openDemocracy: When is a genocide a genocide?

For over 40 years, the Burmese state has been engaged in wholescale persecution of the Rohingya; denial and deprivation of their nationality; denial of their history and identity; restrictions on marriage and children; forced malnutrition and forced labour; restrictions on education, healthcare and movement; arbitrary arrests and killings; all with the cumulative intent of denying their participation in society, driving them out and destroying them. This systemic and structured persecution has been interspersed with waves of acute violence carried out by state and non-state actors alike – in 1978, 1991, 2012, 2015; and has been fuelled by the most vitriolic propaganda campaign which has brainwashed a country into reviling and fearing the most vulnerable and downtrodden among them. [...]

The arbitrary denial and deprivation of Rohingya’s Burmese nationality has played a pivotal role in how they are perceived and treated. Rohingya have faced targeted exclusion and persecution at least since the 1970s; but it was the 1982 citizenship law which entrenched their statelessness. The Rohingya were denied citizenship because they are an unwanted minority. Once made stateless, this was used to reinforce the dominant narrative that they are not from Burma, that they are illegal immigrants from Bangladesh. Their statelessness was drawn on to deny their identity (they are Bengali, there are no Rohingya) and their history. It became the justification for the suffocating restrictions imposed on them. It mattered not, that there was no international law or historical basis for any of this. [...]

There is however, another way of perceiving her. She has not been silent. She has used her voice to stoke hatred against the Rohingya, to ridicule the testimonies of survivors of genocide. To accuse humanitarian actors of colluding with terrorists. To justify the denial of the Rohingya identity. she is only silent in her unwillingness to speak the name ‘Rohingya’. And so, she no longer has any moral authority to speak of. She is a failed leader, who is watching her country burn, her people turn against their neighbours, her military perpetrate the most unspeakable and atrocious crimes and who has taken a calculated and cynical decision to stand with the oppressors.

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Places Journal: A Fortuitous Shadow

Regionalism has long been a difficult topic, provoking ambivalence and anxiety, inextricably bound up with controversial notions of the peripheral, provincial, and parochial. This was especially true for American architects of Yeon’s generation (he was born in 1910), schooled in Emersonian self-reliance and mindful of their country’s emergence as a global superpower, yet shaped by longstanding beliefs in European cultural supremacy. Even as late as the 1950s, Americans tended to weigh their nation’s art and architecture against that of Europe, leading some to lament its derivativeness and mediocrity and others to make exaggerated claims for its originality and importance. Never was this more true than in the decades between the world wars, when tensions over the definitions and national origins of “modern architecture” became a significant part of the American intellectual atmosphere. [...]

But the internationalist impulse would prove short-lived. Consolidating its power as a cultural pace-setter, MOMA again signaled a shift when, in 1936, Holger Cahill, former acting director of the museum and new director of the Federal Art Project, announced that American artists and arts institutions were “declaring a moratorium on [their] debts to Europe and returning to cultivate [their] own garden.” One year later, MOMA trustee Nelson Rockefeller wrote to Henry-Russell Hitchcock, urging him to support more shows on American architecture. Indeed, between 1938 and 1941, 18 of the 22 exhibitions organized by the museum’s Department of Architecture and Design focused on American topics. 9 In making this shift, MOMA was reflecting and appealing to a sensibility spreading rapidly across the nation, one visible in everything from the popularization of terms like “the American Dream” and ‘”the American way of life” to the passage, in 1940, of the Alien Registration Act and the eventual detention of Japanese-American citizens in internment camps. In a turbulent era that saw multitudes grappling with economic depression and unemployment, with communism, fascism, and foreign imperialism, and with the coming of war, the U.S., like other nations, grew increasingly nationalistic and xenophobic. These attitudes quickly entered the artworld and were amplified by it. [...]

It’s notable — as the examples above suggest — that the new regionalist architecture of mid-century America was limited almost exclusively to a single building type: the free-standing, private house. Yeon’s and Belluschi’s Portland houses of the late 1930s and ’40s, for example, were called regionalist, but Belluschi’s larger-scaled skyscraper and office designs — such as the much-lauded Equitable Building of 1944 — were not. Precisely because the single-family house serves a small user group and limited range of functions, it is a prime vehicle for expressions of identity and place, freighted with cultural associations and symbolic potential. [...]

In other words, regionalist modernism was bounded more by time than by geography: it was the architecture of an era first, and of a place only second. After all, the regionalist ethos was emerging not in 1840, when months of perilous travel separated the east and west coasts and when regional distinctions were undeniable and profound, but in 1940, when the country was connected by near-instantaneous communications and ever-more rapid transportation and distribution networks. And when regionalist modernism was becoming a national “style,” a geographically broad-ranging, historically situated mode of thinking and practice.

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The New York Review of Books: Terrorism: The Lessons of Barcelona

With the help of a team of assistants, we interviewed and surveyed more than eight hundred people of Pakistani and Moroccan origin. We could approach some subjects in public areas, while others were referred to us by previous interviewees. They were mostly eighteen to forty years old and a mix of first- and second-generation immigrants. The majority were not radicalized but we did eventually tap into clusters of avowed supporters of jihadist groups and some former members. The political preoccupations of these two ethnicities differed in minor ways. The Pakistanis were far more concerned with the plight of the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, whereas the Moroccans focused more on Syria. Pakistanis were far more strongly identified with Islam, Muslim people, Spain, and their country of origin than were Moroccans. An area of agreement was in each group’s perceptions of the other. Moroccans saw Pakistanis as docile and a bit hypocritical when following their religion; Pakistanis saw Moroccans as hot-headed. “We Pakistanis like to talk a lot. The Moroccans, they don’t talk, they just do,” said one Pakistani local. [...]

The process would often begin with a young man being confronted by some difficulty—often the loss of a job, or a sick family member with exorbitant medical bills, or anything that might call into question his ability to fulfill his duty as caretaker of the household. A period of despair would begin, with the young man passing days on end in cafés, on park benches, or sulking with his friends. It was then that, through an acquaintance, the man would be introduced to someone who could provide him with a steady income. The work would be mostly logistical, but all in support of “the cause.” While my informants would admit that they knew they were getting in bed with jihadists, they insisted that their support for the cause was given only minimal vetting by their recruiters. [...]

These stories from Morocco and Pakistan were very different from those of the scores of people I met who were radicalized in Europe. The European youth were drawn in far more by a revolutionary spirit and a belief that they could change the world. For example, one young Pakistani man who grew up mostly in Barcelona began his radicalization over the time that I knew him. When we first met he was a brash youth with dreams of grandeur. Every week he had a different life goal, from wanting to be a professional athlete to being the first Pakistani-Spanish rapper. As every path to fulfilling these dreams was denied by his conservative family, he became more depressed. Until one day, he approached me with anger: “Foreign fighters from Europe were heroes during the Spanish Civil War, but now they’re considered traitors when they go to Syria! This is the hypocrisy of the West.” A radical imam in the area had begun to channel the young man’s stymied lust for glory toward jihad. (Luckily, after I spoke with his family, his parents intervened and he is now pursuing his athletic goals.) [...]

The program puts a large burden on the communities to do more to funnel information up toward the central government, which will then disperse it. The failure of the Catalan official to pass along the alarming email from Vilvoorde to Spanish central authorities highlights the need for this flow of information. However, my investigation into the Ripoll case indicated that the central government also failed to pass information down to the municipality. Had the mayor, social workers, or other community members been notified that Es Satty had previous radical ties, they could have been more vigilant.

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The Atlantic: How the GOP Prompted the Decay of Political Norms

But during some periods of divided government, when one party controls the White House and the other has a majority in the House, the Senate, or both chambers, cross-party coalitions where parties share responsibility for governance have thrived. As political scientist David Mayhew showed, divided government during the decades following World War II produced significant legislative achievements—and arguably did so as or more often than when a single party held all the reins of power. [...]

So what happened? Parties have certainly become more polarized, shaped by the great ideological and geographical sorting that began in the 1960s. The South, realigned by Lyndon Johnson’s commitment to civil rights, lost its status as nearly uniformly Democratic and gradually became the GOP’s most important power center. New England and the West Coast had once been strongholds of an often-moderate brand of Republicanism. They became bastions of Democratic strength. A repolarized partisanship solidified by the 1990s and became even more pronounced after 2008. [...]

Gingrich transformed the Republican Party in Congress. His recruits came in believing what Gingrich had taught them. Although he had a deep interest in science, Gingrich launched an attack on the use of science and facts in public policy that would be picked up by other Republican politicians in the years to come. One of the more enduring norms of Congress was that evidence vetted by acknowledged experts would frame debate and deliberation. Lawmakers could differ sharply on policy solutions, but all would share facts curated by the experts. As speaker, Gingrich abolished the Office of Technology Assessment, a blue-ribbon congressional agency that had been established for scientists to offer objective analysis on issues ranging from defense and space to climate and energy. The new majority defended shuttering the office’s doors as a cost-saving measure, and it was part of Gingrich’s broader (and largely successful) effort to centralize power in the speaker’s office. But the move also sent a message that ideological commitments would trump evidence. [...]

But there was no better example of extreme partisanship than McConnell’s refusal to consider any nominee Obama put forward to replace Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia after Scalia’s sudden death in February 2016. McConnell argued that the “American people should have a voice in the selection of their next Supreme Court Justice” and that “this vacancy should not be filled until we have a new president.” This was a radical departure. Supreme Court nominees had been rejected before, but except for those who withdrew, none in recent memory had been denied both a hearing and a vote. That it was justified with a risible claim to being democratic, as if the American people hadn’t reelected Obama for a full four-year second term, showed just how far McConnell was willing to go. And nearly all of McConnell’s colleagues overwhelmingly supported this strategy, one by one announcing that they, too, would seek to delay hearings and a vote on a nominee until Obama had left the White House. This even included Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah, who had once praised Garland as a “consensus nominee.”

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The Conversation: Keeping global warming to 1.5 degrees: really hard, but not impossible

We calculate that by limiting total CO₂ emissions from the beginning of 2015 to around 880 billion tonnes of CO₂ (240 billion tonnes of carbon), we would give ourselves a two-in-three chance of holding warming to less than 0.6℃ above the present decade. This may sound a lot, but to put it in context, if CO₂ emissions were to continue to increase along current trends, even this new budget would be exhausted in less than 20 years 1.5℃ (see Climate Clock). This budget is consistent with the 1.5℃ goal, given the warming that humans have already caused, and is substantially greater than the budgets previously inferred from the 5th Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), released in 2013-14. [...]

The emissions reductions required to stay within this budget remain extremely challenging. CO₂ emissions would need to decline by 4-6% per year for several decades. There are precedents for this, but not happy ones: these kinds of declines have historically been seen in events such as the Great Depression, the years following World War II, and during the collapse of the Soviet Union – and even these episodes were relatively brief. [...]

There are several optimistic signs that peak emissions may be near. From 2000 to 2013 global emissions climbed sharply, largely because of China’s rapid development. But global emissions may now have plateaued, and given the problems that China encountered with pollution it is unlikely that other nations will attempt to follow the same path. Rapid reduction in the price of solar and wind energy has also led to substantial increases in renewable energy capacity, which also offers hope for future emissions trajectories.

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Slate: Hunger and Obesity Can Be Two Sides of the Same Coin

While the increase in hunger is making headlines, the numbers in the report make it obvious that the world is facing food problems on multiple fronts. An estimated 815 million people are going hungry at the same time that more than 700 million people, including more than 100 million children, are obese. While hunger’s ability to kill makes it vivid in our minds, obesity, which has doubled since 1980, is tied to a host of health issues, too, including diabetes, high blood pressure, and an increased likelihood of stroke.

It’s easy to see hunger and obesity as two infuriating but separate issues—a baffling manifestation of a split world, of the haves and the have-nots. But in reality, the numbers are actually two sides of the same coin: A startling portion of the world does not have access to reliable, nutrient-rich food. The undernourished obviously suffer this problem, but in many cases, those who end up obese suffer from a lack of access to nutritious food, too. [...]

In many places, obesity and hunger are not tragic antagonists but troubling twins. Yet the U.N. is still focused primarily on hunger, defined by the agency as chronic undernourishment, or being regularly unable to acquire a suitable daily caloric intake. This focus on lack of calories, as opposed to lack of nutrients, is clearest in the U.N.’s Sustainable Development Goals. On the list of 17 world-changing metrics to meet by 2030, the second goal is “zero hunger,” which focuses almost exclusively on problems of low caloric intake. The third goal, a seemingly all-encompassing effort to achieve “good health and well-being” for all, doesn’t mention obesity, either. (The U.N. isn’t oblivious to the other public health crisis. In a Q&A accompanying the report, the U.N. acknowledges that in many nations, and indeed in some households, obesity and food insecurity coexist, as some poor people turn to cheap, low-nutrient foods.)

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Slate: Merkel’s Legacy

But the Germans did make big mistakes. I think they pressed too hard on austerity and so now the income gap between North and South in Europe is worse than ever. They did not have a coherent policy on Ukraine because a lot of Europeans, even though they went along with sanctions, were grumbling about all the lost trade and, indeed, even within Germany that was the case. On Brexit, they could have had a deal in which they could have talked David Cameron back from doing his referendum, but not enough was done to let him off the hook. A lot of these problems, I think, resulted from basically Merkel just being overwhelmed.

On refugees, she showed great moral and humanitarian courage, but she hadn’t thought through the consequences, and she didn’t have any support, or much to speak of, from other European leaders. So as a result, you had this huge influx of people coming into Germany, and the Eastern countries, like Poland and Hungary, refusing to take any refugees. Germany stuck with 1 million and now you have this right-wing, xenophobic backlash, which is fueling the rise of the neo-Nazi party, Alternative für Deutschland, which may get more than 10 percent in the election this Sunday. [...]

I think, first of all, this will be her last term. In a way, she is going to be using this to establish her legacy. She realizes that what has been driving her is that she wants Europe to move forward. The question will be whether she challenges people within her party and even her own voting constituency to say, “Look, in order to save Europe, we are going to have to change our policies dramatically.” Macron has sided, basically, with the other southern states who are saying, “If you’re going to save Europe from populist nationalism, you need to do everything you can to create jobs, especially for young people, and cast aside this austerity drive.”

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Quartz: Octlantis is a just-discovered underwater city engineered by octopuses

In Jervis Bay, off Eastern Australia, researchers recently spotted 15 gloomy octopuses congregating, communicating, dwelling together, and even evicting each other from dens at a site the scientists named “Octlantis.” The international team of marine biologists, led by professor David Scheel of Alaska Pacific University, filmed these creatures exhibiting complex social behaviors that contradict the received wisdom that these cephalopods are loners. Their study was published in the journal Marine and Freshwater Behavior and Physiology (paywall). [...]

The likely explanation, said Stephanie Chancellor, a study co-author and doctoral student in biological sciences at the University of Illinois-Chicago, in a statement, is that in both Octopolis and Octlantis there were several seafloor rock outcroppings dotting otherwise flat and featureless areas. “In addition to the rock outcroppings, octopuses who had been inhabiting the area had built up piles of shells left over from creatures they ate, most notably clams and scallops. These shell piles, or middens, were further sculpted to create dens, making these octopuses true environmental engineers,” she said. [...]

There’s also a lot of aggression apparently, although the researchers can’t yet explain why. Gloomy octopus males seem to spend a great deal of time chasing each other out of dens. Scheel is hesitant to speculate about what exactly this behavior means. “We are still studying this,” he said.

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JSTOR Daily: The psychology behind why clowns creep us out

This wasn’t the first time there had been a wave of clown sightings in the United States. After eerily similar events occurred in the Boston area in the 1980s, Loren Coleman, a cryptozoologist who studies the folklore behind mythical beasts such as Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster, came up with something called “The Phantom Clown Theory,” which attributes the proliferation of clown sightings to mass hysteria (usually sparked by incidents witnessed only by children). [...]

In fact, a 2008 study conducted in England revealed that very few children actually like clowns. It also concluded that the common practice of decorating children’s wards in hospitals with pictures of clowns may create the exact opposite of a nurturing environment. It’s no wonder so many people hate Ronald McDonald. [...]

The persona of the creepy clown really came into its own after serial killer John Wayne Gacy was captured. In the 1970s, Gacy appeared at children’s birthday parties as “Pogo the Clown” and also regularly painted pictures of clowns. When the authorities discovered that he had killed at least 33 people, burying most of them in the crawl space of his suburban Chicago home, the connection between clowns and dangerous psychopathic behavior became forever fixed in the collective unconscious of Americans. [...]

Unusual or strange physical characteristics such as bulging eyes, a peculiar smile or inordinately long fingers did not, in and of themselves, cause us to perceive someone as creepy. But the presence of weird physical traits can amplify any other creepy tendencies that the person might be exhibiting, such as persistently steering conversations toward peculiar sexual topics or failing to understand the policy about bringing reptiles into the office.

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