The Conversation: ‘Far right’ groups may be diverse – but here’s what they all have in common

However, the term “far right” tends to subsume a broad range of parties and groups that differ significantly in agenda and policy – especially economic and welfare policies – as well as the extent to which they support and employ violence. This category includes both parties that have moderated their agendas, distancing themselves from fascism in order to appeal to broader electorates; and vigilante street groups and extreme parties which employ violence, such as the Greek Golden Dawn (GD), the English Defence League (EDL), Britain First and the Italian Casa Pound. [...]

The “far right” umbrella includes parties and groups that share an important commonality: they all justify a broad range of policy positions on socioeconomic issues on the basis of nationalism. The point here is not simply that they are all, to a degree, nationalist; but rather, that they use nationalism to justify their positions on all socioeconomic issues.

The term “right-wing populism”, however, is less appropriate. Populism is an even broader umbrella that often includes disparate parties and groups. To narrow down this category, we often tend to conflate populism and nationalism, identifying a party as populist, not on the basis of its populist attributes – what party doesn’t claim to speak on behalf of the people in a democracy? – but on the basis of its nationalist attributes. But despite the similarities between “populism” and “nationalism” – both emphasise conflict lines, focus on the collective, and put forward a vision of an ideal society – the two are conceptually different. While the former pits the people against the elites, the latter pits the in-group against the out-group.

And so herein lies the problem. If nationalism is always a feature of the far right, as most researchers agree, what is the added value of the term “populism”? To put it another way, what is the difference between a radical right-wing party and a populist radical right-wing party? While populism may or may not be an attribute of some far right parties, it is not their defining feature. Rather, nationalism is.

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Politico: How Barnier could be EU’s Trojan horse

EU national leaders, however, have already warned that legally they could not, and would not, be bound by the process, because it strips away their discretion. And some political groups, especially the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe, have lost enthusiasm for the Sptizenkandidat system, viewing it as overwhelmingly favoring the EPP, the center-right party which is widely expected to once again win the most seats in Parliament next year.

However, Barnier’s decision not to seek the EPP nomination means that the Council could potentially draft him as a capable, and popular, candidate — presuming, of course, that he leads the Brexit talks to a successful outcome — even though he did not run as a Spitzenkandidat. [...]

In the short term, Barnier’s decision stands to boost the chances of former Finnish Prime Minister Alexander Stubb, who is widely expected to join the contest for the EPP nomination. So far, the only declared candidate is Manfred Weber, the German leader of the EPP group in Parliament, who has the backing of Angela Merkel but no prior executive experience. [...]

Barnier’s predicament also highlights what critics of the Spitzenkandidat process cite as one of the system’s biggest flaws: anyone who already has an important job, particularly sitting heads of state or government, is unlikely to give that up to campaign for the chance of winning the Commission presidency.

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CityLab: Mapping the Edison Bulbs of Brooklyn

But culture also plays a role in lighting appreciation. In China, dim incandescent lighting is still associated by older people with the poverty and hardships of the recent past. A bright home was a mark of wealth through much of Chinese history, while demons like the nian were believed to lurk in dark corners—to be flushed out with lanterns and fireworks at Lunar New Year. Illumination was thus both a prophylactic against evil and a status symbol, which explains why brilliantly lighted shops and restaurants—even upscale ones—are still common in China. Most Westerners (and younger Chinese, less beholden to tradition and with little memory of Mao-era privation) expect low dim light in a fashionable restaurant—light that evokes the ambience of a candle-lit dinner. It is no coincidence that Edison bulbs deliver a color temperature almost identical to the flattering light of a candle flame.

The Edison bulb revival began quietly in the 1980s, when entrepreneur Bob Rosenzweig began manufacturing reproductions for collectors. Sales were thin for years, until CFLs began replacing incandescent bulbs on store shelves. By the mid-aughts, Rosenzweig's products were all the rage with restaurant designers in New York. Then came the 2007 Energy Independence and Security Act, which unintentionally kicked the Edison revival into overdrive. Its new standards for energy consumption effectively banned most “general service” incandescent light bulbs, which became illegal to manufacture or import after 2014. But there were exceptions—bug lights, black lights, three-way bulbs and “decoratives” such as Edison bulbs. [...]

Just how accurate a marker of affluence and gentrification are Edison light bulbs? Very, it would seem. I recently walked most of Brooklyn’s Flatbush Avenue at twilight looking for the bulbs. The borough’s original Main Street, Flatbush makes a 10-mile plunge from downtown Brooklyn to Floyd Bennett Field—Gotham’s failed first municipal airport. Much of the route is an unspoken boundary of sorts between majority-black neighborhoods of Bedford-Stuyvesant, Crown Heights, and East Flatbush to the east, and the mostly-white enclaves of Park Slope, Ditmas Park, Midwood, and Marine Park to the west. That line has blurred in recent decades, as creative-class elites moved east to reclaim white neighborhoods—Prospect Heights, Prospect-Lefferts Gardens, Prospect Park South—that emptied after World War II.

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IFLScience: A Physicist Claims He's Figured Out Why We Haven't Met Aliens Yet, And It's Pretty Worrying

Russian physicist Alexander Berezin, from the National Research University of Electronic Technology (MIET), has another idea. He calls it the “First in, last out” solution of the Fermi Paradox. He suggests that once a civilization reaches the capabilities of spreading across the stars, it will inevitably wipe out all other civilizations. [...]

Berezin's solution for the paradox comes from several simplifications of assumptions. For example, our definition of life depends on seven parameters, but for Berezin, there’s only one that matters: growth. Growth is the push for expanding beyond the planet of origin, and if the push to expansion becomes the dominant force, it will trample any other existing life in the universe. Colonialism and capitalism are two historical example of such forces.

So, is this it? We need to either go out there and conquer or be destroyed? Well, Berezin hopes that he’s wrong. One other requirement of his solution is that life can only be found when very close rather than at a distance. So finding alien life before we are on the destruction path might just make us a decent civilization.

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99 Percent Invisible: Dollhouses of St. Louis

Back in the 1950s, St. Louis was segregated and The Ville was one of the only African-American neighborhoods in the city. The community was prosperous. Black-owned businesses thrived and the neighborhood was filled with the lovely, ornate brick homes the city has become famous for.

Samuel Moore, who became a local alderman in 2007, grew up in The Ville. Moore’s father worked as bricklayer and helped build some of the stately brick houses in this area. “He was a great bricklayer,” says Moore. “He did quite a few jobs around this town and I still see some of my dad’s work — beautiful homes. Triple brick, three-story buildings that would cost a million dollars to duplicate.”

But driving around The Ville today, where Moore has lived for almost his entire life, the neighborhood looks very different. Some buildings are simply rundown or abandoned, but others are missing large chunks entirely. Walls have disappeared. The bricks are gone. “We call them dollhouses,” says Moore, “because you can look inside of them.”

In the past fifty years, the city of St. Louis has lost more than half its population. Vacancy has skyrocketed in The Ville and other neighborhoods on the north side of the city. Entire blocks in this area have returned to pastureland, punctuated by the occasional dilapidated building slowly surrendering to the landscape around it.

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Haaretz: How Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince's Rise Led to the Fall of the Bin Laden Business Empire

Three Bin Laden brothers, senior executives in the family firm, were among more than 200 businessmen, royals and officials detained in November 2017 in an anti-corruption drive ordered by the prince. Bakr and two of his brothers, Saleh and Saad, eventually transferred their combined 36.2 percent stake in the family firm to the state in April 2018. Bakr, in his late 60s, is still in custody, although no charges have been made public. [...]

The Bin Ladens' undoing exposes the contradictions in Prince Mohammed's plan to build a modern economy, some economists say. He has embraced privatisation, hoping to inject dynamism, yet the state has intervened in firms such as Saudi Binladin Group. He has tackled corruption, yet there has been little transparency around the process. One Saudibusinessman said the Bin Laden saga had become a "symbol of what's happening between the government and the private sector - a breakdown of trust." [...]

Then, in September 2015, a construction crane owned by Saudi Binladin Group collapsed in Mecca's Grand Mosque, killing 107 people just before the start of Islam's annual haj pilgrimage. The government moved against the company, suspending it from receiving new state contracts and barring its board members and senior executives from traveling abroad. It also ordered the Finance Ministry to review the firm's existing projects, citing unspecified "shortcomings."

A senior Saudi Binladin Group executive and a source close to the family said the crane accident gave the government an opening to act against the firm. The executive said SaudiBinladin Group wasn't responsible for the site at the time - the work fell under the supervision of local authorities in Mecca. The senior government official disputed this, saying it was standard practice that the contractor supervised the site. A legal case over the incident was still pending, he added.

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Aeon: A truly African philosophy

The ambitious African philosopher finds herself between the devil and the deep blue sea. She has to convince the West that she has something interesting to say about philosophy. She has to insist that African philosophy is not the same as ‘philosophy in Africa’. And by insisting on African philosophy, she stamps her foot hard on the ground and defends the virtue of originality: innovative thinking that’s not subservient to the dominant Western tradition of philosophical thinking and which, at the same time, transcends traditional African thought. The other front of her struggle is Africa. She has to confront a very limited local audience averse to radical creative thinking. Most of her colleagues don’t think that ‘originality’ is possible or even desirable. These are colleagues who studied Western philosophy all through college, and had come to see Western philosophy as the supreme and only universal template of philosophy. [...]

The idea of ‘consolation’ philosophy does not imply an attempt to comfort philosophers. Rather, it suggests a philosophy of life, a project similar to the human-centred philosophical projects of Western existentialists such as Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Friedrich Nietzsche, Gabriel Marcel, Søren Kierkegaard, Miguel de Unamuno, Emmanuel Levinas and German idealists such as Arthur Schopenhauer. Here I offer a brief presentation of this African philosophical synthesis, which I hope will help to resolve the dilemma eloquently put forward in 1997 by professor of philosophy at Penn State University Robert Bernasconi: ‘Either African philosophy is so similar to Western philosophy that it makes no distinctive contribution and effectively disappears; or it is so different that its credentials to be genuine philosophy will always be in doubt.’ [...]

The human being as a melancholy being is the entity defined first by emotion, which is fundamental, and secondly by reason, which is a structured intellectual capacity with roots in the nature of the melancholy being as a creature of mood. Mood is an originary intelligence, the basis of feeling, a primordial reason, a proto-mind from which advanced reason, thought, affects and attitudes arise. The conception of mood in the dimension of a proto-mind – and the results that this conception produces for speculative metaphysics – distinguishes my thought-system from the existentialism of Heidegger and Sartre, for example. In other words, consolation philosophy understands the human being as a unity of emotion and reason, with both aspects of her nature having a real efficacy in the physical world and, therefore, equally important, without the one diminishing the value of the other. Emotion supplies the primal, motivational energy of life while reason structures the realities we embrace by simple faith. [...]

Given the impossibility of freedom, I hold that the meaning of existence, from the human standpoint rather than from the standpoint of an omniscient mind, is the realisation of ‘consolation’. While the goal of existence (perfection) is unrealisable, there is meaning (consolation) in existence that is realisable. Consolation is realisable and has been realised in human beings in the moment-to-moment maximisation of the emotion of joy in the life of the melancholy being who defines her intellectual project from an understanding of herself as a being thrown into a world whose purpose she doesn’t know but can only speculate about. Consolation is realisable – and has been realised in nonsentient nature at the micro level of atomic and subatomic impulses in the endless striving for what I speculate as consciousness as a step on the road to perfection.

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Aeon: How to tell the difference between persuasion and manipulation

Suppose that Amy just left an abusive-yet-faithful partner, but in a moment of weakness she is tempted to go back to him. Now imagine that Amy’s friends employ the same techniques that Iago used on Othello. They manipulate Amy into (falsely) believing – and being outraged – that her ex-partner was not only abusive, but unfaithful as well. If this manipulation prevents Amy from reconciling, she might be better off than she would have been had her friends not manipulated her. Yet, to many, it could still seem morally dodgy. Intuitively, it would have been morally better for her friends to employ non-manipulative means to help Amy avoid backsliding. Something remains morally dubious about manipulation, even when it helps rather than harms the person being manipulated. So harm cannot be the reason that manipulation is wrong.

Perhaps manipulation is wrong because it involves techniques that are inherently immoral ways to treat other human beings. This thought might be especially appealing to those inspired by Immanuel Kant’s idea that morality requires us to treat each other as rational beings rather than mere objects. Perhaps the only proper way to influence the behaviour of other rational beings is by rational persuasion, and thus any form of influence other than rational persuasion is morally improper. But for all its appeal, this answer also falls short, for it would condemn many forms of influence that are morally benign. [...]

What makes an influence manipulative and what makes it wrong are the same thing: the manipulator attempts to get someone to adopt what the manipulator herself regards as an inappropriate belief, emotion or other mental state. In this way, manipulation resembles lying. What makes a statement a lie and what makes it morally wrong are the same thing – that the speaker tries to get someone to adopt what the speaker herself regards as a false belief. In both cases, the intent is to get another person to make some sort of mistake. The liar tries to get you to adopt a false belief. The manipulator might do that, but she might also try to get you to feel an inappropriate (or inappropriately strong or weak) emotion, attribute too much importance to the wrong things (eg, someone else’s approval), or to doubt something (eg, your own judgment or your beloved’s fidelity) that there is no good reason to doubt. The distinction between manipulation and non-manipulative influence depends on whether the influencer is trying to get someone to make some sort of mistake in what he thinks, feels, doubts or pays attention to.

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SciShow Psych: Why Do People Join Cults?

It’s easy to assume that people who join cults have something wrong with them, but usually the people who join cults are just like the rest of us. So, how does it happen?

UnHerd: Can we really call Jeremy Corbyn an antisemite?

These are somewhat trivial examples. But it applies just as much to more sensitive subjects. For instance, a large amount of public debate at the moment is dedicated to whether or not Jeremy Corbyn is an antisemite. But once again, the disagreement comes down to definitions (ironically enough, given that the row is in part inspired by the Labour Party not wanting to use the International Holocaust Remembrance Association definition of antisemitism). [...]

The trouble is that there can be no right answer here. Words don’t have ‘correct’ meanings; they are defined by how they’re used, and if enough people use them differently, there’s nothing but personal taste to choose between them. So someone can very angrily insist that the definition of antisemitism includes Corbyn; others can equally insist that it doesn’t. Neither will ever be proved correct. A dictionary won’t help; it just tells you how some people use the word. All you can do is go back and forth: “I define it to mean this!” “But I define it to mean that!” [...]

If you want to argue about real differences, though, you have to get past the definitions to what the thing is underneath. Find what your real disagreements are, and what you expect to happen. I don’t expect Jeremy Corbyn ever to call a Jewish person a racist epithet, but I do expect that we’ll keep finding out stuff about him hanging around with people who repeat the blood libel.

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Bloomberg: Bannon’s Meeting With a Populist European Leader Ends in Trade Clash

The mastermind of Donald Trump’s 2016 election victory met Czech President Milos Zeman, an early fan of the U.S. leader, this week in Prague. Zeman also welcomed Petr Bystron, a lawmaker for the euroskeptic, anti-immigration Alternative for Germany party that is part of Bannon’s push to bring together anti-establishment groups to challenge the EU’s liberal order. [...]

“He asked for an audience, got 30 minutes, and after 30 minutes I told him that I absolutely disagree with his views and I ended the audience,” said Zeman, an economist and former prime minister who’s also a leading supporter in the EU of Russian President Vladimir Putin. “The reason why I disagree with his views is because he was defending American trade restrictions.” [...]

Zeman, who won a second term in January after waging an anti-refugee campaign, has triggered outrage among some mainstream Czech political parties for endorsing an anti-Muslim party. He didn’t comment to the newspaper on any other parts of his discussion with Bannon or on his plans to mobilize support for nationalists before the May EU Parliament ballot.

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Quartz: India’s supreme court strikes down a colonial-era adultery law

Unlike the country’s sexual assault laws, which hinge on the consent of the woman, the 158-year-old adultery law did not consider the woman’s will. Though women couldn’t be punished under the provision, a husband could prosecute the man who had sexual relations with his wife, even if the wife was a voluntary participant in the act. [...]

The Narendra Modi government had supported the colonial-era law on the grounds that it preserved the sanctity of marriage and served a public good. [...]

The Modi government was open to making the law gender-neutral by allowing for the prosecution of a woman who has sex with a married man. However, the court has consistently refused to allow for prosecution of women.

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Quartz: India’s top court won’t re-examine if mosques are essential to Islam

With a 2:1 majority, a three-judge bench consisting of chief justice Dipak Misra and justices Ashok Bhushan and S Abdul Nazeer has declared that there is no need for a larger bench to reexamine a 1994 supreme court ruling that said that a mosque is not essential to Islam. [...]

Since the 16th century, the Babri mosque had stood on a site that some Hindus believe is the birthplace of Lord Ram, the protagonist of the epic Ramayana. Determined to build a Hindu temple by replacing the mosque, thousands of kar sevaks (religious volunteers) descended upon the mosque in December 1992 and tore it down. The incident sparked large-scale communal violence that killed over 2,000 people across the country, and raised concerns over the rule of law, freedom of worship, and the secular identity of India. The courtroom battle over the land has remained unresolved ever since, but the final hearing in the case began earlier this year. [...]

But the fact remains that, in the years since the mosque was demolished, the dispute has pitted India’s Hindu majority against its Muslims. When the final verdict does come for the closely watched case, it will have a bearing on the very identity of India, especially as it approaches the 2019 national elections.

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Politico: Last rites for Spitzenkandidat

Since then, the power-sharing agreement has collapsed, and the heads of government on the European Council have said they will not be bound by the Spitzenkandidat process. Meanwhile, parties other than the EPP have turned against the system, recognizing that it overwhelmingly benefits the conservatives, who are once again virtually guaranteed to win the most seats in Parliament in next year’s election. [...]

Some of the strongest resistance is coming from the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe (ALDE), which has only the fourth-largest faction in Parliament but has made strong gains in national elections and is soon expected to hold eight seats on the European Council — the same number as the EPP. [...]

For now, Merkel has backed Weber’s candidacy, but her endorsement is largely a necessity of national allegiance, and in announcing her support she made clear that merely winning the party’s nomination would not guarantee that Weber becomes Commission president — an implicit renunciation of the Spitzenkandidat system. [...]

But unlike national parliaments, the European Parliament is co-legislator along with the European Council, and members of the Council have made clear that they are not willing to relinquish their legal authority over nominating the Commission president in favor of an unwritten process that gives Parliament overwhelming control.

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The Atlantic: He’s Going to Get Reelected, Isn’t He?

But if you live in the reality that mainlines Fox News, you saw something else—a strong president. You heard Trump assert America’s resurging greatness: Steel mills are being built, farmers will thrive, and the economy is doing better than even he predicted. Trump suggested that he was wheeling and dealing on trade with everyone from South Korea to Mexico, and showing everyone who’s boss. World leaders at the UN were laughing with him, not at him. He was too busy chairing the Security Council to pay attention to Kavanaugh’s latest accuser. And his genuine solidarity with the accused reinforced the narrative taking hold in conservative circles: Don’t fear that your daughters’ lives will be ruined by assault; fear that your sons’ lives will be ruined by false accusations. [...]

Trump hasn’t done many of these solo press conferences. (My former boss President Barack Obama used to get heat for not doing more, but Trump has famously avoided them without much criticism.) And yet, in his few appearances, he has completely upended the medium. Gone are the predictable if tense affairs where reporters asked questions and presidents would either answer them or give the appearance of answering them. They have been replaced with a reality show where the president pits reporters, nations, his staff, and even his own controversies (Kavanaugh v. Rosenstein) against one another, all to demonstrate that he alone hands out roses. [...]

A poll released on the day of Trump’s press conference showed that Kavanaugh’s support among Republican women had dropped by 18 points. But 2020 is still far away. If the Democrats do, as some predict, take back Congress and start investigating the administration, Republicans will surely close ranks around their threatened leader. If Kavanaugh isn’t confirmed and Democrats are able to spend the next two years blocking the confirmation of another right-wing justice, the conservative base will rally around Trump.

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The Atlantic: Boys Don’t Read Enough

Developed countries like the United States have seen a remarkable transformation in education over the last century: Girls and young women—once subjected to discrimination in, and even exclusion from, schools and colleges—have “conquered” those very institutions, as a report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) put it. Today, for example, women comprise a growing majority of students on college campuses in the U.S., up from around 40 percent in the 1970s. [...]

But it’s not just a phenomenon in the U.K.: These trends in girls’ dominance in reading can be found pretty much anywhere in the developed world. In 2009, a global study of the academic performance of 15-year-olds found that, in all but one of the 65 participating countries, more girls than boys said they read for pleasure. On average across the countries, only about half of boys said they read for enjoyment, compared to roughly three-quarters of girls. (The list generally excludes less-developed countries where girls and women tend to have lower rates of literacy than boys and men.) [...]

Understanding why girls are so much more inclined to read might help eradicate what is proving to be a stubborn gender gap both in the U.S. and around the world: the lagging educational outcomes of boys and men. Reading for pleasure is, as the OECD has concluded, a habit that can prove integral to performing well in the classroom. “Any cognitive skill can be improved with practice,” Reilly says. “If girls are reading more outside of school”—if they’re doing so out of an intrinsic motivation rather than because they have to—“this provides them with thousands of hours of additional reading over the course of their development.”

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Vox: Poll: 48% of white evangelicals would support Kavanaugh even if the allegations against him were true

Aside from the 48 percent who said they would support Kavanaugh’s appointment to the court, 36 percent of white evangelicals say they would not support it, and 16 percent did not have an answer. Mirroring the poll results, many prominent white evangelicals have spoken out in Kavanaugh’s defense, characterizing the allegations against him as part of a liberal plot to waylay his nomination. Jerry Falwell Jr., president of the evangelical Liberty University, sent 300 women Liberty students to Washington, DC, to support Kavanaugh during this week’s Senate confirmation hearings. [...]

Such a perspective fits neatly within the context of evangelical sexual culture, which in recent months has been characterized by a wider suspicion of the #MeToo movement. Within evangelical culture, as I’ve written previously, the idea that women are “supposed” to be the gatekeepers of male sexuality, that male sexual urges are inherently uncontrollable, and the idea that forgiveness is automatically “owed” to any alleged abuser, converge to create a climate in which allegations of sexual harassment and abuse tend to be seen as minor or, at least, forgivable.

Certainly, the evangelical community is already redeeming its own people accused of sexual misconduct during the #MeToo movement. Earlier this month, former Southern Baptist Convention president Paige Patterson — who left his position as president of the Southwestern Baptist Seminary in disgrace after accusations of sexism — returned to public ministry with a pair of sermons that denigrated the #MeToo movement and focused on the problem of false rape allegations.

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The Spectator: All by herself: Theresa May and the politics of isolation Inbox x

Her current policy — to threaten to walk away from talks if the EU doesn’t accept her Chequers plan — is not taken seriously in Brussels. EU leaders can see that the UK is hopelessly unprepared for no deal, and reason that she’d be stopped by her cabinet, parliament or both if she tried it. May’s colleagues worry that she is in denial, and so they are making their own plans. One of those intimately involved in the government’s contingency planning tells me, ‘No deal cannot be our only Plan B.’ [...]

Even the handful who still defend Chequers in private, as well as in public, admit that things are now more difficult. One cabinet minister concedes that the EU’s approach at Salzburg was a ‘very successful negotiating tactic’. Another cabinet member says the Chequers plan has done its job: to show the government had made an effort, in good faith, to negotiate as close an economic relationship with the EU as possible. ‘You’ve got to be able to say to the Remainers that we tried.’

There are some in the cabinet who still loathe Brexit and regard Chequers as the UK’s opening offer. Philip Hammond, the Chancellor, is expected to push to stay in the customs union and makes no attempt to disguise his concerns about Brexit. In cabinet meetings this week, he complained that a restaurant in his Surrey constituency can’t hire enough staff to wait all the tables — proof, he said, that the UK needed low-skilled immigration. But as one exasperated cabinet minister put it to me afterwards, it didn’t seem to have occurred to the Chancellor that maybe the restaurant should just pay its staff more. And that the balance of power between workers and low-wage businesses might be precisely why so many voted for Brexit in the first place.

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UnHerd: Beware keep fit totalitarianism

It should be stressed that the company is not forcing anyone to take part or share their fitness data. Furthermore, they are rewarding healthy habits not punishing unhealthy ones; and if you hate the idea anyway, other life insurance providers are available.  [...]

But what if a special feature of one life insurance provider’s products becomes a general feature of all health insurance provision? Being without health insurance in America isn’t much fun – so anything generally required of policy holders is pretty much compulsory. [...]

Is this dystopia for Americans only? Perhaps not. Countries with socialised models of healthcare might also be vulnerable to the hi-tech enforcement of healthy lifestyles. Instead of the profit motive, the driver would be the need to keep public spending under control. One could imagine hard-up governments offering discounts on social insurance contributions or rebates on taxes in return for verifiable evidence of responsible behaviour.  

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UnHerd: Why I regret my war on drugs

In 1961, when I was ten years old, Britain signed the United Nations Single Convention on Drugs committing all member states to a global prohibition on production, supply and use of certain drugs for non-medical use. Xenophobia was the foundation of the convention, identifying those who were associated with the use of cannabis, opium and cocaine – namely Hispanics, Chinese and Afro-Americans.

Ten years later, the Labour Party supported the passing of the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971. It has continued to support drug prohibition ever since – in government and in opposition – although this pernicious policy has brought distress to millions and death to tens of thousands.

Prohibition, though, was a failure. You just have to look at the number of overdose deaths in Britain compared with countries that have moved from punishment to treatment, such as Portugal, to see this approach has been catastrophic. It created a fiercely hostile environment, acted as a barrier to troubled individuals seeking help and, in the process, hugely damaged the criminal justice system. [...]

Relying on prohibition as the main policy tool gifted the drugs trade to criminals, creating a free and uncontrolled black market in which the biggest profits went to the most violent players. Meanwhile, we criminalised generations caught up in drugs, betraying people who should have been able to look to the Labour Party for a way out of their abandoned hell. [...]

For every pound we spend fighting the drug war, we have to spend many more just to clear up the mess. It is a terrible irony that the Home Office is pursuing a policy that creates half of all property crime and channels a vast income stream towards organised criminals. And the war on drugs is also filling our prisons. We currently have the highest prison population in Western Europe. And these prisons are awash with drugs, creating new addicts.

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Politico: Cuba on the Thames

Corbyn’s fate greatly depends on the unfolding Brexit drama, expected to climax in the coming weeks as the U.K. pushes for a deal before its scheduled exit in March 2019. But the impact of a Corbyn government, should he assume the reins of power, could be much more significant.

While the prospect of a Corbyn government would likely make post-Brexit trade relations with Europe more straightforward in the short term, predictions of a socialist London have already set alarm bells ringing in Washington, according to U.S. officials asked to draw up memos for the State Department in case of another snap election this year. [...]

Corbyn promised a Britain in which the rich would be more heavily taxed, utilities and the railways would be nationalized, the government would invest in 400,000 jobs focused on tackling climate change, and large companies would be forced to give workers stakes of up to 10 percent and pay annual dividends to staff. He signaled Labour would end British backing for Saudi Arabia in the war in Yemen, immediately recognize a Palestinian state, and tilt firmly away from the U.S. as a key ally.[...]

In 2015, during Corbyn’s first conference, lobbyists were conspicuously thin on the ground, uncertain of how to influence the most socialist Labour leadership in modern history. This year, BP, Google, Visa, Bombardier and Fujitsu were all represented with stands at the conference floor. PwC, Hitachi, Novartis and Cisco all hosted or co-hosted fringe events, and numerous others sent lobbyists keen to fix up meetings with members of a potential government-in-waiting.

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Politico: Merkel loses key ally in conservative rebellion

Most observers were convinced Kauder, with the support of Merkel and other party leaders, would easily beat Brinkhaus, who has virtually no public profile. Brinkhaus, who witnesses described as surprised by his own victory, received 125 votes to Kauder’s 112. [...]

In Germany’s stability-obsessed political culture such open rebellions, especially within the governing party, are rare. But conservatives in Merkel’s bloc — an alliance of two parties, the Christian Democrats and Bavaria’s Christian Social Union — have long taken issue with her handling of migration and other issues, such as the eurozone bailouts, grumbling that she has taken their party too far to the left. [...]

The turmoil over the botched dismissal of Germany’s domestic spy chief added to growing frustration over her leadership, however. The affair marked the second time since July that the so-called grand coalition of conservatives and Social Democrats came to the brink of collapse, largely due to infighting within Merkel’s camp that she struggled to bring under control.

The fact that Brinkhaus even decided to challenge Kauder was itself considered a small sensation, as it marked only the second time since 1973 that more than one candidate has run for the position. While the parliamentary leadership post is considered a key job within the center-right hierarchy, MPs normally leave the selection to top party officials.

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The New York Review of Books: ‘I Can’t Believe I’m in Saudi Arabia’

For middle-class urban Saudis the social changes brought in by King Salman and his powerful son, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, generally known as MBS, are significant. A movie theater has been built where men and women may sit together—the first film shown was Black Panther, which proved very popular. Women have been permitted to attend sporting events, albeit in single-sex areas, but the most important decree, introduced in 2016, may have been the one curtailing the powers of the mutaween. No longer can the men tasked with “promoting virtue and preventing vice” arrest women on the streets and whip them for failing to cover themselves adequately. Their job must be carried out “in a gentle and humane way.” Robbed of the powers they used to exert with such arbitrary cruelty, they have melted away. [...]

A decade ago, James Mann’s The China Fantasy: How Our Leaders Explain Away Chinese Repression (2007) examined how Western politicians and businesspeople “foster an elaborate set of illusions about China, centered on the belief that commerce will lead inevitably to political change and democracy.” China’s continuing economic expansion coupled with its repression of those who challenge Communist Party rule has provided an object lesson to other governments: it is perfectly possible to allow certain changes that improve your citizens’ lives without letting loose pesky “Western” ideas like civil rights and free elections. In Saudi Arabia, change is designed precisely to curtail political upheaval or a demand for democracy. After the Arab Spring, which saw youth uprisings across the Middle East, King Salman understood that he had to do something for the two thirds of the population who are under thirty. Vision 2030, the ambitious economic and social plan designed by his thirty-three-year-old son, is designed to do just that. [...]

By the logic of a Saudi Arabia rather than a China fantasy, however, there is no contradiction. MBS knows that if the kingdom is to diversify its economy and reduce its dependence on oil, women must become more productive, so they need to drive and not waste their earnings on a driver. He wanted everyone to understand that women were being allowed to drive not because they had campaigned for it, but because their rulers had issued a decree. The point was clear: civil disobedience will not bring results; changes will come only from submission to a benign monarch who will decide what is best. [...]

The war in Yemen has provided many such opportunities for the state to co-opt and neutralize both modernizers and traditionalists. It is not the first time Saudi Arabia has intervened in its impoverished neighbor, but now there is an added sectarian dimension: the Houthis, who seized control of the capital, Sanaa, in early 2015 were to some extent sponsored by Shia Iran, the regional rival to Sunni Saudi Arabia. “This new military interventionism immediately became popular among many Saudi constituences, from Islamists to liberals,” writes Al-Rasheed. “By amplifying the undoubtedly genuine Iranian threat, the Saudi regime invoked both nationalism and sectarianism.”

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The New York Review of Books: Mike Pence, Star Witness

Because of these extraordinary circumstances, some of the president’s men decided that they had to take extraordinary action. I have learned that, in order to force the president’s hand in firing Flynn, two senior government officials instructed aides over the weekend that followed to leak sensitive information to The Washington Post and other news organizations in order to underscore that Flynn had likely lied about his conversations with Kislyak, and that there were concerns at the highest levels of the Justice Department and the FBI about Flynn’s conduct. These two officials believed that they were, in the words of one person familiar with the effort, “protecting Trump’s presidency from himself” and the country’s “national security from the president.” I have no information that Vice President Pence was involved in the leaking of this information, but Pence had certainly by then become a strong advocate of Flynn’s firing and, together with Priebus and McGahn, was extremely frustrated that the president had taken no action. [...]

This new information suggests that Vice President Pence could prove to be a crucial witness in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into whether Trump obstructed justice. There is no evidence of wrongdoing by the vice president. If the special counsel questions him, it would almost certainly be only as a witness, and it is far from certain that he will necessarily be questioned by investigators. [...]

Pence, Priebus, and McGahn then spoke with the president. All three counseled Trump that Flynn should be asked to resign, or be fired, according to White House records. Pence “took the lead” during this discussion, one well-placed source with knowledge of the matter told me. The vice president was uncharacteristically outspoken during their conversation because he no longer had any doubt that Flynn had lied to him and had done severe damage not only to the White House’s reputation, but also to Pence’s personal reputation, according to two people familiar with the matter. Attempting to depersonalize the issue, Pence said that the issue was not only that he had been lied to, but that Flynn had embarrassed the president and the administration. But as one person familiar with this presidential discussion told me, it was also about Pence himself, who felt that “for the president to not care about that aspect of it was disrespect for the vice president personally.” [...]

To date, Pence has played the part of deferential deputy to the president who, above all, demands loyalty from his subordinates. It is clear from this new account, though, that Pence interceded forcefully with the president about firing Flynn. There are few other people who know as much as Pence does about whether the president possibly broke the law. The president and his legal team have based their claim that Trump did not obstruct justice on the premise that Trump did not know that Flynn was under FBI investigation and did not know that Flynn had possibly lied to the FBI. Pence, according to the new information in this story, has some knowledge as to whether that is true. Pence also would have significant insight into the president’s frame of mind—his intent and motivation, the foundational building blocks of any obstruction case—when he allegedly pressured Comey to shut down his investigation of Flynn.

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The Atlantic: It’s a Very Awkward Time to Be a British Lawmaker in Europe

But representing Britain in an organization as it’s preparing to leave hasn’t been easy. When I met with Gill at the Labour Party’s annual conference in Liverpool this week, she told me that her last two years as a British member of European Parliament (MEP) have been some of the most difficult—and the most frustrating. “The entire process has been a disaster in terms of not just the British image abroad and the way people view us, but also in relation to just doing what we used to be very good at, which was getting our key message across to all of our representatives,” she said. Prior to Brexit, British lawmakers in Brussels might have known what the U.K.’s positions are on various issue areas. But now, with the seemingly constant infighting in Westminster over what kind of deal the U.K. should strike with the EU (or whether it needs one at all), there is no such clarity. “People would ask me, ‘What exactly does the U.K. want?’” Gill said. “And frankly, for two years I haven’t been able to give them an answer.” [...]

Gill said this type of rhetoric hasn’t helped the U.K. in its negotiations with the EU. “We’re in a difficult negotiation and you’ve got these Brexiteers who are offending all the people who we are negotiating with on a regular basis in parliament,” she said. “It’s quite different experiences, depending on where you’re at in terms of [being] pro-Europe or anti-Europe. If you’re anti-Europe, you don’t really care what goes on—you’re against everything anyway.” [...]

When I asked Gill about calls within the conference for an option to remain in the EU, she told me she was “bemused” by the reaction there. “I never imagined that I would be walking into Labour Party conference and there’d be that many big European flags flying,” she said. When she was first elected to the European Parliament in 1999, she said, Britons weren’t as opposed to the EU—but that sentiment began to change after 2000. “Looking back, I think we should have fought harder not to let Europe be sidelined,” she added. “It’s only when you’re about to lose something that you start to appreciate what it was.”

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Politico: A Frenchman joins the Battle of Barcelona

Speaking in slightly accented Spanish and Catalan — and some French — Valls spoke about his origins in Barcelona (his father was a Catalan painter exiled under the dictatorship of Francisco Franco) and his love for Catalan culture and language, which he said was spoken at home after the family moved to France. [...]

Valls is targeting both Catalan unionist voters — the liberal, pro-unity Ciudadanos, which offered him the chance to be the head of its local list, has thrown its weight behind his independent candidacy — and moderate, affluent nationalists tired of what he described as the “grave problems” of the city; namely, insecurity, drugs and illegal street vendors. [...]

Valls became involved in Spanish politics after his failed bid for the leadership of the French Socialist Party and at the peak of the Catalan independence push last year. His tough words against separatism — “unmaking Spain is unmaking Europe,” he said — played well with pro-unity audiences in Catalonia and the rest of Spain. [...]

Much is still unknown about Barcelona’s mayoral ballot, with not all candidates having declared. Some secessionists are calling for a common pro-independence ticket and others are resisting the pressure. Even if Valls ends up as the most popular candidate, a potential alliance of pro-independence parties or one of Colau and other leftist groups could deprive him of power.

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FiveThirtyEight: Science Says Toxic Masculinity — More Than Alcohol — Leads To Sexual Assault

And this is no surprise to experts who study campus sexual assault. Years of research both in and out of the lab suggests that there is a connection between young men drinking alcohol and making choices that destroy young women’s lives. But it’s not accurate to say alcohol causes sexual assault. Preventing rape will take more than simply convincing young men not to drink (let alone telling their victims to abstain). That’s because booze is only part of the problem. Every drink is downed amid cultural expectations and societally mediated attitudes about women and power. Those things — and how young men absorb them — have a stronger causal influence than the alcohol alone. When a man feels entitled to assault someone, he may get drunk before he does it, but the decision to act was ultimately his alone.

Half of all sexual assaults involve alcohol consumption — usually by both the victim and perpetrator, said Kelly Cue Davis, a professor at Arizona State University. And a 2002 review of literature found that, across a number of studies, perpetrators were more likely to report using alcohol at the time of an assault than victims — 60 to 65 percent of perpetrators compared with 30 to 55 percent of victims. Although men can be both perpetrators of sexual violence and victims, almost all the research is focused on the heterosexual paradigm of male perpetrators and female victims, Davis said. [...]

Testing what causes real-world sexual assaults is particularly complicated by the fact that the men who commit them have things in common with each other that go far beyond booze. If you compare men who have perpetrated sexual assault to those who have not, the perpetrator group always drinks more, Testa said. For example, one study found that 53 percent of men who reported committing sexual violence met a diagnosis for alcoholism, compared with 25 percent of sexually active men who did not report committing sexual violence. But the impact of these other variables — anti-social behavior, for instance, and negative views about women — are much stronger predictors of sexual violence than alcohol use. “And then alcohol is just sort of on top of it,” she said.

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IFLScience: Nepal's Tiger Population Doubles Thanks To Dedicated Conservation Work

Once found throughout the Asian continent and several Asian islands, tigers (Panthera tigris) have been wiped out of existence in many regions and are endangered in all their remaining pockets of habitat due to human activities, chiefly deforestation for agriculture and urbanization (more than 40 percent of native tiger ecosystems have been destroyed in the past 20 years alone), depletion of prey species, and poaching.

Per the IUCN Red List, tigers have disappeared from Java, Bali, southwest and central Asia, and from large areas of southeast and eastern Asia over the past 100 years. Currently, tigers inhabit about 7 percent of their former range, with evidence of breeding populations in Nepal, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Russia, Thailand, and potentially China and Myanmar. It is estimated that there were around 100,000 tigers in the wild in the early 1900s; now there are around 3,200 tigers – a figure that encompasses all subspecies.

Nepal’s success provides a model of how other nations can fulfill their pledge to meet the goal of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF)’s TX2 project. Launched at the WWF’s 2010 Tiger Summit, TX2 is an ambitious research, conservation, and anti-poaching project aimed at doubling the total tiger population to 6,000 individuals by 2022 – the next Year of the Tiger in the Chinese Zodiac. Nepal and 12 other nations within the species’ range have committed to the plan.

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Quartz: Urban bees are living healthier lives than rural bees

Research published in the Royal Society B found that bumblebees living in urban areas experience healthier lives than their counterparts in rural habitats. Their colonies are larger, better fed, and less prone to disease. Urban colonies also survive longer than their country cousins. [...]

The bee colonies experienced population cycles, peaking between three and five weeks and then falling rapidly. Colonies in the city grew larger than those on the farm. [...]

While the study notes that flowers from public and private gardens offer a varied and consistent diet for bees in urban areas, it suggests fewer pesticides may be why bees thrive in the city. [...]

As with humans, cities offer insects opportunities for growth. Whether swarming Times Square, or invading Los Angeles the pollinators stay busy and multiply.

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Vox: Why US public transportation is so bad — and why Americans don’t care

Transit problems have roots in politics too. A recent Times article followed Koch-financed activists in Nashville who went door to door, recruiting locals to vote down plans to build light-rail trains, a traffic-easing tunnel, and new bus routes as part of the Koch brothers’ goals of lowering taxes and shrinking the government. (It also benefits the Koch brothers’ companies which produce gasoline and asphalt, and make seat belts, tires, and other automotive parts.) [...]

The most common myth on why Americans doesn’t have great mass transit is that the country is too spread out, but a look at Canada quickly unravels this theory. Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver all have buses, rapid transit, and commuter rails. Though sprawling, Canada still manages to have adequate transport in all its major cities. According to the aforementioned study, Canada ridership grew significantly between 2012 and 2017. [...]

Walker also says most American customers mistakenly prioritize reach over frequency; they want buses or trains everywhere, on every block, as opposed to a few trains that come all the time. “There is a distinctly American idea to have infrequent trains from the suburb into the city,” he says. “That’s an example where you put a line on map and people say, ‘Oh, [transit] exists,’ and someone who doesn’t understand frequency is going to think an area is being serviced when it is not.” Those who are more familiar with public transit understand that it’s better to have a few lines with frequent trains, rather than many lines that leave once every two hours. [...]

But Cervero says it has more to do with the economy. He believes a rise in gas prices, or “auto disincentives,” would drive up ridership more than creating more mass transit. This could look like the low-emissions zone in London, where cars are charged a fee for driving in a select area in order to limit pollution and traffic. There could also be a limit to how much car ownership growth is allowed per year, like in Singapore. Cervero suggests that even those who support investing in public transit don’t always walk the walk (or ride the ride?), and rarely is investment in public transit an effective political bargaining chip.

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Vox: How Trump could win in 2020

Up until now, Trump has governed like a very hardline conservative except on trade. But except for authoritarian views on immigration and crime, Trump doesn’t have any personal history of consistency as a conservative. And even during his 2016 campaign, he put forth a much more eclectic, heterodox version of himself than how he’s governed. [...]

One immediate consequence of this would be that it would give guys like Ben Sasse and Mike Lee, who sometimes like to position themselves as more high-minded than Trump, the opportunity to actually vote against the president sometimes. Any Trump-Pelosi deal could easily weather a dozen or so defections from the right that would allow that crew to own the brand of “true conservatives” without needing to do anything to check Trump’s corruption or authoritarianism. [...]

Trump’s electoral base wouldn’t mind a handful of ideological betrayals since rank-and-file Republicans are really here for the culture war stuff and not for the concrete policy anyway. So Trump would enter the 2020 campaign with his base intact but also with the brand as a freethinking moderate who’s at odds with the right wing of congressional Republicans. Democrats would end up nominating someone with a relatively extreme rejectionist profile, and Trump would be in a good position to improve his approval ratings and get reelected.

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99 Percent Invisible: Thermal Delight

In the summer of 1902, the Sackett and Wilhelms Lithography & Printing Company in Brooklyn, New York had a problem. They were trying to print an issue of the popular humor magazine Judge, but the humidity was preventing the inks from setting properly on the pages.

The moisture in the air was warping the paper and messing up the alignment. So the company hired a young engineer named Willis Carrier to solve the problem. 

Carrier developed a system that pumps air over metal coils cooled with ammonia to pull moisture from the air, but it had a side effect — it also made the air cooler. The room with the machine became the popular lunch spot for employees. Carrier had invented air conditioning, and began to think about how it could be used for human comfort.

Before air conditioning took off, a hot and crowded theater was the last place anyone wanted to be during the summer. So Carrier approached a bunch of theater owners and pitched them on his technology — it wouldn’t be cheap, he explained, but higher ticket sales could pay for it.

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openDemocracy: Poland vs. Azamat Baiduyev: how an EU member state deported a Chechen refugee back to face the Kadyrov regime

That same day, Baiduyev was flown to Moscow. He then flew to Grozny, capital of Chechnya. Soon after, according to contacts of Akhmed Gisayev, head of the Human Rights Analysis Center, reported that “roughly a hundred people with weapons, portable radios and police vehicles” surrounded a house belonging to Baiduyev’s uncle.

According to witnesses, some of these men spoke Russian without a Chechen accent and had a Russian appearance, which indicates that the Russian FSB was involved in the operation alongside the Chechen Interior Ministry. Azamat was abducted by force. It is not known where he is currently located. [...]

This final question is important because, according to Jacek Białas, a lawyer from the Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights, regardless of the fault of the individual, the case law of the European Court of Human Rights indicates that the decision to deport to a country where they are threatened with torture or death is a violation of the European Convention on Human Rights, as well as the Polish Law on Foreigners. [...]

If the Polish authorities did not ask Russia to guarantee the security of Azamat Baiduyev, this is a serious charge in light of international law. If they did, it shows the kind of importance Russia attaches to these guarantees.

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Haaretz: What Russia and Turkey Really Want in Syria

And last week, Russia struck a bold deal with Turkey that averts a battle for Idlib — at least for now. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov will seek broader backing for the accord at the UN General Assembly this week, and try to drum up Western money for Syria’s costly reconstruction.

Syria’s Cold War patron, Russia wants to maintain influence over Damascus once the war winds down, to keep a strategic foothold in the Mideast and a stable client for Russian weapons and commodities — and to warn the U.S. and its allies against future interference. Russia’s announcement Monday that it will supply Syria’s government with sophisticated S-300 air defense systems sent that message loud and clear, depsite Israel's vow to continue to restrain Iranian actions in the country. [...]

As Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan takes the stage Tuesday at the UN, he will be seeking to head off or at least delay new crises along the Syrian border. Turkey wants to avoid a new wave of refugees and stop extremists it once tacitly supported from setting up camp on Turkish soil. And most of all, Ankara wants to keep the region’s Kurds at bay. [...]

Iran is loath to see an expansion of Turkish and U.S. influence in the region, and argues that the West fueled jihadis with past support for the Syrian opposition.

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Political Critique: No orphans allowed in Czechia

Czech anti-immigration sentiments got lifted up from the domain of quacks, wannabe Nazis and populists into actual policy when Andrej Babiš woke up one day and realized his party’s popularity dropped a couple percent; a situation very easily remedied by causing an international faux pas by telling Italy he will not accept a single immigrant (because look what they did to your country). His resolve has been tested for the last few weeks with a full-on media barrage regarding the proposed acceptance of fifty orphans from Syria – an issue on which he managed to change his firm opinion only about five or six times a week. [...]

And here is the thing: those fifty orphans could seriously help us there. The Czech Republic has mostly managed to avoid EU scrutiny due to Babiš playing chameleon and changing colors based on whether he was speaking to home or foreign audience. But it seems the chameleon is going senile and cannot shift its complexion as fast as it once could – and sometimes, like in Italy, the true colors shine through. Now, viewed from the outside, there is an opportunity to put his money where his mouth is and prove that he is dedicated to a common European cause. The only problem is that, back home, he has just announced zero tolerance for immigrants. What to do, what to say? [...]

Putting aside the rather distressing implication that a human life loses value with age (something the masterpiece of applied necromancy posing as our current President should get through its brain, whichever canopic jar that might be stowed away in), this first attack was deflected rather easily by pointing out that we’d have our choice of orphans to accept; no one was talking a specific group of children. This did not stop plenty of other parties to join the fun; the xenophobic SPD calling the initiative “pseudohumanistic cries of the neo-marxists” (given the rhetorical capabilities of the average SPD member, one can only assume a dictionary was heavily involved in the creative process behind that phrase) and a party called Czech Sovereignty (nope, never heard of them either) outright accused the orphans of being ISIS fighters – amazing foresight since no specific children were chosen.

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Politico: Romania’s dangerous family referendum

In truth, the initiative — launched in 2015 by a coalition of NGOs that receive backing from the Orthodox church — is a dangerous diversion tactic. For the government, which gave its backing to the proposal, it’s a useful way to distract voters, thousands of whom took to the streets earlier this year to protest rampant corruption. [...]

Supporters of the proposed constitutional alteration are attempting to use this divisive, hurtful and anti-family campaign to distract from public dissatisfaction with their policies. It might not be corruption in the financial sense, but their actions are certainly morally bankrupt. [...]

There is no upside to this campaign. The rights of married couples of opposite sexes will stay the same, while different types of families would see their legal protections stripped away. It is entirely contrary to the EU values of dignity and equality to ask voters to strike the fundamental rights from their fellow citizens. [...]

Human rights organizations and citizens in Romania are already urging voters to stay at home on October 7 to invalidate the result, which needs a 30 percent turnout rate to be considered valid. That would show this vote for what it is: a shameless exercise in political opportunism.

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CityLab: Scotland Tries for the Bilbao Effect at the New V&A Dundee

Earlier this month, the jewel in this ongoing revamp of the quayside was unveiled: The V&A Dundee, a spectacular design museum just opened on the quayside that is an offshoot (albeit an independent one) of London’s Victoria and Albert Museum. Containing the largest exhibition space in Scotland, the museum hopes to garner attention for a city that has for too long had a low profile, not just across the U.K. but even within Scotland itself. In other words, Dundee is trying to do more or less what the city of Bilbao did with its Guggenheim Museum. [...]

Certainly, the 148,000-person city is not the industrial powerhouse it once was. A century ago, it was known nationally for “jute, jam, and journalism,” a reference to its role as a center for textile production, as the headquarters of a major (and still extant) media company, and as the place where marmalade is (apocryphally) said to have been invented. The city’s industrial base was decimated in the 1980s and, just like the rest of the U.K., Dundee is now battling galloping inequality. With many manufacturing jobs gone, an estimated 28 percent of the city’s children live in poverty. In the most deprived areas of the city, such as the housing projects of Whitfield, that child poverty level reaches over 96 percent. [...]

If V&A Dundee is straining under competing tensions, that’s partly a reflection of the stringent standards to which cultural spending is held in an age of relative austerity. In order to gain government funding, cultural institutions in the U.K. must demonstrate their worth as motors of social and economic transformation far beyond their primary role. Katrina Brown, director of the Glasgow visual-arts organization The Common Guild and former curator of Dundee Contemporary Arts, insists the proper focus for the museum’s success will be in providing something for Dundonians themselves.

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The Atlantic: The Not-So-Great Reason Why Divorce Rates Are Declining

After accounting for the rising average age of married Americans and other demographic shifts during that time, Cohen found “a less steep decline—8 percent—but the pattern is the same.” That is, the divorce rate in 2016 was still lower than one would have predicted if the demographics of married people were the same then as in 2008. [...]

The point he was making was that people with college degrees are now more likely to get married than those who have no more than a high-school education. And the key to understanding the declining divorce rate, Cherlin says, is that it is “going down some for everybody,” but “the decline has been steepest for the college graduates.”

The reason that’s the case is that college graduates tend to wait longer to get married as they focus on their career. And they tend to have the financial independence to postpone marriage until they’re more confident it will work. This has translated to lower rates of divorce: “If you’re older, you’re more mature … you probably have a better job, and those things make it less likely that you’ll get into arguments with your spouse,” Cherlin says. [...]

Chen connects this trend to the decline of well-paying jobs for those without college degrees, which, he argues, makes it harder to form more stable relationships. Indeed, Cohen writes in his paper that marriage is “an increasingly central component of the structure of social inequality.” The state of it today is both a reflection of the opportunities unlocked by a college degree and a force that, by allowing couples to pool their incomes, itself widens economic gaps.

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openDemocracy: The struggle for Yerevan: how city elections became a referendum on Armenia’s revolution

Yerevan city council elections have become an important touchstone for Nikol Pashinyan’s revolutionary team. The “struggle for Yerevan” started on 16 May, a week after Pashinyan’s appointment as Prime Minister. That day, photos showing that trees had been felled in a park outside City Hall as part of a beautification project went viral. As a result, civic activists first occupied the park and then the municipality building as they demanded that Taron Margaryan, the mayor of Yerevan and member of former ruling Republican Party, resign. [...]

The background for these events was the intensification of decentralised public protests across Armenia. On that same day (16 May), roughly 20 protests on very diverse issues were taking place in different parts of Armenia. The revolution, it seemed, was being disseminated and localised. At the same time, these decentralised protests questioned the capacity of Pashinyan’s government to control the situation. This concern was raised by Levon Ter-Petrosyan, the first president of Armenia and a former ally of Pashinyan’s against the Republican Party regime. “Pashinyan is the Prime Minister now, the head of the state whose most important duty is to secure the normal workflow of government bodies,” said Ter-Petrosyan. “Consequently, although these spontaneous protests, seizure of buildings and blocking of roads are done with good and sincere intentions, they actually work against Pashinyan.” [...]

Yerevan is too big a city for Armenia, with its population of three million. More than a third of them live in Yerevan. All governmental and administrative agencies, institutions are centralised here. While looking at the economics, more than 60% of Armenia’s GDP, 74% of retail, 61% of construction, and 80.6% of services are produced in Yerevan. In other words, Armenia looks like a man whose head is far bigger than his body — and to find its balance, this man has remain upside down, causing disproportionate distribution of everything among the country’s other regions. [...]

These attempts to transform the elections into a referendum narrowed the political space which had been opened, ironically, mostly by Pashinyan’s previous efforts. But while the presence of Pashinyan does not cancel out the fact of holding city council elections with 12 participating forces, it should be noted that his strategy requires only two political subjects — himself and the public. No other political subjects are envisaged under this logic. From the one side, this strategy clears the political arena, but from the other it devastates it. Any other subject finds itself in a love triangle — where the third person is superfluous. Moreover, to bring sense to his own active participation and therefore replacing the city council agenda with the revolutionary agenda, Pashinyan targeted people in his speeches who weren’t candidates for the city council or even represented via any of the forces. In this sense, the city council elections became impossible: voters could not elect the “light” and “dark” forces as described by Pashinyan per se, but could give their votes to the My Step bloc in approval of the April-May events. These kind of post-revolutionary elections are always approximate.

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Vox: The rise of YouTube’s reactionary right

Lewis’s report is trying to map the emergence of a new coalition on the right, one driven by a reactionary impulse and centered on YouTube. If you’re over 30 and don’t use YouTube much, it’s almost impossible to convey how central the platform is to young people. But spend much time talking to college students about where they get their political information and you’ll find YouTube is dominant; what’s happening on the platform is important to our political future, and badly undercovered.

Lewis is interested in how this ecosystem is being shaped by both social and algorithmic dynamics. The social side is familiar: Hosts appears on each other’s shows, do events together, and cross-pollinate their audiences. The algorithmic side is less familiar: YouTube’s powerful recommendation engine learns who’s connected to whom, adds in a preference for extreme and outlandish content, and thus pushes the entire ecosystem in a more radical direction. (Controversially, Lewis suggests YouTube should cut the most extreme of these shows off from monetization channels; this part of the report is the least detailed and, in my view, the least convincing, so I’m not going to spend time on it here.) [...]

If you spend much time listening to the reactionary right, you find that line cuts across social justice issues. You can hold a lot of different opinions on the economy, on Trump, on same-sex marriage, on atheism, and still be part of this community. It’s much more accepting of differing views on health care, the role of the state, and taxation than the modern Republican Party. But you can’t be in sympathy with the SJWs.

On the left, the reverse is increasingly true. The unbridgeable divides today, the ones that seem to define which side you’re really on, revolve around issues of race, gender, identity, and equality. While I see a lot of angry arguments about deficits within the Democratic coalition, I don’t know of any congressional Democrats who are against same-sex marriage, vocally skeptical of Black Lives Matter, and in favor of tight restrictions on immigration — even though those were common positions among elected Democrats in the aughts.

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Haaretz: Not Just Millennials: These Older U.S. Jews Are Disillusioned by Israel Too

Even World Jewish Congress President Ronald S. Lauder, a leader of mainstream Jewish organizations, a Republican (and longtime friend of U.S. President Donald Trump) took to the pages of The New York Times in August to voice his dismay in an Op-Ed entitled “Israel, This is Not Who We Are.” [...]

Lauder’s Op-Ed was the latest example of what political scientist Prof. Dov Waxman labels a fundamental change among U.S. Jews nowadays: Being pro-Israel no longer means pure unconditional support for the Israeli government. “I call it critical engagement,” he says, adding it is no longer the old model of what he calls “passive support.” [...]

He says that in the two years since his book was published, he has spent a lot of time on the road giving talks where, he estimates, some 90 percent of the audience is older American Jews. “And everywhere, I heard the same sentiments,” he says: “That people had long felt troubled by Israeli politics and actions regarding the Palestinians, but never felt able to speak out. They cowered around the sense they were alone, and felt like now a burden was being lifted because they were no longer alone and intimidated by speaking out,” says Waxman. [...]

Indeed, a recent American Jewish Committee poll seemed to suggest a major fissure between American and Israeli Jews when it comes to how they think Trump is handling U.S.-Israel relations. While 77 percent of Israeli Jews approve, only 34 percent of American Jews do.

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Politico: Salzburg Brexit failure stems from insular UK government

There’s a rather more convincing explanation for this massive failure: It’s a failure of the ecosystem of May’s government, rather than the individuals involved. British government machinery tends to be more comfortable executing a task than questioning fundamental assumptions. [...]

This is not the first time that geopolitical disasters have resulted from an overly narrow approach. In the run-up to the Iraq war, British diplomats and spies were tasked with making the case that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. They set about delivering with determination and energy. So successful was this work that, in early 2002, then-CIA Director George Tenet complained to his own spies that “all the good reporting I get is from [MI6].”

Unfortunately, nobody thought to ask the prior question: “Have they actually got these weapons?” The results are now all too well-known: Iraq was invaded on the false premise of a threat from WMD. The country collapsed into anarchy which still plagues it and the wider region, leading directly to the rise of ISIS and a new wave of global terrorism. [...]

Inside this pressure cooker, particularly the extreme pressure that the Brexit process is generating, there is an understandable tendency to focus on the narrow task at hand. This leaves British officials feverishly developing a plan that respects May’s self-defeating red lines rather than the bigger task of finding a plan that can actually be accepted by Europe.

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Al Jazeera: Modi's Hindu nationalism is stumbling

Moreover, the party's majority obscured the carefully worked out caste and regional alliances inside it. These strategic alliances with segments within lower and formerly "untouchable" castes or Dalits, as well as "tribal" populations, extended the social bases of the party beyond its core of urban upper castes in northern and western India, roughly a fifth of the Indian electorate. [...]

In 2014, Hindu nationalism essentially tied together disparate allies and agendas in a "Make India Great Again" moment. Muslims and Christians were vilified as non-Hindu "others," and attacked verbally and physically after the elections. But Hindu nationalists have always faced a fundamental obstacle: caste. [...]

Since 2014, Modi's overtures to historically subordinated castes has ended up angering the party's upper-caste votebank even as Dalits are shifting loyaltiesaway from the BJP after recent incidents of caste-based violence against them. [...]

But, after some initial successes, the reality of India as a federal union of states rather than a monolithic nation has become apparent. Indian states are divided linguistically and along borders of historical regions that long predate Hindu nationalism or the modern idea of India. [...]

With 93 percent earning less than the minimum taxable income and 98.5 percent not paying any income tax, the Modi government sought to raise revenues through indirect taxes. For the sake of the Hindu nation-in-the-making, buyers had to pay more for their consumption and sellers had to part with more of their earnings. The hasty introduction of the GST and the onerous new reporting standards hurt small business owners in the form of lower sales and earnings.

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FiveThirtyEight: We Looked At Hundreds Of Endorsements. Here’s Who Republicans Are Listening To.

The Republican Party is a coalition of overlapping factions — pro-business types, libertarians, evangelicals, populists, single-issue advocates and more — but to whom does it really belong? To many, the answer is clear: Donald J. Trump. And the success of Trump-endorsed candidates in the Republican primaries this year seems to bear that out — but, according to our research, that’s only part of the story. [...]

Let’s start with the kingpin of the Republican Party, the president himself. Trump endorsed 17 candidates in open Republican primaries this election cycle, and 15 of them won. That 88 percent win rate is the highest of any person or group we looked at. In early August, Trump tweeted, “As long as I campaign and/or support Senate and House candidates (within reason), they will win!” It was a bit of an exaggeration, but his success rate has certainly been high so far. [...]

Trump’s win rate may also be inflated by the type of candidate he endorses. For example, several of the candidates he endorsed didn’t face truly competitive primary opposition, including U.S. Senate candidates Florida Gov. Rick Scott and Mitt Romney, who is running in Utah. Other candidates he backed are less firebrands in Trump’s own image and more straitlaced establishment types with broad appeal. Trump has repeatedly cautioned Republican primary voters to “remember Alabama” — where a Republican Senate candidate lost to a Democrat in a deep-red state after the GOP nominee was embroiled in a sexual misconduct scandal involving minors — and vote for a candidate who can win a general election. [...]

Although the tea party appears to have largely gone out of style, we’d be remiss if we didn’t look at the endorsements of the individual power brokers most closely associated with the movement: the Koch brothers. Charles Koch (his brother David has retired) and groups affiliated with the Koch family, like Americans for Prosperity, continue to spend money and political capital on candidates who support their limited-government priorities. And it looks like they still have plenty left in the tank: This year, the Koch political network backed 21 candidates, 86 percent of whom won their races. That’s especially interesting given the Kochs’ opposition to Trump’s trade policies and Trump’s public feud with the brothers. In fact, Trump has bragged on Twitter that the Kochs’ “network is highly overrated, I have beaten them at every turn.” But at least in the open primaries we looked at, the two have not supported opposing candidates this year. By contrast, they’ve actually supported the same candidates in eight open races.11

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