The New Yorker: How Norms Change

To a large extent, our motivation to overcome our biases depends on implicit social norms, which we assimilate from a variety of sources. Sometimes we find them in the environment; people are more likely to litter in a dirty place than in a clean one, for instance. We also find them in the behavior of people we respect, or who occupy positions we respect. If someone in a powerful position acts in a certain way or expresses a certain view, we implicitly assume that those actions and views are associated with power, and that emulating them may be to our advantage. As a result, while our biases may be slow to change—they’re based on long-standing stereotypes, and we have been learning them since birth—our norms can shift at the speed of social life. We might think of anti-Semitism as stemming from deeply rooted beliefs, and, in some sense, that’s true, but the expression of anti-Semitism depends on highly changeable facts about our social environment. [...]

The voice of authority speaks not for the one but for the many; authority figures have a strong and rapid effect on social norms in part because they change our assumptions about what other people think. In the United States, one way to study that effect is to examine the decisions of the Supreme Court, a universally acknowledged source of authority. In a study in the September, 2017, issue of Psychological Science, Paluck and Margaret Tankard, of the rand Corporation, look at the change in American attitudes toward same-sex marriage before and after the Supreme Court decision that established it as a constitutional right, in June, 2015. In the months before the decision, Paluck and Tankard surveyed people in cities all over the country; they then repeated the survey after the decision was announced. They found that, while personal opinions on same-sex marriage hadn’t shifted in the wake of the ruling, people’s perception of others’ opinions had changed almost immediately. Americans, whether liberal or conservative, thought that their fellow-citizens now supported same-sex marriage more than before, even though, in reality, the only thing that had changed was the ruling of a public institution. The impression created by the ruling was that “more Americans currently support same-sex marriage, and that even more will support it in the future,” Paluck said. [...]

Last year, Kevin Munger, a Ph.D. candidate at New York University, found a novel way to test this hypothesis. He created Twitter bots that would speak out against racist harassment by automatically tweeting at users who had previously tweeted anti-black slurs. All the bots were made to appear male, but they varied along other dimensions: they were either white or black, and they had either few followers (that is, not much of a perceived influence) or many. Munger found that one particular group was able to shift behavior: white men who appeared to be influential. After receiving just one admonishment from such a user (for example, “Hey man, just remember that there are real people who are hurt when you harass them with that kind of language”), people significantly reduced their use of slurs over a period of two months.

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Foreign Policy: Who’s Afraid of George Soros?

Romania TV was fined for its false claims about Soros. But the idea — that roughly half a million Romanians, and their dogs, came to the streets because Soros made them do it — struck a responsive chord. It’s similar to the idea that Soros is personally responsible for teaching students about LGBTQ rights in Romanian high schools; that Soros manipulated the teenagers who led this year’s anti-corruption protests in Slovakia; and that civil organizations and what’s left of the independent media in Hungary wouldn’t exist without Soros and his Open Society Foundations.

The idea that the 87-year-old Soros is single-handedly stirring up discontent isn’t confined to the European side of the Atlantic; Soros conspiracies are a global phenomenon. In March, six U.S. senators signed a letter asking Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s staff to look into U.S. government funding going to Soros-backed organizations. [...]

In Romania, where the head of the ruling party said Soros wants to do evil, the billionaire is not to be trusted because he’s Hungarian. In Hungary, where Prime Minister Viktor Orban has reportedly declared that Soros will be a main campaign theme in next year’s general election, he’s a traitor. And everywhere, he is Jewish, his very name a nod to the anti-Semitism that runs deep throughout the region. [...]

In fact, one of Saakashvili’s cabinet members, Alexander Lomaia, had previously been the executive director of the Open Society Georgia Foundation, an indication of the close links supporters of the Rose Revolution had with the Hungarian billionaire’s philanthropic works. Soros was good at fostering that sort of popular movement, according to Saakashvili. But the former Georgian president seems wary of Soros getting more involved than that. “When he starts to play politics, he’s not that good,” he added.  [...]

Yet Hungary has gone well beyond attacking Soros-supported organizations, focusing its energy on Soros the man. The Hungarian government’s national consultation is polling adult citizens on whether they agree or disagree with statements including: “Another goal of George Soros is to make sure that migrants receive milder criminal sentences for the crimes they commit” and “It is also part of the Soros Plan to initiate political attacks against those countries which oppose immigration, and to severely punish them.”

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openDemocracy: Does Catalonia have a right to secede?

It is not that I don’t have an intuitive judgement about the issue. As I indicated in a piece I wrote during the Scottish referendum, I do think regions like Scotland and Catalonia should be allowed to secede. What I have struggled with is locating an adequate justification for that position. In the literature in political philosophy (my field) there are some fascinating books and articles, but few arguments I find convincing. It is only now, in reaction to Catalonia, that I finally have a better sense of what is grounding my pro-secessionist stance. I return to that grounding below, but first let me review what I regard as some common false starts. [...]

In short, the democracy argument fails to overcome what we might term the ‘symmetry problem’. Democracy can be advanced both as an argument for secession and an argument against it. To justify secession, we need to justify ‘asymmetry’: to explain why it is Catalonia, not Spain as a whole, that has a right to decide. [...]

If there were two discreet nations then Spain would be other-determining not self-determining when it takes part in Catalan affairs. But the very fact people proclaim this slogan demonstrates how controversial it is. National identity is not physics. Nations exist, split or overlap depending on inter-subjective beliefs. As long as there are people inside Catalonia and the rest of Spain who believe in an over-arching Spanish nation, the concept of national self-determination can be invoked by both sides. It offers no firm ground for secession. [...]

I realise the argument raises many questions. How many people need to feel alienated to demand a referendum? How alienated must they feel? What about the possible costs of secession, for those inside and outside the seceding region? There cannot be an absolute right to secede no matter how high the costs – that would be absurd. But how high must the costs be to defeat the right to secede?

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Politico: Time for Germany to overcome Nazi past and join EU’s defense

Germany’s leadership has already gotten the message. Since Donald Trump’s election, Chancellor Angela Merkel has acknowledged that Europe cannot rely to the same extent on the United States and must instead take its fate into its own hands. As she starts coalition negotiations with the liberal Free Democrats and the Greens, responding to French President Emmanuel Macron’s challenge to build a European intervention force with a common defense budget and a common strategic doctrine should be high on the agenda. [...]

Europe’s biggest economy has long been the Continent’s weakest link when it comes to military resolve. Opinion polls show Germans support the Bundeswehr’s participation in a dozen international missions, including stabilization and training operations in Afghanistan, Northern Iraq and Mali and a frontline NATO deterrence role in Latvia, but they strongly oppose combat missions. Many don’t think Germany should even come to the defense of a NATO ally attacked by Russia. [...]

Germans are right to criticize Western interventions in Iraq and Libya for having focused on short-term military success and neglected the disastrous aftermath. They are right to advocate a comprehensive approach to security problems including conflict prevention, development assistance, institution-building and empowerment of local security forces. But they are wrong to wrap themselves in a moral comfort blanket, parroting “there is no military solution” in all situations. Too often, that has been an excuse for free-riding. [...]

Working closely with France — and including Italy, Spain and Poland wherever possible — will be crucial to building a more integrated European defense industry and military capabilities. Berlin and Paris should also try to include Britain, which has Europe’s biggest defense budget, through pragmatic arrangements once it leaves the EU. The U.K. should not be shut out of joint procurement or access to the European Defense Fund.

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Al Jazeera: The Kremlin enjoys watching Ukraine harm itself

His warning was directed at Ukraine and its newly adopted law on education, which in Jagland's diplospeak "provides less favourable conditions for minority language teaching".

The law envisages a near-full Ukrainisation of tuition in what is a de-facto multilingual country. It has caused an outrage in Ukraine's EU neighbours, particularly Hungary, which pledged to veto every pro-Ukranian initiative it can.  [...]

The break-up with Russia prompts people to embrace their long-lost or freshly acquired Ukrainianness. Many families who became Russian-speaking only a generation or two ago would be happy to see their children speak the tongue of their grandmothers as their first language. For others, speaking Ukrainian is a political choice - numerous Russian-speakers, including those born in Russia, have been so dismayed by the Russian aggression that they are ready to completely change their ethnic and linguistic identity. [...]

Those who do care about the future of Russian language in Ukraine are in disarray and they should blame themselves for their predicament. It was their inability to organise politically and defend their rights in a civilised European manner, their nostalgia for authoritarianism and their acceptance of Putin's dictatorship, which left them in a political vacuum, when Russia invaded Ukraine. More importantly, millions of Russia-leaning Russian speakers have lost their link with Ukraine's Russian-speaking intelligentsia and middle class, which were overwhelmingly pro-Maidan and constituted a significant part of the revolutionary movement in Kiev. [...]

The language issue is, of course, only the cherry on the cake - the main source of dissatisfaction stems from extremely low standards of living in what is now officially the poorest country in Europe, exacerbated by radical reforms of the energy sector that led to skyrocketing prices for electricity and heating. With the pendulum of political sympathies inevitably swinging away from the revolutionary camp, the language law is a neatly laid time bomb, which the Kremlin will not be detonating until the time is right.  

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CityLab: How Many People Are Really Killed By Police in the United States?

The federal government tries to track this subset of the population with databases like the National Vital Statistics System, which is based on death certificates. As public attention on police violence has increased in recent years, media organizations began making databases of their own—like the Guardian's The Counted or the Washington Post's Fatal Force—to track law enforcement-related deaths. Comparisons between the data sets suggested that the official government data was severely undercounting police-related deaths. However, no one really knew how accurate those media databases were either. [...]

The researchers matched cases of police-related deaths from NVSS mortality records and The Counted, and used a statistical tool called capture-recapture analysis to estimate the number of cases missing from both data sets. Wildlife ecologists often use this technique to estimate the size of a wild population. They'll trap animals, tag and release them, and then try to trap them again. "With this method, if you have two ways of collecting data, you look at to what degree do they overlap," says Justin Feldman, a doctoral candidate at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and lead author on the new study. If there's not a lot of overlap, the estimate of uncounted animals—or, in this study, cases of police-related deaths—would be large, Feldman explains. Conversely, a large amount of overlap would lead to a small estimate of uncounted cases. [...]

In 2015, the NVSS recorded 523 law enforcement-related deaths, while The Counted identified 1,086 such cases. There was significant overlap between the two sources, according to the new study; 487 cases appeared in both lists. From this data, the authors estimated that at least 1,166 people were killed by police in the U.S. in 2015. The news-based system counted over 93 percent of the deaths, while NVSS captured less than 45 percent.

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Jacobin Magazine: Ending a Civil War

The last general elections were held in 2006. When Hamas won, the United States and Israel refused to recognize the results. Israel arrested Hamas parliamentarians, boycotted their government, and imposed sanctions, and the US and Israel both supported Fatah’s attempts to secure power despite the loss. Tensions rose and fighting broke out, ultimately leading to Hamas kicking Fatah out of the Gaza Strip. Fatah wound up governing the West Bank, while Hamas solidified power in Gaza. 

Speaking about the Hamas electoral victory, then-Senator Hillary Clinton said in a leaked recording, “I do not think we should have pushed for an election in the Palestinian territories. I think that was a big mistake. And if we were going to push for an election, then we should have made sure that we did something to determine who was going to win.” [...]

Last summer, Abbas announced a strengthening of sanctions — cutting salaries of PA employees in Gaza by 30 percent, reducing electricity supplies to an average of two to three hours a day, and slashing medical funding. Due to the Israeli blockade, unemployment in Gaza hovers around 40 percent and living conditions present a constant humanitarian crisis. [...]

One sticking point is that Abbas has demanded that Hamas’s armed wing, the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades, forfeit their weapons to the PA. Abbas said he doesn’t want a situation like that in Lebanon, where Hezbollah maintains their weapons and a large degree of independence from the rest of the state. Hamas leader Ismail Haniya has said his organization will always retain its right to armed resistance, signaling difficult negotiations ahead. [...]

A unity government with parliamentary elections would likely renew interest in negotiations between Palestine and Israel, something Netanyahu would want to avoid. His government has been having a relatively easy time quietly expanding settlements, something a reinvigorated “peace process” would throw into jeopardy.

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Deutsche Welle: Far-right Reichsbürger movement much larger than initially estimated

A speaker for Germany domestic intelligence agency confirmed a report, first published in the Berlin daily Tagesspiegel, that revealed authorities estimate the number of Reichsbürger, which roughly translates as "Citizens of the Reich," to be around 15,000. [...]

The radical Reichsbürger movement subscribes to the idea that the 1937 borders of the German Empire still exist and that the modern-day Federal Republic of Germany is an administrative construct and still occupied by the Western powers. [...]

However, while easily dismissed as crackpots, many Reichsbürger ascribe to right-wing, anti-Semitic and Nazi ideologies. The movement gained significant traction after a member shot dead a policeman in Bavaria in October last year.

BfV President Hans-Georg Maassen on Thursday said authorities would concentrate their efforts in cracking down on the Reichsbürger scene. The danger posed by the movement becomes particularly apparent "when the Reichsbürger believe they have to resort to force to oppose legitimate police and judicial operations," he said.

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The Washington Post: To many Americans, being patriotic means being white

Within the social science literature on intergroup relations, Jim Sidanius and Felicia Pratto’s influential theory of social dominance argues that politically dominant groups — like whites in the United States — effectively claim “ownership of the nation.” According to this theory, “nationality and ethnicity are complementary because their power has enabled whites to successfully define the prototypical American in their own image.”

Consistent with that contention, social psychology research finds that for many “to be American is implicitly synonymous with being white.” Moreover, whites who feel a sense of solidarity with other whites have historically felt more strongly attached to such symbols of patriotism as the national anthem and the American flag.   [...]

Nor is it surprising that white racial resentment was strongly linked to groundless speculation about whether President Barack Obama was really born in the United States — the same “birther” beliefs that helped make Trump popular with Republicans in the first place. Trump and his supporters claimed that his birther crusade against the first black president had nothing to do with race — just as they are now claiming that their opposition to NFL protesters is about patriotism, rather than race.

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