Foreign Policy: Ethiopia’s Great Rift

Bekele’s release was the culmination of a three-day standoff between the government, which had previously announced its intention to release some of its many thousands of political prisoners, and the protesters, who had grown impatient with the slow pace of the promised amnesties. For nearly a month, the wind has seemed to be at the protesters’ backs: More than 6,000 political prisoners have been freed since January, meeting one of the demonstrators’ most central demands. “Within a month, the political environment has completely changed,” says Hallelujah Lulie, a political consultant based in Addis Ababa. [...]

Behind the drama of the last week lies a radical shift in Ethiopia’s political landscape, one that has the potential to lead to genuine reforms. The EPRDF, a coalition of four nominally ethnic parties that has ruled the country single-handedly since taking power in 1991, is in the midst of a vicious internal power struggle. At issue is the question of the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), which has long been the dominant of the four ethnically based coalition partners, despite representing only a small minority of the country (Tigrayans make up about 6 percent of the population). Yet the influence of the TPLF is waning as two rival factions, the Oromo People’s Democratic Organization (OPDO) and the Amhara National Democratic Movement (ANDM) — which represent Ethiopia’s first- and second-most populous regions, respectively — vie with the TPLF for control over the coalition and, with it, the country.  [...]

His administration has made significant steps toward reforming the party and the regional government. Thousands of local officials have been replaced. The revamped regional broadcaster, the Oromia Broadcasting Network, has been transformed from a government mouthpiece into an investigative watchdog, covering, among other things, land grabs, ethnic violence, and the release of Oromo political prisoners. The regional security forces seem to have changed some of the worst of their ways, too: Oromo police, once despised for beating up civilians, are now widely seen as allies in their political struggle, at times even posing for photos with protesters. The party has also launched a left-wing economic program, known as the “Oromo economic revolution,” involving land redistribution and higher taxes on foreign investors.

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Broadly: Man and Wife and Wife: The Dark World of Polygamous Wedding Ceremonies

In recent years, Order weddings have become even more atypical: After David and Daniel, two of the highest ranking elders in the Order, went to prison for incest and rape—they are married to several of their own nieces, half-sisters, and cousins, some of whom were underage at the time of the weddings—the protocol changed. "They started taking the bride and the groom and whomever was going to marry them... into a separate room, after they walked down the aisle, so that no one can witness their wedding," Julianna explains. "Then people can't legally say that they saw the couple get married—and it's usually women that are underage, and it's an older guy, and they're related."

The underage brides, though, are nothing new. When Julianna was 15 years old, she dreamt that she should marry her then 19-year-old nephew, Jacob Kingston, the son of her half-brother, Order figurehead John Daniel Kingston. Because their religion—a fundamentalist interpretation of traditional Mormonism—believes that prophecies from God can come to you in your sleep, as they did to the original Mormon prophet Joseph Smith, members of the Order place special significance on the literal interpretation of dreams. [...]

"The men can dance with whomever they want, but not with a married woman they're not married to," she continues. "And if a girl is married, she's not going to dance with anyone except her husband, or maybe her dad or brother. But the married men can pretty much dance with any of the single women."

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The Guardian: Is the British establishment finally finished?

This started to become clear to me when researching the civil service and business world in the later years of David Cameron’s coalition government. Interviews with former career mandarins revealed just how much Whitehall had changed. The service they had joined in the 1960s and 70s was the preserve of the establishment amateur. The vast majority had come from Oxbridge, having previously studied history, classics or something else that failed to equip them for managing an archaic state bureaucracy. Generalists ruled and specialists occupied the lower rungs.

As Sir Alan Budd, a former economic advisor to the Treasury from 1970 onwards, explained, the department was not run by professional economists. Instead, those in charge deferred to the “Brown Book”, a government tome explaining how to use certain technical levers to respond to shifts in employment, inflation, etc. It was sort of a Dummies’ Guide to managing the British economy. “If you wanted to, say, reduce unemployment by 100,000, there were various ways of doing this,” Budd told me. “It was very like any textbook at university. The chapter on macroeconomics – this explained how you did things.” [...]

Second, the automatic links between exclusive education, tradition, status, power and money, which once typified the establishment, have been broken. A far smaller percentage of those in power have taken the Clarendon-Oxbridge conveyor belt to the top. Exclusive London clubs lie empty or – worse still for elites – now allow women, foreigners and lower-class members to join. The members of the aristocracy, once liberally sprinkled across the boards of public institutions and corporations alike, have vanished from sight. [...]

Remarkably, Bailey even predicted the likely causes of the financial crash and how it might play out, three years before it actually did: spiralling property prices and lending, derivatives, banks too big to fail and a Federal Reserve bailout. He was not the only one: a handful of economists and financiers – such as Nouriel Roubini, Ann Pettifor and Raghuram Rajan – went public with dire warnings of what they thought was to come. There were a lot more insiders who had their suspicions, but who chose to keep quiet. A lot of people – insiders and outsiders – still see more of the same ahead. But venal self-interest means most of them don’t care.

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SciShow Psych: How Ancient Viruses Might Have Changed Our Brains

The Guardian: 'There is no long-term vision': young Italians lose faith in politics

Analysts say the growing apathy with politics is not confined to the young: overall, about 30% of voters plan to abstain or are undecided.

“This is partly due to a loss of faith in politicians,” said Antonio Noto, the head of the polling firm IPR. “A decade ago, the level of faith in political parties was around 10%, now it’s 7%. People think that voting is useless.” [...]

The abstention rate in national elections has risen since the early 1990s, partly because of penalties against non-voters being abolished in 1992. The turnout in the 2013 general elections was 75.19%, the lowest since 1946.  [...]

The outcome of the upcoming elections is likely to be determined by the 10 million voters who, so far, remain undecided. In the 2013 elections, support for M5S rose 5% in the last few days of the campaign.

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Politico: The beginning of Merkel’s end

To calm the waters, Merkel agreed to open the Cabinet doors to a new CDU generation. It was a painful concession for the chancellor because it forced her to push out longtime political allies such as Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière and Health Minister Hermann Gröhe. [...]

Spahn, 37, has been vocal and public in opposing Merkel on issues such as migration and dual citizenship. At a party convention in 2014, he elbowed his way into the CDU’s executive board, beating out Merkel’s own candidate for the post.

Earlier in her career, Merkel earned a reputation for dispatching such renegades swiftly and often brutally. That she failed to do so with Spahn is seen as a sign of her weakening grip on the party.

The chancellor’s waning influence was palpable at Monday’s convention. While delegates rewarded her hour-long speech with polite applause, they saved their enthusiasm for another speaker — Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, the party’s new general secretary and a figure many would like to see as the CDU’s next leader. [...]

Despite the growing speculation over Merkel’s successor, chances are the chancellor will remain in control for some time. Earlier this month she dismissed suggestions she might step down after another two years as chancellor, insisting she “would like to serve a full term.”  

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Bloomberg: The EU Can Do a Lot More With Its Money

This challenge offers the EU-27 an opportunity to rethink the way the budget is allocated. A document published jointly last week by the finance ministers of Italy and Germany offers one useful blueprint. They argue that the EU should spend more on European "public goods" -- areas of spending identified as in the interests of the whole union.

In their most clear-cut form, these spending items share two characteristics: They are what economists call non-rival and non-excludable. To put it simply, one country's or person's consumption doesn't affect another's. Furthermore, it is impossible to exclude countries that have not paid for them from using them.

Spending to foster European defense and to patrol the EU's external borders are two straightforward examples. More efficient checks in the Mediterranean Sea could help the whole of the EU manage the inflow of refugees. Asking one member state to fund this effort alone is unfair, since the benefits will inevitably trickle down on all European partners. While there is already some EU funding for these tasks already (for example, via the European Border and Coast Guard Agency), it is patently insufficient, leaving countries such as Italy to shoulder a disproportionate share of the total costs. [...]

Recipient countries should also be compliant with other EU objectives, including showing solidarity in managing migration inflows. Some in Germany have gone even further, arguing that "cohesion funds" should be linked to respect of the rule of law and democracy. These ideas have already proven controversial with Eastern European governments, but they make a lot of sense: If you benefit from transfers from other members of a club, it is only fair that you play by the rules.

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The Guardian: Welsh and Scottish governments raise pressure over Brexit plans

Both governments are pressing ministers in London to reverse proposals that they say will allow the UK government after Brexit to take unjustified control over key policies with a UK-wide scope, such as farming, fisheries and environmental protection. [...]

Nicola Sturgeon, Scotland’s first minister, told BBC Scotland it was very likely Holyrood would refuse to agree to the UK government’s proposals – spelt out by the Cabinet Office minister, David Lidington, on Monday – unless they were radically changed.  [...]

The continuity bill being put before the Welsh assembly is designed to legally transfer EU powers into Welsh legislation, and would be submitted formally if the talks with UK ministers over post-Brexit powers collapse. [...]

Although Sturgeon and Jones have worked together to force changes to the Brexit bill, a split is emerging between the two governments. The Welsh administration appears more optimistic about the prospects of deal. That may reflect the Welsh vote in favour of leaving the EU in the 2016 referendum, when Scotland voted heavily in favour of remain, but also Labour’s decision to accept the Brexit vote. In contrast, the Scottish National party remains deeply hostile to Brexit.  

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Deutsche Welle: Unemployed in Germany have greatest risk of poverty in the EU

Those who are unemployed in Germany face a much bigger risk of falling into poverty than in any other European Union country, according to figures released by European statistics office Eurostat on Monday.

After analyzing data from 2016, Eurostat found that the risk of poverty for those on unemployment benefit in Germany is at 70.8 percent - significantly higher than the average of 48.7 percent across Europe. [...]

Germans who have lost their jobs can at first claim 60 percent of their salaries as unemployment benefit (or 67 percent if they have children) - provided they have been paying social insurance contributions for at least 12 months.

After a certain period, which depends on how long they were in work, unemployed people must claim a standard benefit known colloquially as "Hartz IV," - currently set at €416 ($512) a month. Housing benefits have to be claimed separately." [...]

"We did have increasing inequality, and increasing poverty risk rates, since the end of the 1990s until around 2005, though since then there hasn't been a particular increase," he added. "There has been an increase because of the relatively high immigration rate - but if you take that out you have only a slight increase in inequality."

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The New Yorker: A Celebrity Philosopher Explains the Populist Insurgency

Sloterdijk’s comfort with social rupture has made him a contentious figure in Germany, where stability, prosperity, and a robust welfare state are seen as central to the country’s postwar achievement. Many Germans define themselves by their moral rectitude, as exhibited by their reckoning with the Nazi past and, more recently, by the government’s decision to accept more refugees from the Syrian civil war than any other Western country. Sloterdijk is determined to disabuse his countrymen of their polite illusions. He calls Germany a “lethargocracy” and the welfare state a “fiscal kleptocracy.” He has decried Merkel’s attitude toward refugees, drawn on right-wing thinkers such as Martin Heidegger and Arnold Gehlen, and even speculated about genetic enhancement of the human race. As a result, some progressives refuse to utter his name in public. In 2016, the head of one centrist party denounced him as a stooge for the AfD, a new far-right party that won thirteen per cent of the vote in last year’s federal elections. [...]

Most Germans think of health care, education, and other basic services as rights, not privileges, but the F.D.P. has argued that the country’s welfare state has become hypertrophied, a view close to Sloterdijk’s own. “It creates a double current of resentment,” he said. “You have the people making money who feel no gratitude in return for all they give in taxes. Then you have the people who receive the money. They also feel resentment. They would like to trade places with the rich who give to them. So both sides feel bitterly betrayed and angry.” Sloterdijk argues that taxation should be replaced with a system in which the richest members voluntarily fund great civic and artistic works. He believes that this kind of social web of happy givers and receivers existed until around the end of the Renaissance but was then obliterated by the rise of the European state. He gets excited about the profusion of philanthropic schemes emanating from Silicon Valley and sees in them an attractive model for the future. [...]

He described this concept in his 2006 book “Rage and Time,” an examination of the loathing of liberal democracy by nativist, populist, anarchic, and terrorist movements. The book follows his usual detour-giddy historical method, comparing political uses of anger, and of related emotions such as pride and resentment, from Homer to the present. In premodern societies, he argues, vengeance and blood feuds provided ample outlet for these impulses. Later, loyalty to the nation-state performed a similar function, and international Communism managed to direct class rage into utopian projects. But modern capitalism presents a particular problem. “Ever more irritated and isolated individuals find themselves surrounded by impossible offers,” he writes, and, out of this frustrated desire, “an impulse to hate everything emerges.” It was this kind of rage, Sloterdijk believes, that was on display in the riots in the banlieues of Paris in 2005.

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The Guardian: Emma Bonino: Italy's pro-Europe, pro-immigrant conscience

These days, the former foreign minister, activist and candidate for parliament, is waging an equally difficult battle in support of migrants and in defence of Europe, two ideas that seem radical in today’s bitter political environment.  [...]

While she is not realistically hoping to win next Sunday’s national election, if Bonino and her party – More Europe – do well, she will win 3% of the highly fractured Italian vote, a result that would give her control of her own parliamentary group. It would also grant her a fair amount of influence in the event that the election ends, as many expect, with the creation of a grand coalition government between the centre right and centre left parties headed by two former prime ministers, Silvio Berlusconi and Matteo Renzi. [...]

She has been thinking about the “banality of evil”, the term coined by Hannah Arendt, the political theorist who examined the rise of Nazism, after she saw a viral video of an elderly Italian woman harassing a black man on a bus while other passengers looked on. [...]

She is convinced that Europe’s demographic challenges and low birthrates will, eventually, give European capitals a wake-up call about their need to welcome immigrants.

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The Guardian: If the elite ever cared about the have-nots, that didn’t last long

For some people at least, Brexit is now a pretext for simply standing back and smugly scoffing at the fate of the places where a majority of people voted for it. In a recent issue of the anti-Brexit newspaper the New European, one columnist articulated the basic argument: “The north-east and the Midlands voted for Brexit. Yes, I know they almost certainly did so unwittingly against their own economic interests, but democracy isn’t, ‘Get what you vote for, unless you’re wrong and then we’ll fudge it for you from there.’ I’m sorry that those areas will suffer, but such is the price of democracy.”

If this kind of thinking is your cup of tea, it now has intellectual underpinning. The Harvard psychology professor Steven Pinker has just published Enlightenment Now, a doorstep-sized statement of the case for “reason, science, humanism and progress” against what he calls “progressophobia”. Among other things, Pinker believes that across the west and beyond, people are actually “getting healthier, richer, safer, and freer”, and that inequality “is not in itself a dimension of human wellbeing, and … should not be confused with unfairness or with poverty”. [...]

Pinker’s book evokes the same liberal misanthropy now swirling around Brexit. “Most voters are ignorant not just of current policy options, but basic facts,” he says. And woe betide anyone who publicly questions the idea that progress is continuing apace, and no fundamental rethinks are required. “I believe that the media and intelligentsia were complicit in populists’ depiction of modern western nations as so unjust and dysfunctional that nothing short of a radical lurch could improve them,” he says, seemingly ignoring the fact that 10 years after the crash there is still rather a lot of injustice and dysfunction around.

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PolyMatter: Apple's Money Problem (& Why It Won't Buy Netflix)

Apple makes an astonishing amount of money but this presents an interesting challenge for the company and raises questions about what they should do with it all.

Business Insider: Why Hosting The Olympics Isn't Worth It Anymore

It's no secret that it's a pricey pain to host the Olympic Games, running billions of dollars above the estimated budget. As the International Olympic Committee receives fewer bids with each problematic games, the future of the tradition is looking unsure. We spoke with Smith College Professor of Economics Andrew Zimbalist on the matter. He should know, he's written about the Olympic issues in Circus Maximus, No Boston Olympics, and Rio 2016.

Financial Times: Big Tech's power remains unchallenged | Opinion

Rana Foroohar, the FT's global business columnist, examines the implications of the dominance of Big Tech groups like Google, Amazon and Facebook for competition, for innovation and for the health of democracy. 

Quartz: Elephants have different personalities, just like us

Between 2014 and 2017, researchers from the University of Turku in Finland studied 257 semi-captive elephants who work logging timber in Myanmar (meaning their study was focused only on Asian, rather than African, elephants.) They asked the mahout, or elephant rider, of each elephant to fill out a survey assessing their elephants’ behavior on 28 metrics. These included traits like affection (shown by an elephant rubbing its forehead or body against another elephant), confidence (for example, making decisions without hesitation), inventiveness, (e.g. an elephant that creates new tools), mischievousness (such as swinging a trunk to spray mucus), and slowness (moving in a relaxed, deliberate manner.) Each elephant was rated on a four-point scale of how often they displayed such behavior, from “very rarely,” to “most of the time.” [...]

Within these 28 ratings, the researchers identified 15 behaviors that could be grouped into three traits and correlated with each other. Each of these three broader traits was named by one of its indicative behaviors. “Attentiveness” was defined according to attentive, obedient, slow, vigilant, confident, and active behavior—Seltman describes it as “how an elephant acts in and perceives its environment. “Aggressiveness” describes aggressive, dominant, and moody behavior. And “sociability” is made up of mischievousness, social behavior towards elephants of the same sex, playfulness, friendliness towards elephants of the same sex and people, popularity, and affectionate behavior. “Sociability describes how an elephant seeks closeness to other elephants and humans, and how popular they are as social partners,” said Seltmann.  [...]

Elephants are not the only animals with distinct personalities. Crayfish can be anxious, trout can be shy, and some baboons are more friendly than others. Humans do have a tendency to anthropomorphize animals and read emotions into individual actions but studies into patterns of animal behavior show that it’s not just our imagination: Many animals really do have distinct personalities.

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The New York Times: Companies Cut Ties to the N.R.A., but Find There Is No Neutral Ground

For companies like MetLife that are caught in the middle of these angry social media storms, actions tied to divisive social issues can be a lose-lose proposition. A year ago, Nordstrom first faced calls for a consumer boycott because it carried the Ivanka Trump line of clothing. But it quickly drew another round of boycott cries from the other side of the ideological spectrum when it quietly stopped selling her products. [...]

But in the days since the Florida school shooting, the push for boycotts and meaningful change has mobilized faster than with previous mass shootings. Professor Schweitzer noted that reflected the fact that the survivors are teenagers who are well versed in the usage and power of social media. [...]

Still, in some cases, the rapid assembly on Twitter and Facebook may have resulted in a speedy response. In less than 24 hours, at least eight companies that had offered N.R.A. members discounts or special deals announced plans to separate or end affiliations with the organization, including Hertz, Enterprise and Avis Budget; SimpliSafe, which gave N.R.A. members two months of free home security monitoring; and North American and Allied Van Lines.

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statista: Where Corruption Is Raging Around The World

On Wednesday, Transparency International released its 2017 Corruption Perceptions Index which measured perceived public sector corruption in 180 countries and territories on a scale of 0 to 100. The research found that most countries across the world are making little or no progress in ending corruption. The ones scoring close to 100 are successfully containing corruption while those scoring 50 or lower have serious problems. The average global score was only 43.

Some governments have seen noticeable improvements in their scores over the past six years with the Ivory Coast, Senegal and the UK all making progress. Others had to endure a slide with Syria, Yemen, Australia and Hungary all deteriorating. The latter in partcular saw its score fall ten points over the last six years. It could fall even further in the future if draft legistlation is enacted that could restrict NGOs and revoke their charitable status.

New Zealand was ranked the world's least corrupt nation in 2017 with a score of 89, ahead of Denmark with 88. Third position was a three way tie between Finland, Norway and Switzerland who all scored 85. Syria, South Suda, and Somalia were at the bottom of the index with all three scoring lower than 15. Along with Austria and Belgium, the United States came 16th with a score of 75.

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The Conversation: Friday essay: the erotic art of Ancient Greece and Rome

Simply put, sex is everywhere in Greek and Roman art. Explicit sexual representations were common on Athenian black-figure and red-figure vases of the sixth and fifth centuries BC. They are often eye-openingly confronting in nature.

The Romans too were surrounded by sex. The phallus, sculpted in bronze as tintinnabula (wind chimes), were commonly found in the gardens of the houses of Pompeii, and sculpted in relief on wall panels, such as the famous one from a Roman bakery telling us hic habitat felicitas (“here dwells happiness”). [...]

The secret cabinet was founded in 1819, when Francis I, King of Naples, visited the museum with his wife and young daughter. Shocked by the explicit imagery, he ordered all items of a sexual nature be removed from view and locked in the cabinet. Access would be restricted to scholars, of “mature age and respected morals”. That was, male scholars only. [...]

The intention of the ithyphallic (erect) satyrs is clear in their appearance on vases (even if they rarely caught the maenads they were chasing); at the same time their massive erect penises are indicative of the “beastliness” and grotesque ugliness of a large penis as opposed to the classical ideal of male beauty represented by a smaller one.

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Social Europe: The Big Idea For Liberals

At first, liberals tried to forge a united front against the “populist threat.” In Greece, socialist PASOK went to bed with its long-standing foe from the New Democracy to prevent Syriza from coming to power. In Italy, Matteo Renzi from the left-wing (former communist) party worked hand in hand with the people from Silvio Berlusconi’s right-wing party to fend off pressure from the Five Stars Movement. This tactic was a mixed blessing for liberals, especially those on the left. PASOK is practically dead, and Partito Democratico, led by Renzi may follow the suit. (We will learn more on the latter in March, after the Italian elections.) A “grand coalition” has seriously weakened social democrats even in economically prosperous countries such as Germany and Holland.

More recently, liberals, especially those on the right, have tried a different tactic. They have embraced a “soft” version of populism to defeat their “fully fledged” populist opponents. Mark Rutte in Holland castigated migrants, Emmanuel Macron bashed traditional parties, and Theresa May embraced Brexit. Sebastian Kurz in Austria went even further: in his recent electoral campaign, he adopted populist anti-immigrant rhetoric and later formed a government coalition with the party of the late Jörg Haider. (Finland witnessed a similar coalition with populists.) This tactic too is likely to be a mixed blessing, especially for those on the right. The distinction between soft and hard populism is fuzzy, and soft populists will be pressed to harden their stance when faced with the next economic, migratory or security crisis. Can liberalism survive such a populist turn? [...]

My big liberal idea consists of three steps: reckoning with the past, engaging in experimentation, and creating a new liberal system fit for the digital world. The first step can be accomplished in a year or two, the second step in less than a decade, but the third step may take much longer and we ought to be honest about that. In short, the big idea does not amount to a big bang. Liberals should offer the public a new sense of direction in their march towards a better future. They should offer safe refuge to those unable to adjust to change. However, liberals should not fall into the populist trap of promising heaven on earth by issuing a few decrees and rebuking opponents.

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The New York Review of Books: A Modern Greek Tragedy

If one asks European officials, the consensus is harsh: Varoufakis was a self-aggrandizing time waster who helped ruin the Greek economy before Tsipras got rid of him. The hard-edged intellectuals of Popular Unity agree that Varoufakis was as much a part of the problem as he was a part of the solution. They also agree that it was a mistake for Syriza to have haggled with the eurozone creditors. Their preferred option was for Syriza to have broken with the creditors from the beginning.2 A “rupture,” an exit from the eurozone, in January or February 2015 might have sustained the momentum of Syriza’s election victory. [...]

To understand Varoufakis’s motivations, we have to understand how he defines what was at stake in the battle between Greece and its creditors. For many on the left, the struggle was between the “forces of capital” and democracy. That made a good rallying cry. But it is far from the situation that Syriza actually confronted in 2015. Due to the 2012 debt write-down, when Syriza took power three years later only 15 percent of Greece’s debts were owed to banks, insurance funds, or hedge funds. Eighty-five percent were debts to official agencies and other European governments. The struggle was not with the capital markets but with official creditors and the other national governments assembled in the Eurogroup. [...]

By buying sovereign and private bonds, the ECB propped up their prices, pushed interest rates down, and flushed hundreds of billions in euro liquidity into the financial system. The primary aim was to stimulate the eurozone economy, but quantitative easing also had political ramifications. As long as the ECB kept buying their bonds, Spain, Italy, and Portugal were immune to contagion from the uncertainty surrounding Greece. Quantitative easing thus deprived Syriza of one of its chief bargaining weapons. Ironically, it was the ECB’s action—made in defiance of the conservatives in the Eurogroup—that freed those conservatives to lay siege to the left-wing government in Athens. They could force Greece to the brink of a disorderly Grexit without fear of destabilizing the rest of the eurozone and fight Greece’s political contagion without having to worry about the financial kind.

At the height of the crisis—between 2010 and 2012—there was indeed a spectacular confusion in the eurozone that might have been resolved by means of a grand bargain. But even then, the idea that the solution could have come from Greece was fanciful. In 2012, it took the combined weight of France, Italy, Spain, the European Central Bank, the European Commission, and the Obama administration to convince Germany to accept the ECB’s commitment to do “whatever it takes” to save the eurozone. What emerged in the aftermath of that crisis was neither a muddle—as Varoufakis suggests—nor a conspiracy. Europe’s political economy came to be dominated by the “reform” project first launched by Germany’s main political parties in the early 2000s, which centered on labor market liberalization and fiscal consolidation.

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Vox: The surprisingly weak scientific case for emotional support animals

How is it legal to bring your duck on the plane? Under the federal Air Carrier Access Act, passengers are allowed to bring animals aboard by showing a letter from a mental health clinician or doctor asserting that the pet is part of their therapy. But the law is surprisingly vague about which species can come on board and gives airlines significant discretion. “You are never required to accommodate certain unusual service animals (e.g., snakes, other reptiles, ferrets, rodents, and spiders) as service animals in the cabin,” it reads.

Yet as a quick Google search will show, it’s possible to obtain these letters online for a small fee. Some passengers may very well be exploiting the law to bring pets on planes. And stories about peacocks and ducks in booties on planes are increasingly leading ESAs (and their handlers) to be treated as a punchline. In the New York Times, columnist David Leonhardt called the animals a “scam” and “one of the downsides of a modern culture that too often fetishizes individual preference and expression over communal well-being.” [...]

Molly Crossman is a psychology researcher at Yale who published a 2016 review in The Journal of Clinical Psychology of the evidence on using animals to counter psychological distress. Here’s what she found: “The clearest conclusion in the field is that we cannot yet draw clear conclusions.” [...]

Basically, in treatments for anxiety that work, we ask people to face their fears. We work with them to gradually approach the things they’ve avoided. These treatments work really well. They’re some of sort of the best mental health treatments that we have. A concern we have in those kinds of treatments is that people will feel like, “I can only approach this terrifying situation if they have my mom with me, or my blankie,” or whatever.

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Vox: Why (almost) no one wants to host the Olympics anymore

Rising costs, horror stories of unexpected debt, and the increasing burden of “white elephants” — facilities that are expensive but useless after the games — have made cities more and more wary of hosting the Olympics in recent years. [...]

In fact, for the 2024 Games, the International Olympic Committee decided to do something unprecedented: Instead of choosing between the only two bidders, Paris and Los Angeles, it decided to award Paris the 2024 Summer Olympics and give Los Angeles the 2028 Summer Olympics. Experts say the IOC decided to give them out at the same time for a simple reason — it was afraid no city would want to host the tournament by the time the 2028 bidding started. [...]

And when cities attempt to retrofit Olympics facilities to make them useful for other sports, it can become very expensive very quickly. According to Matheson, London’s attempt to convert its Olympic stadium for a local soccer team after it hosted the games in 2012 ended up costing as much as the stadium itself. [...]

Andrew Zimbalist, a sports economist at Smith College, has pointed out that there’s little evidence that cities see a substantial tourism bump beyond the games themselves. Barcelona saw a lasting tourism legacy after hosting in 1992, but most analysts say its experience was exceptional because the Spanish city was a “hidden gem” with vast cultural offerings that weren’t as well-known around the world prior to the games. The reality is that most cities can’t simply become great tourism hubs just by virtue of hosting the Olympics.

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Quartz: The world is getting better at English—but some countries are learning faster than others

This relationship doesn’t show causation—improving people’s English might not lead those other indicators to increase. But the correlations are strong enough that improvements in English ability are a good proxy for positive changes in other areas. Good knowledge of English means people have access to a huge set of global ideas and services that would otherwise be unavailable. [...]

There are a couple things to note here. For one, the overall trend is up. Among these 59 countries—the ones the EF has measured every year since 2014—the average score has gone from 51.9 to 53.5. Second, countries with previously very low levels of proficiency—many of them places in the Middle East, like Saudi Arabia, Morocco, and Iran—are starting to catch up. In part this just shows regression to the mean: countries starting from a low base have more room to improve. It also shows, though, that the minimum level of English is rising, even in places where it is not widely spoken. [...]

The EF’s data comes with a couple caveats. The proficiency scores are based on free online tests, so the people taking them are self-selected. They are not a representative sample of the country’s citizens, and may instead represent a group that is particularly interested in English and has access to the internet. And the EF only has data on a partial list of the world’s nations.

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IFLScience: GM Crops Found To Increase Yields And Reduce Harmful Toxins In 21 Years Of Data

Published in Scientific Reports, the team was led by Elisa Pellegrino from the Institute of Life Sciences in Italy. They conducted a meta-analysis of 6,006 peer-reviewed studies from 1996 to 2016 on maize that had been genetically engineered. Only 76 publications, however, met the researchers' high standards for inclusion.  

The results showed that genetically engineered (GE) maize produced a greater yield of 5.6 to 24.5 percent compared to non-GE maize. It resulted in lower concentrations of mycotoxins (−28.8 percent), fumonisin (−30.6 percent), and thricotecens (−36.5 percent). The former is toxic and carcinogenic in humans and animals. There were also no significant differences in grain quality, such as proteins, lipids, and fiber. [...]

“This analysis provides an effective synthesis on a specific problem that is widely discussed publicly,” study co-author Laura Ercoli told the Italian newspaper La Republica. The researchers also noted that some studies showed the use of GMO corn has reduced the active ingredient of herbicides and insecticides by 10.1 percent and 45.2 percent respectively.

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The Conversation: New evidence suggests we may need to rethink policies aimed at poverty

But less than 15% of the most disadvantaged people in Australia exit poverty from one year to the next, according to data from the Journeys Home survey, run by the Melbourne Institute. [...]

However, our research suggests that income poverty is persistent for a small group of Australians and is combined with other forms of disadvantage. Supporting these people in finding a pathway out of poverty requires deeper interventions, including targeted health, education and social policies.

Most of the evidence we have on the persistence of poverty is based on long-term surveys designed to be representative of the entire population. Although these surveys offer broad coverage of the population, such surveys are typically limited in their ability to capture the most disadvantaged groups because they constitute only a small part of the general population. [...]

The HILDA results show that most Australians who fall below the poverty line do so for a relatively short time, which is good news. However, it is also clear that among chronically disadvantaged people the chances of poverty becoming an enduring feature of life are much higher than previously thought.

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Political Critique: Dutch unions back coal phaseout but demand compensations

Last fall, the new Dutch government coalition announced it would close down all five of the Netherland’s coal power plants by 2030, including three that opened as recently as 2015. The coal phaseout was a part of a plan to cut emissions by 49 per cent compared to 1990 levels by 2030, a target more ambitious than the one set by the EU (40 per cent). The coalition agreement also mentions a carbon floor price of 18 euros in 2020, rising to 43 euros per tonne in 2030. [...]

‘We backed this process because we thought, simply, that it was necessary: there are no jobs on a dead planet,’ explained Patrick van Klink. ‘Additionally, the changing of the economy came with the creation of new jobs which were not unionised, and this was an opportunity for us. Many of the new jobs that were created were flexible, precarious; because we were involved in the process, we could make a fuss about this from the start.’ [...]

Nowadays, about 2 500 jobs are threatened by the coal phaseout, in the coal plants, coal terminals at the Dutch ports and in transport sector. They are few in comparison to the number of mining jobs lost decades ago, but the political context has changed so much that the unions are worried whether they can get a fair deal today.

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Jacobin Magazine: From Zuma to Ramaphosa

Yet perhaps what Zuma will be remembered for most is the Marikana massacre. In August 2012, police gunned down, in broad daylight, thirty-four miners in the northwest city. The ANC government and their allies in COSATU and the SACP claimed that the murdered workers were “criminals” who, aided by potions, charged the police in a suicidal frenzy and thus deserved to die. Evidence later emerged that ANC politicians (including Ramaphosa) had pressured the police to intervene in the strike and that the massacre was not a tragic accident, but a premeditated act. As a member of the mine’s board, Ramaphosa sent an email saying the strike was “dastardly criminal and must be characterized as such.” His conclusion: “there needs to be concomitant action to address this situation.” [...]

It also bred a new class of politicians who acted like old-style warlords. Violence became inseparable from politics, especially in Zuma’s home province of Kwazulu-Natal. Between January 2016 and mid-September 2017, at least thirty-five people were murdered in political violence related to ANC rivalries there. The ANC itself counted eighty of its political representatives killed between 2011 and 2017. At one men’s hostel in Durban, the largest city in the province, eighty-nine people were murdered between March 2014 and July 2017 in acts of political violence. Almost no arrests have been made. [...]

Zuma’s regime was rife with instability. He regularly hired and fired ministers (he averaged one finance minister per year) and kept on ministers who caused harm and despair. He governed in a highly personalized manner, simultaneously speaking about his reign as if he was an outside observer and using his power to hollow out or capture any part of the state that might threaten his interests or those of his vast family, or of the Guptas. Everyone was expendable to Zuma; his closest allies in his journey to the presidency — such as Blade Nzimande, former general secretary of the Communist Party, and, crucially, Julius Malema, former ANC Youth League firebrand — would also become Zuma’s greatest enemies. [...]

What Ramaphosa represents at one level is a return to the classic ANC model of social compact, putting forward a collective vision that favors developmental capitalism, collective aspiration, social harmony — but by and for elites, at the expense of workers. Indeed, while COSATU and the SACP supported Ramaphosa’s campaign, Zuma broke the back of these once proud organizations and Ramaphosa will most likely be able to pass pro-business policy without facing any real opposition from the Left.

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Slate: The Parkland Teens Will Win. Eventually.

In response to the Parkland shooting, advocates are trying a few tactics that are relatively new to the gun-control debate, if not to progressive activism writ large. Students in Connecticut are trying to plan a National School Walkout on April 20, the anniversary of the 1999 Columbine massacre. Teachers have discussed doing their own. High school survivors from Parkland have announced a March for Our Lives to take place in Washington on March 24, with concurrent satellite marches in other locales around the country, along the lines of the Women’s March held the day after Donald Trump’s inauguration. It has the potential to be the largest national demonstration for gun control the U.S. has ever seen.

Those who’ve watched children slaughtered in their classrooms many times over with no discernible change in gun-control policy or decline in American gun ownership may have reason to doubt that any of these activist measures will accomplish what the others have not. None of the organizations founded after other massacres have shifted the U.S. gun-control conversation in meaningful ways, jolted the general public into a new sense of urgency, or changed the hearts and minds—and, more importantly, the votes—of legislators. Recent polling shows that 97 percent of Americans support universal background checks for gun purchasers, including 97 percent of gun owners, and more than two-thirds support a nationwide ban on assault rifles. Clearly, public opinion is not enough to sway public officials bankrolled by the National Rifle Association, which opposes any expansion of federal gun regulations, including stronger background checks. [...]

In other words, the best outcomes gun-control activists can hope for in the foreseeable future are incremental. Florida legislators have agreed to consider instating a three-day waiting period for all rifle purchases and raising the legal age for assault-rifle possession to 21. Such a law might have prevented Nikolas Cruz, the 19-year-old who allegedly murdered his Parkland classmates with an AR-15, from buying his gun, but only temporarily. The same legislative body refused to even discuss a possible ban on assault weapons, while teen survivors of Parkland looked on, even as they approved a resolution calling pornography a public health risk. These are not people prepared to be moved by a rousing address, postcards from progressives, or a march on the National Mall.

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Social Europe: How To Tackle Populism: Macron Vs Kurz

The re-branding of his Austrian People’s Party forestalled a tougher stance on immigration, while he borrowed the far-right’s polemical rhetoric on EU ‘Zentralisierung’, or ‘centralisation’. By the end of the campaign, the dividing lines between the centre-right and far-right were sufficiently blurred for one to ask: which is the populist? The subsequent announcement of a coalition government involving the far right is a cause for great concern.

Emmanuel Macron used different tools. His counter-vision approach involved debunking the tenuous promises made by his populist adversary Marine Le Pen, while offering attractive alternative arguments. This is the harder of the two to pull off. It requires an individual of political skill and personal charisma with the courage to confront the populist head-on, without fear of disturbing the ideological balance of one’s party. In his presidential election campaign, Macron offered a text-book example of how to deploy the counter-vision. He directly attacked Le Pen and her anti-euro arguments – and skilfully exposed their paucity. In so doing, he provided a convincing defence of France’s role in the European Union, while appealing to French patriotism. [...]

On the other hand, the Kurz strategy is a dangerous one. When a figure – and party – of the so-called establishment adopts the policies and rhetorical devices of an extreme opponent, and where electoral considerations trump sound policy making, the outlook promises to be grim. The Kurz approach, if followed by others, will equate to a gentle ‘hollowing out’ of the European Project from within. Europe might be spared the Austrian Freedom Party, or indeed the Front National in power. But, if the Austrian and French centre-right adopt their policies anyway, what difference does it make? [...]

A new vision and set of EU objectives must reflect features of international cooperation that today inspire and are of most value to Europeans. It must centre on extending the benefits of greater connectivity – digital, technological, mobility-related – to more Europeans. It must build on the theme of greater opportunity – where the EU makes more people more prosperous, keeping the best, while protecting citizens from the worst aspects of globalisation. It must also highlight the principle of solidarity – an EU demonstrating a social and humanitarian dimension, across member states and civil societies.  

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The New York Review of Books: Luther vs. Erasmus: When Populism First Eclipsed the Liberal Elite

The publication of Erasmus’s revised New Testament was a milestone in biblical studies. It gave scholars the tools to read the Bible as a document that, while divinely inspired, was a human product that could be deconstructed and edited in the same manner as a text by Livy or Seneca. As copies began circulating, the magnitude of Erasmus’s achievement was immediately recognized. Not since Cicero had an intellectual figure so dominated Western discourse as Erasmus did in that enchanted spring of 1516. “Everywhere in all Christendom your fame is spreading,” wrote John Watson, a rector in England with whom he was friendly. “By the unanimous verdict of all scholars, you are voted the best scholar of them all, and the most learned in both Greek and Latin.” [...]

Knowledge of geography, history, astronomy, and nature was all to be imparted through readings in the classical authors specified by Erasmus. His educational program was, in short, highly elitist, seeking not to prepare ordinary citizens for a productive life but to train an aristocracy of culture and taste that could guide the rest of society. This curriculum became the basis for upper-class schooling in Europe until well into the nineteenth century; through it, knowledge of the classical canon would become a ruthlessly clear indicator of class. [...]

Beyond that immediate matter of dispute, however, their conflict represented the clash of two contrasting world views—those of the Renaissance and the Reformation. Erasmus was an internationalist who sought to establish a borderless Christian union; Luther was a nationalist who appealed to the patriotism of the German people. Where Erasmus wrote exclusively in Latin, Luther often used the vernacular, the better to reach the common man. Erasmus wanted to educate a learned caste; Luther, to evangelize the masses. For years, they waged a battle of ideas, with each seeking to win over Europe to his side, but Erasmus’s reformist and universalist creed could not match Luther’s more emotional and nationalistic one; even some of Erasmus’s closest disciples eventually defected to Luther’s camp. Erasmus became an increasingly marginal figure, scorned by both Catholics, for being too critical of the Church, and Lutherans, for being too timid. In a turbulent and polarized age, he was the archetypal reasonable liberal.

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Vox: The Church of England’s Lent challenge: give up plastic

To critics, the church’s actions may seem emblematic of a wider “secularization” of Lent: in which an originally spiritually focused religious observance becomes more about anodyne notions of “wellness” and “doing good.” It’s fair, too, to critique the movement as a bid for relevancy by a fading institution: A 2016 poll found that the number of Britons attending a weekly Church of England service fell for the first time to fewer than 1 million (or less than 2 percent of the UK’s population).

Those criticisms would be valid. But at the same time, the Church of England’s actions reflect a wider willingness among many mainline Protestant and Catholic Christian groups to focus on combating structural or global issues — from income inequality to environmental stewardship — alongside individual misdeeds.  [...]

Francis’s notion of sin as something collective and structural, not just individual, has informed much of his theology, from his environmentalism to his fervently anti-capitalist stance, a dynamic also at play in the way the Church of England is talking about its own initiatives.

It’s worth noting that these initiatives, which tend to be popular with Catholics and mainline Protestants, are not necessarily shared by all Christians. American evangelicals, in particular, have long been wary of environmental causes, seeing them as a threat to what they envision as man’s God-given dominion over the earth.

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Quartz: Dear America, here’s how other countries stop mass shootings

Research shows that countries with fewer guns have lower homicide rates. Even US states with fewer guns have fewer homicides; in a landmark 2002 study, analysis of data from 1988 to 1997 showed that states with “high” gun ownership had three times the rate of homicide than states with few guns. A decade later, a 2013 study found that every percentage point increase in gun ownership corresponded to a 0.9% higher risk of gun homicide. Countries and states that legally limit overall gun ownership simply have fewer gun deaths. [...]

The United States stands out among countries for the frequency with which its mass shootings occur. But last year, after the US witnessed its most fatal mass shooting in history at Las vegas, the Trump administration made it easier—not harder—for people with mental illness to buy guns. (That decision rolled back Obama-era restrictions that had been passed in the wake of Sandy Hook.) [...]

Back in 1996, it took only 12 days after a mass shooting for Australia to pass the National Firearms Agreement, which banned automatic and semi-automatic weapon for “personal defense.” The country created a temporary buyback program for guns that had become illegal. Stricter background checks were enforced. As Zeif pointed out yesterday, there have been no school shootings in Australia since.

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CityLab: Court Says Paris's Car Ban Is Illegal

On Wednesday, Paris’s Administrative Court ruled that the city’s decision to ban cars from a promenade along the river Seine was illegal. For a city administration that approached the area’s car-calming, anti-pollution measures with a striking single-mindedness of mission, this decision is a bombshell. If Paris City Hall’s already-planned appeal fails, heavy car traffic will again return to what had become a riverside walkway reserved exclusively for pedestrians and cyclists.

This is one of the most famous, well-loved strips of urban land anywhere on the planet, and the scheme to remodel the area probably had the highest profile of any pro-pedestrian project underway anywhere. What makes the ruling’s timing especially sharp is that new statistics this week showed that road traffic on the streets adjacent to the quayside had actually fallen.

The court’s objections to the policy are clear enough. It was, the judges ruled, based on preliminary impact studies that “included inaccuracies, omissions and inadequacies concerning the effects of the project.” Furthermore, the legal article invoked to give Mayor Anne Hidalgo the right to bar cars from the waterside does not actually grant her that power, the court said; at most, the article means she’s only allowed to restrict traffic at certain times.

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Politico: Italian election’s biggest winner is Europe

In January, Renzi organized a pro-Europe event in Milan, in which he called for “a United States of Europe” and challenged his rivals to say where they stood on the issue. Among his electoral allies is former European Commissioner Emma Bonino, head of the explicitly pro-European +Europa party.

Berlusconi is also singing  a different song these days. He loves Europe, he now says. The past is the past, relations with German Chancellor Angela Merkel have always been good, and he’s proud of having her support. “Our relation has always been positive, and Signora Merkel backs our electoral campaign with determination,” he said last month during a visit to the center-right European People’s Party headquarters in Brussels. [...]

As recently as last December, the party’s candidate for prime minister, 31-year-old Luigi Di Maio, had said he would vote to leave the eurozone were Italy to hold a referendum on its membership. Today, he has ditched the idea of holding a referendum. And in an interview with the French daily Le Monde last week, he even argued that the party he represents is “pro-European.” [...]

In fall 2017, just 36 percent of Italians said EU membership was a good thing. That’s 21 percentage points below the European average. Only Cyprus and the Czech Republic were less in favor.

At the same time, however, a majority in the country is in favor of common European policies. “Italy ranks among the highest in considering that more decisions should be taken at the EU level (61 percent “agree,” ranking seventh of the EU28),” reads the Delors report.

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Politico: How Martin Selmayr became EU’s top (un)civil servan

Selmayr has won fame and disdain and spurred envy and fury by deploying ruthless autocracy in the name of European democracy. His sudden election ensures the German lawyer and avowed European federalist will retain a perch at the apex of power in Brussels beyond the end of Juncker’s mandate in 2019 — for as long as he desires, or until a new set of commissioners dares to try to remove him.  [...]

In more than three years as Juncker’s chief of staff, Selmayr has shown time and again that he would fit in well with the cast of ruthless characters in the political drama. He has steamrolled higher-ranking commissioners, blocked legislation, upended negotiations and picked fights with officials from national governments. [...]

Selmayr’s consolidation of power sets the stage for more clashes with the European Council, the body representing the governments of the EU’s member countries. A number of Council officials view Selmayr as poisonous and claim he created a fight in his own mind between the institutions over who would lead the Brexit negotiations, leading to the rushed appointment of Michel Barnier as chief negotiator. [...]

Some EU diplomats griped angrily that Selmayr’s election will concentrate too much power in the hands of Germany — already the predominant power in the EU. The secretary-general of the European Parliament, Klaus Welle, is also German, as is Helga Schmid, the secretary-general of the European External Action Service.

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The Guardian: The fascist movement that has brought Mussolini back to the mainstream

By the early 2000s, it was no longer taboo for mainstream politicians to speak warmly of Mussolini: admirers of Il Duce had become government ministers, and many fringe, fascist parties were growing in strength – Forza Nuova, Fronte Sociale Nazionale, and various skinhead groups. But where the other fascists seemed like throwbacks to the 1930s, CasaPound focused on contemporary causes and staged creative campaigns: in 2006 they hung 400 mannequins all over Rome, with signs protesting about the city’s housing crisis. In 2012, CasaPound militants occupied the European Union’s office in Rome and dumped sacks of coal outside to protest on behalf of Italian miners. Many of their policies looked surprising: they were against immigration, of course, but on the supposedly “progressive” grounds that the exploitation of immigrant labourers represented a return to slavery.  [...]

They also began pushing for policies the left had given up hope of ever hearing again, such as the renationalisation of Italy’s banking, communications, health, transport and energy sectors. They cited the most progressive aspects of Mussolini’s politics, focusing on his “social doctrines” regarding housing, unions, sanitation and a minimum wage. CasaPound accepted that the racial laws of 1938 (which introduced antisemitism and deportation) were “errors”; the movement claimed to be “opposed to any form of discrimination based on racial or religious criteria, or on sexual inclination”.

CasaPound’s concentration on housing also appealed to voters of the old left. Its logo was a turtle (an animal that always has a roof over its head) and Ezra Pound’s name was used in part because he had railed, in his poem Canto XLV, against rent (considered usury) and rapacious landlords. One of the first things CasaPound did in its occupied building was to hang sheets from the windows protesting against rent hikes and evictions – in 2009, there were an average of 25 evictions in Rome every day. They campaigned for a “social mortgage”, in which rental payments would effectively become mortgage payments, turning the tenant into a homeowner. Within months, they had given shelter to dozens of homeless families, as well as to many camerati down on their luck. [...]

These ideas are not likely to appeal to many Italian voters – but CasaPound’s job is already done. It has been essential to the normalisation of fascism. At the end of 2017, Il Tempo newspaper announced Benito Mussolini as its “person of the year”. It wasn’t being facetious: Il Duce barged into the news agenda every week last year. A few weeks ago, even a leftwing politician in Florence said that “nobody in this country has done more than Mussolini”. Today, 73 years after his death, he is more admired than traditional Italian heroes such as Giuseppes Garibaldi and Mazzini.  

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The Atlantic: The Rise of the Anti-Liberals

Wherever I go and wherever I’ve lived, there are others, from all over the world, who I can easily connect with—“anywheres” of the center-left and center-right who share a similar disposition. They don’t really have a local community or “home” they feel particularly strongly about. They tend to have graduate degrees; be interested in politics; speak various languages; avoid sports-related conversations; and be vaguely privileged financially (it’s never entirely clear how privileged). Perhaps most importantly, they are suspicious of happy people but especially earnest people. No one’s particularly religious, but if they are, they’re probably members of a minority group, usually Muslims or Jews, which makes it okay. No one’s perfect, of course, but such are the people of my “tribe.” [...]

Self-professed liberals often describe liberalism as indifferent to how we live our lives, so that liberalism effectively serves as a kind of referee or neutral bystander. But this does not necessarily entail ideological neutrality, since liberalism itself emerges from a set of ideological and philosophical assumptions regarding religion, human nature, and the state. Liberalism only offers neutrality within itself. (Political liberalism, as expounded by John Rawls, is based on the “veil of ignorance”—the notion that the founders of a new polity are free to construct their own society without any knowledge of their future position and without any distinctive set of preferences or values. But, as the philosopher Lenn Goodman writes, “Every one of Rawls’s choosers is trapped in a liberal society. … They are not free to construct a value system for themselves.”) [...]

All transformations, even largely good ones, come at a cost. Most Americans and Europeans, including those who benefit most from the liberal status quo, understand that something is not quite right. Take our unprecedented levels of inequality, which are only likely to grow. But the incentives for meritocratic elites to do anything serious about it—Deneen suggests a rather unappealing “household economics” model while social democrats like Matt Bruenig propose “social wealth funds”—are limited. Liberals are the new conservatives.

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Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell: Homeopathy Explained – Gentle Healing or Reckless Fraud?

Vox: How the economy shapes our love lives

 It may seem like the way we date is dictated by things like love and affection but it’s actually driven by something far less romantic: the economy.

Dating as we know it didn’t really start until the Industrial Revolution when young people left farms and small towns to flock to cities for work. They got jobs in factories, bars, and restaurants and being away from their families for the first time offered them the freedom to mix and match with other young people.

Ever since then the way single people have gotten together has been dictated by the ups and downs of the economy in the United States. We talk to Harvard’s Moira Weigel, author of “The Labor of Love: The Invention of Dating” about how our woes about dating are nothing new, they’ve been around since people starting pairing off.

The Washington Post: Sweden is taking on Russian meddling ahead of fall elections. The White House might take note

Russia has a big stake in Sweden’s political affairs: Sweden is a rare outlier in Europe, because it is not a member of the NATO military alliance, which the Kremlin sees as a strategic threat. But attitudes toward NATO started to shift here after Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine in 2014, and now Sweden’s center-right political opposition says it wants to join the alliance if it comes to power. About 47 percent of Swedes support joining NATO, a Pew survey found last year. 

Separately, Sweden is embroiled in a debate about how widely to open its doors to immigrants, a split that Russian state media have played up. [...]

Before the presentation, Bay said Swedish authorities are not trying to predict exactly what Russia might do as they figure out ways to thwart such moves. Instead, he said, they want to improve the political system’s overall readiness. [...]

The project by Swedish public television, Swedish public radio and two major newspapers, Dagens Nyheter and Svenska Dagbladet, will seek to combat misinformation from both domestic and foreign sources, proponents said.

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The Local: Italy is 'steeped in hate', Amnesty warns amid toxic election campaign

Against this background, the campaign for Italy's election on March 4th has only aggravated the problem, Amnesty said. The group has been monitoring comments made on social media by political leaders and candidates nationwide and in the past two weeks alone has identified more than 200 that it flagged as hateful or discriminatory on grounds of race, religion, gender or sexual orientation. 

Virtually all were made by members of the centre-right alliance that the latest polls show leading, comprised of Forza Italia centrists, the populist League and far-right Brothers of Italy. [...]

Meanwhile the Brothers of Italy, while making fewer discriminatory statements about migrants, refugees and Roma people, made the highest number of negative comments about women and LGBTI people. While the party has a high-profile female leader, Giorgia Meloni, it promotes "traditional family values" that tend to exclude orientations other than heterosexual.  [...]

Amnesty's Rufini warned that Italy is more polarized than ever before, saying that part of the public believes itself to be "great, pure, Italian while the rest don't deserve to share the country [...] creating an impossible climate in this country and killing all chance of debate". 

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openDemocracy: Brazil militarizes its war on crime

The military has repeatedly been called in to assist civilian police in Rio de Janeiro in recent years, but Temer’s decree — subject to congressional approval that is expected this week — represents the first time that the government is using the constitutional provision allowing the federal armed forces to assume control over civilian police since the end of the country’s military dictatorship in 1985. [...]

Moreover, the head of Brazil’s army, Eduardo Villas Bôas, recently cautioned against using the military for domestic crime-fighting, arguing that such actions increase the risk of politicization and corruption of the troops. [...]

Etchegoyen’s description of Rio as a “laboratory” for militarized security policies is telling, given that the city has seen multiple past deployments of the armed forces in recent years that have not achieved any sustainable security gains. The results of militarized anti-crime strategies implemented by civilian authorities in the city have proven to be similarly lackluster.

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Politico: China’s trash ban forces Europe to confront its waste problem

Of the 56.4 million tons of paper EU citizens threw away in 2016, some 8 million ended up in China, purchased by recycling centers that turn it into cardboard and send it back to Europe as packaging for Chinese exports. That same year, the EU collected 8.4 million tons of plastic waste, and sent 1.6 million tons to China.

At the end of last year, Beijing put an end to the practice, putting in place strict limits on imports of foreign waste. Only eight weeks later, Europe is struggling to deal with mountains of plastic and paper waste. [...]

The EU is to some extent a victim of its own success. For years, European leaders have touted the benefits of limiting and reusing waste. Just last month, the European Commission presented its vision for the future of plastics, exhorting Europe to turn waste into an economic opportunity. [...]

The Commission’s Plastics Strategy, announced in January, aims to make all plastic packaging recyclable or reusable by 2030, something that it says could create 200,000 jobs. For that to happen, Europe’s capacity to sort and recycle waste would have to be multiplied fourfold — something that would cost as much as €16.6 billion.

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Politico: The thriller that predicted the Russia scandal

The People’s House centers around a Russian scheme to flip an election and put Republicans in power by depressing votes in the Midwest. Pipeline politics play an unexpectedly outsize role. Sexual harassment and systematic coverups in Congress abound. But it’s no unimaginative rehash. Pepper released the book in the summer of 2016, just as the presidential contest between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton was heating up — and before Russia’s real-life campaign to influence the election had been revealed. In fact, the heart of the story had been written for three years when Russian government sent hackers to infiltrate the Democratic National Committee and sent their trolls to influence the election on social media. The Putin-like oligarch Pepper portrays as pulling the strings of U.S. politics had been fleshed out for two. [...]

As he waited for edits on the first book, early in 2016, Pepper got started on a sequel, The Wingman. He finished the bulk of the manuscript by January 2017, as Trump was getting sworn in. Now, one year into Trump’s tenure, his second offering in the otherwise dull world of political thrillers — which comes out on Monday — is an equally complex tale of kompromat influencing a presidential election, even more sexual misconduct, and an Erik Prince-like military contractor with close ties to the administration, this time told through the lens of a rollicking Democratic presidential primary. He wrote it before the now-infamous Steele dossier became public knowledge (and before, Pepper says, he learned about it) — and months before revelations about the Blackwater founder’s close ties to the Trump team and its Russian entanglements. If the first parallels were eerie, these ones were, Pepper admits, maybe even spooky. [...]

The key to writing a successful political thriller is to come up with a scenario that’s far-fetched enough to stretch the reader’s imagination, but not so insane as to be wholly unbelievable. Two years ago, a successful Russian plot to throw an American election by manipulating the Midwest would almost certainly fall into the latter category. So might the idea of systematic blackmail of a presidential candidate.

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Haaretz: Why We've Suppressed the Queer History of the Holocaust

While we may believe that this homophobia was a natural outgrowth of 1930s society, the opposite was the case. Redlich was from the Czechoslovakian town of Olomouc. Similarly to Weimar Germany, Czechoslovakia had a vocal movement calling for the decriminalization of homosexuality, there was a gay subculture, with bars, journals, novels, and activists.

Scholars like Insa Eschebach have pointed out that homophobia among those who were themselves victims of the Holocaust was a specific product of the concentration camp society. Reading survivors’ testimonies, the historian comes across often hair-curlingly vicious statements about prisoners who engaged in same sex conduct.

This homophobia was not a byproduct of the Nazis’ prejudice; the prisoners viewed same sex desire as a personification of all that was wrong in the violent world of the camps. [...]

The Holocaust produced a prisoner society that was deeply gendered, homophobic, hierarchical, and violent. We need to recognize that even  a collective of those who themselves had been excluded and victimized still excluded those they defined as "other."

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Nautilus Magazine: Waiting For the Robot Rembrandt

One reason to be optimistic is that humans are not the only creatures capable of creation without utility. For example, given drawing materials, chimpanzees have been observed to produce drawings for the sheer pleasure of it. In fact, the Okinawa exhibition includes drawings by five chimpanzees and a bonobo owned by Tetsuro Matsuzawa, a professor at Kyoto University—and all are classified into Category (4), “Machine Art / Machine Aesthetics,” to remind us of what is possible. If the animals had produced drawings in return for bananas, we would not have included them in that category, because their art would not been created for its own sake.

For AI to get to where chimpanzees are, two steps are needed. First, AI must be able to generate its own goals. The goals of today’s AI are designed by human programmers, who write so-called evaluation functions to calculate how well or poorly an algorithm is doing at any given time. The first piece of machine-made art that qualifies for category 4 will need to be able to write its own evaluation functions. [...]

When AI starts making fine art, will we recognize it? We can teach AI our own art history as a way of encouraging output that we will recognize and enjoy. On the other hand, untrained AI will be more likely to produce something starkly original and even unrecognizable, after the manner of so-called Outsider Art or Art Brut. While we cannot divine the internal aesthetic sense of the autistic artist Moriya Kishaba, one of our category-2 exhibitors, many people find his tilings of tiny Chinese characters strangely beautiful. The future of AI art is analogous to a world full of artists like Moriya before they were discovered.

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CGP Grey: This Video Will Make You Angry (Mar 10, 2015)

The Irish Times: Fintan O’Toole: Is Brexit the maddest thing England has ever done? Not quite

Edward was not mad. He knew the claim wasn’t real. He made it because he was in dispute with the actual French monarchy about the feudal status of his own vast holdings in the southwest of the country, the duchy of Aquitaine. He needed the support of the Flemings, but they were also feudal subjects of the French monarchy. They couldn’t support him unless he declared that he was in fact king of France. So he did.

This reminds us, though, of one of the great problems of Brexit: saving face. People – and states – don’t act merely out of self-interest. There are times when they make claims they know to be daft. But they can’t find a way to back down.

The claim that the English monarch was king of France started out as a way of dealing with an immediate political problem, just as Brexit has its origins in David Cameron’s strategy for dealing with internal dissent in the Tory party. It, too, was thought of as a kind of deliberate overreach: Edward, like the less extreme of the Brexiters, thought he was making an exaggerated gesture that could be easily bargained away in later negotiations. [...]

It is astonishing how much pain people will suffer and inflict rather than admit they made a mistake. Brexit is not the Hundred Years War, but unless someone finds a way out it now, the consequences will be felt for a century.

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The Guardian: For how long can we treat the suffering of animals as an inconvenient truth?

Those alert to animal sentience already find themselves in difficult situations. Richard Dawkins, for example, has declared: “We have no general reason to think that non-human animals feel pain less acutely than we do.” This, Dawkins says, should change our cultural habits. Practices such as branding cattle, castration without anaesthetic and bullfighting, for instance, “should be treated as morally equivalent to doing the same thing to human beings”. [...]

There’s no escape via the “lower” animals, though. Plenty of research suggests that chickens are not unfeeling meat stores on two drumsticks. They suffer distress, even when they are not suffering themselves. Uncomfortable as it may be to learn this, chickens demonstrate empathy for one another. Studies of fish brains and behaviour suggest that intensive farming practices are almost certainly causing fish conscious distress. And then there are the cephalopods: the octopus, squid and cuttlefish. Their brains have the capacity to think, plan, reflect and learn and almost certainly feel, in the same way that humans do. Octopuses make this clear, showing intention and imagination when they carry shelters with them, build settlements, vary their hunting habits from day to day and escape from captivity when given the chance. Thanks to revelations such as these, while I still eat cows, sheep and pigs, I no longer eat octopus. It’s my own little cognitive dissonance; after all, I haven’t quite given up eating cuttlefish, even though I know about studies that show that they, like cats and dogs, dream when asleep. I have, unconsciously, drawn a line. [...]

Bioethicist David Mellor, who was influential in drafting New Zealand’s progressive animal welfare legislation, says our deepened scientific understanding of the animal experience means we should move away from giving the animals in our care mere “freedoms” from negative experience; we should, instead, be ensuring they enjoy lives that are “worth living”.  

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