Political Critique: Nowadays, Everyone Is a Potential Target in Ukraine

On 20 April, activist Stas Serhijenko was brutally attacked and stabbed near his home in Kiev. He suffered serious wounds and was taken to hospital. This incident was only one of a series of violent attacks on left-wing activists and institutions. But as Aliona Liasheva explains, it is not only those associated with the left who have become the victims of attacks, anyone who is seen as challenging mainstream pro-Ukrainian and pro-war views can easily become subject to repressions of different sorts. [...]

[Aliona Liasheva] It’s hard to say for sure whether these incidents are connected, but it’s clear that part of the far right are going wild right now. These are people who did not make it either into mainstream politics or other state structures, such as the police. They are not controlled by any institution and I can only hope the attacks are not systematically organized. The difficulty in assessing the situation is also a result of these attacks often being “covered” by the police. [...]

AL: I completely agree that there are a whole host of different groups and interests involved. The situation certainly changed after Maidan. In the past three years, we have witnessed an increase in far-right violence, though of course it’s not something completely new. These far-right groups existed already before Maidan and were also financed by oligarchs in certain cases. They were also very much associated with the Dynamo Kyiv football team. During the Maidan, these groups were instrumentalized by the elites, part of them are now in the volunteer battalions of the army. Others, especially leading figures, received positions in the police and secret police institutions. The head of the police has far-right connections. Those who were beating LGBT people on the streets are now sitting in offices. And those who didn’t get a position in the army or security services are now out and about and ready to spark violence at any point.

read the article 

The Atlantic: The Parts of America Most Susceptible to Automation

A new analysis suggests that the places that are going to be hardest-hit by automation in the coming decades are in fact outside of the Rust Belt. It predicts that areas with high concentrations of jobs in food preparation, office or administrative support, and/or sales will be most affected—places such as Las Vegas and the Riverside-San Bernardino area may be the most vulnerable to automation in upcoming years, with 65 percent of jobs in Las Vegas and 63 percent of jobs in Riverside predicted to be automatable by 2025. Other areas especially vulnerable to automation are El Paso, Orlando, and Louisville. [...]

Moenius and colleagues used a widely cited 2013 study from Oxford University predicting which of roughly 700 common jobs are most susceptible to automation, and then mapped out which metropolitan areas have a high share of those jobs. That study, by the economists Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A. Osborne, suggested that 47 percent of total U.S. employment is at risk of automation over the next decade or two; they found that telemarketers, insurance underwriters and appraisers, tax preparers, and cashiers were some of the most likely to see their jobs threatened by automation, while the livelihoods of mental-health and substance-abuse social workers, oral surgeons, choreographers, and physicians were more protected. [...]

What’s particularly striking about the new Redlands report is that the regions that are susceptible to automation are those that already have a high share of low-wage jobs. Previously, automation had hurt middle-class jobs such as those in manufacturing. Now, it’s coming for the lower-income jobs. When those jobs disappear, an entire group of less-educated workers who already weren’t making very much money will be out of work. Moenius worries about the possibility of entire regions in which low earners are competing for increasingly scarce jobs. “I wasn’t in LA when the riots happened, but are we worried about this from a social perspective?” he said. “Not for tomorrow, but for 10 years from now? It’s quite frankly frightening.”

read the article 

CityLab: America's State Capitols: An Architectural Explainer

States selected the finest architects of their day to design their capitols about as often as they selected their finest citizens to be governors—not very frequently. The vast majority of these buildings were the work of architects of lesser-to-vanishing renown. There are a few works by eminent American architects, one by McKim Mead and White, two by Cass Gilbert, and one partially to Henry Hobson Richardson’s credit. And yet the first three of those are obvious experiments on familiar models, all looking far more like the national and state peers than anything else. [...]

Skyscrapers and state capitols are America’s unique contribution to monumental architecture. The skyscraper is a product of function and structure; the state capitol owes its special character to symbolism. To most Americans today architectural symbolism means church design—the steeple and the pointed Gothic arch. Yet far more significant to the United States are earlier, Classically inspired architectural features, first built by colonial legislatures long before the opening guns of the Revolution. Their creators were legislators who saw in the dramatic possibilities of architecture a means of expressing the spirit of liberty. The vision was an accurate one: Those architectural features developed into symbols for the young nation, eventually taking on an abstract authority in the architecture of state capitols. Since the second decade of the nineteenth century the symbols have dominated every legislative building erected in the United States. Their story through two centuries of American building is a chronicle more continuous than any other, even that of the church and private house. [...]

Competitions limited to in-state architects were fairly common: Pennsylvania’s capitol, designed by a Philadelphia firm, would seem to vindicate nativist approaches, others may not. Nationally-prominent architects entered other competitions—and often lost to competitors savvier in cultivating design commissions and local taste. As Hitchcock wrote, “Architects with less training learned more readily that radical architectural concoctions must be made palatable with familiar spices.”

read the article 

Jacobin Magazine: The Uses and Abuses of Antisemitism

[Rebecca Vilkomerson] My own Jewish education was very much Holocaust-Israel, Holocaust-Israel. Jewishness as an identity was drilled into us as a legacy of oppression and discrimination, with statehood as the answer. With the establishment of Israel seen as the endpoint of that legacy, it created a reality where criticism of the state was assumed to be a criticism of Jewish people. You need to have tools with how to grapple with that, and unlearn that stuff, and have a much richer conversation. [...]

[Rabbi Brant Rosen] The Israeli government has been quick to pounce on every antisemitic attack in Europe to promote Jewish immigration to Israel, but we’ve heard nothing but crickets in response to the uptick of antisemitic hate acts in the United States since Trump’s election. The reason is obvious: Israel is eager to promote the narrative that “radical Islam” is the most serious antisemitic threat in the world. They’ve been far less eager to protest the rise of the radical right in Europe, and now in the United States, because Israel’s own political culture is increasingly dominated by the far right. [...]

[Rebecca Vilkomerson] There was a very deliberate schema set out by certain Jewish organizations to define Israel as “the Jew of the world.” The idea is that Israel is a person, and in the same way that Jews are discriminated against by non-Jews, Israel as the Jewish state is discriminated against by non-Jewish countries around the world. Therefore, every criticism of Israel is a reflection of antisemitism. [...]

[Rebecca Vilkomerson] Some of the bigger Jewish organizations, that have a lot of resources, have specifically used recent acts of antisemitism as a way to suppress conversation on this issue. Most recently was the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act — a federal bill intended to codify criticism of Israel as antisemitic, which was fast-tracked through the Senate. The depth of the hypocrisy behind that bill was so clear when it was brought out right as Steve Bannon became a key adviser to Trump, and all of a sudden we were seeing a rise of antisemitic incidents and no response from the Trump administration.

read the article 

Vintage Everyday: Before Hillary Clinton, There Was Victoria Woodhull: The Strange Tale of the First Woman To Run For U.S President in 1872

Woodhull was a provocative personality. She was a feminist, supporter of the suffrage movement and labour rights and a proponent of "free love." She often spoke about sex on the lecture circuit, saying, among other things, that women should have the right to escape bad marriages and control their own bodies. Even more shocking to Victorian sensibilities, she espoused free love. “I want the love of you all, promiscuously,” she once declared. “It makes no difference who or what you are, old or young, black or white, pagan, Jew, or Christian, I want to love you all and be loved by you all, and I mean to have your love.” Woodhull practiced what she preached, at one point living with her ex-husband, her husband and her lover in the same apartment. Yet she also knew when to hold back her amorous affections. “Let women issue a declaration of independence sexually, and absolutely refuse to cohabit with men until they are acknowledged as equals in everything, and the victory would be won in a single week,” she wrote. [...]

Early in 1871, she was invited to address the House of Representatives judiciary committee. She gave a convincing presentation that the recently adopted 14th and 15th Amendments to protect the civil and suffrage rights of African-Americans could be extended so women could be granted the right to vote. Though that was not to happen for close to 50 years, she attracted sufficient attention from the newly formed National Woman Suffrage Association. A year-and-half later at the NWSA’s convention in New York, the delegates formed the Equal Rights Party and selected Woodhull as their presidential candidate. [...]

Like Clinton, Woodhull was insulted by her enemies in the press as a "witch" and portrayed in political cartoons as "Mrs. Satan." In 1872, she was 34 and hence one year shy of the 35-year-old constitutional age requirement to be U.S. president. The Equal Rights Party had selected as her running mate Frederick Douglass, the former slave and abolitionist, except it had not bothered to ask him first. He ignored Woodhull and the party and campaigned for the Republican incumbent (and eventual winner), Ulysses S. Grant. And even if she had not been locked up on election day, she could not have voted for herself and neither could the women who supported her.

read the article and see the photos 

Quartz: Autocrats are more likely to build giant skyscrapers—even when their countries don’t need them

There’s a race on to build the tallest tower in the world. Currently in the lead: Dubai’s Burj Khalifa, at 828 meters. Saudi Arabia’s Jeddah Tower, projected to cost $1.2 billion and soar 1,000 meters high, will pass it and then some when it is completed in 2020. If Dubai wants to keep the title, it will need to add a spire or two to its new building dubbed simply “The Tower” which is slated to be 928 meters when it is completed in time for the World Expo 2020 to be hosted in Dubai. It’s not a coincidence that both Saudi Arabia and Dubai also fare badly on most measures of democracy.

A new working paper from researchers at the University of Oslo found that autocracies build more new skyscrapers than democracies, and the buildings they construct tend to be more excessive and wasteful than those built in democratic countries. A harsh autocracy builds 1.6 more skyscrapers each year on average than a high-scoring democracy. [...]

The paper also found that autocracies are more likely to build skyscrapers where there is little clear economic benefit. For instance, in democratic countries, skyscrapers are usually built only in urban settings, while autocratic governments will sometimes build skyscrapers in rural parts of their countries. Skyscrapers in autocratic governments also tend to have a high percentage of “vanity meters,” which is the distance from the highest occupied floor to the top of the building, often bolstered by constructing spires. For instance, 29% of the total height of the Burj Khalifa consists of vanity meters.

read the article 

Independent: T-shirts sold at Marine Le Pen rally found to be made in Bangladesh despite ‘made in France’ policy

The far right presidential candidate has repeatedly said she would defend French interests against globalisation and the relocation of factories abroad. But the memorabilia sold in her name does not appear to be an example of the “economic patriotism” she has so vigorously advocated.

Labels on most the polo shirts, which were on sale at Ms Le Pen’s meeting in the northern Parisian suburb of Villepinte earlier this week had all been cut out, preventing buyers from finding out where the clothes were made. 

But reporters from BFM TV found the shirt displayed on a mannequin had an untouched label stating the piece of clothing had been made in Bangladesh - a country well known for its textile manufacture and cheap labour. 

read the article 

Quartz: Why is it so hard for the US government to prosecute police who kill?

Between 1995 and 2015, according to a report from the the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, nearly all—a whopping 96%—of the civil-rights complaints against law enforcement got turned down by US attorney’s offices around the country. The few cases that resulted in federal convictions in the past included the Los Angeles officers acquitted on state charges in the brutal beating of Rodney King in 1991. Just a day before the Sterling decision, Michael Slager, the South Carolina officer who fatally shot unarmed motorist Walter Scott in the back in 2015, pleaded guilty to civil-rights charges as part of a deal. [...]

The statement shows exactly why it’s so hard to bring charges in a case like this. For one, prosecutors have to prove that the use of force was not “objectively reasonable” in the given circumstances. “The standard is sufficiently vague that it’s very hard to prove, especially beyond reasonable doubt,” said Barry Friedman, law professor and director of New York University’s Policing Project. What is “objectively reasonable,” a standard determined by a 1989 Supreme Court ruling, use of force may be vastly different for different people. [...]

The other component is the officer’s “willfulness,” or intent to violate someone’s constitutional right. “This high legal standard–one of the highest standards of intent imposed by law–requires proof that the officer acted with the specific intent to do something the law forbids. It is not enough to show that the officer made a mistake, acted negligently, acted by accident or mistake, or even exercised bad judgment,” the DOJ says.

As the department itself admits, this is a nearly impossible standard to hold a case to. The NAACP said in a statement that the standard is “deeply flawed” and that it “frustrates the meaning of the federal statute designed to protect against the deprivation of rights by officers of the state.”

read the article 

Slate: Don’t Be Fooled by Marine Le Pen’s Gay Pandering—Her Party Is Awful for LGBTQ Equality

Such a public display of queer love was startling in a country that, for all its claim to liberté, has long struggled with LGBTQ rights. The passage of marriage equality in 2013 nearly tore the country apart, and sparked a new conservative movement called La Manif Pour Tous (roughly Protest for All), which has fought to defend “traditional” family values. In October of last year, 24,000 people marched on the streets of Paris to demand the gay marriage law be repealed. Center-right presidential candidate François Fillon, who received 20 percent of the vote in last Sunday’s first round of elections, ran on a platform to repeal gay adoption rights and, according to a prominent gay rights group, has a vision of France that is “clearly hostile to LGBT people.” [...]

Jean-Marie Le Pen was ousted by his own daughter Marine in 2011, who has since tried to soften the party’s image in her bid for the presidency. In an interview with French newspaper Le Parisien, Marine Le Pen distanced herself from her father’s comments, saying "My father was kicked out of the National Front, he does whatever he wants, it doesn’t concern me anymore...I don’t talk to him, and I’m not responsible for him or his inadmissible remarks.” Speaking with French news channel LCI, Le Pen said she had “found the ceremony very dignified" and was “very touched by the speech that was made by his companion.” [...]

But with less than a week before the decisive second round of the election, it is worth remembering that Le Pen is anything but LGBTQ-friendly: Her campaign platform calls for the repeal of gay marriage and would restrict fertility services for gay and lesbian couples wanting to have children. Her niece, Marion Maréchal-Le Pen, who holds one of two parliamentary seats in the Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur region, has been one of the most vocal supporters of the anti-marriage equality movement. And no matter how much Marine Le Pen tries to pinkwash the party and distance herself from its extremist past, even going so far as to recuse herself from its leadership last week, the stain of her homophobic father remains indelible.

read the article