Political Critique: Andrej Babiš: Change as Status Quo

Shortly after being elected, Donald Trump phoned three Eastern European politicians: the leader of the Polish PiS Jarosław Kaczyński, the Prime Minister of Hungary Viktor Orbán and the Czech President Miloš Zeman. The new American President has (correctly) realized that the Eastern edge of the European Union is a fertile ground for regimes that share his rhetoric, so he invited their representatives to Washington in mutual delight: these three leaders look up to Trump and finally they could boast international recognition, as until now, their anti-liberal views have not been exactly popular in the West. [...]

Ten years ago, the Hungarian philosopher Gáspár Miklós Tamás called the Central European mix of authoritarianism, hard asocial capitalism, and a formal take on democracy “post-fascism.” “Fascism is defined by denying the civic laws of certain groups of people, which is already happening,” said Tamás on Czech radio, supplying the example of criminalization of the homeless in Budapest. He stresses that the term post-fascism concerns the heading of society as a whole – individual politicians or parties need not be fascist or post-fascist in order to shift their society towards what Tamás considers post-fascism. After all, there is no perfectly satisfactory way to label the current wave of politics veering away from liberal values: the ultra-right tendencies (extreme nationalism, cultural conservatism and social darwinism) is just one of the many facets of this trend. And it is one of the least visible with Babiš. [...]

What does make Babiš similar to his authoritarian neighbors (or Trump) are his methods that require a center of power – primarily owning media or at least being able to influence it. In Poland, Kaczyński can lean on the Catholic Church and its influence, including sympathetic, conservative media like Radio Maryja or his own schools for future journalists. Kaczyński had access to this PiS-friendly support structure even before he won the elections and started subjugating state television. In Hungary, Orbán’s Fidész has created a structure of clientele networks of interconnecting state, party and business subjects. These shift the balance of power towards Orbán and decisively influence his media image. Babiš can rely on one of the biggest companies in the Czech Republic, which has – right before elections – also happened to eat up the biggest publishing house in the country. Babiš placed his people as the heads of the two biggest newspapers in the country – the professional loyalist Jaroslav Plesl at MF Dnes and his friend István Léko at People’s News. The first openly sympathizes with Trump, the second with Orbán.

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Katoikos: Mélenchon could be the French Bernie Sanders, and that’s not a good thing

We recently saw a revival of this in the US with the Bernie Sanders campaign. Although Sanders ended up endorsing Clinton, the fact that his campaign and particularly his ‘supporters’ had concentrated their fire on her using ammunition provided by Trump and Putin (most of it buckets of undifferentiated rubbish) and refused to sully their consciences by voting for someone ideologically tainted by neoliberalism meant that ultimately Sanders helped Trump win. In the UK we saw the example of ‘Lexit’: people on the left who voted to leave the EU because they thought a campaign led by far-right demagogues and sponsored by Rupert Murdoch and the Daily Mail might somehow help bringing about socialism in our lifetime. [...]

Nonetheless, I have no sympathy with those who voted for Le Pen. They know what she and her father have always stood for. Even if FN voters are unemployed or overworked, I cannot sympathize with their tendency to become suicidal as a result. They could have expressed their anger at their plight by voting for a candidate who at least nominally represented an alternative rather than one who (aside from being openly corrupt) denies France’s role in the Holocaust, scapegoats all Muslims as terrorists and would even stop all legal immigration. [...]

Anti-fascism has to be the absolute basis of what people who see themselves as on the left stand and fight for. Encouraging the illusion that there is no difference between a banker and a fascist is utterly irresponsible, puerile, infantile, juvenile and obscene. It’s like Slavoj Žižek at his most obtuse. Any mature adult with a basic understanding of history and political realities would vote for a neoliberal rather than a lifelong national socialist. As the French themselves say , ‘c’est du gâteau‘ – it’s a no-brainer. Just as in 2002, when the slogan was ‘it’s better to vote for a crook than a fascist’, the French left must swallow its pride and vote to stop Le Pen. [...]

The CGT is calling the next stage a contest between the plague (Macron) and cholera (Le Pen). Criticism of Macron is already focussing on his past as a banker for Rothschild, i.e. evoking and appealing to a deep-seated anti-semitic canard particularly prevalent on the internet among Putin, Trump and, bien sûr, Le Pen supporters.

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Slate: Will Le Pen Lose in 2017—and Win in 2022?

So you are quite right to ask whether this kind of ganging up on the National Front can only be good for it in the long term. I’d be surprised if she weren’t stronger in 2022. This sense of marginalization and grievance and being ganged up on is really, really quite helpful from the National Front’s point of view because they can say that the will of the people has been thwarted. It’s a tradition that she, or whoever succeeds her, can invoke by saying, “We have always been discriminated against. There’s always been a kind of conspiracy of the institutions and the establishment against us. We’re going to get clear of it, and we’re going to embody the will of the people.” [...]

Yeah, this is a candidate for regulated capitalism. He’s not the candidate of change, in my view. It seemed to us in Europe that Obama, whatever his shortcomings in his two administrations, was a huge symbolic figure. I’m not sure Macron will make it to that extent. I don’t think the symbolism in Macron will have the resonance of Obama’s symbolism. I think they may be very similar candidates. They’ll navigate the ship, and they’ll try to keep things going for as long as they can, and in 2022 Macron and his team will face a bigger challenge from Le Pen, just as Obama after two administrations got hit hard by Trump. [...]

That was a moment. It was also one which he possibly regretted, although he’s OK now. This was the nearest, in terms of internationalism, that Macron ever came to the Mélenchon campaign. Mélenchon is a genuine internationalist in his support of migrants, asylum seekers. He’s very conscious of the global south. Macron is more a market liberal and a proper social liberal at the same time. He would say, “Look, this is a globalized world. We have to let the history slide away if it’s inhibiting our relationships with other countries, and I feel that this whole past with Algeria needs to be cleared away.” He’s modern in that way. He doesn’t carry the weight of history in the way that old Marxists do or people whose politics descend from that tradition do. I think he’s free. He was punished, dragged across the coals for saying it, but actually it’s subsided. I think it was a strange and radical and controversial thing to say, and I admire him for it.

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Vox: A Cold War theory for why scientists and the government have become so estranged

One of the more compelling responses I’ve seen to this question can be found in this 2008 paper by W. Henry Lambright, a political scientist at the Maxwell School at Syracuse University. To simplify a bit, he argues that the glory days of US science were an artifact of the Cold War and the arms race against the Soviet Union. That era has long faded, but if scientists want to bring about a new golden age, they should study that history closely. Because it contains some valuable lessons about how politics drives public attitudes toward science — and not, as is often assumed, the other way around. [...]

Politicians, after all, have a very different job than scientists. At least ideally, scientists seek only to uncover objective truths about the world. They follow a strict methodology, explicitly meant to filter out values, biases, or preconceptions that might color their research. Politicians, by contrast, must grapple with conflicting values and interests. Adjudicating those disputes is the whole job, and most such disputes can’t be resolved by scientific facts alone. So, not surprisingly, the two communities don’t always see eye to eye. [...]

It’s important to be clear on what motivated this warmer relationship. It was not politicians embracing the principles of objective scientific inquiry. Instead, both Democrats and Republicans had rallied around a larger common purpose — defeating the Soviet Union — and realized they needed scientists’ help in order to achieve that goal. Politics drove science’s golden age, not the other way around.

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SciShow Psych: Do Personality Tests Mean Anything?

Quartz: An astrophysicist used NASA data to make an insanely detailed map of US racial diversity

Tomasz Stepinski used to be focused on Mars, mapping its craters algorithmically. Now the astrophysicist and mathematician is into his home planet, Earth. His latest project is an incredibly detailed map of the US that shows shifting racial diversity down to the neighborhood.

The free map tracks racial diversity spatio-temporally by laying census data from 1990 to 2010 over detailed grids from NASA satellite maps. The method was recently publicized in the journal Plos One, and on April 27, Stepinski will present his work at the annual Population Association of America conference in Chicago. [...]

The map—which allows users to zoom in and check out their neighborhoods—provides a previously unseen view of how the racial composition of neighborhoods is changing in the US. “People don’t realize that the United States is a diverse country but at the same time is still very segregated,” Stepinski says. [...]

Stepinski acknowledges that while the free flow of information is ideal, his map could also be used for less educational purposes. Arguably, it could enable racism, for example, by helping potential property owners seek demographic information that real estate agents are not legally allowed to provide.

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CityLab: The Case for Weed Reparations

For many decades, law enforcement has been directed to lock up anyone who tries to make a living in this field, especially if they are black. As criminal justice scholar Michelle Alexander wrote in a 2013 op-ed for The New York Times: “We’ve spent billions of dollars, arrested and caged millions of people, destroyed countless families and futures, and yet marijuana remains as popular and plentiful as ever. Why has this insanity continued for so long?”

Well, because racism. In Oakland, California, efforts are now underway to repair what the war on drugs destroyed through mass incarceration: In May 2016, the city amended its existing local medical marijuana regulation ordinance to provide more opportunities for people of color to open their own dispensaries. Most importantly, under the new equity permit program, people with prior convictions for weed-related crimes would have first dibs on getting a city license.

To flesh out the details for this program, the city commissioned a race and equity analysis report, to ensure that the new marijuana permitting process would benefit the right people. There is nothing more alarming in that report than the arrest data it relies upon for the program’s foundation: In 2015, African Americans made up 30 percent of the population but 77 percent of cannabis arrests, compared to 4 percent for whites.  

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CityLab: Mapping Global Air Pollution Down to the Neighborhood Level

A team of Yale University environmental researchers just released a map tool that shows concentrations of fine particulate matter (PM 2.5) across the whole world in pretty astounding detail: each pixel represents a 10-by-10 kilometer square. They also included visual representations of the world’s dirtiest power plants—a timely feature as the U.S. announces a sweeping new plan to reduce carbon emissions from power plants, especially coal-fired ones.

PM 2.5 inflicts critical damage on populations exposed to it in high concentrations, says map co-creator Alisa Zomer, manager of the Yale Environmental Performance Index. "PM 2.5 is invisible to the human eye,” she says. “But it penetrates into blood and organ tissues, and can lead to cardiovascular and respiratory diseases."

The map draws from satellite measurements to calculate average particulate matter. Users can also toggle on citywide PM 2.5 counts, which come from the WHO’s ambient (outdoor) air pollution in cities database from 2014. Power plants came from the database over at Carbon Monitoring for Action. The air pollution data represent averages, so Zomer notes that the best way to track particulate matter is to install more local sensors in at-risk neighborhoods. That can inform policies and political action to clean up the air.

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