VICE: No One Knows if Porn Is Bad for You

Their data revealed that participants who reported a younger age of exposure were more likely to seek power over women, based on their answers to the survey, which defines that behavior as "perceived control over women at both personal and social levels." Meanwhile, participants first exposed to porn later in life were more likely to exhibit promiscuous "playboy" behavior, defined by the inventory as "desire for multiple or non-committed sexual relationships and emotional distance from sex partners." In essence: The younger you watch porn, the more likely you are to be an asshole to women. Is it really that simple? [...]

Media is typically thirsty to take this kind of data and run with it. But claims that porn causes misogyny, or that "boys who watch porn are more likely to become misogynists," are pretty blatant distortions of what this data really represents. Take it from the researchers themselves: "Because it's not a causal relationship, we can't say which one came first," says Christina Richardson, a UNL doctorate candidate on the team that conducted the study. [...]

Research that relies on self-reported data can be problematic, Tarrant goes on to explain, especially when it comes to culturally loaded, baggage-laden topics like sex and gender: The answers are simply less reliable. Plus, as both Richardson and Tarrant point out, there are plenty of other variables to consider in the relationship between porn exposure and later gender behaviors: Did they grow up with religion? How were they raised, ideologically? What was their sex education like, if any? "There are so many other things that factor into how we understand ourselves or form our gender identities, and all those other things can also impact how a teen boy might experience exposure to pornography," Tarrant says. [...]

Porn is an object of lurid fascination in popular science, but based on my conversations with researchers, from their perspective it's a morass of uncertainty, flimsy claims, and, like this University of Nebraska–Lincoln study, small sample sizes. The psychological, sociological, and physiological implications and long-term effects of porn consumption have been an area of interest for decades, but the research itself is notoriously fuzzy. Add to that the social taboo surrounding porn, and it gets messy. "The way researchers define [porn] can often depend on their political perspectives to start out with, what kind of content they find alarming," Tarrant explains.

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The Conversation: From Charlottesville to Nazi Germany, sometimes monuments have to fall

A monument, like the one to General Lee, is a material acknowledgement of a person’s virtue and contribution to the common good. Once history books are written and the voices of victims of dark episodes such as slavery have been heard, it is pertinent to reconsider the moral standing of figures who might have once been considered heroes and are depicted in statues. [...]

According to the Gregorian dictum, written 1400 years ago by Pope Gregory the Great: images should not be destroyed because they are the books of the illiterate. We learn the mistakes of our past from the images that we make, in the present, of that troublesome past. [...]

Some statues need to be removed because of their embodiment of venomous ideologies, such as Nazism. For this reason, many symbols of Nazism such as the big swastika in the Zepellinfeld in Nuremberg were completely destroyed after the second world war in Germany. After all, images can work as didactic devices.

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Political Critique: Eastern Europe according to British media: More likely to go to Italy for cappuccinos than join the ethnic fighting in Kosovo

But a closer look revealed two recurring, patronising patterns. The first was seeing the accession as a unification of Europe and the true end to the Cold War, and the second was the equation of the pre-2004 EU with Europe itself. I’m not exaggerating when I say these came up in all, I repeat, all articles. [...]

In these articles, the new members gained a more genuine Europeanness – one of a Western European nature. Numerous articles implied that the key to becoming a European is to follow Western standards and to open up one’s markets to Western investors, or as they put it, “catching up.” The authors were also pretty clear about who deserved credit: “the EU’s finest minds have spent years getting the ten newcomers’ economies, and social and trade policies and just about everything else in line with EU norms.” [...]

As the coverage in 2004 celebrated the new members’ democratic and economic achievements, I expected that the coverage between 2010-2016 about the new Hungarian and Polish governments’ actions in undermining those exact same democracies would be more negative in tone. I was surprised to find, however, that both The Telegraph and The Daily Mail supported the new governments – not necessarily because they endorsed their policies, but, in line with British media’s traditional Euroscepticism, because they saw them as allies against the EU. The Guardian, on the other hand, while it condemned the new policies as anti-democratic, typically saw them as deviations from a standard western path of development. [...]

Despite their differences, there was one thing all papers had in common: their attempts to contextualise the covered events all turned into explanations of “how this region operates.” Similarly to our travellers before, these explainers take the West’s presumed ignorance about the region, and set out to correct it with their personal insight. Nevertheless, most of them cite either only one cause for the present circumstances, or, when they cite multiple, they connect them linearly and coherently, becoming simplifying rather than informative. The causes they “reveal” are vague phenomena from the countries’ histories, which are shown to be in a direct causal relation with contemporary cultural attitudes.

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Political Critique: Where the West Sets: Photographic Reflections on the European Frontlines

Where the West Sets is a documentary project that attempts to chronicle this crisis as it plays out on the northern Aegean Islands and in mainland Greece – the same territories where Western Culture and its values were born. The aesthetics of my work lies on an approach that had me go to those places not as a reporter looking for facts but as a documentarist trying to verify facts. The series of photographs reflect the consequences that the refugee crisis is having on the cradle of civilization, whereas the traditional value of respecting other human beings is replaced with feelings of hostility, fear, and xenophobia among the Greeks.

In the same country that gave birth to philosophy, science, and anthropology, people are living among refugees in an uncertain and disordered way, holding tightly to their self-referential and contradictory values, belonging to a Europe that is now diminished but that is frantically trying to redefine its own identity.

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CityLab: Grenfell Was No Ordinary Accident

Grenfell was built in 1974, an austere concrete tower of 120 flats spread over 24 floors, its design in keeping with the Brutalist style of the day. Unprepossessing as it and many similar towers across Britain may have been, early residents were proud to live in these modern dwellings. Strong community bonds formed throughout their halls and stairwells. [...]

As the moneyed enclave of Notting Hill, where the stucco-fronted terraces have long been a magnet for the great and the good, began to march west, the area surrounding the Lancaster West Estate, in which Grenfell Tower is situated, became a front line in the inexorable gentrification of central London. A three-bedroom townhouse in Portobello Square, not 200 meters from Grenfell, costs £2.1 million (around $2.7 million). [...]

In January 2016, Jeremy Corbyn, then an embattled Leader of the Opposition, tabled an amendment in the U.K Parliament that would have required landlords to ensure that their homes were “fit for human habitation.” The Conservative majority, 72 landlords among them, voted it down. A few months later, the £8.6 million refurbishment of Grenfell, overseen by the Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation (KCTMO), was completed. The sprinkler systems that could have helped to prevent the disaster to come were deemed superfluous. But money was found to improve the building’s aesthetics. The now infamous cladding, white and grey polyethylene panels which were already banned in the Germany and America, were chosen instead of the fire-resistant alternative, for a total saving of under £300,000. [...]

You could hear its promulgation in David Cameron expressing a desire to “kill off health and safety culture for good” in 2012, and in the Brexiteers promising “a bonfire of regulations.” You could hear it in the hypocrisy of those who cheered the heroism of the London firefighters battling their way up the smoking tower even though they had condemned their right to protest for fairer fire service pensions three years before. And now you can see it looming over North London, a soot-strewn edifice in the sky.

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Salon: Why can’t white supremacists confront the fact that the source of their economic problems are white economic elites?

Slavin cites eight major economic trends, pointing out that almost everyone who is not living in wealthy enclaves — usually coastal cities or inland hubs — is facing a downward spiral that’s been decades in the making. These are the same stretches of suburban and rural America that elected Trump, elected the right-wing House Freedom Caucus, where hate groups are concentrated, and where many of those arrested in Charlottesville come from. They hail from the losing end of the trends Slavin cites and forecasts for the country. [...]

7. The make-work private sector’s useless jobs. This isn’t just the growth of service industries, but “more than 15 million Americans hold jobs that do not produce any useful goods or services,” such as bill collectors, telemarketers, sales reps paid on commission, etc., Slavin writes. [...]

There were not many non-white executives in Detroit when the auto industry acted to destroy public transit systems. There were not many non-whites on corporate boards in the 1980s, when the first wave of moving manufacturing abroad hit. The business schools minting sought-after MBAs were teaching predominantly white students to take operations to countries where labor was cheaper, or extolling the virtues of businesses like Walmart that decimated entire Main Streets across small-town America. [...]

The list goes on and a pattern emerges — a class division, more so than race — which has deepened and afflicts America today. As Slavin writes, “Perhaps the most persuasive indicator of our nation’s economic decline is that millennials are on track to be the first generation in our nation’s history to be poorer than its parents’ generation. In January 2017, CNBC reported, ‘With a median household income of $40,581, millennials earn 20 percent less than boomers did at the same stage of life, despite being better educated, according to a new analysis of Federal Reserve data by the advocacy group Young Invincibles.’”

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Social Europe: Why Are Illiberal Democrats Popular?

Control over traditional media, like television, radio and newspapers, is of course one reason why these regimes maintain their electoral majorities. But manipulation, or even outright control, of the media cannot explain the enduring popularity, borne out by opinion polls, of illiberal leaders.

The key reason for these leaders’ political success is that these regimes, despite positioning themselves as anti-Western, have followed the so-called Washington Consensus, which prescribes prudent macroeconomic policies and open markets. [...]

Illiberal strongmen have nonetheless accepted the basis of the Washington Consensus – that prudent macroeconomic policies deliver better economic performance in the long run – and have usually delegated macroeconomic management to apolitical experts. They have resisted the temptation to use short-term fiscal or monetary stimulus to increase their popularity, relying instead on identity politics to maintain electoral dominance. The longer-run result has been relatively solid economic performance – and relatively satisfied voters. [...]

Today’s European strongmen have retained popular support by maintaining the relative economic freedom on which long-term prosperity depends. But as these regimes become increasingly authoritarian, their ability to keep voters happy is becoming more and more doubtful.

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Time: Prominent Supporter of President Trump Admits He Regrets His Vote

"Those of us who supported Mr. Trump were never so naïve as to expect that he would transform himself into a model of presidential decorum upon taking office. But our calculation was that a few cringe-inducing tweets were an acceptable trade-off for a successful governing agenda," Krein wrote. "Yet after more than 200 days in office, Mr. Trump’s behavior grows only more reprehensible. Meanwhile, his administration has no significant legislative accomplishments — and no apparent plan to deliver any." [...]

Krein also criticized Trump's reaction to the violence at a white supremacy rally in Charlottesville, Va. Trump defended those associated with white supremacist groups and said "both sides" were to blame for the clashes that left one counter-protester dead. Trump's remarks earned praise from white supremacists, but were criticized by members of both parties. CEOs responded by withdrawing from Trump's advisory councils, and two charities canceled events that had been scheduled to take place at Trump's Mar-a-Lago Club.

"It is now clear that we were deluding ourselves," Krein wrote. "Either Mr. Trump is genuinely sympathetic to the David Duke types, or he is so obtuse as to be utterly incapable of learning from his worst mistakes. Either way, he continues to prove his harshest critics right."

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MapPorn: Ethnic Russians in the Russian Federation, 2010.

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