to do in the next months. It entails building local alliances against Germany and lining up with all who will desire “Europe of two speeds”. The volunteers joining them, however, may be not too many, as the strategy is absolutely surrealistic – it is the same establishment that leans towards closer integration and wants to resist populism, and that Kaczyński himself holds in contempt assuming it responsible for the destruction of the EU. He said it directly himself: it is Merkel and Tusk, who devastate the Union. In parallel, the fixed ideas presented by Poland – such as enhancing the weight of the national votes and weakening the position of the European Commission by the occasion of the next Treaty reform can only take place if there is a broad consensus behind them. This is, in essence, the very same consensus that Poland rejects. In that context even the most obvious mechanisms – that politicians of EPP would support an EPP candidate – are taken by Kaczyński as effects of conspiring, international plotting and dirty lobbyism. Hereafter Poland becomes a hostage of a certain paradox, which is a nationalistic diplomacy. At the same time it insists that each country should be entitled to ruthlessly defend its respective interests, and it is disenchanted and furious, when it discovers when others do precisely that.

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Quartz: Conscious consumerism is a lie. Here’s a better way to help save the world

Making series of small, ethical purchasing decisions while ignoring the structural incentives for companies’ unsustainable business models won’t change the world as quickly as we want. It just makes us feel better about ourselves. Case in point: A 2012 study compared footprints of “green” consumers who try to make eco-friendly choices to the footprints of regular consumers. And they found no meaningful difference between the two. [...]

The majority of our food and consumer products come wrapped in plastics that aren’t recyclable. Food that is free of pesticides is more expensive. We’re working ever-longer hours, which leaves little time for sitting down to home-cooked meals, much less sewing, mending, and fixing our possessions. Most of those clothes have been designed in the first place to be obsolete after a year or two, just so that you’ll buy more. And only 2% of that clothing is made in the US—and when it is, it’s 20% more expensive. Palm oil, an ingredient that is the world’s leading cause of rainforest destruction and carbon emissions, is in half of our packaged food products, hidden behind dozens of different names. These are just a few examples of how the government and businesses collude to nudge you into blindly destroying the environment on a regular basis, whether you choose to buy organic milk or not. [...]

Beyond making big lifestyle decisions such as choosing to live in a dense urban area with public transportation, cutting red meat out of your diet, and having fewer children (or none at all), there are diminishing returns to the energy you put into avoiding plastic or making sure your old AAs end up in the appropriate receptacle. Globally, we’re projected to spend $9.32 billion in 2017 on green cleaning products. If we had directed even a third of that pot of money (the typical markup on green cleaning products) toward lobbying our governments to ban the toxic chemicals we’re so afraid of, we might have made a lot more progress by now.

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The Atlantic: When Nuns Tried to Kickstart India's First Transgender School

The six council members approved the lease, with the blessing of the local bishop. It was an important endorsement in Kerala, where the Church is a powerful social and political arbiter in a state that is nearly 20 percent Catholic. The Church has no official doctrine regarding transgender identity, but most Catholic churches (especially in the United States) have distanced themselves from the issue. However, the Carmelites are Catholic nuns whose mission revolves around three elements: prayer, community, and service. For Sister Pavithra and her convent’s council, helping the trans community through education seemed like a natural blend of the latter two elements.

When the school was inaugurated on December 30, 2016, media organizations reported that Sahaj had 10 students and intended to offer accredited online classes through the National Institute of Open Schooling as well as vocational training to trans dropouts in their 20s and 30s. It was the first school of its kind in India, and the first time the Catholic Church had gotten involved in such a capacity with the issue of transgender education.

But three months later, Sahaj has no teachers, no accreditation, and no students. Mallika never got around to hiring teachers, and the few students who briefly attended left, partly due to a lack of direction for the program. Sahaj is now functioning only as a shelter: The dormitory and kitchen are used by four trans people training to become workers for the forthcoming metro system. The school isn’t suffering because of a lack of need in this conservative South Indian state. Instead, various factors have impeded the school’s success: social stigma, weak direction, and a failure to anticipate the needs of the larger trans community. [...]

Faisal believes that the social stigma trans people face in Kerala is partly due to a lack of a hijra community in the state. Hijras are transgender, intersex, and transsexual people who live within a strict hierarchical community, and are found mostly in neighboring Tamil Nadu and further north in states like Maharashtra and Gujarat. While hijras are rarely integrated into society, they are often viewed as divine and are a known entity that does not arouse the same suspicion as trans people in Kerala. (Hinduism has a long tradition of embracing gender fluidity; in myths and religious texts, a god may appear as male and female at different times or even at the same time, and human beings can undergo sex changes through curses or blessings.)

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The Atlantic: What Russia's Latest Protests Mean for Putin

But Sunday’s protest was different. Unlike the rallies in Nemtsov’s memory or even the 2011-2012 protests, this one did not have a permit from the Moscow city authorities. Over the weekend, the mayor’s office warned people that protestors alone would bear the responsibility for any consequences of attending what they deemed an illegal demonstration. But despite those warnings and despite the fresh memory of some three dozen people being charged—many of whom did prison time—for a protest in May 2012 that turned violent, thousands came out in Moscow. The police estimated attendance at 8,000, but given officials’ predilection for artificially deflating the numbers of those gathered at such events to make them seem less of a threat, the number could easily have been double that. People clogged the length of Tverskaya Street, one of the city’s main drags. The iconic Pushkin Square was packed, and people clung to the lampposts, chanting “Russia will be free!” [...]

What was most remarkable, though, was that the protests happened not just in protest-loving Moscow, but in over 90 cities across the country. People came out by the hundreds in Vladivostok, in the Far East; in Siberian Tomsk; in Krasnodar, in the south; and in Kaliningrad, a tiny Russian enclave in the middle of Poland. They came out in cities like Chelyabinsk, in the Ural Mountains; southern Samara; and in Novosibirsk. (Meduza, an independent Russian news outlet, has a compelling photo essay here.) This is significant because “the regions,” as everything outside of Moscow and St. Petersburg is known, are significantly more conservative and Putin-friendly than the two biggest cities. They are much poorer, much less developed, and people living there are often more dependent on the state to make their living. There is almost no independent media there, except what can be found online, and information critical of the government can be hard to come by. Going against the authorities can result in serious repercussions, both economically and in terms of personal safety, sometimes more so than in Moscow, where people have more money, political connections, and the savviness to solve their problems. [...]

First and foremost, it was a tremendous show of power by Navalny, who has declared that he is running for president of Russia in 2018. He is a longshot at best, and the Kremlin may not even allow him on the ballot. Yet he showed he has real political power and that tens of thousands of people across the country see him as a legitimate leader, despite the Kremlin’s assiduous work to marginalize him by keeping him off government-controlled television—still Russians’ main source of news—and inventing a half-dozen criminal cases against him.

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Broadly: 'We Sell a Lot of Dicks': Inside a Factory Making Male Sex Dolls for Women

In 2016, Sinthetics wants to further revolutionize sex with manikins marketed towards women. The Kellers first started designing male manikins for gay customers, according to Bronwen. "The gay market felt underrepresented," she explains. Then a woman purchased a doll, and Sinthetics decided to produce silicone men specifically for women. Now they'll see if women can surpass the stigmas surrounding sex dolls. They see the risk as worth it. But they're also creating the manikins for more personal reasons: "This is a passion project," Bronwen says.

Matt designs each manikin based on clients' custom orders. Like most people in sex industries, Matt did not originally intend to go into this specific career path. He went to school for industrial design. For nearly a decade, he worked in the "Halloween industry," designing life-size scary decorations, which he loved doing. "We started out high-end," Matt explains. Then, according to him, his employer began outsourcing to China and selling to Wal-Mart. Matt's handmade art had been turned into mass-produced pieces of shit, so he quit. [...]

The couple has altered their product for women. Matt builds gay customers silicone men that weigh 108 pounds and stand at 5'9", but Bronwen says female buyers need smaller dolls. "Imagine a very heavy man you have to carry and clean," she says. "A crushing stigma [surrounds sex dolls]... Nobody is gonna call her girlfriend and ask her to help her move a doll."

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The Telegraph: Canada expected to legalise cannabis by July 2018

Prime minister Justin Trudeau's Liberal government will introduce legislation to legalise recreational marijuana the week of April 10th and it should become law by July next year, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity due to lack of authorisation to discuss the upcoming legislation.

Mr Trudeau has long promised to legalise recreational pot use and sales. Canada would be the largest developed country to end a nationwide prohibition of recreational marijuana. In the US, voters in California, Massachusetts, Maine and Nevada voted last year to approve the use of recreational marijuana, joining Colorado, Washington, Oregon and Alaska. Uruguay in South America is the only nation to legalise recreational pot. [...]

The task force recommended adults be allowed to carry up to 30 grams of pot for recreational purpose and grow up to four plants. It also recommended that higher-potency pot be taxed at a higher rate than weaker strains. It also said recreational marijuana should not be sold in the same location as alcohol or tobacco. Under the task force proposals, alcohol-free cannabis lounges would be allowed.

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The Conversation: New research shows immigration has only a minor effect on wages

Economic arguments against immigration often take two forms – immigrants either suppress the wages of workers, or immigration creates higher unemployment. But our research shows that the impact of immigration on the labour market in Australia over the last 15 years is negligible. [...]

Past attempts at gauging the impact of immigration on the labour market compared geographical areas with different percentages of immigrants. The problem with this approach is that it assumes that geographic labour markets are fixed and distinct. It rules out the selectiveness of migrants and whether incumbents react to new migrants by moving to other neighbourhoods.

To get around this we used an approach pioneered by George Borjas, who found that immigration significantly impacted low-skill US workers who were at the same skill level as new immigrants. We looked at changes in immigration rates into different skill groups in Australia to identify the effects of immigration on the earnings and employment prospects of Australian workers. [...]

In our study we looked at six outcomes – annual earnings, weekly earnings, wage rates, hours worked, participation rate and unemployment. We explored 114 different possibilities in all. We estimated the model for both HILDA and the SIH data across the whole population and separately by male and female. We restricted it to young people and broadened our definition of skill groups. We also controlled for overall macroeconomic conditions.

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JSTOR Daily: The Recipe for Secession: What Makes Nations Leave

Political Sociologist Michael Hechter has explored what the ingredients to a true secession are. His conclusion: secession doesn’t come from one event, but is borne of economic disparities, identity crises, legislative failure, and bad blood.

Different economic interests: In theory, nations work for the betterment of their populations. But if different regions feel that their contributions outweigh their benefits (as was the popular sentiment in Brexit, substantiated or not), calls for separation naturally follow.

Cultural identity: As with any major decision, there is an emotional component. A nation’s identity isn’t purely (or even necessarily mostly) tied to economic shared interests. Rather, it’s a shared sense of affinity and similarity. There are numerous ways a shared cultural identity can form—and numerous ways it can fracture. [...]

A failure to negotiate an alternative. Unless military action is considered an option, seceding states must come to an agreement with their parent state. And as Hechter notes, “If there is one constant in history apart from the universality of death and taxes, it is the reluctance of states to part with territory.” Unless the seceding territory is a clear liability, there are multiple ways—legislative, economic, political—to appease a disgruntled population.

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Independent: Clever teenagers twice as likely to smoke cannabis, study finds

Students who are high academic achievers at the age of 11 are also more likely to drink alcohol as teenagers, but less likely to smoke tobacco cigarettes, a nine-year study by University College London found.

Analysing data for 6,059 young people from state-funded and fee-paying schools in England, experts deemed bright children less likely to smoke cigarettes as teenagers but more likely to smoke cannabis.

This is thought to be a result of middle-class parents being more likely to warn their children of the dangers of tobacco and smoking traditional cigarettes. [...]

“These associations persist into early adulthood, providing evidence against the hypothesis that high academic ability is associated with temporary ‘experimentation’ with substance use.”

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