Jacobin Magazine: Hindutva’s Forward March

This March, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won regional elections in four out of five states, including Uttar Pradesh (UP). This huge prize represents a qualitative advance for the party and the Hindu nationalist Sangh Parivar it represents, giving greater legitimacy to their long-term goal of establishing a Hindu state in all but name. [...]

This article will trace what has happened since March, measuring Hindutva’s forward march. Though the forces have not advanced as fast or as far as the Sangh and BJP wished, their leaders should have more reason to feel satisfied with their progress. I’m basing this assessment on three parameters: developments on the electoral-political front since March, inroads in the “long march through the institutions,” (where I look at the Election Commission of India, the Supreme Court, the public education sector) and Hindutva’s hegemonizing thrust in civil society, which increasingly focuses on generating fear among dissenters. [...]

The BJP and NDA dominate the two houses of parliament, the Lok Sabha and the Rajya Sabha, and control more than half of India’s state governments. As a result, this summer, the Sangh relied on loyal MPs and Members of the Legislative Assemblies (MLAs) to elect the right president and vice president from among the competing candidates. [...]

Over the last fifty years the Supreme Court (SC) has all too often suborned itself  to government dictates and pressures. It reached its pinnacle of obedience during the 1975–77 emergency rule, then tried to recover its independent reputation in the 1980s. However, since the 1990s, it has regularly conformed to the perspectives of whatever regime happened to rule at the center. This is especially true in cases concerning communal crimes and corruption. [...]

The Modi regime’s greatest weakness comes from its economic failures. For example, the demonetization scheme represented a massive failure. Modi designed his program to attack the black economy’s cash flow, but the most important component of the informal economy is the stock of wealth held in immovable assets or stashed abroad. The government promised that the program’s success would make up for the short-term disruption to the most vulnerable people, but most of the old notes have returned to the formal banking sector. This means that the elites, who hoarded wads of cash, have converted their wealth into legitimate bank holdings that they can now earn interest on. The scheme’s mismanagement has helped lower average growth rates over the last two years. Modi’s promise of greater prosperity for the vast majority has not and will not be fulfilled.

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BBC4 Beyond Belief: Religious Polls

The first Gallup national poll into religion was carried out in 1935. Ever since - but especially with the arrival of the internet - pollsters have fed a hungry media the latest statistics about belief in God and church attendance. How important is the polling industry to our understanding of religion? What can the polls not tell us? What is their relationship to academic social sciences? Professor Robert Wuthnow from Princeton University argues that polling on religion is a huge waste of money and creates rather than reflects categories of believers and non-believers. Also joining Ernie Rea to discuss the promise and pitfalls of religious polls are Professor David Voas from University College London, Katie Harrison from the Faith Unit at Comres and Andrew Graystone, founder and former director of the Church Media network.

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Quartz: Scientists searching for alien life are starting to consider some weird biological possibilities

For decades, astronomers have come at that question by confining their search to organisms broadly similar to the ones here. In 1976, NASA’s Viking landers examined soil samples on Mars, and tried to animate them using the kind of organic nutrients that Earth microbes like, with inconclusive results. Later this year, the European Space Agency’s ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter will begin scoping out methane in the Martian atmosphere, which could be produced by Earth-like bacterial life. NASA’s Mars 2020 rover will likewise scan for carbon-based compounds from possible past or present Mars organisms. [...]

To open our minds, we need to go back to basics and consider the fundamental conditions that are necessary for life. First, it needs some form of energy, such as from volcanic hot springs or hydrothermal vents. That would seem to rule out any planets or moons lacking a strong source of internal heat. Life also needs protection from space radiation, such as an atmospheric ozone layer. Many newly discovered Earth-size worlds, including ones around TRAPPIST-1 and Proxima Centauri, orbit red dwarf stars whose powerful flares could strip away a planet’s atmosphere. Studies by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), set to launch next year, will reveal whether we should rule out these worlds, too. [...]

The search for exotic life therefore must begin close to home. The moons of Saturn and Jupiter offer a test case of whether biology could exist without an atmosphere. Jupiter’s Europa and Saturn’s Enceladus both have inner oceans and internal heat sources. Enceladus spews huge geysers of water vapour from its south pole; Europa appears to puff off occasional plumes as well. Future space missions could fly through the plumes and study them for possible biochemicals. NASA’s proposed Europa lander, which could launch in about a decade, could seek out possible microbe-laced ocean water that seeped up or snowed back down onto the surface.

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Quartz: Bill Clinton coined a new phrase to describe today’s right-wing populism

“You’re all here because, in one way or another, you intuitively know this. You believe that multiplication is a superior strategy to division. You believe that addition is the superior strategy to subtraction in economics, social inclusion and politics. You believe that there are severe limits on the ability of rising separatist tribalism to solve the problems that [threaten] the opportunities of the modern world.” [...]

Clinton said that separatist tribalism is evident everywhere from the expulsion of the Rohingya in Myanmar, to the estimated 11 million refugees who have fled their homes in Syria since the outbreak of civil war, to the pressures on Jordan and Lebanon regarding their policies in Yemen, and the economic and political crisis rocking Venezuela. [...]

Successful cooperation, he said, depends on “first believing that we can and must every day expand the definition of ‘us’ [and] shrink the definition of ‘them’—and we shouldn’t have to have an earthquake or a hurricane to know that that is what we’re about.”

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FiveThirtyEight: Democrats Weren’t Always Super Liberal On Immigration

It was only 11 years ago that a majority of Senate Democrats voted in favor of the Secure Fence Act of 2006, which called for 700 miles of fencing along the U.S.-Mexico border. It was just 10 years ago that Sen. Bernie Sanders voted against comprehensive immigration reform. [...]

Long before Trump made building a wall along the southern border one of his main campaign issues, some Democrats were open to the idea of fencing along the border. In a May 2006 Gallup survey, before Congress voted on the Secure Fence Act, nearly 40 percent of Democratic voters were in favor in favor of “building a wall along the border with Mexico.” And support for a wall generally held through the first part of this decade. [...]

More recently, however, Democratic support for a border wall has plummeted. Support dropped to just 29 percent for “building a wall along the entire border with Mexico” in a Pew Research Center survey in September 2015. And by February of this year, just 8 percent of Democrats were for it in Pew’s polling, while 89 percent were opposed. [...]

Democratic voters have also become far more in favor of granting citizenship to immigrants in the country illegally. To be clear, Democrats have always been in favor of a path to citizenship. In a January 2006 Time/SRBI poll, 72 percent of Democrats favored “allowing illegal immigrants now in this country to earn U.S. citizenship if they learn to speak English, have a job and pay taxes.” But that still left a sizable minority of Democrats, 24 percent, opposed to such a proposal. In fact, Republicans were actually slightly more likely than Democrats to say they were in favor, at 77 percent.

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The Guardian: We're at the end of white Christian America. What will that mean?

The survey is no ordinary one. It was based on a huge sample of 101,000 Americans from all 50 states, and concluded that just 43% of the population were white Christians. To put that in perspective, in 1976, eight in 10 Americans were identified as such, and a full 55% were white Protestants. Even as recently as 1996, white Christians were two-thirds of the population. [...]

As well as expecting the return of Christ, they sought to mould a pious community which embodied their goals of moral and ecclesiastical purity. They also nurtured a lurid demonology, and hunted and burned supposed witches in their midst. These tendencies – to millennialism, theocracy and scapegoating – have frequently recurred in America’s white Christian culture. [...]

This faith informed the 19th-century doctrine of manifest destiny, which held that the spread of white settlement over the entire continent was not only inevitable, but just. The dispossession of native peoples, and the nation’s eventual dominance of the hemisphere, was carried out under an imprimatur with Christian roots. [...]

While two-thirds of seniors are white Christians, only around a quarter of people 18-29 are. To varying degrees, this has affected almost every Christian denomination – and nearly four in 10 young Americans have no religious affiliation at all. [...]

Last week John Judis, previously a leading advocate of “demography is destiny” predictions about an emerging Democratic majority, recanted, remarking: “Whiteness is not a genetic category, after all; it is a social and political construct that relies on perception and prejudice. A century ago, Irish, Italians, and Jews were not seen as white.

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The Guardian: A blunt, fearful rant: Trump's UN speech left presidential norms in the dust

There are precedents for such fulminations, but not from US leaders. In tone, the speech was more reminiscent of Nikita Khrushchev, Fidel Castro or Hugo Chávez.

It did echo George W Bush’s 2002 “axis of evil” speech. That was delivered to a domestic audience, and there was little doubt that in his mind Trump was looking beyond the stony foreign faces looking up at him from the hall – where his customary pauses for applause were filled with uneasy silence – to the cheering crowds of supporters that carried to him to his stunning electoral victory, and to the centre of the world stage. [...]

The speech struck some of the darker notes of Trump’s earlier rhetoric, like the “American carnage” he described at his inauguration in January, and his evocation of an embattled western civilisation in his speech in Poland in July. [...]

Like Bush, Trump offered the world a black-and-white choice between the “righteous many” against the “wicked few” – but his choice of language was far blunter than his predecessor. There can not have been many, if any, threats to “totally destroy” another nation at a UN general assembly. He did not even direct the threat at the regime, making it clear it was North Korea as a country that was at peril. [...]

Venezuela was targeted for the socialist policies of the Nicolás Maduro government and the erosion of its democracy, but Trump did not attempt to distinguish Venezuela’s faults from other autocratic regimes with whom Trump has sought to cultivate.

Saudi Arabia was not mentioned. Nor was Russia, although there was, early on in the speech, a rare public expression of support for Ukrainian sovereignty.

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The Conversation: Airbnb and empty houses: who’s responsible for managing the impacts on our cities?

Airbnb poses a possible threat to rental affordability. The income Airbnb generates in areas of cities popular with tourists causes owners of rental properties to withdraw these from the long-term rental market. It also causes investors to acquire property and enter the Airbnb market, and to increase the cost of long-term rental.

This may create a ripple effect as relatively high-income households are displaced to adjacent neighbourhoods. The scale of Airbnb impacts on rents, displacement of long-term renters and neighbourhood fragmentation has led cities such as Barcelona, New York and Amsterdam to attempt to ban, or strictly regulate, the extent and location of Airbnb. [...]

On the night of the 2016 Census, 1,089,165 dwellings were empty – 11.2% of all Australian dwellings. It’s widely assumed that these empty dwellings, by not contributing to housing supply, increase house prices. [...]

However, empty house data should be seen in context: over the previous 35 years, between 9.2% and 11.2% of houses were empty. Vacancy rates have changed little over this time. Almost two-thirds of empty dwellings on census night are holiday houses or dwellings where owners were absent. Among the capital cities, only in metropolitan Perth did the empty dwelling rate exceed 10%.

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