The New Yorker: Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds (February 27, 2017)

The Stanford studies became famous. Coming from a group of academics in the nineteen-seventies, the contention that people can’t think straight was shocking. It isn’t any longer. Thousands of subsequent experiments have confirmed (and elaborated on) this finding. As everyone who’s followed the research—or even occasionally picked up a copy of Psychology Today—knows, any graduate student with a clipboard can demonstrate that reasonable-seeming people are often totally irrational. Rarely has this insight seemed more relevant than it does right now. Still, an essential puzzle remains: How did we come to be this way? [...]

Stripped of a lot of what might be called cognitive-science-ese, Mercier and Sperber’s argument runs, more or less, as follows: Humans’ biggest advantage over other species is our ability to coöperate. Coöperation is difficult to establish and almost as difficult to sustain. For any individual, freeloading is always the best course of action. Reason developed not to enable us to solve abstract, logical problems or even to help us draw conclusions from unfamiliar data; rather, it developed to resolve the problems posed by living in collaborative groups. [...]

Mercier and Sperber prefer the term “myside bias.” Humans, they point out, aren’t randomly credulous. Presented with someone else’s argument, we’re quite adept at spotting the weaknesses. Almost invariably, the positions we’re blind about are our own. [...]

The Gormans don’t just want to catalogue the ways we go wrong; they want to correct for them. There must be some way, they maintain, to convince people that vaccines are good for kids, and handguns are dangerous. (Another widespread but statistically insupportable belief they’d like to discredit is that owning a gun makes you safer.) But here they encounter the very problems they have enumerated. Providing people with accurate information doesn’t seem to help; they simply discount it. Appealing to their emotions may work better, but doing so is obviously antithetical to the goal of promoting sound science. “The challenge that remains,” they write toward the end of their book, “is to figure out how to address the tendencies that lead to false scientific belief.”

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Jacobin Magazine: How Washington Hacked Mongolia’s Democracy

Many people are familiar with the Clinton administration’s efforts to give then-Russian president Boris Yeltsin a much-needed — and decisive — boost in the country’s 1996 presidential election. Fewer are aware that from 1991 to 1996, US political operatives, funded by the federal government and directed by an influential senator, played an active role in bringing Mongolia’s right-wing opposition to power, a move that would prove as much a disaster to ordinary Mongolians as it would a boon to US government and corporate interests. The incident is so little-remembered today, it’s not even listed in Carnegie Mellon University political scientist Don Levin’s otherwise exhaustive list of superpower meddling in foreign elections.  [...]

Strategists sent by the IRI to Mongolia taught the parties about membership recruitment, campaign messaging, and grassroots party building. At the start of 1996, they convinced the opposition to form a united coalition — the Democratic Union Coalition (DUC) — and advised the candidates to personally tour their message around the country, routine practice in most Western democracies but a new concept in Mongolia at the time. [...]

It’s doubtful all this could’ve happened without the large sums of US taxpayer money being lavished on the coalition. According to the NED’s annual reports at the time, between 1992 and 1996 it gave a total of $480,520 to the IRI for expressly partisan purposes — to help the free market opposition “develop strategies to make them a more effective force within the legislature,” and to help them “solidify their platforms and develop comprehensive and viable communications strategies for the parliamentary elections.”

To put that into perspective, the total cost of Mongolia’s 2000 parliamentary elections was $333,000. In 1996 alone, the NED gave the IRI $158,327 to assist the coalition in that year’s election, nearly half that total. [...]

But the damage was already done. Driven partly by a collapse in world copper prices, the economy quickly fell apart after the DUC’s victory. Unemployment ballooned over 20 percent, helped along by the purging of government departments and the decline of domestic industries. Close to four hundred children were estimated as living permanently on the streets. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization determined that one-third of the population was below nutritional-starvation levels. Even the founding chairman of one of the parties in the DUC admitted that average real incomes had dropped by 30 percent in the year they were in power.

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Jacobin Magazine: Brazil’s Abortion Battle

The tactic was simple: find a bill that women of all political visions will support, work directly with the women involved, create an emotional narrative about the connection between a mother and her child, and insert, somewhere in there, what’s known in Brazil as a “turtle” clause: a provision snuck into a separate, unrelated bill. If the bill is time sensitive, the “turtle” clause might get pushed through without due public debate. [...]

Though there are different strands of Evangelism, it’s the mega-church, prosperity gospel, morally conservative kind that has a national political project in Brazil. Unlike the Catholic church, the Evangelical churches have invested heavily in electing their pastors and members to all levels of political representation. They also work to establish relationships with the judiciary, the executive, and high-ranking bureaucrats and successful businessmen. Mirroring the televangelists and mega-churches of the United States, they preach financial prosperity as the path towards a “nation chosen by God.” [...]

Members of the Evangelical front come from different parties, from the extreme conservative right to the moderate left, including the Workers Party. Though they don’t vote together on everything, they collude on issues involving religion and traditional family values.[...]

In September, the front sparked a frenzied movement to close a queer art exhibit, claiming it promoted incest, pedophilia, and religious heresy. Then there was the campaign against São Paulo’s Museum of Modern Art, for admitting children to an exhibit involving artistic nudity. These culminated into a generalized crusade against art and progressive intellectual work, setting the stage for the outrageous physical confrontation against Judith Butler and her partner Wendy Brown when they visited Brazil earlier this month.

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Wendover Productions: Why Public Transportation Sucks in the US

SciShow: How a Sick Chimp Led to a Global Pandemic: The Rise of HIV

The Atlantic: The Pope's Impossible Choice in Burma

“You don’t counter racism and prejudice by backing down to it,” Mark Farmaner, director of the London-based Burma Campaign U.K. lobby group, told me. “Already nationalists are gloating about the pope not using the word ‘Rohingya.’ His failure to use the word will only embolden those who want to expel all Rohingya from Myanmar.” [...]

An uneasy and often antipathetic relationship between the country’s Buddhist majority and myriad Christian communities has simmered ever since. Three years after the war ended, celebrations over Burma’s independence were marred when Karen National Union, a largely Christian armed force in the country’s west, took up arms against the new government in Rangoon. Civil wars have flared across the country since then, often along ethnic and religious lines. Burma’s postcolonial government, bowing to pressure from an increasingly vocal monastic community, declared Buddhism the state religion in 1961. The outrage this decision provoked among Burma’s Christian minority helped justify a military coup d’état the next year, ushering in nearly five decades of military rule. [...]

Yet the reality for many outside the Buddhist faith is starkly different. Numerous towns across Burma have been rocked by anti-Muslim pogroms in recent years that have left scores dead. More than 100,000 people, overwhelmingly Christian, have been displaced by a six-year civil war in the country’s north; Burma’s military has worked to block humanitarian aid to many of those forced to flee. [...]

It occurs to me that the doctrine of papal infallibility bears uncomfortable similarities to the expectations we place on secular heroes like Suu Kyi. If that’s the case, it follows that the principles by which we judge both should be the same. Pope Francis has now arrived in Bangladesh; he will meet with Rohingya refugees and bear witness to their suffering. Meanwhile, refugees continue to stream across the border. Suu Kyi has yet to mention them by name.

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Quartz: A Nobel laureate explains why we get the bad economic policies we deserve

The timing of the book—published in English this month after its original release in French last year—is pertinent. The relationship between economics and politics is starting to unravel. Over the past year, many have sought to explain Brexit, the election of Donald Trump, and the rise of far-right and far-left politics in Europe using economic arguments. But it’s becoming clear that economics alone does not explain the situation. If the questions at the root of public life are no longer answered by the famous political dictum, “It’s the economy, stupid,” where does that leave economists? [...]

He also isn’t afraid to turn the tables. “We get the economic policies we deserve,” he writes. “And as long as a lack of economic understanding prevails among the general public, making good policy choices will take a lot of political courage.” This concern shared by the Bank of England’s chief economist, Andy Haldane, who recently said the UK suffers from “twin deficits” in public understanding and trust in economics (paywall). [...]

It also applies to the National Front in France [a far-right party], which has a similar economic program. People see the market as this anonymous entity that is running their life. Governments have a role to play, but not what they think. They want someone to rescue them and they think the government is going to protect their job. I am for a welfare state but, for example, not the way it works now in France. You want to protect workers; you don’t want to protect jobs. [...]

I’m pessimistic. If you look at the populist movement—but not just populists— they always offer more sovereignty. If you look at the broader scale, it’s ridiculous. The French are going to defend against Germans and vice versa. But as a narrative it works, and the trend is towards more sovereignty and less federalism.

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CityLab: London's Future: More People, Fewer Cars

The most eye-catching feature of the report is a near-blanket ban on new parking across much of the city. In Central London and in a constellation of new development zones grouped around outer transit hubs, new car parking spaces will be forbidden altogether. In the few, less central areas of inner London where new parking will be permitted, it will be at a rate of no more than 0.25 spaces per new housing unit.

This zero-tolerance policy may sound strict to future motorists, but it’s also part of a wholesale reimagining of London as a city where the automobile is an endangered species. (Already, private cars no longer dominate city streets.) There are major new transit links on the way, mentioned in the London Plan although not introduced by it. Beyond Crossrail 1— a major east-west heavy rail link due to start service next year—the plan predicts the approval of Crossrail 2, a new north-south counterpart that will ease access to central London from the suburbs and exurbs. Meanwhile, an extension of the existing Bakerloo tube line out to southeast London is also in the cards. [...]

The Draft London Plan shows awareness of this. In fact one of its key priorities is the development of smaller housing plots, of a scale that can house between one and 25 homes. The plan stipulates a target of 245,000 new homes on such sites, more than a third of all homes planned for the city. This seems prudent. Bar a few brownfield sites, there aren’t many large unused pockets in the outer boroughs, but there are many areas scattered with low-rise homes with large gardens that could be filled in with small homes, or parades of shops that could see upper floors added. Such efforts to cram in affordable units would be likely to meet some resistance, but the sheer value of space in London has already seen many homeowners adding as much extra space as they can within existing planning laws, extending kitchens and family rooms into their gardens, squaring out lofts into full rooms, and installing guest cabins or offices in gardens.  

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Al Jazeera: Where do Lebanon's Christians stand on Hezbollah?

To be sure, some Christian politicians were quick to show loyalty to Saudi Arabia, rather than to President Michel Aoun's position in calling for Hariri's release. But a recent Ipsos poll showed that 81 percent of Christians (and 79 percent of Lebanese people as a whole) considered Aoun to have done a good job handling the crisis. Surprisingly, this included 67 percent of Sunnis, who have generally been hostile to Aoun in the past.  

Hezbollah has employed a winning strategy when it comes to its relations with Lebanese Christians. It needs to be noted before proceeding that "Christians" in Lebanon are not a monolithic entity. I am using the term here to denote elected Christian parties based on the 2009 parliamentary elections. That said, Hezbollah's success with Lebanese Christians is not a value judgment, but a mere reading of the state of affairs in the country - one that helps understand the complexity of the Lebanese mosaic. [...]

To understand the significance of Aoun's election, we need to remember that he has been widely described as Lebanon's first "strong president" since the end of the civil war in 1990. This is because previous presidents lacked Christian popular support and were elected during the Syrian tutelage (1990-2005) or as a result of a political settlement (2008). [...]

While most Christians would naturally side with the sovereignty of the state and would support the need for Hezbollah to hand over its weapons, there is a general perception that the party has played a role in protecting Lebanon against ISIL, despite attempts by Saudi Arabia and its allies to equate the two as being one and the same manifestation of terrorism. 

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