David Anderson examines the government's controversial counter-terrorism strategy Prevent.
3 August 2017
The Huffington Post: American Muslims Are Now More Accepting Of Homosexuality Than White Evangelicals
A Pew Research Center survey conducted this year found that 52 percent of U.S. Muslims say homosexuality should be accepted by society. In contrast, only 34 percent of white evangelical Protestants believed in 2016 that homosexuality should be accepted by society.
The rate at which white evangelicals are shifting their views is slower than the rate for Muslims. White evangelicals shifted their views by 11 percentage points between 2006 and 2016. Muslims’ acceptance of homosexuality shot up by 25 percentage points between 2007 and 2017. [...]
Evangelicals are also one of the religious groups most likely to hold negative feelings towards Muslims. Pew surveys have found that half of white evangelicals believe there is a “great deal” or “fair amount” of support for extremism among Muslims living in the U.S ― higher than any of the other religious group surveyed. They tend to believe that Islam encourages violence (63 percent) and that there is a natural conflict between Islam and democracy (72 percent). [...]
They are the only major religious group that favors allowing small business owners to refuse goods or services to gay and lesbian people on religious grounds (56 percent). And while 63 percent of American adults support same-sex marriage, only 34 percent of white evangelical Protestants say the same. [...]
Arshad said she found the data from the Pew survey particularly encouraging because of how anti-Muslim activists often use LGBTQ rights issues as an excuse to discriminate against Muslims. She pointed to how President Donald Trump used the Pulse nightclub massacre in Florida to drum up support for his proposed Muslim ban.
openDemocracy: An epochal election: welcome to the era of platform politics
We can quibble about the numbers. It is technically true, that because the Tories also gained votes, this election result did not (as was widely misreported) see the biggest swing to Labour since 1945. For that to happen, the Conservatives would have had to lose votes to Labour. Instead what happened is that Labour won votes from UKIP (far more than anyone expected), the SNP and Greens, while the Tories gained far fewer than expected from UKIP and rather more anyone foresaw from the SNP. But the overall result saw the biggest direct increase in Labour’s General Election Vote Share since 1945. In 1945, there had not been an election for 10 years, because of the war. In 2017, the last election had been just 2 years earlier. So this was, by any reasonable standard, a historic result. What it actually meant, and what produced it, is, of course, a matter for debate. At least two popular explanations have been widely circulated. [...]
There is a slightly different explanation on offer, which is far more credible, although it also can be accused of seeking to downplay the significance of what looks like a historic result. From this perspective we are, more than ever, in an era of extreme voter volatility, with non-voters mobilisable, and swing voters swinging, in greater numbers than ever before. Perhaps a better way to describe this situation would be to say that it is one of greatly increased reversibility. Political outcomes and events which looked like they could not be altered any time soon can now, it turns out, quickly be turned around. The return of the Tories in Scotland surely stands as some evidence for this idea – nobody saw it coming, and nobody really thought that it was even physically possible. But this leaves open the question of why this peculiar form of reversibility has emerged, and should draw our attention to the fact that ‘voter volatility’ is not a new political phenomenon. Commentators have been commenting on it since the early 70s. [...]
I think it can. In recent years, post-Fordism has itself been increasingly displaced by a new form of capitalism relying on a new generation of technological innovations. The corporations which define our age – Facebook, Google, Apple, Uber, YouTube – do so not through their specialised fragmentation in pursuit of niche markets, but through the constitution of massive monopolistic platforms which enable them to profit directly from the creative activity and labour of their users. Andrew Goffey and I actually interviewed the great British economist, Robin Murray – the person responsible for Marxism Today adopting the term ‘post-Fordism’ – in 2015 , and he explained in that interview that post-Fordism was now being displaced by this new form of capitalism: what Nick Srnicek calls in his recent book ‘Platform Capitalism’ (see also Alex Williams in ‘Control Societies and Platform Logic’). [...]
One thing that is now evident from the election result is that May’s strategy of appealing to socially conservative, pro-leave Labour voters proved catastrophically unsuccessful, even in Birmingham (a traditional redoubt of working class conservatism, since the days of Joseph Chamberlain). Labour achieved its result by inspiring a new social coalition which included working class voters from all but the most traditionally conservative of the Labour heartlands, young voters of almost all class backgrounds, across every region , and many affluent voters in the South, frightened for their children’s future at a time when even the offspring of the professional classes have seen their historic privileges eroded out of existence by neoliberalism and austerity.
Time: Vladimir Putin Doesn't Understand the Limits of Donald Trump's Power
President Vladimir Putin seems particularly out of sorts. By now he has realized that betting on Trump represents a mistake he has made before with Western leaders, and his decision on Sunday to expel hundreds of diplomats and other personnel from the U.S. embassy in Moscow shows that he’s ready to cut his losses. “There was nothing more to wait for,” his spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, said in explaining the decision on Monday. “It was all pretty obvious.”
And Putin should have known better. His closest alliances with the West have all gone the same way. Whether it was Jacques Chirac in France, Silvio Berlusconi in Italy or Gerhard Schroeder in Germany, each was built on a personal rapport with an incoming head of state, always another man, usually also a blowhard. Each collapsed when that leader was confronted by the limitations of democracy: term limits, a free press, an independent legislature, an unhappy electorate, or any of the other checks and balances built into their constitutions. But with each new attempt at a friendship with the West, Putin seemed to hope that his counterparts could override these curbs on their authority the same way Putin has done in Russia.
They have always let him down, though none quite as spectacularly as President Trump. The U.S. Congress sent Trump a veto-proof bill on July 27 imposing new sanctions on Russia for its alleged interference in the U.S. presidential elections last year, not even a month after the two Presidents met for the first time during the G20 summit in Hamburg, Germany. To many in Moscow, the legislation proved Trump to be a feckless leader, unable to make good on his earnest promises to “get along” with Russia. “Since Trump cannot handle his own lawmakers, it means he is weak,” the Russian political analyst Alexei Makarkin wrote in an analysis of the sanctions bill. [...]
And that conviction is not likely to budge amid the latest lesson in American civics. On Russian state television channels, Trump’s failure to silence the media and force his agenda through Congress and the courts has simply been cast as further proof that the U.S. is run by some all-powerful cabal – only this time the cabal has turned on the U.S. President.
openDemocracy: Venezuela’s Unprecedented Collapse
The most frequently used indicator to compare recessions is GDP. According to the International Monetary Fund, Venezuela’s GDP in 2017 is 35% below 2013 levels, or 40% in per capita terms. That is a significantly sharper contraction than during the 1929-1933 Great Depression in the United States, when US GDP is estimated to have fallen 28%. It is slightly bigger than the decline in Russia (1990-1994), Cuba (1989-1993), and Albania (1989-1993), but smaller than that experienced by other former Soviet States at the time of transition, such as Georgia, Tajikistan, Azerbaijan, Armenia, and Ukraine, or war-torn countries such as Liberia (1993), Libya (2011), Rwanda (1994), Iran (1981), and, most recently, South Sudan. [...]
They were right: Venezuela is now the world’s most indebted country. No country has a larger public external debt as a share of GDP or of exports, or faces higher debt service as a share of exports.
But, like Romania under Nicolae Ceauşescu in the 1980s, the government decided to cut imports while remaining current on foreign-debt service, repeatedly surprising the market, which was expecting a restructuring. As a consequence, imports of goods and services per capita fell by 75% in real (inflation-adjusted) terms between 2012 and 2016, with a further decline in 2017. [...]
Inevitably, living standards have collapsed as well. The minimum wage – which in Venezuela is also the income of the median worker, owing to the large share of minimum-wage earners – declined by 75% (in constant prices) from May 2012 to May 2017. Measured in dollars at the black-market exchange rate, it declined by 88%, from $295 per month to just $36.
Deutsche Welle: Opinion: Kaczynski's reckless confrontation course (30.07.2017)
On the other hand: The fact that it is necessary to take to the streets to demand free courts in the middle of Europe is terrible, and grounds for fear. Another thing that causes fear is the radicalism with which the governing PiS is forcing through its political reforms, as well as the lack of respect with which it dismisses every form of resistance to them. [...]
This is not about "law and justice": It is about power and money. But not just that - it is also about ideology and a monopolization of historical interpretation. No, the government is not acting prudently and benevolently - quite the opposite. It is "sorting" the country's citizens into good and bad. What is currently taking place in Poland is much more than a battle for political power; it has long become a battle over political culture. [...]
In the eyes of the ruling PiS, the opposition is not simply "another political force" - no, it is a "total opposition," deserving "total defeat." That sounds like total insanity to me. Citizens' peaceful protests are not seen as an opportunity for dialogue by the government in Warsaw. PiS politicians defame demonstrators as "political rabies." How will this all end? The government will certainly not give in. It repeatedly calls on members not to succumb to "pressure from the streets" or "from abroad."
The Guardian: The Guardian view on European agencies: lost to a myth
he process of divesting London of some of the key European institutions that have been based here for years is quickening. Bids from countries seeking to be the new home of the European Medicines Agency and European Banking Authority when they relocate have to be in by midnight tonight. The Dutch, who have recently discovered the joy of viral videos after the success of their spoof welcome to President Trump, have made a helpful little film about how Amsterdam is really very like London (glamorous royals, fish and chips). But at least six other countries would also like the chance of hosting the EMA, the body that regulates all human and animal medicines across the EU, advises the European commission on licensing, and monitors safety. Losing it is not a catastrophe; but it is another link out of the chain that connects British and continental Europe’s science and medicine. Nor is it an automatic consequence of leaving the EU. But membership of the EMA, like membership of other agencies including Euratom, which regulates aspects of nuclear safety, means recognising the European court of justice. And for reasons that many lawyers, academics and ordinary voters struggle to understand, leaving the jurisdiction of the ECJ has become one of the defining purposes of leaving the EU.Guardian Today: the headlines, the analysis, the debate - sent direct to you Read more [...]
Yet there has been almost no public conversation about what was perceived to be wrong with the ECJ; nor has there been any consideration of the process of accommodation that is being negotiated with it by other countries which – like Germany – have a constitutional court that is as fiercely protective of the basic law that underpins their constitution as parliament and the supreme court are of the authority of Magna Carta and the bill of rights in Britain; nor how, without it, any future trading relationship between the UK and the EU27 will be adjudicated. [...]
Mrs May appears to have been influenced by the public law QC Marina Wheeler, who in February last year wrote that the ECJ had become overmighty and was set to become more powerful still. Other lawyers were sceptical of her case, but – perhaps because she is married to Boris Johnson – her article appears to have had a decisive influence. As a result, which may have been foreseen, it is impossible for the UK to retain membership of the single market or the customs union, or to host EU agencies. It has become the dictator of the nature of the Brexit deal.
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