Post-truth’ was the Oxford Dictionary word of the year 2016 – but what does it mean, and how can we champion truth in a world of lies and ‘alternative facts’? Renowned journalist Matthew d’Ancona distinguishes post-truth from a long tradition of political lies, exaggeration and spin. For D’Ancona, what is new is not the mendacity of politicians but the public’s response to it and the ability of new technologies and social media to manipulate, polarise and entrench opinion.
17 June 2017
Haaretz: The Ultra-Orthodox Jewish Leftists in Israel Who Aren't Afraid to Admit It
To be sure, Bitan is not entirely representative of Israel’s ultra-Orthodox, or Haredi, community. Although he attended Ponevezh, the jewel in the crown of Ashkenazi yeshivas, he is of Mizrahi stock and grew up in an uncharacteristically political home very sympathetic to the settler movement. Unlike many of his peers, the 26-year-old divorcée chooses not to live in a strictly Haredi neighborhood but rather in a mixed Jewish-Arab neighborhood in Jaffa. He’s also an active supporter of the largely Arab left-wing Hadash party that in the last election merged with three Arab parties to form the Joint List. [...]
Among a small, yet growing, cadre of ultra-Orthodox Israelis who have recently come out as proud leftists, Bitan is revered as both a leader and source of inspiration. After all, it takes guts to embrace an ideology considered anathema in large sections of their community.
Why the instinctive revulsion from leftist politics among ultra-Orthodox Jews?
Not because they reject the notions of peace and territorial compromise. Quite the contrary: The rabbinical leaders of the Haredi community have throughout the ages been known to espouse dovish views.
And not because they prefer free-market capitalism. Quite the contrary: Many members of the Haredi community, one of country’s poorest, owe their daily sustenance to generous social welfare programs provided by the state.
Rather, it’s because they perceive the Israeli left as anti-religious and a threat, in particular, to the very stringent form of Judaism they hold dear. Moshe Gafni, a veteran lawmaker from the ultra-Orthodox United Torah Judaism party, made that abundantly clear in an off-the-cuff remark at this week’s annual Haaretz Israel Conference on Peace. Asked why he insisted on aligning his party with the political right despite his dovish views, Gafni responded: “We will join the left when the left breaks its ties with the Reform movement.”
openDemocracy: The Dutch Have Solutions to Rising Seas. The World Is Watching.
Mr. Ovink is the country’s globe-trotting salesman in chief for Dutch expertise on rising water and climate change. Like cheese in France or cars in Germany, climate change is a business in the Netherlands. Month in, month out, delegations from as far away as Jakarta, Ho Chi Minh City, New York and New Orleans make the rounds in the port city of Rotterdam. They often end up hiring Dutch firms, which dominate the global market in high-tech engineering and water management. [...]
It is, in essence, to let water in, where possible, not hope to subdue Mother Nature: to live with the water, rather than struggle to defeat it. The Dutch devise lakes, garages, parks and plazas that are a boon to daily life but also double as enormous reservoirs for when the seas and rivers spill over. You may wish to pretend that rising seas are a hoax perpetrated by scientists and a gullible news media. Or you can build barriers galore. But in the end, neither will provide adequate defense, the Dutch say. [...]
The project is among dozens in a nationwide program, years in the making, called Room for the River, which overturned centuries-old strategies of seizing territory from rivers and canals to build dams and dikes. The Netherlands effectively occupies the gutter of Europe, a lowlands bounded on one end by the North Sea, into which immense rivers like the Rhine and the Meuse flow from Germany and France. Dutch thinking changed after floods forced hundreds of thousands to evacuate during the 1990s. The floods “were a wake-up call to give back to the rivers some of the room we had taken,” as Harold van Waveren, a senior government adviser, recently explained. [...]
The Maeslantkering is a consequence of repeated historic calamities. In 1916, the North Sea overwhelmed the Dutch coastline, inaugurating a spate of protective construction that failed to hold back the water in 1953 when an overnight storm killed more than 1,800 people. The Dutch still call it the Disaster. They redoubled national efforts, inaugurating the Delta Works project that dammed two major waterways and produced the Maeslantkering — the giant sea gate, completed in 1997, keeping open the immense waterway that services the entire port of Rotterdam
TheRealNews: The Economic Myths of UK's 2017 General Election Exposed
"The General Election is exposing once again the ignorance there is around the production of money and how easy it is for governments to finance expenditure," says World-renowned economist Ann Pettifor.
openDemocracy: Alexei Navalny's campaign: effective management or grassroots movement?
Navalny is conducting a dialogue with the Russian authorities via force. In this context, a sanctioned demonstration — it doesn’t matter what sound equipment you have — doesn’t mean anything. In order to pressure the Kremlin into changing the established scenario of presidential elections in March 2018, he has to constantly raise the pressure — and the level of risk. Only by crossing the boundaries of the permissible can Navalny make himself heard and push against such boundaries, at least a little. The problem is, with Russia’s most prominent protest leader now entering this kind of dialogue with the authorities, how far will Navalny remain open to dialogue with the people who are taking to the streets to protest? [...]
The real agenda — rising poverty, the state’s cruelty and lack of transparency, the never-ending stream of new taxes and cuts to social welfare — will bring more and more people out to protest. You can’t write these people directly into the ranks of Navalny supporters. They are of different views and different ages, but are members of pre-existing social movements. For instance, for people involved in initiative groups against the Moscow city “renovation”, the format of a sanctioned demonstration — where they can make connections and speak to one another — is far more useful than clashes with the police. What Navalny calls the “battle between good and neutrality” doesn’t happen in a vacuum, where there’s only the merciless authorities and the fearless leader of the opposition, but in society, at least a small section of which can still organise itself.
The paradox of Russia’s current protest movement is that it has taken the form of a vertically organised election campaign, when it is, in essence, a broad coalition. This is a “political machine”, and one which is more like a commercial corporation than a political party, where rank-and-file members possess at least formal mechanisms of control over the actions of the leadership. Here, everyone has their own, strictly defined area of work: experts propose solutions, professionals bring them to the public, and the public is left to follow them. The only real justification for this kind of model is that it is effective: the protest wave is building, its geographical spread is constantly growing, and it’s becoming hard to silence it.
FiveThirtyEight: Imagining President Pence
The events that precede Pence’s swearing-in would no doubt shape his tenure in ways that can’t be predicted. But the make and measure of a man is not wholly defined by his circumstances. Pence is a political figure of specific principle and ideology, and his past may give us hints about the president he would be. A reading of his political history reveals a devoted adherent to an unbending conservative worldview but also a man chastened by the realities of governing a society undergoing profound change. Above all, it shows a political survivor, attuned to the delicate dynamics of a capricious White House — and perhaps patient enough to be playing the long game of the Trump presidency.
During his time as governor of Indiana, Pence was largely known for his social conservatism, but before that, while he was serving in Congress, he was a budget-slashing tea party-type before there was a tea party to be part of. If he were to become the president, Pence, who once called himself an “unregenerate supply-sider,” would likely use his time in office to push for the same thing that he’s been working toward over the last two decades: cuts to the federal budget along with a deeply socially conservative agenda. [...]
In 2005, the conservative publication Human Events named Pence their “Man of the Year.” At the time, Pence headed the Republican Study Committee, a group of far-right House conservatives fed up with what Human Events deemed the “big-government conservatism” that had “ruled the roost during the Bush years in Washington.” Shortly after Hurricane Katrina, as Congress sought to fund the recovery process on the Gulf Coast, Pence and his congressional allies proposed $500 billion in cuts to federal programs, including Medicare prescription drug benefits, to pay for the rebuilding. Pence served as a public face of the proposal that conservatives called “Operation Offset.” “We simply can’t allow a catastrophe of nature to become a catastrophe of debt for our children and grandchildren,” Pence said at the time. [...]
While these decisions to act might seem like rudimentary responses to moments of crisis, they tell us something about how Pence balances pragmatism with ideology. Put under enough pressure, he cracks. They suggest that a President Pence could settle on moderate actions when faced with economic pressure or an outpouring of negative public opinion. Even ideologues read the papers and polls and feel the pinch of unpopularity.
Al Jazeera: Protests Spread Across Morocco
Protests Spread Across Morocco Protests Spread Across Morocco.
Posted by Facebook on June 12, 2017
Politico: Rich countries gain edge in EU agency fight
The agencies are attractive not only because of their hundreds of staff but also because of the large numbers of visitors, who will need hotel rooms each year. Some 9,000 people visited the EBA in 2016, and the EMA had 36,000 visitors in 2015.
The EMA’s current 76,000-square-meter location among the skyscrapers of Canary Wharf in London places it close to international airports and within easy reach of upscale hotels, as well as enabling it to draw on the resources of Britain’s own drug regulator and the country’s extensive pool of researchers. The EBA is also located in Canary Wharf.
A European Council official said that business continuity was just “one among six unweighted criteria,” which would be assessed before a vote on the relocation of the agencies. [...]
France and Germany are bidding for both the EMA and EBA, although the draft EU document says that one country cannot host the two agencies. Italy has nominated Milan for the EMA and Spain has put Barcelona forward.
Politico: Europe’s defense fund ignores real threat: populism
There’s no question the EU should boost its defense capabilities and excise wasteful duplication in its members’ military arsenals. But the plans being discussed could seriously backfire. [...]
The defense fund is part of a broader “securitization” of EU foreign policy that bodes ill for future stability. It could also draw resources away from areas of EU foreign policy that are crucial to dealing with the geopolitical drivers behind the threats Europe faces.
The amount of money the EU and its member countries commit to promoting human rights, encouraging democratic reforms and strengthening civil society is extremely limited compared to the budget touted for the defense fund. And, in recent years, most member nations have slashed their aid budgets.
Europe’s aid program is increasingly imbalanced. Across North Africa and the Middle East, the Sahel and some parts of sub-Saharan Africa, the EU has made funds available to authoritarian regimes to help limit migrant outflows. By doing so, it is doing little to foster the kind of democratic change that would help address the underlying causes of the migration. Funds that boost unaccountable security forces are more likely to intensify rather than temper insecurity, instability and radicalization.
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