Jacobin Magazine: Good Cop, Bad Cop

During the 2013–14 Maidan protests, Serhienko belonged to Borotba, a leftist, Euroskeptic organization. The group gained influence during the Antimaidan demonstrations in Kharkiv before its leaders backed the pro-Russian rebels and separatist movements. At that moment, Serhienko and other activists ended their involvement. Nevertheless, the right-wing media enthusiastically spread photographic evidence of his participation after he was spotted at an anti-austerity action in September 2016. His sudden notoriety sparked a wave of online bullying and physical harassment that culminated in the bloody attack.

While it remains unclear who actually attacked him, most agree that the assault was an instance of far-right violence: it took place on April 20 (Adolph Hitler’s birthday), the attackers filmed it, and they did not rob their victim. The day after the attack, the leader of C14, one of the most notorious far-right groups, published a blog entry called the “Separatist Safari,” hinting at the group’s responsibility for the assault. In the post, he made thinly veiled threats “on the germs of terrorists hiding in the peaceful Ukrainian streets.” [...]

Unfortunately, this gruesome case fits right into Ukrainian politics today. Far-right violence has been rising for the past seven years, intensifying after the Svoboda party first entered parliament in 2012. Despite having played an important role in the Euromaidan protests of 2013–14, the far right actually lost ground in the 2014 parliamentary elections — Svoboda won only six seats, compared to thirty-seven two years prior. After this electoral failure, these nationalist forces resorted to more violent means of political participation, both online and in the streets. They do not restrict their animus for the Left: journalists and activists from across the political spectrum have become victims of threats, harassment, and violence. [...]

Andriy Biletsky, National Corps’ leader, became an independent MP in a Kiev district after the pro-Western parties withdrew their candidates in his favor. In 2008, he founded the Social-National Assembly, an organization whose stated objective is “the defense of the white race by creating an anti-democratic and anti-capitalist ‘natiocracy’.” This group mutated into the Azov battalion, which then incorporated itself into the Ukrainian army as a regiment and, as of 2016, formed an officially registered party that gives its founder’s white supremacist ideas a policy form.

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Slate: Why Pretending You Don’t See Race or Gender Is an Obstacle to Equality

Part of the problem may be that the proudly blind are conflating two different issues—on one hand, ignoring difference, and on the other, creating blind hiring processes that mask certain identifying characteristics, as in the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s famous auditions behind a curtain in 1952. In fact, while the first of these ideas can backfire, becoming a real barrier to progress, this other kind of anonymized process really does offer opportunities to help level the field. What we really need is some strategic use of blind processes—led by people who are prepared to acknowledge their biases.

Colleen Ammerman, the director of the Gender Initiative at Harvard Business School, said that the idea of gender or racial blindness can offer people a way to let themselves off the hook. “If we believe that we’re blind to identity, that absolves us of any responsibility or imperative to reflect on ways that we might be bringing bias to the table,” she said. It may even make us more biased: The more people think they’re blind, or that they’re objective decision-makers, the more they may make biased choices, suggest researchers Eric Uhlmann and Geoffrey Cohen.

In fact, Americans are socialized to automatically group others according to three variables—race, gender, and age. That automatic grouping triggers stereotyping, meaning that “even when members are seemingly included within a larger group or organization, they are vulnerable to subtle, often unconscious bias a result of their membership in a lower-status social group,” according to one group of researchers at Yale University.

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The Guardian: Don’t fall for the myth that it’s 50 years since we decriminalised homosexuality

The 50th anniversary in July of the Sexual Offences Act 1967 will be marked by celebratory events, from Queer British Art at the Tate to the BBC’s Gay Britannia season. I feel ambivalent about the celebrations: 1967 was progress, but the criminalisation of homosexuality in the UK did not in fact end until 2013. The 1967 act was just a start. It was the first gay law reform since 1533, when anal sex was made a crime during Henry VIII’s reign; all other sexual acts between men were outlawed in the Victorian era, in 1885.

My new research reveals that an estimated 15,000-plus gay men were convicted in the decades that followed the 1967 liberalisation. Not only was homosexuality only partly decriminalised by the 1967 act, but the remaining anti-gay laws were policed more aggressively than before by a state that opposed gay acceptance and equality. In total, from 1885 and 2013, nearly 100,000 men were arrested for same-sex acts. [...]

Gay sex remained prosecutable unless it took place in strict privacy, which meant in a person’s own home, behind locked doors and windows, with the curtains drawn and with no other person present in any part of the house. It continued to be a crime if more than two men had sex together or if they were filmed or photographed having sex by another person. Seven men in Bolton were convicted of these offences and two were given suspended jail terms – in 1998.

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Vintage Everyday: Humorous Photography by René Maltête – 40 Amazing and Perfectly Timed Photos Capture Street Scenes of France During the 1950s and 1960s

René Maltête (1930–2000) was a French photographer. He was inspired by playful and candid photography. He always found the way to be funny and whimsical with his art. He was interested in capturing French life and all of its characteristics.

Most of his photographs were taken on streets, capturing everyday life of French people. From sunbathing on the beach, to casual walking down the streets. But in all those everyday moments René managed to create clever images with a lot of humor. He used surroundings perfectly and told a little story on each and every of his photographs. He wasn’t afraid to touch all parts of society he lived and created like a free man. Most of his images are black and white but with his genius he painted so many minds throughout his life.

René's pictures are based on incongruity and surprise: humor is always present, but more than just a picture, there is often a philosophical dimension. You can enjoy some of his amazing work here bellow.

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Political Critique: Abandoned Checkpoints: Photographer documents Europe’s forgotten borders

With everything that’s been happening in Europe lately and the EU struggling to cope with the biggest wave of migrants and refugees its ever known, it’s interesting to discover Polish photographer Josef Schulz’s Übergang series – meaning Crossing – which explores abandoned military checkpoints across the continent.

Uncovering every corner of Europe, Schultz digitally fades the background surrounding each redundant station as though they are shrouded in fog, allowing these forgotten borders to stand out and make an impact.

Interestingly, each former checkpoint no longer belongs to anywhere. They just sit, going to waste with broken or shuttered windows, rusty doors and peeling paint – merging the past with the present. And although the border police are long gone, and the buildings themselves are quite harmless, they still provoke an unsettling feeling – potentially conjuring up bad memories of the past when Europe was divided by borders.

This particularly holds true for Schulz, as he hopes his series will highlight how these physical traces of borders are impossible to forget. He explains: “Borders were lines, drawn not only across territories but also through our heads.”

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Bloomberg: Modi's Idea of India

Modi is far from realizing his promises of economic and military security. Pakistan-backed militants continue to strike inside Indian territory. The anti-Indian insurgency in Kashmir has acquired a mass base; Maoist insurgents in central India attack security forces with impunity. Industrial growth, crucial to creating jobs for the nearly 13 million Indians entering the workforce each year, is down, at least partly due to Modi’s policy of demonetization.

That gambit was, as the economist Kaushik Basu writes, “a monetary policy blunder,” which “achieved next to nothing, and inflicted a large cost on the poor and the informal sector.” Yet Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party subsequently swept elections in Uttar Pradesh, India’s politically most significant state. He looks almost certain to be reelected as prime minister in 2019. [...]

Ascendant in both new and old media, Twitter as well as radio, television, and the press, Modi is moving India away from debate, consensus-building and other democratic rituals. He is presiding over what Mukul Kesavan, a sharp observer of Indian politics and culture, calls an “infantilization of Indians.” “Instead of being proud, equal, adult members of a republic,” Kesavan writes, they “are reduced to being the wards of an all-seeing parent.” [...]

The devastating flaw in Modi’s project is this: He is trying to build a homogeneous national community in an irrevocably diverse country. It commits him and his party to demonizing, excluding and alienating too many members of the Indian population. Moreover, he has arrived too late in history, decades after Park Chung-hee, Chiang Kai-shek, and Lee Kuan Yew accomplished their tasks of national self-strengthening.

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The Guardian: Study finds mushrooms are the safest recreational drug

Of the more than 12,000 people who reported taking psilocybin hallucinogenic mushrooms in 2016, just 0.2% of them said they needed emergency medical treatment – a rate at least five times lower than that for MDMA, LSD and cocaine.

“Magic mushrooms are one of the safest drugs in the world,” said Adam Winstock, a consultant addiction psychiatrist and founder of the Global Drug Survey, pointing out that the bigger risk was people picking and eating the wrong mushrooms. [...]

Magic mushrooms aren’t completely harmless, notes Winstock. “Combined use with alcohol and use within risky or unfamiliar settings increase the risks of harm most commonly accidental injury, panic and short lived confusion, disorientation and fears of losing one’s mind.” [...]

One of the riskiest drugs, according to the survey, was synthetic cannabis. Over one in 30 of users in the sample sought emergency medical treatment – the highest of any drug studied except crystal methamphetamine. That rises to one in 10 among people who use the drug at least 50 times per year. These figures echo the data from the previous year’s report.

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Scientific American: Special Report: The Psychology of Terrorism

The experts writing in this special report share some valuable insights from recent studies, classical research and professional experience. Social psychologists Stephen D. Reicher and S. Alexander Haslam make the case that most terrorists are not psychopaths or sadists, much as we would like to believe. Instead the majority are ordinary people, shaped by group dynamics to do harm in the name of a cause they find noble and just. Critically, those group dynamics involve all of us: our overreaction and fear, Reicher and Haslam explain, can beget greater extremism, thereby fueling a cycle other scholars have termed “co-radicalization.”

French anthropologist Dounia Bouzar describes what she has learned from deprogramming hundreds of young people caught up in this cycle. She notes that only the tug of emotion, not reason, can pull teens back from the call to jihad. Bouzar emphasizes that parents should talk to their children about the shadow world on the Internet—a major recruitment arena in both Western Europe and the U.S.

Last but not least, social psychologists Kevin Dutton and Dominic Abrams consider how we can all help break the cycle of co-radicalization, drawing on seven key studies for concrete suggestions. Among those ideas: bridging the toxic divide of mutual distrust by celebrating broader social identities—much as President Barack Obama did so powerfully in his address to Muslim Americans at a Baltimore mosque this past February. Instead of listening to “polemical pundits and belligerent blowhards,” Dutton and Abrams write, we all need a brain check: keep calm and “tune in to the quieter, more discerning notes emanating from some of our laboratories.”

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Land of Maps: Unemployment rate, Germany, 2013

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