BBC4 A Point of View: The miserable pantomime of contemporary British vegetarianism

"As the years have passed", writes Will Self, "so gnawing on a bloody piece of cow rump has come to seem, to me, more and more...well, vulgar".  

Via Leviticus and Arcimboldo, he charts his conversion to vegetarianism.  

And he explains why it's not just personal morals that are "propelling me headlong towards the horror of Quorn"!

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The Atlantic: How Hindu Nationalists Politicized the Taj Mahal

Much of the BJP’s vitriol for the history of Muslim rule is projected onto the Indian Muslims of today, comprising 15 percent of the population. Hindu nationalists often question Muslims’ loyalty and right to their homeland, a view exacerbated by the communal tensions engendered by Partition in 1947. The BJP leadership has been criticized for inciting violence against Muslims with its inflammatory rhetoric, including the 2002 anti-Muslim riots in Gujarat which killed over 1,000 people (Modi was the state’s chief minister at the time). In 2014, Yogi Adityanath, a Hindu priest perpetually cloaked in his saffron robes and appointed the BJP chief minister of Uttar Pradesh in March 2017, stated at a political rally, “If [Muslims] kill one Hindu man, then we will kill 100 Muslim men.”

In many ways, Adityanath’s meteoric rise in Indian politics exemplifies both the BJP’s ever-tightening embrace of extreme Hindu-nationalist positions and increasing political power. A controversial figure since his election to parliament in 1998, Adityanath founded the militant Hindu group Hindu Yuva Vahini, which has been accused of inciting communal tensions and is linked to recent attacks on Muslims. He has long been a hardline promoter of Hindutva, stating in 2005, “I will not stop until I turn [Uttar Pradesh] and India into a Hindu rashtra [nation].” He promised to cleanse India of other religions, calling this “the century of Hindutva.” After Adityanath became chief minister, he pushed for a number of policies that aligned with his ideological position, including increasing legal protections of the cow, considered sacred in Hinduism. These measures have been criticized for stoking violence against Muslims suspected of eating beef or of raising cattle for slaughter, in attacks known as “beef lynchings.” [...]

While the BJP government has acknowledged the architectural wonder’s value as a tourist destination, its potential future hangs in the balance, given Hindu nationalism’s growing popularity and political power. Shamsul Islam, a professor at Delhi University has said that the Taj Mahal’s very existence is now in danger. While the specter of Hindu mobs destroying it is an unlikely one, Islam recognized that the Taj Mahal could be permanently damaged through deliberate neglect as air and water pollution take their toll on the ancient structure.

Yet this fear is no mere hyperbole. Hindu nationalists have long targeted Islamic buildings and other historic sites. For example, a survey found that 230 Islamic historic sites were vandalized or destroyed, many reduced to mere rubble, during the 2002 Gujarat riots. Perhaps the most famous example of this is the 1992 razing of the Babri Masjid mosque in Ayodhya, which resulted in communal rioting around the country that led to nearly 2,000 deaths. Hindu nationalists have argued that the mosque, constructed in the 16th century by the Mughal Emperor Babur, was built over a destroyed Hindu temple, a claim contested by scholars, near the site traditionally considered to be Lord Rama’s birthplace. On December 6, 1992, leaders of the BJP, alongside fellow Hindu nationalist groups Vishva Hindu Prashad and Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, gathered outside the mosque to offer prayers, followed by a mob of their followers breaking through the security barrier and, piece by piece, pounding the ancient structure to the ground with sledgehammers. The site has been a source of controversy in recent years—in 2005, Islamic militants attacked the makeshift Hindu temple that had been built on the mosque's ruins with an explosives-laden jeep.

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Vox: When Trump met Xi: how the president learned to stop worrying and love China

Yet since Trump became president, his view seems to have shifted dramatically. The more he has spoken with Chinese President Xi Jinping, the more pro-China he has sounded. And by the time he visited Beijing for the first time, in November, Trump was projecting stunning optimism about the possibility of closer ties between Beijing and Washington. [...]

How long this Damascene conversion lasts, or whether it produces anything good for America, remains to be seen. But for now, one thing is abundantly clear: A presidential candidate who attacked China in harsher terms than any before him now seems more comfortable with Beijing than any of his predecessors.

When one examines Trump’s musings on international politics for the past 30-odd years, in both his writing and his public appearances, there’s one consistent theme: The world is a zero-sum place. If an agreement or policy benefits another country, it hurts America — and vice versa. [...]

Early in his presidency, it seemed like Trump might turn this rhetoric into policy action. During the transition, he spoke directly with the president of Taiwan — a shot at China that no previous American president had been willing to take. In March, he blasted China on Twitter for failing to stop North Korea’s nuclear development. It seemed like the first meeting between Trump and President Xi, on April 6, would be brutally awkward. [...]

The budding friendship between Trump and Xi appears to have profoundly shifted Trump’s view of US-China relations. Why the two men have gotten along so well isn’t clear; reporters aren’t allowed in their private meetings. But it makes some sense given Trump’s apparent admiration for strongmen across the world, like Russia’s Vladimir Putin and the Philippines’ Rodrigo Duterte (both more thuggishly violent than Xi).

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Wisecrack Edition: The Lion King: Is Simba the VILLAIN?

SciShow Psych: Can Trauma Be Inherited?

Social Europe: Links Between Austerity And Immigration, And The Power Of Information

This is the first link between immigration and austerity I want to draw. The Labour party before 2015 had also decided that attacking austerity was politically impossible: ‘the argument had been lost’. Focus groups told them that people had become convinced that the government should tighten its belt because governments were just like households. The mistake here, as I wrote many times, was to assume attitudes were fixed rather than contextual. I was right: austerity is no longer a vote winner (but to be fair, whether I would have been right in 2014/15 if Labour had taken a clear anti-austerity line we do not know).

Why might attitudes to immigration change? I strongly suspect that anti-immigration attitudes, along with suspicion about benefit claimants, become stronger in bad times. When real wages are rising it is difficult to fire people up with arguments that they would have risen even faster in the absence of immigration. But when real wages are falling, as they have been in the UK in an unprecedented way over the last decade, it is much easier to blame outsiders. Equally when public services deteriorate it is easy to blame newcomers. [...]

This is particularly true when it is in the interests of the governing political party and its supporters in the press to deflect criticism of austerity by pretending immigration is the real cause of people’s woes. This is the third link between austerity and immigration, and it is one deliberately created and encouraged by right wing political parties. In this way Brexit has its own self-reinforcing dynamic. People vote for it because of immigration, its prospect leads to falling real wages as sterling falls and the economy falters, which adds to bad times and anti-immigrant attitudes.  [...]

For politicians who do want to start making the case for immigration, the place I would start is public services. Few economists would dispute that immigrants pay more in tax than they take out in using public services. Yet most of the public believe the opposite. In this post entitled Is Austerity to blame for Brexit, I show a poll where the biggest reason people give for EU immigration being bad is its impact on the NHS. Getting the true information out there will have a big effect. Just as public attitudes to austerity can change, so can they over immigration, but only if politicians on the left start getting the facts out there.

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Social Europe: Bulgaria’s EU Presidency: Normalizing Nationalism?

However, if the EU’s existential crisis seems over, the bloc has significantly lost cohesion in terms of its values. In a word: nationalists are coming to town. This is markedly evident in one of Europe’s lesser-known powers: Bulgaria, where anti-migrant and pro-Russian nationalists now rule in a coalition government with mainstream conservatives (since May). In the year 2000, other EU countries imposed (temporary) economic sanctions on Austria for daring to have a government including the nationalist Freedom Party (FPÖ). [...]

The new Bulgarian government is unlikely to face much trouble from Brussels, because the country’s shift is symptomatic of a wider trend in European politics. In both east and west, traditional liberal-internationalist elites have been increasingly destabilized, notably because of bungled management of the economic and migratory crises. In France, the nationalist Marine Le Pen made it to the second round of the presidential elections and in Germany the anti-Islam Alternative for Germany party (AFD) broke into the Bundestag with over 12% of the vote. In Eastern Europe, Brussels has been largely powerless in the face of populist and anti-immigration governments and politicians in Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia. Thus, Bulgaria – though a small country dependent on EU funds – is likely to find many allies who would help them veto any liberal pressure from Brussels.

The EU’s poorest member state has nonetheless enjoyed a substantial economic recovery, with GDP growing over 3% in both of the last two years (3.6% 2015, 3.4% 2016). The migratory crisis, however, has proven beneficial to the nationalists. As the Bertelsmann Stiftung’s 2017 Sustainable Governance Indicators (SGI) report on Bulgaria notes: “The European refugee crisis of the last several years, of which Bulgaria has experienced a small part, has demonstrated two things. First, xenophobia and xenophobic parties are on the rise. Second, government policies in accommodating and integrating refugees have generally failed, while civic organizations have proven to be very active and, in fact, indispensable to helping address refugees’ basic needs.” [...]

Nor is Bulgaria likely to lead a particularly cohesive bloc as EU Council president. The Eastern European populists may be united in their opposition to migrants, but in other respects their positions vary. Bulgaria and Romania are eager to support the EU so as to not be excluded from new structures, while Poland and Hungary have taken to Brussels-bashing, all the while quietly pocketing EU subsidies. In any case, despite a legal victory at the European Court of Justice (ECJ), the Commission has backed down from its scheme for mandatory resettlement of 120,000 refugees across the EU. The biggest bone of contention between Brussels and the Eastern European populists has thus been removed.

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CityLab: Visions of Alt-Berlin in 'The Man in the High Castle'

Speer’s plan—developed in close collaboration with Hitler, who understood the nationalistic power of architecture and urban design—was to transform Berlin: the old city was to be reborn as Welthauptstadt Germania (Germania, World Capital), the seat of the new empire.   [...]

Thus, through this one image—five seconds of film—viewers begin to enter the shadowlands between the world that was and the world that might have been. As your eye moves up from the column to follow the shot, you’re treated—or terrified—with a feast of unbuilt architecture. Using the latest software and rendering techniques to visualize the completion of actual archival plans from the 1930s, the production team has masterfully brought to life a mad planner’s beautiful nightmare: an “Alt-Berlin” that was designed to last a thousand years, but never built. (Dick’s story doesn’t get to Berlin, but he certainly would have enjoyed the mind-bending nature of this work.) [...]

Although never built, Speer’s monster-piece (indeed, some dubbed it the “Monsterbau,” or monster-building) truly puts the “dominate” in “dome”: looking like the U.S. Capitol on Pervitin, it would have been large enough to fit the Papal Basilica of St. Peter inside it. Hitler planned to use the massive hall to gather crowds of up to 180,000 people—what would have been by far the largest interior assembly space in the world; planners fretted that the respiration from so many excited Nazis in a single enclosed space might create its own weather patterns. [...]

Speer even contemplated the destruction of his own beautiful creations 1,000 years in the future, expounding his Ruinenwerttheorie—a “theory of ruin value”—for the architectural monuments he designed, a sort of perverted death-cult in stone, the city as mausoleum.

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Quartz: Russia’s dire economics are forcing smokers to grow their own tobacco

Russians’ real disposable income fell for the fourth month in a row in October—a 1.3% drop compared to the same month last year. In September, real wages were 13% lower than in 2014, before the recession started, according to Moscow’s Higher School of Economics. Meanwhile, tax hikes on tobacco have made cigarette prices nearly double since 2013—a challenge to one of Europe’s heaviest-smoking populations. [...]

“Several governors have told me that last year people started planting tobacco in their dachas and gardens,” Sergei Ryabukhin, the head of the Russian Senate’s budget and finance committee said last week (link in Russian). “When you go to a region, you realize with horror that people have turned to growing tobacco or shag. According to official statistics [tobacco production] has fallen 21% and people are smoking less. But in reality it’s not like that.”

Despite the country’s massive drop in cigarette sales (19.6% between 2013 and 2016), Russia was still the world’s third biggest market (pdf, p.2) for tobacco in 2016.

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