Vox: Study: austerity helped the Nazis come to power

“During the 1920s, there was no substantial difference in the economic performance of nations that, in the mid-1930s, were democratic regimes or dictatorships,” the authors note. “The depth of the depression was only slightly greater in Germany than in France or the Netherlands, and was even worse in Austria (and other eastern European nations) and the USA.” Of those countries, Austria also saw a radical right-wing dictatorship come to power under Engelbert Dollfuss, in 1932. But France, the Netherlands, and the US did not see radical right-wing parties take office.

Also troubling for the most simplistic economic explanation is the fact that unemployed people weren't particularly likely to vote for Nazis. The authors cite reams of research showing that the unemployed were likelier to vote for the Communists or the Social Democrats. “It was not that Hitler did not try to appeal the unemployed masses,” they note, “but rather that the Communist Party was perceived as the party that traditionally represented workers’ interests.”  [...]

That's where austerity comes in. The scale of the cutback that Brüning enacted from 1930 to 1932 is truly staggering. The authors estimate that Brüning cut German government spending by about 15 percent, after inflation, from 1930 to 1932. He raised income taxes on high earners by an average of 10 percent, and slashed unemployment, pension, and welfare benefits.

The economic consequences were horrific. GDP fell by 15 percent, as did government revenue. Unemployment increased from 22.7 percent to 43.8 percent. Brüning came to be known as the “Hunger Chancellor.” [...]

While the authors don't give a definitive answer, they note that the Nazis ran on an anti-austerity platform, complementing their hypernationalist and anti-Semitic themes. They promised tax breaks, to "maintain the social insurance system," to secure "a generous expansion of support for the aged," and to expand investment in highways.

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The New York Review of Books: Militants & Military: Pakistan’s Unholy Alliance

The international community is worried because there is a growing domestic political crisis in this nuclear-armed nation that is fueled by extremists at home and by a foreign policy that involves harboring insurgent groups, which has become unacceptable to the world as well as to Pakistan’s neighbors in South Asia. President Donald Trump and NATO have clearly signaled they will no longer tolerate the Pakistani army’s alleged duplicity—that while it fights those terrorists who threaten the state of Pakistan, it shelters outside groups like the Afghan Taliban, which does its fighting elsewhere. Pakistan’s response is to accuse the Americans of looking for scapegoats, having lost the war in Afghanistan. 

The Pakistani “miltablishment”—a name coined by the weekly Friday Times that describes the alliance between the army, its all-powerful Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI), the senior judiciary, the government bureaucracy, and some politicians—is now deeply at odds with itself. A power vacuum has developed into which has stepped a bewildering array of Islamist extremists. The future of Pakistan itself is at risk.

During a harrowing three weeks in November, a small, almost unknown fringe group of well-armed Sunni militants blocked the capital Islamabad’s main highway and demanded the resignation of the justice minister and other officials for trying to change the stringent blasphemy law and for being sympathetic to the Ahmadis, a Muslim sect controversially proscribed by the state. The group, which calls itself Tehreek-e-Labaik (TEL), or the Movement in Service to the Finality of the Prophet, then ordered its followers to block major roads all over the country. For several days, traffic across Pakistan ground to a halt. Six or seven people were killed and more than two hundred were injured. [...]

The Islamabad fiasco brought to the surface another deep concern: the growing sectarianism among the Islamist groups. For two decades, Sunni extremists have been killing Shia Muslims in both Pakistan and Afghanistan. These Sunni militants usually belong to the Wahabbi or Deobandi sects, or offshoots of them, and these include al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and the Islamic State. Their interpretations of Islam are severe, and they reject Shi’ism and Sufism (the mystical side of Islam). The largest Sunni sect in Pakistan is the Barelvis, who have a moderate and more gentle interpretation of Islam partly inspired by Sufism. Until now, they have been largely peaceful and tolerant, and not inclined to religious violence. 

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The Atlantic: Why Happy People Cheat

The damage that infidelity causes the aggrieved partner is one side of the story. For centuries, when affairs were tacitly condoned for men, this pain was overlooked, since it was mostly experienced by women. Contemporary culture, to its credit, is more compassionate toward the jilted. But if we are to shed new light on one of our oldest behaviors, we need to examine it from all sides. In the focus on trauma and recovery, too little attention is given to the meanings and motives of affairs, to what we can learn from them. Strange as it may seem, affairs have a lot to teach us about marriage—what we expect, what we think we want, and what we feel entitled to. They reveal our personal and cultural attitudes about love, lust, and commitment—attitudes that have changed dramatically over the past 100 years. [...]

We also live in an age of entitlement; personal fulfillment, we believe, is our due. In the West, sex is a right linked to our individuality, our self-actualization, and our freedom. Thus, most of us now arrive at the altar after years of sexual nomadism. By the time we tie the knot, we’ve hooked up, dated, cohabited, and broken up. We used to get married and have sex for the first time. Now we get married and stop having sex with others. The conscious choice we make to rein in our sexual freedom is a testament to the seriousness of our commitment. By turning our back on other loves, we confirm the uniqueness of our “significant other”: “I have found The One. I can stop looking.” Our desire for others is supposed to miraculously evaporate, vanquished by the power of this singular attraction. [...]

The symptom theory has several problems. First, it reinforces the idea that there is such a thing as a perfect marriage that will inoculate us against wanderlust. But our new marital ideal has not curbed the number of men and women who wander. In fact, in a cruel twist of fate, it is precisely the expectation of domestic bliss that may set us up for infidelity. Once, we strayed because marriage was not supposed to deliver love and passion. Today, we stray because marriage fails to deliver the love and passion it promised. It’s not our desires that are different today, but the fact that we feel entitled—even obligated—to pursue them. [...]

As I listen to her, I start to suspect that her affair is about neither her husband nor their relationship. Her story echoes a theme that has come up repeatedly in my work: affairs as a form of self-discovery, a quest for a new (or lost) identity. For these seekers, infidelity is less likely to be a symptom of a problem, and more likely an expansive experience that involves growth, exploration, and transformation.

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The Atlantic: The United States Is Already a Low-Tax Country

This is not a widely accepted point, granted. The share of Americans who say that their taxes are too high is at roughly 50 percent, a 15-year peak. Moreover, Republicans have sold their tax bill as an essential tax cut for America’s income-starved, tax-strangled families and businesses, promising to deliver $4,000 a year to the average family and huge boosts to corporate investment. “Today, America has one of the least competitive tax rates on planet Earth, 60 percent. Think of that, 60 percent higher than the average in the developed world. So our taxes are 60 percent higher,” President Trump said this month. “These massive tax cuts will be rocket fuel.” [...]

Data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development clearly shows that the United States is not a particularly heavily taxed country at all. Indeed, out of 35 developed economies, the United States’ tax burden as a share of GDP—26 percent—is the lowest save for four others: Turkey, Ireland, Chile, and Mexico. (Turkey, Mexico, and Chile are considerably poorer than the United States, and have considerably younger populations.) The social democracies of northern Europe, like Denmark and France, take in nearly 50 percent of their GDPs and spend the money on ample welfare states, including child-care benefits and old-age pensions. “From a global perspective, [our tax rate is lower] than average,” said Scott Hodge, the president of the Tax Foundation, a Washington-based think tank. “The difference is that other countries tend to have a value-added tax, in addition to the same system we have with income taxes, payroll, and all that stuff.”

Moreover, Trump has insisted that the United States has an extremely high corporate-tax burden, one that forces businesses to keep money overseas and hurts jobs and income growth here at home. He is correct that the United States has very high statutory tax rates on corporate incomes, with a top rate of 39 percent on business’ profits. But the American corporate tax code is also full of exceptions, special provisions, and loopholes that companies use to reduce their tax bills. Factoring in deductions, credits, and so on, the effective corporate tax rate is about 19 percent—lower than the top marginal rate that Republicans would put in place. The OECD has found that the United States is about average when it comes to hitting companies with income taxes. [...]

The overall effect would be to make government far less redistributive, meaning post-tax, post-transfer inequality would become even more severe. Indeed, a new analysis by the Tax Policy Center found that most working families would end up with less money in pocket as a result of the Republican plans. “If you consider plausible ways of financing either the House or the Senate bill, most low- and middle-income households would eventually end up worse off than if the bill did not become law,” writes William Gale, the co-director of the TPC. “In other words, they would lose more from inevitable future spending cuts or tax hikes necessary to eventually offset the costs of the tax bill than they would gain from the tax cuts themselves.”

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Vox: This is why evangelicals love Trump's Israel policy

President Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital last week made little sense to most Middle East experts. His own national security team opposed the decision. But for many white evangelical Christians, 81 percent of whom voted for Trump, it was great news.

According to a recent poll released by the Brookings Institution, 53 percent of American evangelicals supported Trump’s decision, while only 40 percent opposed it. (Sixty-three percent of all Americans opposed the decision.) [...]

These are the folks who believe that there will be a millennium in the future, a golden age, where Christ reigns on Earth, [and] they believe that before Christ will return, there will be a tribulation where Christ defeats evil. There will be natural disasters and wars, and perhaps an Antichrist, as the book of Revelations notes. Then at the end of that period, the people of the Mosaic covenant, including the Jews, will convert. Then after their conversion, the great millennium starts. [...]

Yes. This is a movement in Christianity that’s as old as Christianity itself. You have this group of people looking around for signs of the end time, and in the 20th century when Israel was founded, this was seen as a major sign. This was electrifying for that community because the gathering of all the Jews in exile to the Holy Land is a prerequisite for all of these events unfolding. So for the subset of evangelicals in the 20th century, support for Israel became a really, really important political position.

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FiveThirtyEight: More Terrorist Attacks Can Make People More Resilient

In New Yorkers’ nonchalant reaction, there is a counterintuitive kernel of good news. Exposure to repeated acts of terrorism may help habituate people to terrorism, effectively defusing its intended psychological effect: a widespread sense of vulnerability and fear in a community. Shared resilience in the face of danger can even promote a greater sense of communal solidarity.

But even though adapting to terrorism may have psychological and political benefits, it comes at a price. That sense of communal solidarity can result in greater xenophobia and intolerance, and promote social divisions. And although habituation means that people carry on as usual regardless of the threat, that doesn’t mean they don’t feel anxiety or paranoia — instead, low-grade stress can itself become normal. [...]

Research conducted in the aftermath of terrorist attacks has shown that there is usually a spike in the number of people reporting psychological conditions like post-traumatic stress disorder or depression, even if they weren’t directly affected by the attack. A survey carried out in the days after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks found that 44 percent of people in the national sample had some kind of stress reaction associated with PTSD. Similarly, research conducted in the aftermath of the 2005 terrorist bombings in London’s public transportation system found that 31 percent of Londoners reported significant stress in its immediate aftermath.

In these and other similar cases, however, stress levels soon returned to normal, indicating that the attacks hadn’t caused long-term psychological damage. A study conducted in the months after 9/11 found that the incidence of symptoms related to PTSD among people living in the New York metropolitan area had declined substantially. In London, research found stress levels were much lower seven months later. [...]

But Waxman and other researchers agreed that exposure to terrorism changes societies and people and might have other health risks that we’re just starting to uncover. Some psychologists have argued that even though the incidence of psychological conditions like PTSD and depression may decline following terrorist attacks — or even level off in cases of repeated terrorism — an everyday sense of fear and anxiety can still have negative physical and mental health effects. A recent study of Israeli adults found that consistent exposure to terror threats could create a higher risk for heart disease among otherwise healthy people.

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CityLab: How Place Shapes Our Politics

The “space between us” is the political space between us, our inability to come together, across groups, in politics to do the things necessary for a successful society, such as cooperating and compromising. The “distance” in political space is a manifestation of the psychological space between groups, how similar or different we think other groups of people are from our own group, and thus how much we think that we should cooperate with them.

This psychological space is influenced by geographic space: When groups are separated on the Earth’s surface—say into different sides of a city—our minds use this geographic separation as a shortcut to believe the groups are different; they become separated in our minds and this then spills over into our behavior, separating us in politics. This separation has consequences. If we cannot cooperate politically, we cannot do the things necessary to have a functioning modern society, such as building infrastructure and caring for the needy. [...]

It’s really high up there. I would absolutely put it above things like social media, and I would even put it above age, even above income. A rich white person will vote very differently depending on where they live and who else they live around. Whether they live in a red state or a blue state, whether they live in a diverse city or a homogenous city, they’re going to behave differently. It’s going to be one of the number one predictors for how we behave.

Geography is a fundamental thing in our psychology; it shapes the way we think about the world and other people. It’s hard to imagine social media having such an effect on our politics and turning us so tribal, if we weren’t already segregated by these other geographic realities.

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Al Jazeera: How is Hungary's far right changing?

"Since the refugee crisis, [Fidesz] has become much more radical and even more prejudiced than it was before," Peter Kreko, a political scientist at Political Capital Policy Research and Consulting Institute, told Al Jazeera. [...]

An opinion poll published in early November concluded that Fidesz maintains a support rating of 61 percent, as reported by Hungarian Free Press. [...]

Recent years have seen the party shift from open anti-Semitism to a more brazen form of pro-Russian, anti-Muslim and anti-refugee politics that lines up with other European far-right parties. [...]

Cas Mudde, an expert on far-right politics and associate professor in the School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Georgia, said Jobbik "has partly been forced to remake itself into a mainstream right-wing party" because Fidesz has been "effectively dominating 'their' themes of authoritarianism, nativism and populism".

"[Jobbik is] now mainly a radical right anti-Fidesz party though, whose electorate is their core base and radical right people who are upset about the corruption of the governing party," he told Al Jazeera.

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Quartz: Dead coal mines everywhere are being reincarnated as solar farms

Over the weekend, the world’s biggest floating solar project began operating in the eastern Chinese city of Huainan, which accounted for nearly 20% of the country’s coal reserves in a 2008 estimate. The 150-megawatt (MW) project consists of panels floating on a lake formed in a collapsed coal mine, according to (link in Chinese) the state-owned power company China Three Gorges Corporation, which began building the project in July.

The company said it had spent 1 billion yuan ($150 million) on the project, which it expects to come into full use in May 2018. At full capacity, it’ll be able to power around 94,000 homes. The project sets a new record in its class and will quickly eclipse another floating solar power project in the same city that became the world’s biggest such farm in August. The latter, which can supply electricity to 15,000 homes, also sits atop a former coal mine. [...]

Germany, which ranks third in terms of installed photovoltaic capacity, is also working on turning a coal mine with a half-century of history into a renewable energy plant. The plant will power 40,000 homes with energy from solar panels and wind turbines. The coal mine, located in the northwest of the country, is closing next year.

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