Politico: Catalonia’s muted anti-independence voices

The campaign to keep Catalonia in Spain, on the other hand, is small and fractured, struggling to unite behind a single message or leader. Those who do speak up say the fierce backlash they feel shows how hard it is to debate possible secession from Spain. [...]

Pro-independence forces keep using “absolutely false” reasoning, added Josep Piqué, a former minister and ex-leader of the center-right Catalan Popular Party, whose national branch holds power in Madrid. As the dictatorship of Francisco Franco repressed Catalan language and culture, everyone who opposes independence is labeled a Franco supporter, he said. “We need to keep insisting that the analogy between anti-independence [views] and Francoism doesn’t have anything to do with reality.” [...]

But the nationalists’ success in branding people who oppose them as “right-wing” or worse works too. It’s helped marginalize anti-independence groups that can claim to speak for around half the Catalan population, to look at recent polls. And it’s kept them divided, for example by helping keep Catalonia’s left from joining the common unionist front. [...]

The SCC is the largest of a number of groups that opposes Catalan independence. The secessionist movement gained momentum in 2012, in part following the creation of the Catalan National Assembly (the biggest civil society group in support of secession) and the first mass demonstration in Barcelona in support of independence. The new anti-independence groups include the business collective Empresaris de Catalunya, journalists’ association Pi i Margall, and lawyers’ group Llibertats — none of which is more than three years old.

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The Conversation: Gender makes a world of difference for safety on public transport

Urban environments are not gender-neutral. Architects and urban designers are increasingly seeking to understand how gender-sensitive design can combat the spatial inequities faced by those who identify as women and girls of all demographics, races and socio-economic groups. Public transport spaces, for instance, incubate many systemic issues. [...]

To this day, women are more likely than men to have extra domestic and care-giving responsibilities, but fewer transport options. This affects their travel patterns. Women are more likely to move between multiple destinations throughout their daily commute.

Gendered inequalities in transport use open a myriad of additional concerns. For women, this includes a disproportionate fear of victimisation in public transport spaces. [...]

The fear of sexual harassment in urban areas is so widespread that a 2016 national survey found Australian girls and women regularly modify their behaviour to reduce their risk of harassment. More are staying at home rather than going out at night. [...]

Importantly, segregation marginalises individuals from the LGBTQI community and those who have fluid or non-conforming gender identities. The present victim-blaming approach to safety on public transport does not only affect cis-gendered women. For example, the New South Wales Police website advises LGBTQI people to “wear something over your outfit, such as a jacket or overcoat, or consider changing at your destination” if “frocking up for the night (for example, in ‘drag’ or something revealing)”.

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The Conversation: Speaking with: Dr Mark Blaskovich on antibiotic-resistant bacteria and the threat of superbugs

Since the discovery of antibiotics in the mid-20th century, millions of lives have been saved from bacterial infections. But the over-prescription of these drugs has led to some types of bacteria becoming resistant to treatment.

It’s estimated at least two million people are infected with antibiotic-resistant bacteria in the United States each year. These “superbugs” can spread rapidly and stopping them is increasingly challenging as new antibiotics need to be developed to treat them.

William Isdale spoke to Dr Mark Blaskovich about the the overuse of antibiotics and the risks superbugs pose to communities.

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Al Jazeera: Russia: A resurgent superpower?

Moscow sees itself as a resurgent superpower - but the Kremlin's current ideology opposes almost everything the communists stood for. After Putin's return to the Kremlin for a third presidency in 2012, Moscow has become a global bellwether of neo-conservative, ultranationalist, right-wing and anti-globalist political forces, and the Russian Orthodox Church eagerly fills the void left by the collapse of the Communist dogma. [...]

"I really believe that Russia is the leader of the free world right now," Matthew Heimbach, head of the white supremacist Traditionalist Workers Party, said last December. "Putin is supporting nationalists around the world and building an anti-globalist alliance, while promoting traditional values and self-determination." [...]

Kouprianova translated the works of controversial philosopher Alexander Dugin, who believes that Russia is the world's sole power that prevents the coming of Antichrist and predicts the revival of the Russian Empire through a new "Eurasian Union" with former Soviet republics that will eventually take over all of Europe, into English. [...]

Putin's European supporters include such Eurosceptic and far-right groups as the National Democratic Party of Germany and the Alternative for Germany, Jobbik in Hungary, Golden Dawn in Greece, the Freedom Party of Austria, the Serbian Radical Party and France's National Front. The latter's leader, Marine Le Pen, said she "admired" Putin and admitted to receiving a $12m loan from a Kremlin-affiliated bank in 2014. [...]

The conference was organised by the Russian Anti-Globalist movement, a Moscow-based group that denies ties to the Kremlin. But its leader, a bespectacled seven-footer named Alexander Ionov, admitted to this reporter that the separatist summit was paid for by a $55,000 government grant - and donations from "Texas and other countries".

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Political Critique: The Struggle for Poland

The founder of Poland’s Krytyka Polityczna, Sławomir Sierakowski, unpacks Donald Trump’s recent visit to Warsaw and the country’s slide toward illiberalism with PS editors Whitney Arana and Jonathan Stein.

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Vox: The age of white Christian America is ending. Here's how it got there

Though the book begins and ends with a mock eulogy for white Christian America (WCA), it’s not quite a eulogy, nor is it gleeful grave stomping. Rather, it is a sensitive, nuanced look at the decline of a world "where few gave a second thought to saying ‘Merry Christmas!’ to strangers on the street ... a world of shared rhythms that punctuated the week: Wednesday spaghetti suppers and prayer meetings, invocations from local pastors under the Friday night lights at high school football games, and Sunday blue laws that shuttered Main Street for the Sabbath.” [...]

Jones traces WCA’s decline as a culturally powerful institution, however, not just as the result of demographic change but rather as the result of white Protestant churches failing to adapt to a multicultural, multiracial America. Jones casts his eye on a complacent mainline Protestant church that failed to hold on to the fervor of its members, and an evangelical church that sailed to the “moral majority” on issues of segregation and race. [...]

Mainline Protestantism declined first, as it lost ground to secularism and to the evangelical right, which was quicker to raise the political pulse. But as the culture wars of the ’80s and ’90s gave way to certain permanent shifts in American culture — most religious Americans now support same-sex marriage, and among young evangelicals support is likewise increasing — evangelicals found themselves, too, at sea. [...]

But Jones recognizes, too, that mainline Protestantism largely squandered its enormous political, social, and financial advantage over its evangelical cousins to the South, inadvertently ceding its status as the mouthpiece of American Christendom. After all, he says, mainline Protestantism’s contributions to civil rights "were ultimately more symbolic than revolutionary, and more focused on the press than grounded in the pews."

Overall, the age gap reflects this disparity: According to PRRI’s research, almost seven in 10 seniors identify as white Christians, versus fewer than three in 10 young adults. The recent decline in (white) mainline numbers in particular is striking: from 24 percent of the population in 1988 to just 14 percent in 2012.

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Vox: “Neoliberalism” isn’t an empty epithet. It’s a real, powerful set of ideas.

Neoliberalism, at its core, describes the stage of capitalism that has existed over the past 30 years, one that evolved out of the economic crises of the 1970s. The underpinnings of this stage are buckling under the weight of our own crises, perhaps even collapsing, all of it in ways we don’t yet understand. A careful consideration of the term can help us grasp a lot of what is going on in the world, especially as the Democratic Party looks to change. [...]

These policies included reduction of top marginal tax rates, the liberalization of trade, privatization of government services, and deregulation. These became the sensible things for generic people in Washington and other global headquarters to embrace and promote, and the policies were pushed on other countries via global institutions like the International Monetary Fund. This had significant consequences for the power of capital, as the geographer David Harvey writes in his useful Brief Introduction to Neoliberalism. The upshot of such policies, as the historical sociologist Greta Krippner notes, was to shift many aspects of managing the economy from government to Wall Street, and to financiers generally. [...]

The third meaning of “neoliberalism,” most often used in academic circles, encompasses market supremacy — or the extension of markets or market-like logic to more and more spheres of life. This, in turn, has a significant influence on our subjectivity: how we view ourselves, our society, and our roles in it. One insight here is that markets don’t occur naturally but are instead constructed through law and practices, and those practices can be extended into realms well beyond traditional markets. [...]

This is a little abstract, but it really does matter for our everyday lives. As the political theorist Wendy Brown notes in her book Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution, the Supreme Court case overturning a century of campaign finance law, Citizens United, wasn’t just about viewing corporations as political citizens. Kennedy’s opinion was also about viewing all politics as a form of market activity. The question, as he saw it, was is how to preserve a “political marketplace.” In this market-centric view, democracy, access, voice, and other democratic values are flattened, replaced with a thin veneer of political activity as a type of capital right. [...]

We can leave it to the historians to piece together why and how Democrats made the decision to shift course in the 1980s, emphasizing means testing, privatization of key government services, education as a cure-all, and a trusting attitude toward large business. But they did, and we have to figure out what comes next. We need a full break with what happened before, both because the times are different and because the recent solutions — whatever word you use to describe them — aren’t cutting it anymore.

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The School of Life: The Cure for Unrequited Love

The real cruelty of unrequited love is that we don’t get to know our beloveds well enough to find out their flaws – and therefore to lose interest in them gradually. The best cure for love is in essence: get to know them better.