Haaretz: Israel's Minister of Truth

If in 1975, Chaim Herzog dramatically tore up a copy of UN General Assembly Resolution 3379, equating Zionism with racism, the justice minister has now admitted the truthfulness of the resolution (which was later revoked). Shaked said, loud and clear: Zionism contradicts human rights, and thus is indeed an ultranationalist, colonialist and perhaps even racist movement, as proponents of justice worldwide maintain.

Shaked prefers Zionism to human rights, the ultimate universal justice. She believes that we have a different kind of justice, superior to universal justice. Zionism above all. It’s been said before, in other languages and other nationalist movements. [...]

Thus Shaked believes, as do so many around the world, that Israel is built on foundations of injustice and therefore must be defended from the hostile talk of justice. How else can the repulsion to discussing rights be explained? Individual rights are important, she said, but not when they are disconnected from “the Zionist challenges.” Right again: The Zionist challenges indeed stand in contradiction to human rights. [...]

Zionism is Israel’s fundamentalist religion, and as in any religion, its denial is prohibited. In Israel, “non-Zionist” or “anti-Zionist” aren’t insults, they are social expulsion orders. There’s nothing like it in any free society. But now that Shaked has exposed Zionism, put her hand to the flame and admitted the truth, we can finally think about Zionism more freely. We can admit that the Jews’ right to a state contradicted the Palestinians’ right to their land, and that righteous Zionism gave birth to a terrible national wrong that has never been righted; that there are ways to resolve and atone for this contradiction, but the Zionist Israelis won’t agree to them.

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Scientific American: Visualizing Sex as a Spectrum

Much of the public discourse in this arena centers on gender rather than sex, presumably because gender is understood to be somewhat subjective; it is a social construct that can be complex, fluid, multifaceted. Biological sex, on the other hand, appears to leave less room for debate. You either have two X chromosomes or an X and a Y; ovaries or testes; a vagina or a penis. Regardless of how an individual ends up identifying, they are assigned to one sex or the other at birth based on these binary sets of characteristics. [...]

The project abruptly transformed into an exercise in visualizing complexity. First, it seemed imperative to define a few terms. Sex, gender, and sexuality are all distinct from one another (although they are often related), and each exists on its own spectrum. Moreover, sex cannot be depicted as a simple, one-dimensional scale. In the world of DSDs, an individual may shift along the spectrum as development brings new biological factors into play. The density of science underlying this phenomenon compelled a shift towards intersex as the primary focus of the visualization. [...]

DSDs—which, broadly defined, may affect about one percent of the population—represent a robust, evidence-based argument to reject rigid assignations of sex and gender. Certain recent developments, such as the Swedish adoption of a gender-neutral singular pronoun, and the growing call to stop medically unnecessary surgeries on intersex babies, indicate a shift in the right direction. I am hopeful that raising public awareness of intersex, along with transgender and non-binary identities, will help align policies more closely with scientific reality, and by extension, social justice.

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openDemocracy: Gentrifier heal thyself?

Curiously, many of the people who make these comments about gentrification are gentrifiers themselves, railing against the displacement of the working class at their house-warming parties on up-and-coming blocks where working class people used to live. [...]

Maybe the left-wing case against gentrification is the same—a worthy concern, but one for which we would personally sacrifice very little. That may sound harsh, but we can’t ignore such critiques. Not only do many of us participate in gentrification—we actually enjoy it: earnestly deploring the Trump Presidency in Che Guevara-themed cafés; celebrating the diversity of city life in a live music bar with a $10 cover charge; or buying produce at farmers’ markets instead of greasy delis. [...]

The idea of gentrifiers as a pioneering “creative class” of tech start-ups and quirky businesses has been largely discredited, but in my experience the residents of poorer neighbourhoods don’t always see the arrival of people with additional energy and resources as inherently bad. They might bemoan the destruction of public housing in favour of ‘shared workspaces’ and roof-top bars, without opposing the basic idea of outside investment. [...]

Nonetheless, in the fight for more just and inclusive cities, gentrifiers can lend valuable support. Though not to the same extent, they can see and feel the damage done by profit-centred housing markets. They can sense the unwillingness of politicians to respond, and they can help imagine and develop solutions to the crisis. When people have some shared experience—even if it’s scraping together enough money for a broker’s fee, or dealing with a negligent landlord, or complaining about inexplicable power cuts in their building, they begin to see more common interests with their neighbours—and to recognize the need to fight alongside them for improvements.

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Vox: Why fact-checking can’t stop Trump’s lies

The School of Life: Why We Need Ancient Greek Words for Love

Many of our relationship problems stem from the emptiness of our vocabulary around our affectionate emotion. We have only the minimal word 'love'. Luckily, the Ancient Greeks had a more nuanced and complicated vocabulary that we can usefully borrow from.

Politico: Unity of Central Europe’s Visegrad Group under strain

They may well be still here but they don’t all seem to be in the same place politically. Even the lineup for Thursday’s gathering suggested as much. It was billed as a foreign ministers’ meeting — but, of the Visegrad countries, only Poland and Hungary had foreign ministers present. Slovakia and the Czech Republic sent state secretaries. [...]

The Czech Republic is planning to request observer status at meetings of eurozone finance ministers. Meanwhile, Slovakia’s Prime Minister Robert Fico said a couple of weeks ago that the “fundamentals” of his policy were being “close to the [EU] core, close to France, to Germany.” [...]

Petr Ježek, a Czech member of the European Parliament representing the centrist ANO movement, which leads in opinion polls ahead of a general election in October, said the Visegrad Group was a “useful format for regional cooperation” in the long term. But, he added, “I’m afraid that the government in Poland and to some extent the one in Hungary are not the ones one should team up with too much.” [...]

“Visegrad is not the only pillar on which the Czech Republic builds its Central European policy,” said Tomas Kafka, director of the Central Europe Department at the Czech Ministry of Foreign Affairs, citing the country’s strategic dialogue with Germany and its so-called “Slavkov cooperation” with Slovakia and Austria.

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Politico: Preventing disaster in Donbas

The situation is a ticking time bomb. Because the divided communities are geographically very close, an incident on one side of the line of contact will have an impact on people living on the other side — and beyond.

For example, earlier this year shelling hit a building at the Donetsk Filter Station, where 7,000 kilograms of chlorine gas is stored. Had it exploded, the damage would have been catastrophic. [...]

Despite the Minsk agreements that were meant to stabilize the situation, heavy weapons and ammunition continue to move into the region, and mines are being laid. Since the beginning of the year, the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission to Ukraine has confirmed 347 civilian casualties: 64 killed, and 283 injured — an increase of more than 30 percent compared to the same period last year. [...]

If chemicals released by a misaimed shell were to leak into rivers or groundwater, hundreds of thousands of people would be affected. The flooding of coal mines has the potential to contaminate the water supply and devastate agriculture — even in neighboring Russia. [...]

In recent weeks, water treatment plants and pumping stations have been hit repeatedly near the line of contact. Over 1 million people in communities on both sides of the line are dependent on the South Donbas Water Pipeline — including almost half a million downstream in Mariupol. Their water supply is at risk, and temperatures remain high.

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FiveThirtyEight: Trump Voters In Alabama May Be About To Teach Trump A Lesson

Endorsements, if they work at all (and often they don’t), work best when they give an ideological cue to a voter that they wouldn’t have otherwise had. That’s why endorsements rarely matter in general elections: Most voters already fit into one of the partisan camps and are going to cast a ballot based solely off party label. In a primary, on the other hand, the candidates are more ideologically similar, and so an endorsement can help voters make a choice.

In 2010, for example, Sarah Palin endorsed fellow tea partyer Christine O’Donnell over the more moderate and well-known Mike Castle in the Delaware Republican Senate primary. Palin’s endorsement of O’Donnell specifically highlighted O’Donnell’s conservative positions, and though it may not have won O’Donnell the primary, according to polling data, it certainly helped her along. [...]

The lesson of these different endorsements should be fairly clear: Trump voters aren’t mindless drones. They’ll take cues from the president when he’s selling them on something it makes sense for them to back.2 Indeed, much of the reason Trump won in 2016 was because he defended positions that were already popular among the base, even if they weren’t popular among the party elite. On one of the biggest issues of the 2016 primary, illegal immigration, Trump staked out a hardline position that was already highly correlated with vote choice in previous primaries. (More anti-immigration Republicans did better, on average, in GOP primaries.) He took that position when one of the so-called frontrunners for the GOP nomination, Jeb Bush, was known for being soft on illegal immigration. Trump found a lot less success when he was pushing a health care bill this past spring and summer that went against his promises to Republican voters in the primary.

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Politico: After three rounds of Brexit talks, a gaping divide

“I see in several [of the U.K.’s] proposals a certain nostalgia, through precise demands, which would amount to wanting to continue to benefit from the advantages of the EU’s single market without being part of it,” the EU negotiator, Michel Barnier, said at a joint news conference Thursday to wrap up the latest, abbreviated round of talks, which lasted just two days. [...]

Davis also publicly declared a frustration that U.K. officials have voiced privately for weeks — their view that the EU27 are being overly rigid in their demands and have given Barnier and his team no flexibility to compromise. Again repeating his line that the EU’s rigid sequencing of the talks (divorce first, future relationship second) makes no sense, Davis implored his interlocutor to put “people over process.” [...]

That the two sides remain so bitterly divided on the issues that the EU identified as the core divorce terms makes it increasingly unlikely that the European Council at its summit on October 19-20 will determine that “sufficient progress” has been made to move on to the next phase of talks, including a future trade relationship and potential transition period.

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