The New York Review of Books: Iran: The Miracle That Wasn’t

Iran’s presidential election on May 19 will in all likelihood be won by the incumbent, the moderate cleric Hassan Rouhani. In 2015, two years after he came to power, Rouhani pulled the country back from the brink of confrontation with the West when he guided Iran toward the historic nuclear deal with the Obama administration. For Iran, the agreement—which it reached with the United States, the four other permanent members of the UN Security Council, and Germany—was supposed to bring its economy in from the cold after the bellicose and isolationist presidency of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. According to the terms of the deal, many tough international sanctions on Iran were lifted in exchange for Iran’s mothballing of some of its main nuclear facilities; at last, foreign cash was supposed to flow in and the country’s lucrative oil reserves to flow out. So a Rouhani victory this month might seem like fair reward.

But the economic miracle that was promised by the Rouhani government hasn’t happened, and the sense of anti-climax is palpable—a disillusionment that has broadened into a general contempt for politics, politicians, and promises that aren’t kept. Whether in Tehran or far-flung areas such as Khuzestan—an oil-rich province in the south that nonetheless suffers from chronic electricity and water outages, and whose inhabitants complain of neglect by the central government—there is widespread skepticism of the state’s determination to improve the lot of the ordinary Iranian. [...]

Few of Iran’s current ills can in fact be traced to the Rouhani administration, which, on the whole, has played a poor hand well. But the government is paying the price for raised expectations of an influx of foreign investment, which—notwithstanding President Donald Trump’s claims that Iran has been making hay since the lifting of sanctions—has signally failed to materialize. Investors fear that the new US administration and the US courts will continue to punish multinationals—including banks and oil companies—that have extensive dealings with Iran.

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Nautilus Magazine: How the Tension Between Mercy and Blame Shaped Our Legal Codes

In a 2008 study, Cushman found part of the reason why: Different factors matter to us when we’re judging, on the one hand, an act as permissible or not and when we’re deciding, on the other hand, what’s a suitable punishment and whether anyone is to blame. Moral judgements, he writes, are “overwhelmingly determined” by our understanding of what someone was thinking, whether their mental state was “culpable”; but our thoughts on punishment and blame have more to do with “causal responsibility,” or how someone’s actions led to some consequence, regardless of what they were thinking. These two distinct processes actually compete to determine our moral judgement, Cushman concludes: “The assignment of causal blame competitively blocks the assignment of mental culpability, while the silencing of the causal assessment allows the mental-state assessment to dominate.”

We also often take people’s actions as a reliable proxy of their mental states. In a 2015 paper, Neil Levy, Deputy Director of the Oxford Centre for Neuroethics, writes, “Because there is a sufficiently high correlation between causing and intending harm in a range of circumstances, we are disposed to take the causation of harm as a sufficient condition for some blame in those circumstances.” The problem here, he explains, is that the proxy may be misleading. Cushman says it resulted in unreasonable legal codes: “Legal codes tend to start focusing just on outcomes. There are instances where our laws reflect that more primitive response.” Hammurabi, the king of the city-state Babylon, for example, put forward lex talionis, an “eye for an eye.” But over time, Cushman says, legal codes “acquire a greater and greater focus on intent.” [...]

In one of their experiments, the researchers provided subjects different information explaining why Robert Alton Harris killed two teenage boys in 1978. One group received a historicist narrative describing a troubled and abused past, while another received fabricated information that Harris was born with a brain defect. (They told another group, the control, only that Harris killed the boys.) The researchers found that subjects who heard a historicist narrative assigned the least amount of blame because the narrative, the researchers argue, reduced subjects’ impression of how much control Harris had over his “self-formation.”

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The Atlantic: Imagining the Presence of Justice

Over the past several decades, America has seen a startling divergence between crime and punishment. While crime rates dropped steadily from the dramatic peaks of the 1990s, the nation’s incarceration rates continued just as steadily to grow. And so, despite containing only 5 percent of the world’s population, the United States came to hold a quarter of the world’s prisoners. 

We’ve covered this divergence extensively in the print and digital pages of The Atlantic, from Ta-Nehisi Coates’s landmark story on the rise of the carceral state and the devastation it wreaked on black families to Inimai Chettiar’s exploration of the many causes of the decline in crime. Among the findings that emerge most clearly from this robust, sad literature is that the factors driving both aspects of the divergence—the fall in crime, the increasing spread of punishment—are highly complex. Despite dawning awareness of the deep social and economic costs of mass incarceration, no one-size-fits-all solution exists to change this picture. Rolling back mass incarceration while protecting public safety will require a legion of efforts in thousands of prosecutors’ offices, police departments, parole boards, and legislative chambers. "What we have is not a system at all,” as Fordham University’s John Pfaff told The Atlantic's Matt Ford, "but a patchwork of competing bureaucracies with different constituencies, different incentives, who oftentimes might have similar political ideologies, but very different goals and very different pressures on them.”[...]

The powers-that-be had sought and won a court injunction to forbid the troublemakers from kneeling and sitting and walking, and yet the troublemakers kneeled and sat and walked. Some of them, including King, got thrown in jail. From his cell, King wrote the famous letter that would cleave the nation’s understanding of “law and order” right in half, arguing that the observance of an unjust law violates the moral order. "An individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law,” he wrote. He castigated "the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order' than to justice; who prefers a negative peace, which is the absence of tension, to a positive peace, which is the presence of justice."

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Politico: Labour’s last Scottish bastion crumbles

In Glasgow, and across Scotland, Labour is in steep decline. In the 2015 U.K. general election, the party lost all but one of its 41 Scottish seats to the Scottish National Party (SNP), including all seven in Glasgow. In 2016, the SNP won elections to the Scottish parliament for the third successive time, also claiming all the directly elected seats in Glasgow. And now Labour faces a double-drubbing — in local council elections this coming Thursday and again in Britain’s snap general election on June 8. [...]

The immediate — and most obvious — cause of Labour’s precipitous demise is the rise of Scottish nationalism. Three years ago, Glasgow voted Yes to independence despite Labour campaigning to maintain the three-centuries-old union with England and the rest of the United Kingdom. [...]

The independence campaign accelerated a shift from Labour to the SNP that began with Scottish devolution in the late 1990s but gathered pace after Tony Blair’s decision to go to war in Iraq. “Iraq was a big moment for me because I realized that what our government was telling us was a load of rubbish,” says Feargal Dalton, an Irish-born Royal Navy veteran elected as Glasgow SNP councillor in 2012. [...]

Recent polls have put support for the Scottish Tories as high as a third, raising the possibility of the Conservatives taking a number of the record 56 Scottish seats won by the SNP. Even in Glasgow, where the Tories hold only a single council seat, there are hopes of a breakthrough in a city identified as “the least Conservative place in Britain” based on previous election results.

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The Washington Post: France’s critical election happens in June, not on Sunday

France’s president appoints the premier, but once in office, the premier can be removed only by the assembly. This means the premier answers to the parliament, not the president. And the French constitution gives the premier, not the president, greater lawmaking powers. The president, for example, has no veto power, so the assembly can pass legislation by a bare majority even over the president’s objections. 

The French premier also has some tools that have no real parallel in pure presidential systems with their separation of powers. Article 49 of the French constitution allows the premier to propose legislation under a special rule — if the assembly takes no action, the proposal becomes law, but a negative vote from the assembly brings down the government. The maneuver is known as the guillotine. [...]

During cohabitation periods, the presidency diminished in stature, and the premier tended to exercise the main executive policymaking authority. For example, in the late 1980s, Chirac as premier engineered a major tax cut and privatized state-owned enterprises while the Socialist Mitterand could only watch.

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Motherboard: The First Space Colonies Might Be Illegal

Chief among them is the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which makes it illegal for countries to appropriate the moon or other celestial bodies. That treaty notoriously does not specifically mention private citizens, which has led to people like Dennis Hope, a Nevada-based “real estate agent” selling tracts of land on the moon and claiming the treaty doesn’t apply to him as a private citizen. So far, Hope hasn’t run into much legal trouble, but that’s because he’s basically selling novelty certificates to suckers (no offense). The whole paradigm changes when someone like Bigelow Airspace, who is currently working with NASA, decides to make a private space station or announces plans to put an inflatable on the moon.  [...]

But that doesn’t mean that commercial space is inherently doomed. Amending the space treaty isn’t going to be easy, but it also might not even be necessary. Sattler says that there is enough wiggle-room in the language of the treaty that spacefaring nations can sign memoranda of understanding with each other to allow specific commercial activities, a move that would be several orders of magnitude easier to finagle than a whole new international treaty.  [...]

Instead, the State Department or some other national body is going to have to strike a deal with other nations—and other nations that want to do this are going to have to strike a deal with us. Considering that Russia just announced plans to have moon bases by 2030 (and potentially plans to extract minerals there) and says it’s done working with the United States in space, that may be a negotiation that requires more than just a rubber stamp.

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Independent: These maps will change how you think about immigration

Earlier in the year, Jakub Marian, a Czech linguist, mathematician, and artist, made a series of maps on immigration, using UN data from 2010 to 2015.

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The Telegraph: Gluten-free diet should not be eaten by people who are not coeliac, say scientists

Around one per cent of Britons are genuinely gluten-intolerant, and face a string of debilitating symptoms including vomiting, nerve problems, anaemia, inflammation and an increased risk of coronary heart disease.

However some estimates put the proportion of adults adhering to gluten-free diets in the UK at more than 12 per cent, many believing that it is better for the heart.

Researchers at Harvard University looked at data from nearly 120,000 people over 26 years and found that going gluten-free did not cut the risk of heart disease.

And they warned that restricting dietary gluten may result in a low intake of whole grains, which are known to be beneficial for the heart. [...]

However a recent study by Harvard also suggested that ingesting only small amounts of gluten, or avoiding it altogether, increases the danger of diabetes by as much as 13 per cent.

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The New York Times: Angela Merkel Presses Vladimir Putin on Treatment of Gays and Jehovah’s Witnesses

Ms. Merkel said she had talked to Mr. Putin about her concerns on civil rights in Russia, including, among other issues, the persecution of gay men, a new ban on Jehovah’s Witnesses and the arrests of anti-Kremlin protesters. [...]

“I also spoke about the very negative report about what is happening to homosexuals in Chechnya and asked Mr. President to exert his influence to ensure that minorities’ rights are protected,” she added. He hosted her at his residence in Sochi, her first visit to Russia since May 2015. [...]

In Germany, the talks are important for the chancellor as she faces a difficult race for a fourth term in elections scheduled for Sept. 24. Gay rights protesters had engaged in a 48-hour vigil outside Ms. Merkel’s office, demanding that she bring up the issue of gay men in Chechnya. [...]

The official reason for the visit on Tuesday was the agenda of the Group of 20 summit meeting in July in Hamburg, Germany, where Ms. Merkel will be the host. It will probably be the first face-to-face encounter between Mr. Trump and Mr. Putin.

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