Slate: How the Alt-Right Is Using Sex and Camp to Attract Gay Men to Fascism

Both have become influential figures in the alt-right; horribly, they are not the only gay men to respond to an olive branch lately offered by white nationalism. The opening of this movement to cisgender gay men is a radical change, "one of the biggest changes I've seen on the right in 40 years," says Chip Berlet, co-author of Right-Wing Populism in America. In the United States, unlike in Europe, out gay men have never been welcome in white supremacist groups. The Klan and neo-Nazi groups, the main previous incarnations of white hate in this country, were and still are violently anti-queer. And while a subset of openly gay men has always been conservative (or, as in all populations, casually racist), they never sought to join the racist right.

That was before groups like NPI, Counter-Currents Publishing, and American Renaissance started putting out the welcome mat. Since around 2010, some (though by no means all) groups in the leadership of the white nationalist movement have been inviting out cis gay men to speak at their conferences, write for their magazines, and be interviewed in their journals. Donovan and O'Meara, far to the right of disgraced provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos, are the white nationalist movement's actual queer stars. But there are others in the ranks, like Douglas Pearce of the popular neofolk band Death in June. And there are many more gay men (and some trans women) who have been profoundly influenced by two white nationalist ideas: the "threat" posed by Islam and the "danger" posed by immigrants. [...]

Of course, neither O’Meara nor Donovan actually support gay rights. This is partly because they don't believe in "civil rights." Although O'Meara wants to be part of an imagined elite band of men who love each other and rule society—his version of an Aryan fantasy called the Männerbund—he doesn't want to support, as he put it in the interview with Alternative Right, "some sniveling queen demanding 'my rights!' … 'The plight of the homosexual' … is a Leftist myth." Donovan says explicitly that straight people should be given more power and privileges than gay folks, because their "reproductive sexuality" is superior to ours. Both men openly detest lesbians and trans and genderqueer people: Donovan calls the trans movement "men who want to cut their dicks off and women who want to cut their tits off." And of course, no white nationalist organization anywhere supports LGBTQ rights on a social or legislative level. Their new "support" is limited to allowing cis gay men who are white racists to join them.

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The Conversation: How Australia became a nation, and women won the vote

This year is also the 120th anniversary of the Australasian Federal Convention. In April 1897, ten elected delegates from each of Australia’s colonies (except Queensland, which did not attend) gathered at Parliament House in Adelaide to map the route to nationhood, a Commonwealth of Australia.

Six years earlier, delegates appointed by the colonial parliaments met in Sydney to discuss a draft constitution for federating the British colonies in Australia and New Zealand. But 1897 was the first time that members of the Constitutional Convention were appointed by popular vote. (New Zealand was no longer included, having decided that being part of a trans-Tasman Commonwealth was not in its best interests.) Here was a novel experiment in democracy: allow the people to elect representatives to draft a constitution that would be submitted to the people for their assent. [...]

At the 1897 Convention in Adelaide, “warm Federalist” Frederick Holder and Charles Kingston, South Australia’s premier, proposed that full voting rights for all white adults should be written into the Constitution. Three years earlier, South Australian women had become the first in the world to win equal political rights with men: the right to vote and to stand for parliament. (New Zealand women won the right to vote in 1893, but eligibility to stand was withheld until 1919.) Playing with a home ground advantage, Holder moved to add a clause to the draft Constitution that read “no elector now possessing the right to vote shall be deprived of that right”. [...]

However, the Commonwealth Franchise Act of 1902, which made Australian women "the freest of the free”, was the same legislation that stripped Aboriginal Australians of their citizenship rights - legal personhood - which they would not claw back until 1967.

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Vox: The myth of self-control

Modern-day psychologists might not blame Eve for her errant ways at all. Because what’s true today was also true at the beginning of time (regardless of what story you believe in): Human beings are horrible at resisting temptation. [...]

The implications of this are huge: If we accept that brute willpower doesn’t work, we can feel less bad about ourselves when we succumb to temptation. And we might also be able refocus our efforts on solving problems like obesity. A recent national survey from the University of Chicago finds that 75 percent of Americans say a lack of willpower is a barrier to weight loss. And yet the emerging scientific consensus is that the obesity crisis is the result of a number of factors, including genes and the food environment — and, crucially, not a lack of willpower. [...]

The students who exerted more self-control were not more successful in accomplishing their goals. It was the students who experienced fewer temptations overall who were more successful when the researchers checked back in at the end of the semester. What’s more, the people who exercised more effortful self-control also reported feeling more depleted. So not only were they not meeting their goals, they were also exhausted from trying. [...]

The new research on self-control demonstrates that eating an extra slice of cake isn’t a moral failing. It’s what we ought to expect when a hungry person is in front of a slice of cake. “Self-control isn’t a special moral muscle,” Galla says. It’s like any decision. And to improve the decision, we need to improve the environment, and give people the skills needed to avoid cake in the first place.

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The Atlantic: The Six-Day War Was a Step Backward for Zionism

The stunning defeat of Egypt, Syria, and Jordan, and the sudden expansion of the territory under Israel’s control was ironically a step backward for Zionism, and it has struggled ever since to reconcile its core philosophy with the set of circumstances that has reigned for the past half century. The 50th anniversary of the Six-Day War is an opportunity not only to examine Israel’s past and future trajectory, but also to refashion a more pragmatic Zionism for the next 50 years. [...]

This was certainly not the fulfillment of Herzl’s utopian vision, laid out in Altneuland, of a prosperous country and harmonious society. But it was the fulfillment of the Zionist essence: Jewish self-determination in the Jewish homeland. That the boundaries of the state in that homeland were limited and that the state was beset by true existential threats presented daily problems for Israel’s governance, but they did not present a threat to Zionism itself. Zionism had become a quest not for the perfect but for the possible, and it was this pragmatism and focus on a single core idea that made Zionism the rare 20th-century ideology that actually delivered on its promise and survived the crucible of wars, upheavals, and Cold War struggles. [...]

The Zionism that envisions complete Jewish sovereignty between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea does not account for the complication of approximately 2.5 million West Bank Palestinians living in a state of limbo while their own legitimate national aspirations go unfulfilled. It does not account for Israel’s isolation within its own region and its increasingly difficult relationships with democratic European allies. It does not account for the security, economic, and ethical strains that controlling the West Bank places upon the Israeli state and society. [...]

The 50th anniversary of Israel’s greatest victory and the apparent realization of Zionism’s greatest desires can be a time for Zionism’s renewal, which means a more pragmatic and realistic ideology that marries ambition with advisability. Governing and statecraft almost always involve tradeoffs, and that means rejecting the 1967 myth that Israel and Zionism can have everything they want, and embracing the truth that Israel and Zionism have to live within their means. Otherwise, one of the most successful political ideologies of the modern age will find itself unnecessarily struggling to maintain its viability.

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Arduous Trifles: religion in the United States

I recently discovered a very interesting databank on religion in the United States and decided to create some maps showing distribution of different religions and denominations throughout the country.

Some of them are not surprising at all, for instance you would expect Mormons to live mostly in Utah and Evangelicals to live in the South. But some are more interesting, like high percentage of Catholics in the Dakotas (I have always thought the plains are as protestants as they come) and low percentage of Catholics in souther Michigan/Northern Indiana and Ohio where a lot of Polish and German immigrants settled 150 years ago.

I also took the liberty to include Amishes in those maps, as I find this minority utterly fascinating. 

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The Conversation: Australia will finally ban cosmetic testing on animals

Last week, a bill was put before the House of Representatives that would ban animal testing of industrial chemicals intended solely for use in cosmetics. [...]

It’s difficult to know exactly how many animals will be affected by this ban, as companies do not advertise their use of animal testing and results are often unpublished. It’s likely to be relatively small, but this ban will both improve their lives and be an important international signal. [...]

Most prominent in this arena is the European Union. After animal testing was first banned in Germany in 1986, it was extended to the entire Union in 2004. In 2009 the ban was expanded to include ingredients, not just the finished product. Then imports came under scrutiny, as Japan and the United States are major exporters to the EU, and imports of cosmetic products tested on animals were banned in 2013.

Since that time Israel, India, Norway, New Zealand, South Korea, Turkey, Taiwan and parts of Brazil have all banned testing of cosmetics on animals. However, the Humane Society International estimates that globally around 100,000-200,000 animals are still used annually for this purpose.

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Al Jazeera: Qatar-Gulf rift: The Iran factor

Deep in the Gulf waters between Qatar and Iran lies the world's largest gas field, a 9,700-sq-km expanse that holds at least 43 trillion cubic metres of gas reserves.

Qatar's southern portion is known as North Field, while Iran's slice to the north is called South Pars. The two countries share exploration rights in the area, and it is one of many ties that bind them.

But Doha's relationship with Tehran has been put to a new test on Monday, after Iran's regional rival Saudi Arabia led four other countries in cutting diplomatic ties with Qatar, accusing its fellow Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) member of undermining security in the region by siding with Iran, among other actions.  [...]

Souzan Krdli, a Tehran-based Gulf analyst, said more than demanding Doha's allegiance, Saudi and the UAE want to "rein Qatar in" and make it "another Bahrain if you will" in terms of foreign policy. [...]

"However, it is clear that a rift in the GCC can be beneficial to Iran," he said. "Saudi Arabia is a lifeline for Qatar in terms of trade. We must wait and see whether Iran and Turkey can fill the void." 

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CityLab: The Dramatic Health Disparities Between Rich and Poor Americans

The U.S. has one of the largest income-based health disparities in the world, according to a new paper out in the journal Health Affairs. Among the poorest third of Americans studied, 38.2 percent report being in “fair or poor” health, compared with 12.3 percent of the richest third. Only Chile and Portugal have a larger income-based gap in the health status of their citizens.

Most of the 32 nations studied had income-based differences in how healthy their citizens are. Only in Japan and Switzerland were people about equally healthy regardless of their wealth. Poor people in the U.S. were also more likely than rich people to say they couldn’t get access to care because of the cost, and more likely to report being dissatisfied with their last visit to the doctor. “The United States exhibited large disparities in most measures, making it unique among high income countries,” the authors, Harvard health-policy researchers Joachim Hero, Alan Zaslavsky, and Robert Blendon, write. The other countries with big gaps between rich and poor on all three measures were Bulgaria, Russia, Chile, and Portugal. [...]

The U.S. respondents were interviewed in 2012, before the implementation of the Affordable Care Act. A major limitation of this study is that it didn’t take into account the ACA’s reforms to the insurance market—namely, the expansion of Medicaid to cover about 15 million low-income adults and children. However, the authors write that the U.S.’s health-status disparity ranking wasn’t affected by adjusting for insurance status.

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IFLScience: Reintroduced Beavers In England Help Protect Against Floods And Soil Erosion

Through the creation of a vast network of channels, pools, and dams, beavers have been found to drastically improve the quality of water, prevent floods, and mitigate soil erosion. As a result of these impressive and far-reaching benefits, experts are recommending that beavers should be reintroduced across England.

The researchers found that the water leaving a beaver wetland is around three times cleaner than the water entering it, that the pools they form store up to 16 tonnes (17.6 tons) of carbon and 1 tonne (1.1 ton) of nitrogen, and that they prevent the sedimentation in downriver catchments. The findings are the preliminary results of a study looking into the impact that a colony of beavers in Devon, in the southwest of England, have had on the surrounding environment.

The reintroduction of beavers in England is controversial, particularly following the unofficial release of beavers that has occurred in Scotland. Some claim that they cause flooding and damage, others that they maintain the environment. This has led researchers from Exeter University to study their impact on the ecosystem.

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