BBC4 In Our Time: Purgatory

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the flourishing of the idea of Purgatory from C12th, when it was imagined as a place alongside Hell and Heaven in which the souls of sinners would be purged of those sins by fire. In the West, there were new systems put in place to pray for the souls of the dead, on a greater scale, with opportunities to buy pardons to shorten time in Purgatory. The idea was enriched with visions, some religious and some literary; Dante imagined Purgatory as a mountain in the southern hemisphere, others such as Marie de France told of The Legend of the Purgatory of Saint Patrick, in which the entrance was on Station Island in County Donegal. This idea of purification by fire had appalled the Eastern Orthodox Church and was one of the factors in the split from Rome in 1054, but flourished in the West up to the reformations of C16th when it was again particularly divisive.

With

Laura Ashe Associate Professor of English and fellow of Worcester College at the University of Oxford

Matthew Treherne Professor of Italian Literature at the University of Leedsand

Helen Foxhall Forbes Associate Professor of Early Medieval History at Durham University

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Nautilus Magazine: What Both the Left and Right Get Wrong About Race

Race does not stand up scientifically, period. To begin with, if race categories were meant primarily to capture differences in genetics, they are doing an abysmal job. The genetic distance between some groups within Africa is as great as the genetic distance between many “racially divergent” groups in the rest of the world. The genetic distance between East Asians and Europeans is shorter than the divergence between Hazda in north-central Tanzania to the Fulani shepherds of West Africa (who live in present-day Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso, and Guinea). So much for Black, White, Asian, and Other. [...]

It is a good time, then, to dispel some myths about genetic variation that have been promulgated by both the left and the right alike. On the left, many try to discredit the notion that genetic variation underlies group differences by pointing out that there is more genetic variation within these groups than between them. Another favorite approach is to cite the fact that all humans are 99.9 percent genetically identical and that no group of humans has a gene (i.e., a coded-for protein) that another group lacks. Both of these arguments are canards. After all, we are also 98-plus percent identical to chimps and 99.7 percent similar to Neanderthals. Oh, what a difference that 2 percent (or 0.3 percent) makes! [...]

Highlighting the fact that all humans share the same genes ignores the fact that much of evolutionary change and biological difference is less about the development of novel proteins (i.e. genes) than it is about the regulation of those genes’ expression—­that is, the extent, the timing, and the location of when and where they are turned on and off. In fact, when the Human Genome Project first began, the number of human protein-coding genes was anticipated to be on the order of 100,000. After all, we are certainly more complex than Zea mays (corn) with its 32,000 genes, are we not?1 As it turns out, we have a mere 20,000 genes (or fewer). So most human difference is driven by the turning on and off of those 20,000 genes in specific tissues at particular times. The same ones may be expressed in the brain and in the liver. They may get switched on by an attacking bacterium and silenced by a hot meal. Each one is like a multitasking parent balancing home and office. [...]

Even if we had figured out a way to factor out all the cultural, historical, and economic differences that correlated with genetic ancestry, and found an effect, such a result would still raise the question: How? While it may or may not be true that brain development pathways could be implicated in test score differences, it is almost surely true that the percentage of African or European ancestry predicts physiognomy. That is, even within families, we are willing to wager that the sibling with more African genes is also the sibling with darker skin, curlier hair, and more West African facial features. There may even be other physical features that are less clearly racialized in the U.S.—such as height—that correlate with ancestry.

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The Atlantic: Gentrification, Post-Soviet Style

That the demolition and rehousing were, according to press reports, supposed to happen only with permission of the residents mattered little; they would assent, as the Russian saying goes, “dobrovol’no prinuditel’no”—voluntarily but forced. That is, the government would eventually do what it wanted, whether its citizens liked it or not—not entirely strange for Russians, given their country’s Soviet-era history of mass expropriation, deportations, arrests, imprisonment, and so on. Today’s Russia is not the Soviet Union, of course. But potent, fearful memories, passed down from generation to generation, live on in almost every family. [...]

Khrushchevkas have no elevators; each apartment unit consists of one to three rooms, a kitchen, a bathroom, and at times a balcony. They are, to be sure, eyesores, made of either brick or prefabricated concrete panels. The pensioner’s building stood in central Moscow, near a metro station—prime real estate. It made sense that Khrushchevkas in such neighborhoods would be the first to go; after all, housing built in their stead would afford urban developers huge profits, and to Moscow, increased tax revenues. New buildings would also give many districts a more modern, less Soviet look, just as Moscow Mayor Sergey Sobyanin has envisioned for Russia’s showcase city. But most of all, the proposed demolitions seem to be about money. Or, at least, no other reason seems to exist—Khrushchevkas have not begun collapsing, and their residents are not clamoring for relocation. [...]

Putin’s go-ahead, it seems, was all Sobyanin needed to proceed. In scale, his proposal would eclipse Luzhkov’s still-unrealized plan, destroying 8,000 Khrushchevkas and rehousing 1.6 million people (Moscow’s total population is an estimated 12 million), at a cost to the state of some three trillion rubles, or the equivalent of $53 billion. All this, by the end of 2018, the year of both Russia’s next presidential elections and Moscow’s mayoral contest. Legislation backing Sobyanin’s scheme is still being put together, but a draft law approved by the Moscow Duma on its first reading on April 20 stoked worries. It would permit the city to declare entire blocs of Khrushchevka buildings “renovation zones.” Putin pledged not to sign any bill violating people’s rights, but until residents see the fine print, they have not been inclined to relax.

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Vox: The economics of beard popularity in the US

FiveThirtyEight: Are The U.K. Polls Skewed?

Conservatives won only a slim overall majority in 2015 despite winning the popular vote by 6.5 percentage points because 87 seats went to regional parties (especially the Scottish National Party, which won 56 seats), third parties (such as Liberal Democrats) or independent candidates. While FiveThirtyEight isn’t attempting to translate votes to seats — that’s a tricky problem and one that we haven’t had much luck with in the past — other people’s models show that if Conservatives were to win by much less than their 2015 margin, their majority would be under threat. A series of YouGov models released this week have shown Conservatives winning 308 to 317 seats — short of a 326-seat majority — with a 3- to 4-point win. Uniform swing calculations also suggest that Conservatives would be underdogs to retain their majority with a 4-point win, and about even money to do so with a 5-point win. [...]

Exactly how strong the Conservative tendency to outperform their polls has been depends on where you measure from. Since 1992, Conservatives have beaten their final polling margin over Labour by an average of 4.5 percentage points, and have done so in all but one election. (That was 2010, when both Conservatives and Labour gained ground as Liberal Democrats’ support collapsed, but Labour slightly outperformed its polling margin against the Tories.) Go all the way back to 1945, however, and the average Conservative overperformance is just 1.8 percentage points and is not statistically significant.4 [...]

This is also the case in Europeanwide polling. It’s often assumed that nationalist or right-wing parties tend to beat their polls, perhaps because (as is supposedly the case with Shy Tory voters) people are reluctant to declare their support for a “politically incorrect” party to pollsters. But over dozens of European elections over the past several years, there’s been no systematic tendency for nationalist parties to outperform their polls. Yes, it happens sometimes — such as in the 2015 election in Denmark. But the nationalist party has underperformed their polls almost exactly as often, as Marine Le Pen and the National Front did last month in France.

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ArguingFromIgnorance: UK Election 2017 — Part 4 — How Will Each Party Reform The UK Political System?

Al Jazeera: Corbyn was right in 2003, and he is right again today

The import of Corbyn's statement must be considered in its historical context. Despite the legion of people who stood figuratively and philosophically with the then backbench Labour MP, Corbyn faced a deep and vitriolic thicket of establishment opposition, particularly from Britain's rancid reactionary press that universally supported then-Prime Minister Tony Blair's disastrous military misadventure and instinctively libelled the war's opponents as quislings. [...]

But Corbyn's speech arrived at its moral crescendo when he warned the mesmerised throng, and, by, extension, the rest of us, of the calamitous human and geopolitical consequences the obdurate trans-Atlantic architects of the pestilential Iraq invasion would ultimately cause.

His voice rising in plaintive anger, Corbyn said the war would "set off a spiral of conflict, of hate, of misery, of desperation that will fuel the wars, the conflict, the terrorism, the depression, and the misery of future generations ... the way to free us from the scourge of war is to free ourselves from the scourge of injustice, of poverty, and of misery". [...]

In this regard, Corbyn made what many other politicians consider a politically fatal admission: Britain, France and the United States (or their regional proxies) invading and dropping bombs on Afghanistan and other, predominately Arab countries - from Iraq, Syria, Yemen to Libya - year after dreadful year have fuelled, rather than stemmed, the terror visited upon so many, in so many places.

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Politico: Anarchic Athens finds a new cause: Ukraine

The neighborhood of Exarchia in central Athens has always been home to those who fight the system. Before Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras’ left-wing Syriza Party came to power in 2015, groups of police would stand on street corners bordering the area, riot shields at the ready, waiting for the streets to erupt into one of the area’s periodic fits of violence. Syrians, Afghans and Africans; pirated DVDs, cannabis and cocaine, you can find just about anyone and anything on the central square — except ATMs, symbols of “rapacious capitalism” that the anarchists long ago firebombed out of existence. [...]

Zafeiris started to pay attention to the political situation in Ukraine in the aftermath of the EuroMaidan protests, he recalls. “For the first time in recent European history we had a government in a European country with a Nazi element,” he says. He describes EuroMaidan as a NATO-organized coup “to overthrow Yanukovych because he was not interested in [drawing closer to] the EU.” [...]

Far-right parties only managed to secure a tiny percentage of the vote in Ukraine’s post-EuroMaidan elections, but that doesn’t deter Zafeiris from concluding that they’re a controlling element in Kiev. “It’s not a matter of size but of quality,” he says. “There are a lot of Nazis with top posts in the government.” The Ukrainian government, he claims, has become a “puppet for some parts of the U.S. regime.”

In March, Zafeiris decided to take action. He gathered a group of like-minded people and began to communicate with the separatist group in Donetsk, which granted him permission to open the Athens office. It’s not the first of its kind in Europe — there are offices in Italy, the Czech Republic and Finland. In Athens, the founding members put up their own money toward renting the premises to get the ball rolling.

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Vox: The British election is in 3 days — and the polls are getting a lot closer

Experts on UK politics say that the Troy collapse is, first and foremost, May’s own fault. She has run a disastrous campaign filled with unpopular policies and embarrassing flip-flops that have seriously shaken British confidence in her ability to govern. Meanwhile, the public’s view of Corbyn was so dim that there really wasn’t anywhere else to go but up — and his relatively competent campaign trail performance has helped that. [...]

To be clear, May’s Conservatives are still heavily, heavily favored to win a majority on Thursday. They’re still ahead in the polls by a healthy margin, and May is still viewed more favorably than Corbyn is overall in opinion polls. Moreover, the basic setup of British politics gives the Conservatives an intrinsic advantage in the 2017 race: Their supporters are more likely to vote and tend to live in more strategically important areas. [...]

Some of the issues the Conservatives chose to talk about were especially unpopular. On May 9, for instance, the prime minister came out in favor of legalizing fox hunting — a traditional, but cruel, pastime of the British upper classes that had been banned by a Labour government in the mid-2000s. The comments made her out of touch with ordinary British concerns, interested in the cultural priorities of the rich rather than what really matters to most people. [...]

The criticism of the “dementia tax” was so overwhelming that, three days later, it was removed from the Conservative manifesto. This actually managed to make things worse: It suggested that May, who was selling herself as a strong hand during the Brexit negotiations, wasn’t to be trusted.

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Quartz: Despite the rhetoric, Macron isn’t about to loosen France’s paternalistic grip in Africa

Unlike any other French leader Macron has openly expressed remorse for aspects of France’s colonial past. His election rhetoric suggested that he viewed France’s neo-colonial dominance with some embarrassment, preferring to loosen France’s hold on its former colonies. [...]

France also propped up francophile leaders, in particular Senegal’s Leopold Sédar Senghor and Cote d’Ivoire’s Felix Houphouet-Boigny. Both saw themselves as the guardians of a paternalistic order that kept Francophone Africa under French tutelage. [...]

During Francois Mitterrand’s term in office (1981 – 1995) 60,000 French troops were stationed in Francophone Africa. They supported several unsavoury governments, including the Hutu regime presided over by Juvenal Habyarimana in Rwanda, which went on to murder 800,000 Tutsis and some Hutus in the 1994 genocide. French soldiers did little to stop the bloodbath. [...]

Chirac was the last of the paternalistic, Gaullist French leaders. After his presidency, France became unapologetically mercantilist: it remains in Francophone Africa to protect its nationals, to guard its assets and to counter Chinese competition for natural resources and markets. [...]

But, nearly 60 years after African independence, France and Francophone Africa remain entangled beyond separation. French companies still have a quasi-monopoly over the most strategic areas in Francophone economies. Examples include electricity, telecommunications, infrastructure, airports and harbours. France’s continued influence on Francophone African foreign policy is apparent in Africa’s policy alignments.

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