Jacobin Magazine: The American AKP

In drawing such parallels, we should be careful not to over-egg the pudding. Erdoğan, for all of his autocratic brutishness, has genuine ideological commitments and cultural and political ties with his base that Trump does not. Erdoğan grew up poor and even spend time in jail for his religious beliefs (a situation you could see befalling Trump, but not out of any political principle).

However, we shouldn’t let personality politics obscure the similar social and political forces driving the type of faux-populism that Trump and Erdoğan represent. They were not created in a vacuum, nor are they sustained by force of personality alone. We must also look to their enablers. [...]

In terms of their mass base, the two parties are similar in that they both draw substantial electoral support from non-elites in districts far from the centers of cultural, economic, and political power. In the US, it’s whites in rural and suburban areas, often religious and often skittish about the country’s demographic changes; in Turkey, it’s pious Muslim Turks of small town Anatolia, resentful of the Westernized cultural and political elite that historically dominated Turkish society as well as the Kurdish minority, who they deplore for supposedly destroying the unity of the Turkish republic.

Both parties mix conservative religious ethics — whether it’s “Judeo-Christian values” or “Muslim morals” — with elite-friendly economic policies. Both peddle xenophobic nationalism served with a hefty dose of conspiracy. [...]

However, at the same time their colleagues in Congress condemn Erdoğan’s assault on protesters and wax lyrical about the sanctity of the First Amendment, GOP lawmakers are busy trying to undermine people’s right to protest at the state level. Across the country, Republican lawmakers have proposed imposing draconian fines on demonstrators, banning masks at protests, and even indemnifying drivers who drive into protesters. In Arizona, legislation introduced this past winter would allow protesters to be charged with racketeering.

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The Atlantic: More and More States Are Outlawing Gay-Conversion Therapy

In the U.S., state governments are beginning to outlaw conversion therapy in growing numbers. California became the first to do so in 2012. Eight other states have banned it in some form since. In 2017 alone, Nevada, New Mexico, and Connecticut have signed their own bans into law. And two weeks ago, a long-anticipated bill passed the Rhode Island Senate. [...]

While one can imagine a clear moral argument against this practice, the ruling in the JONAH case stemmed from the simple fact that it does not work. Research supports this point. A decade after the psychiatrist Robert Spitzer published a controversial and refuted study in 2003 of 200 men and women who claimed to have changed their sexual orientation to “predominantly heterosexual” after some form of “reparative therapy,” he apologized, saying there was no way to verify his participants’ responses. [...]

During his presidency, Barack Obama called for an end to “therapies” that aim to change sexual orientation or gender identity, but a bill introduced to ban conversion therapy at the federal level stalled in Congress last year. The 2016 GOP platform drew the ire of activists as well as the Log Cabin Republicans, a gay conservative group, for including “the right of parents to consent to medical treatment for their minor children,” which some both in and outside of the party interpreted as a tacit endorsement of “conversion therapy.” And, according to McCoy, the understanding of conversion therapy as a threat to children has helped marshal Republican support for these bills at a state level. [...]

Still, the laws in many states are limited. Most states that have enacted bans restrict the actions of licensed mental-health practitioners like psychiatrists, psychologists, and social workers, and are focused on minors. These laws don’t affect unlicensed practitioners or adults who seek their services. This will be the case for Rhode Island in the very likely event that the newly passed bill is signed into law. In contrast, New Jersey’s JONAH case declared conversion therapy completely illegal in the state on the basis of consumer fraud. Even an adult who wants to undergo treatment with a life coach, a clergy member, or other provider not subject to the rules of a licensing board can’t do so legally, because of the lack of evidence that conversion therapy works.

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Vox: Trump supporters know Trump lies. They just don’t care.

In the past, the research has found that no only do facts fail to sway minds, but they can sometimes produce what’s known as a “backfire effect,” leaving people even more stubborn and sure of their preexisting belief.

But there’s new evidence on this question that’s a bit more hopeful. It finds backfiring is rarer than originally thought — and that fact-checks can make an impression on even the most ardent of Trump supporters. [...]

The study, conducted in the fall of 2005, split 130 participants into groups who read different versions of a news article about President George W. Bush defending his rationale for engaging in the Iraq War. One version merely summarized Bush’s rationale — ‘‘There was a risk, a real risk, that Saddam Hussein would pass weapons or materials or information to terrorist networks.” Another version of the article offered a correction that, no, there was not any evidence Saddam Hussein was stockpiling weapons of mass destruction.

The results were stunning: Staunch conservatives who saw the correction became more likely to believe Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. (In another experiment, the study found a backfire on a question about tax cuts. On other questions, like on stem cell research, there was no backfire.) [...]

In both experiments, the researchers couldn’t find instance of backfire. Instead, they found that corrections did what they were intended to do: nudge people toward the truth. Trump supporters were more resistant to the nudge, but they were nudged all the same.

But here’s the kicker: The corrections didn’t change their feelings about Trump (when participants in the corrections conditions were compared with controls).

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Salon: These 2 questions can help liberals understand how Donald Trump got elected

All politics is moral. Progressives and conservatives have opposing moral worldviews. When a political leader proposes a policy, the assumption is that the policy is right, not wrong or morally irrelevant. No political leader says, “Do what I say because it’s evil. It’s the devil’s work, but do it!” Nor will a political leader say, “My policy proposal is morally irrelevant. It’s neither right nor wrong. It doesn’t really matter. Just do it.” [...]

In my 1996 book, “Moral Politics”, I examined how political values tend to arise from the fact that we are all first governed in our families. The way your ideal family is governed is a model for the ideal form of government. This is often a matter of how your real family is governed, though some people rebel and adopt an opposite ideal. [...]

In this moral worldview, it is the father’s moral duty to punish his children painfully when they disobey. Harsh punishment is necessary to ensure that they will obey him and do what is right, not just what feels good. Through physical discipline they are supposed to become disciplined, internally strong and able to prosper in the external world.

What if they don’t prosper? That means they are not disciplined, and therefore cannot be moral, and so deserve their poverty. In this conservative view, the poor are seen as lazy and undeserving while the rich deserve their wealth. Responsibility is thus taken to be personal responsibility, not social responsibility.

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openDemocracy: The real reason Trump went to Poland

Trump's visit was meant to carry symbolic weight. Daniel Tilles, editor of the Notes from Poland social media news group, commented prior to the visit that Trump and PiS "share a distain for the conventional rules and practices of democracy" and will try to "capitalize on their agreement on major issues like migration, defense and a distrust of institutions such as the media and the judiciary". [...]

For his part, Trump declared America's love for Poland, credited Polish-Americans for voting for him, and heaped praise on the PiS establishment. His speech left PiS delirious. Prime Minister Beata Szydło immediately stated that the speech demonstrated that now "Poland was an important country" and even a "guarantor of world peace".

There were few genuinely critical voices in the press, but only Greenpeace, the Razem (Together) party and other leftist groups staged small protests. Poland is a middle-sized country in Europe, but too often its elites suffer from the inferiority complex of a small country. The parliamentary opposition, still struggling to mount a credible electoral challenge to PiS, dared not criticise Trump's speech seeing it as a 'success for Poland'. PiS could not have wished for a better propaganda coup. [...]

Even before Trump's arrival, reports emerged that a controversial historian, Marek Jan Chodakiewicz, from the Institute of World Politics (which employs another infamous Trump advisor, Sebastian Gorka), had a hand in writing the speech. According to Rafał Pankowski, a member of the anti-racist Never Again Association, this "raised eyebrows because of Chodakiewicz’s long record of far-right links. He is mostly known as a denier of Polish responsibility for acts of antisemitism".

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Katoikos: EU’s first state funeral: Remember the past to build the future

The EU’s first official state funeral in honour of Helmut Kohl may just be the beginning of a new era of common European public events. Even national news outlets acknowledged the prestigious event with slightly more attention than usual. Though it was still far from the ceremonial pomp and live coverage you would see around the British royal family’s affairs.

What made this ceremony special was not only the attendance of MEPs and European leaders, but also the presence of leaders from the Middle East, Russia and the United States, who came to pay their respects to Kohl and the era of peace ushered in by the European Union alike. [...]

Even if one wonders sometimes what the European Union truly is — it is neither a super state by any means, not is it a loose club of nation states, — one could say that this vision has been achieved at least partially in the European Union, where consensus-based democracy rules, rather than the conflict-based democracy of the nation state.

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Social Europe: The Real Measure Of Inequality

Official estimates are bad enough. The UK, for example, comes out very unfavourably in international comparisons of income and wealth distribution. There the top ten percent of households have disposable income nine times that of the bottom ten percent. But the level of inequality is much higher for pre-tax incomes where the incomes of the top ten percent is 24 times higher than that of the bottom ten percent. Worse, the top one percent of households on average had an income of £253,927 and the top 0.1 percent had an average income of £919,882 [in 2012]. In terms of income the UK is much more unequal than most OECD countries and is the 7th most unequal; amongst European countries the 4th most unequal.

 Wealth inequality in the UK is even greater than it is for income; the richest ten percent of households hold 45 percent of all wealth and the poorest 50 percent have 8.7 percent. Within the OECD countries the UK has a Gini coefficient for wealth a little higher than the rest [73.2 compared to 72.8]. [...]

It is also worth noting that the UK has had massive property price inflation partly through the liquidity generated by QE and again the greatest benefit will have accrued to the richest segment of the population; this is an extra transfer to the top five percent since real gains on property were excluded from the Bank’s estimates. [...]

The EU confronts a deep and growing income and wealth inequality which in part has its origins in globalised trade and in trends in technological development that substituted precarious work for previously well paid and secure employment. But we also witness governments across the EU following tax policies that are increasingly regressive in their impact with greater dependence on indirect taxes and reductions in the degree of progressivity in income taxes.

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Independent: Outcry as Saudi Arabia executes six people in one day to bring 2017 death penalty total to 44

Saudi Arabia executed six people for murder and drug offences on Monday, thought to be the highest number in a single day since the year began.

The deaths are thought to bring the number of executions claimed by the government so far in 2017 to 44.

A Pakistani man was killed for drug trafficking and five Saudi nationals were killed for homicide, the interior minister said.

The kingdom has one of the highest execution rates in the world, handing down the death penalty for terror, murder, rape, armed robbery and drug trafficking crimes.

A June report by human rights organisation Reprieve found that 41 per cent of those executed in Saudi Arabia in 2017 were killed for non-violent acts such as attending political protests.

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JSTOR Daily: John Calvin: The Religious Reformer Who Influenced Capitalism

Both the blame and the credit for capitalism have often been placed at the feet not of an economist, but rather a sixteenth-century Christian theologian named John Calvin. Calvin’s belief in predestination and other tenets embraced by aggressive capitalists, is seen as giving the theological justification for a Protestant vision that propelled economic growth in Europe, Britain and, eventually, North America. [...]

Calvin’s vision involved a humanistic approach that included a revolutionary look at social questions. For one thing, Calvin, a happily married man, believed that sexual morality should apply equally to both men and women. He was a supporter of republican government over monarchy and saw everyday occupations as part of a calling from God, raising the most humble to an exalted status.

Calvin never accepted capitalism unconditionally. While the first Christian theologian to embrace the use of interest on money—the Catholic Church had long held rules against usury—he also qualified its use. He argued that it should never be used to exploit the poor and that borrowers should profit more from loans than from those they borrowed from. Some ethicists see his principles as a possible response to the worldwide convulsions in banking that occurred in the Great Recession and other economic downturns.

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