The New York Times: It's Time to Talk About the N.R.A.

The massacre of 11 people at a Pittsburgh synagogue on Saturday, allegedly by a man with 21 guns registered to his name, was terrifyingly predictable. Every day in America, about 104 people die from guns, while in Japan it takes about a decade for that many to die from gun violence.[...]

Why do we Americans kill each other, and ourselves, with guns at such rates? One answer as it relates to the Pittsburgh attack is a toxic brew of hate and bigotry, but the ubiquity of guns leverages hatred into murder. And let’s be blunt: One reason for our country’s paralysis on meaningful action on guns is the National Rifle Association. If we want to learn the lessons of this latest rampage, and try to prevent another one, then let’s understand that saving lives is not just about universal background checks and red flag laws, but also about defanging the N.R.A.[...]

In the 1920s and 1930s, the N.R.A. favored tighter gun laws, and its president, Karl Frederick, said that the carrying of weapons “should be sharply restricted and only under license.” In 1934, the United States helped pioneer modern gun laws with the National Firearms Act, with the blessings of the N.R.A., and came close to banning handguns. As recently as the 1960s, the N.R.A. supported — more grudgingly — some limits on guns.[...]

The group claims six million members, although many analysts believe that number is inflated. But even if membership is four million, that is still a huge number, and by all accounts the N.R.A. does an excellent job caring for its members and keeping them loyal; indeed, circulation appears to have risen for its magazines. Perhaps more important, there is nothing comparable on the other side; that’s why the N.R.A. wins.

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openDemocracy: Attacks on women's ministries are a threat to democracy

This experience is not unique to Brazil. Many countries with women’s ministries face right-wing and religious attempts to eliminate or downgrade their influence – and in some cases, to change their mandates altogether. When this happens, it’s a strong signal that other democratic structures may also be at risk.[...]

Protecting women’s human rights was an issue for new democracies, and more established ones. The United States had legalised abortion in 1973, yet marital rape was exempt from the criminal code, women could be fired for being pregnant, and they couldn’t apply for a credit card. Irish women weren’t allowed to sit in pubs; women In Nigeria didn’t have the right to vote; divorce was illegal in Brazil, Chile, and South Africa.[...]

This was a groundbreaking step and a critical necessity to ensure the health, security, and basic human rights of women and girls. It was also well-received by countries internationally. At the end of the World Decade for Women in 1985, 127 UN member states had some kind of national institution focused on women. By 2010, all but four countries had an office like this.[...]

Rising populist movements with regressive social agendas are widely seen as threats to democracy. They are often defined by their anti-free press, anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim positions, but they also share an open hostility to women’s human rights.

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CityLab: How the Tuberculosis Epidemic Influenced Modernist Architecture

Death rates from TB peaked in the early days of the Industrial Revolution, exacerbated by overcrowding, lack of sanitation, and poor nutrition. Between 1810 and 1815, the disease accounted for more than 25 percent of deaths in New York City. In 1900, it was still the country’s third most common cause of death.[...]

The sanatorium movement began in Europe in the mid-19th century, with resorts in Silesia (now Poland), Germany, and Switzerland. (Davos was once “the tuberculosis capital” of Europe.) Although they began as collections of cottages in mountainous locales, sanatoria evolved into purpose-designed buildings, intended to limit the spread of germs while providing key ingredients for recovery: dry, fresh air and sunshine.[...]

The design and construction of specialized sanatoria coincided with the advent of Modernism. Architectural elements like flat roofs, terraces and balconies, and white- or light-painted rooms spread across Europe. Not unlike the sanatorium, the new architecture was intended to cure the perceived physical, nervous, and moral ailments brought on by crowded cities. Part of the appeal of flat roofs was the extra outdoor space they created, which could be used for sunbathing—then known as heliotherapy—and other healthful activities. In 1925, the Swiss architect Le Corbusier dreamed of a city where every citizen’s house was whitewashed and hygienic. “There are no more dirty, dark corners. Everything is shown as it is. Then comes inner cleanliness … .”[...]

The overlap between Modernism and sanatorium design is one reason for the movement’s association with sterility—the Modernist obsession with hygiene was real. But this overlap also complicates the notion that Modernism was coldly indifferent to human concerns. Modernists like Alto and the Eameses appealed to the senses and paid close attention to the dimensions and comfort of the human body. Those qualities inspire architects working today.

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FiveThirtyEight: Why Are Democrats Looking So Strong In The Midwest?

It’s not just the House, either. Democratic incumbents are clear favorites to win their Senate races in Michigan, Minnesota (two races there, actually), Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. They are modest favorites to hold on to seats in Indiana and Missouri — which were very red in 2016. Democrats are favored to win gubernatorial races in Illinois, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota and Pennsylvania. The gubernatorial contests in Ohio and Wisconsin are toss-ups, and Democrats even have a chance in two very conservative states, Kansas and South Dakota. A win by Tony Evers in Wisconsin would be particularly significant for Democrats, who have failed in three different attempts to defeat Gov. Scott Walker.[...]

But why are the biggest gains likely to come in the Midwest? First of all, 2018 is confirming what previous election cycles had suggested — this is an area that swings a lot between the two parties. Democrats made major gains in the Midwest in 2006, then faltered in the Obama years and look to be having a revival now. And because Democrats lost in many key races in the Midwest in 2010 and 2014, there was some low-hanging fruit for Democrats to pick off in a year like this. (Like the governor’s mansion in traditionally-Democratic Illinois, for example.) Contrast the Midwest with the South, where Republicans have steadily gained ground for two decades and are likely to lose relatively few seats even in what appears to be a Democratic wave year.

Secondly and relatedly, national polls suggest that white voters without college degrees favor Republicans in 2018, but the margin between the two parties is likely to narrow compared to 2016, when Clinton lost that bloc by more than 30 percentage points. That shift has outsized influence in the Midwest, which has higher populations of white voters without college degrees than many other parts of the country. So the Democrats’ problem with white working-class voters may not be as severe as it looked on Election Day 2016 — which perhaps had more to do with the conditions in that election than the party overall. What we are seeing in 2018 suggests that working-class whites are not a single national bloc, but still vote much differently by state and region. Working-class whites in Southern states like Georgia and Texas are overwhelmingly opposed to Democratic candidates in key races this year, but they are less GOP-leaning in Midwest states like Ohio and Wisconsin.

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Quartz: Venture capitalists are discovering they don’t like where their money comes from

In the last 10 years, startups’ and VCs’ doors were flung open to accept their money. The Chinese government and state-owned entities back more than 20 Silicon Valley venture capital firms, Reuters reports. Russian oligarchs have seeded multiple investment funds. Yet no one has been embraced by the US technology industry like Saudi Arabia. Saudi investors have directly participated in investment rounds totaling at least $6.2 billion over the last five years with big bets on Lyft, Uber, and Magic Leap, among others. A $45 billion investment (with one more on the way) in SoftBank’s venture funds makes Saudi Arabia the largest single investor in US startups (paywall). That doesn’t even account for private investments, potentially worth billions of dollars, by the Saudi royal family and its inner circle. Just the top known investment rounds with Saudi participation are included in the table below.[...]

So the Saudis are personae non gratae for the moment in the tech world. Executives from Uber to Google bailed on Saudi Arabia’s “Davos in the Desert,” and abandoned advisory roles on Saudi projects. A few entrepreneurs are putting their money where their mouth is. Richard Branson, who suspended a $1 billion Saudi investment in Virgin’s space ambitions, said ”the disappearance of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, if proved true….would clearly change the ability of any of us in the West to do business with the Saudi government.”[...]

Is this the beginning of a trend? So far, the only investors to make explicit statements rejecting Saudi money are not major players in Silicon Valley’s ecosystem, or already get their cash from elsewhere. Most would not respond to inquiries. Andreessen Horowitz, Khosla Ventures, Sequoia Capital, True Ventures, 500 Startups, Y Combinator, along with other firms and industry associations in venture capital and limited partnership investors all declined to comment on the record.

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Social Europe: Why The Left Must Talk About Migration

Immigration may be in most EU countries a topic of high salience but it is toxic and almost taboo for the left. Those who dare to address it, such as the Leftish new movement, Aufstehen, in Germany, or some social democratic local mayors who warn of immigrant ghettos in their towns are often attacked. Colin Crouch warned in a recent piece here of “anti-immigrant sentiment”.[...]

There is comprehensive research on the effect migration on wages by labour economists and there is ground to believe that migration affects the wages of those with similar skills negatively and those with higher skills positively. This should not come as a surprise.[...]

As long as migration is a messy business it remains an easy scapegoat for the far right. Unlike the UK government, which has an immigration target it fails to achieve year in year out, the German government has no explicit migration policy. Net migration into Germany has exceeded 500,000 annually since 2014. Immigration currently stands at more than 1m per year. At the same time, rents in cities such as Berlin have been rising by 10% per year and it is estimated that there is a lack of 2m affordable flats in Germany. While the housing crisis is not caused by migration but by government decisions to end social housing a decade earlier, it shows how little the country is prepared for high levels of immigration.[...]

The left has to find a policy on migration which is strong on anti-racism but does not ignore reality. If Germany wants to avoid the nationalist and anti-migrant turn of British and US politics it has to fight for the values of the open society by making sure that the lower middle class will not suffer from migration. The initial ‘refugees are welcome’ attitude of 2015 is being replaced by a creeping suspicion of economic migration to escape poverty not least because the current mess caused by mixing asylum with labour migration is deeply irritating for many people.

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CityLab: Why Google Rejected Berlin

Zoom in a little closer, however, and a more complex picture emerges. The fight over Google’s Berlin campus was not about rejecting a tech leviathan as such. It was about preserving the integrity of a specific neighborhood—one in which Google would have struggled to fit.

Had Google chosen an office block in one of the Berlin business districts that are already home to many corporate HQs, or pledged to build a campus out on the city fringe, they would have probably been welcomed with open arms. The forceful local backlash, which involved two years of counter-campaigning (including a brief site occupation) from a memorably titled activist coalition called Fuck Off Google, came about partly because they chose a neighborhood that was already under considerable stress. Kreuzberg, the western Berlin location picked by Google, has both an especially distinct recent past and a pretty fragile present status quo.[...]

The withdrawal of Google’s Kreuzberg campus plan should thus be framed more as one neighborhood’s successful effort to avoid being disrupted, rather than a wholesale rejection of Big Tech. This doesn’t mean that Berlin is suddenly an inherently anti-business city. Indeed, there is already talk of a counter-proposal, with the center-right CDU (the party of Chancellor Angela Merkel) inviting Google to set up shop in the less-hip eastern district of Lichtenberg. (Absent Google, that Kreuzberg power station is now slated to have a more on-brand tenant: two humanitarian NGOs.) But the Kreuzberg saga should be a lesson for other major companies as they ponder where to place their giant corporate feet in cities: They must carefully consider the effect their intervention can have on a district expressly chosen for its desirability.

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Politico: The dispensable chancellor

Visions of the German chancellor as the only person standing between humanity and the apocalypse became fashionable after U.S. President Donald Trump’s election to the White House. But they were always overblown. Merkel herself knows that Germany — with its poorly-equipped military, deeply ingrained pacifism and historical hang-ups — is in no position to defend the West.[...]

But now Germany, too, has become more politically unstable, with the rise of the far right populist Alternative for Deutschland and support for the two establishment parties of the post-war order — Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union and the Social Democrats — collapsing.[...]

But Merkel is also the victim of larger social forces sweeping the West, which have led to the collapse of the political center she bloodlessly embodied. Given Germany’s history and taboos, the sort of mass, nationalist political movements present in most other Western countries had eluded it since the end of World War II. That special dispensation, regretfully, is now over. In this sense, Germany is becoming more “normal.”

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Politico: Merkel metrics: Measuring a legacy

With Angela Merkel’s announcement that she will stand down as leader of the Christian Democratic Union, the political career of the chancellor who became known for her staying power is drawing to a close.

Merkel has been Germany’s chancellor since 2005, but took the reins of the CDU five years prior, when the party was in opposition.

As the race to replace her as leader of the party — and eventually the country — kicks off, here is a look back at Merkel’s years as chancellor and CDU chief.

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openDemocracy: Poland's left must offer a real alternative to break the right-wing deadlock

The period of neoliberal hegemony in Poland replicated many of the so-called populist features of the present PiS administration. The division between the elite and the people was emphasised; however in this case it was the elite that was pure and progressive and the people corrupted and regressive. Similar to contemporary populism, Polish politics was also divided into two antagonistic blocs. No overtly neoliberal party was ever able to win political power in a democratic election, despite its overbearing ideological influence in public and intellectual life. Politics fractured along historical lines, with ‘post-Communist’ and ‘post-Solidarity’ camps dominating the political scene until the mid-2000s. Whilst the political debate often oscillated around questions of historical legacies, both blocs implemented similar neoliberal economic programmes once in office. By the time that Poland had entered the EU in 2004, both of these political blocs had all but disintegrated due to the unpopularity of their policies, meaning a new recomposition of party politics was required.[...]

On the one hand, the lives of many of the poorest in society did not improve and even worsened during PO’s consecutive terms (the percentage of those living in extreme poverty rose from 5.6 percent in 2008 to 7.4 percent in 2014.) . Concurrently, the lives of many of the aspiring middle class were becoming increasingly difficult. The transition to capitalism had brought with it a rapid expansion in university graduates; and for some time higher educational qualifications helped to ensure upward social mobility. This provided the material basis for the liberal ideology of meritocratic individual achievement and a justification for the structural inequalities generated by the transition to capitalism. However, the relation between education and income has been steadily weakening in recent years; and those with higher education are finding it increasingly difficult to secure full-time employment. The percentage of the workforce employed on temporary insecure contracts grew from just 5.6 percent in 2000 to 27.9 percent in 2015 (increasing from 14.2 percent to an incredible 73.1 percent for 15 to 24 year olds during the same period.) It was becoming increasingly hard to secure stable employment; raise the capital to buy a secure home; have access to high-quality public services; and look forward to a retirement with a liveable pension. [...]

After gaining power in 2015, PiS did something that was anathema in Polish politics: they fulfilled many of their electoral promises. During their first year in office, PiS introduced a generous package of child benefits, named “Family 500+ Plus” in reference to the 500 PLN (£102.84) per month in child support available for second and subsequent children under the policy. The average monthly wage in Poland is 3,429 PLN (£705.25) after tax. PiS also raised the minimum wage and lowered the pension age. The 500+ child benefit had an immediate positive effect. Child poverty decreased, between 2015 and 2017, from 23 percent to 11 percent, with the number of children receiving child benefits rising from 2 million to 3.8 million (although over 3 million children are still excluded).[...]

Simultaneously, there are severe limitations in the economic and social programme of PiS. Despite the success of 500+, this remains a conservative welfare policy which, for example, is decreasing the participation of women in the workforce. A left-wing alternative is to universalise these benefits while investing in public services, such as nurseries and housing. In order to help fund these investments, the left must do what PiS has avoided and reform the regressive taxation system. Also, the PiS government, despite its nationalist rhetoric, remains heavily dependent upon the inflow of EU funds to maintain economic growth. Once these funds are reduced in a couple of years, the base of the PO and PiS governments’ macroeconomic policies will have been eroded. The question will then be raised as to how government spending can be increased and directed towards those areas in most need of investment. Also, despite its social rhetoric, PiS remains a right-wing party that will tend to oppose the labour disputes of trade unions. Only the left can provide a political voice to such movements.

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Haaretz: Guns, Trump and anti-Semitism: Pittsburgh Shooting Highlights Vast Divide Between Liberal U.S. Jews and Israel

A short time after his letter went public, 11 activists from the Pittsburgh branch of Bend the Arc – an organization for progressive Jews focused on social justice – published an open letter in which they urged Trump to stay away from the city unless he changes his rhetoric on racism and violence in politics.[...]

Continuing to address the president, they added that “for the past three years your words and your policies have emboldened a growing white nationalist movement. You yourself called the murderer evil, but [Saturday’s] violence is the direct culmination of your influence.”[...]

In conversations with Jewish residents in Pittsburgh over the past two days, it was common to hear complaints and direct accusations aimed at Trump – especially regarding the violent rhetoric at his political rallies, such as the calls to “lock up” his political rivals, or his recent praise of Republican Congressman Greg Gianforte who physically attacked a journalist last year. [...]

Yet almost none of these comments came up in remarks offered by Israeli government officials in the days after the attack. To the contrary, Israeli officials have made sure not to even hint at any form of criticism toward Trump or anyone in his political-ideological orbit. Instead, Israeli officials have thanked Trump for denouncing the incident and ordering U.S. flags in government institutions to be lowered to half-staff. [...]

For Israel, anti-Semitism is the only issue that played a significant role in the Tree of Life massacre. And in an interview with MSNBC on Sunday, Israel’s ambassador in Washington, Ron Dermer, said that “when people attribute anti-Semitism to one side of the political debate, they make a very big mistake. To simply say that this is because of one person [and] only comes on one side, is to not understand the history of anti-Semitism or the reality of anti-Semitism.”

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FiveThirtyEight: People Are Changing Their Views On Race And Gender Issues To Match Their Party

A huge body of research has shown that voters were more divided by race and gender views in the 2016 election than they were in previous elections. But it turns out that rather than voters supporting the party that best represents their views about race and gender, the effect may more often work the other way — the parties may be shaping voters’ personal beliefs. Candidates and elected officials can drive a person to change their views, or loyalty to a party may dictate both a person’s beliefs and their candidate preferences.[...]

But voters’ views of specific racial issues, rather than their broader feelings about minority groups, were more likely to follow their candidate preferences. A study by Peter Enns at Cornell University found that Trump and Clinton voters changed their views on controversies like the Black Lives Matter movement to match their candidate’s views, rather than choosing their candidate based on their views about this issue. [...]

Although media attention has largely focused on Trump voters, a working paper showed that it was actually Clinton voters who underwent the more dramatic partisan shift in 2016 (echoing other findings). The largest changes in views of race and gender occurred among white liberals; their perceptions of racial and gender discrimination increased, their feelings toward minorities improved, and their support of policies aimed at increasing diversity, like affirmative action and allowing more immigration, rose. Voters who consistently voted Democratic moved to the left on these questions, especially young voters. That means studies that show an increased association between Trump support and conservative views on race and gender might in part actually reflect Democrats becoming more liberal on these questions.

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Quartz: North Korea's Arirang Mass Games has a new message

Grand Mass Gymnastics and Artistic Performance Arirang aka Arirang Mass Games aka Arirang Festival — Pyongyang, North Korea  

North Korea's "Mass Games", a mass gymnastics and arts festival, has resumed after a five-year hiatus. Having once won the Guinness Book of Records for the biggest gymnastics performance in history, the Mass Games can provide unique insight into the world's most secretive nation - and this year's show brings some surprises.  

Unlike previous years, this year' arirang performance had no mention of missiles, typically a point of pride for North Korea. Instead, North Korea chose to highlight technological advances using a drone display. Messaging in the parade referred to peaceful coexistence throughout the show.

Politico: EU countries stop clock on Commission’s time change plan

His ministry is pushing for countries to be given until 2021 to decide whether they will opt for permanent summer or winter time. Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker wanted that decision wrapped up by the end of March. [...]

Hofer wants the Commission to appoint a coordinator — a sort of EU-wide time lord — to oversee the reform, and Brussels to include a safeguard clause that would trigger new legislation should problems arise from scrapping the unified time change.

In Graz, three countries — Portugal, Greece and the United Kingdom — said they wanted to continue the annual shift to daylight saving, while Cyprus, the Netherlands, Ireland, France and Denmark said they had not yet reached a position.[...]

More than 80 percent of 4.6 million respondents to an EU survey backed removing the system under which clocks spring forward by an hour in March and fall back in October, with around 3 million responses coming from Germany.

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Politico: Merkel’s twilight heralds German turmoil

The decision injects further instability into German politics, increasing the likelihood that Merkel’s grand coalition with the Social Democrats (SPD), already hanging by a thread, will collapse in the coming months. What’s more, it now appears inevitable that the race to succeed her atop the CDU will unleash a bitter battle over its direction, one that will further distract the party from governing.[...]

While Merkel said she intends to remain chancellor until the end of the legislative period in 2021, her decision not to run again for the CDU’s chairmanship when her term expires in December unleashed forces she can no longer control.[...]

She insisted the move wasn’t triggered by Sunday’s election, but by her decision over the summer, which she had not previously shared with the public, not to pursue another term as chancellor. Handing over the reins of the party now would ease the transition and allow the CDU, still Germany’s dominant party despite recent losses, to retain its strength, she argued. If Merkel really planned Monday’s move months ago, she kept the decision close to her chest, not even telling Kramp-Karrenbauer, who on Sunday evening insisted Merkel intended to run again for the CDU chairmanship.[...]

A persistent critique of Merkel in the CDU’s more conservative quarters has long been that she moved the party too far to the left, abandoning its roots. Much of that criticism has focused on the refugee crisis but it extends to social issues as well, with Merkel skeptics accusing her of steering the party away from its traditional values on family and religion. Merkel’s belief that “Islam is a part of Germany” is one of a number of her positions that conservatives take issue with.

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The Atlantic: A Slow, Somber End to the Merkel Era

Merkel—who has led her party for 18 years and her country for 13—will continue as Germany’s chancellor until the next federal elections, expected in 2021, but she will relinquish her position as the leader of the center-right Christian Democrats (CDU) in December and won’t run for further political office. “I am sure today that it’s time to open a new chapter,” she told reporters in Berlin.[...]

But while she survived all those battles on the surface, each dealt a blow to her image as the country’s beacon of stability and, perhaps more importantly, to her standing within her party. “It’s quite clear that the election last September was a turning point,” Jan Techau, who heads the German Marshall Fund’s Europe project, said in an interview. “Since then, she’s been under tremendous pressure to give some sort of indication as to how long this can last.”[...]

Hesse was the final straw: The state-level election there very clearly became a referendum on the performance of Merkel’s government in Berlin, and both the CDU and the center-left SPD posted significant losses as a result. Despite Merkel’s personal involvement in the campaign—she stumped with Hesse Premier Volker Bouffier across the state multiple times—her party dropped more than 10 percentage points in the past five years. Merkel nodded to the Hesse results in her remarks Monday, saying the party’s support there was “disappointing and bitter” and a “clear signal that things can’t go on as they are.”[...]

But it also poses a challenge: Whoever takes over from Merkel as party leader is someone she will have to work closely with for the remainder of her chancellorship. A like-minded CDU leader could make that transition easier than a rival. Merkel has nevertheless said she is ready to work with whomever is chosen to replace her. “I am someone who can work very well together with a lot of different people, and I think I have a reputation for it,” Merkel said.

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Vox: “A collapse of the center”: why fringe movements are winning around the world

People from Europe to Latin America are increasingly concerned about their economic well-being and general safety, experts say. The problem is that it seems only fringe movements — especially those on the far-right — are the ones offering new solutions for how to meet those needs.[...]

But the 2008 financial crisis, an uptick in terrorist attacks on the continent, and millions of refugees moving into Europe fueled a backlash to increased globalization. Fringe political parties in Europe that already believed in curbing globalization took advantage of that growing sentiment.[...]

As Vox’s Jen Kirby reports, voters in Brazil have grown frustrated with the status quo due to a slew of political and economic crises. The current center-right president, Michel Temer, is deeply unpopular in the wake of a struggling economy and a massive corruption scandal that has engulfed ministers in his government.[...]

“The post-World War II international order was already fading,” Richard Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, told me, “and these developments will only add to the unfortunate momentum.”

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The Guardian: How Matteo Salvini pulled Italy to the far right

Then in 2012, prosecutors discovered that the Northern League’s treasurer had misappropriated some €40m in public money, and that hundreds of thousands of euros had gone to the Bossi family. A party that had run on the slogan of “Roma, ladrona!” (“thieving Rome”) had been caught out in the basest kind of corruption. Money had gone to pay for renovations of the Bossi home, a luxury car and a phony university degree purchased in Albania for Bossi’s less-than-brilliant son, who was being groomed for a leadership position.[...]

The magazine found that Salvini’s following often spiked after he made an especially provocative statement – such as declaring, in 2016, that the pope’s welcome to immigrants would “encourage and fund an unprecedented invasion”. But another Wired study found that Salvini has become increasingly sophisticated in the last few years, stimulating positive feelings as well as the usual negative emotions of anger and fear. “The rhetorical strategy is clear: you lower the reader’s guard by playing on fear and anger, but also suggesting that, by putting faith in the Lega, things will get better,” the magazine concluded. “There is a positive element to his posts, even a bit of joy.”[...]

Salvini’s rise to power has heightened concerns in Italy about the escalation of racist and xenophobic violence in the country. Dozens of attacks on black people and Roma have been recorded in the last year, all over Italy, from Treviso in the north to Gioia Tauro in the south, including Florence and Rome. The attacks range from drive-by shootings with air guns, in which the attackers were reported to shout “Salvini!” to the assassination of a Malian trade unionist campaigning for fair pay for migrant workers. An Italian athlete of Nigerian descent, Daisy Osakue, the Italian under-23 champion discus thrower, was hit in the eye by an egg thrown from a car. Police have been pursuing attackers and making arrests, but the government has been more reticent. After a torrent of criticism for his anti-migrant policies – culminating with the headline “Get behind me, Salvini” on the cover of Italy’s largest Catholic magazine – Salvini responded with a favorite phrase of Mussolini: “many enemies, much honor.” He also insisted that the idea of widespread Italian racism was “an invention of the left”.[...]

While stopping boatloads of refugees from north Africa may satisfy an emotional need to restore a sense of order to immigration, it doesn’t change the basic demographic arithmetic, which shows that Italy actually needs a healthy level of immigration to survive. Last year, 664,000 Italians died, while only 464,000 Italian babies were born – 100,000 of those were of mixed couples, with one Italian parent and one foreign-born one, according to Istat, the national statistics bureau. If the country is going to maintain something close to its current population of 60 million and have enough working people to keep its pension system afloat, it will have to add to its population. Most of Italy’s immigrants are young, arrived legally, and are working and paying taxes.

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Jacobin Magazine: Bolsonaro’s Conservative Revolution

The reasons for this reactionary wave are diverse. As has been noted elsewhere, since the PT’s narrow victory over the PSDB in 2014 there has been a radicalization of the predominantly white middle to upper classes towards authoritarian solutions. This was the part of the population that dominated the street protests calling for Dilma’s impeachment in 2016, but have become disillusioned by the mainstream right. Not all have authoritarian preferences, of course, and many would prefer it if the PSDB continued to represent a viable option. Many dislike Bolsonaro, but their virulent “antipetismo” (hatred of the PT) leads them towards viewing him as a lesser evil.[...]

The demographic breakdown of first-round voting intentions by pollster Datafolha, a few days before the election, shows that 51 percent of voters earning between five and ten minimum wages ($1,261–2,522 USD per month) and 44 percent earning over ten minimum wages ($2,522) planned to vote for Bolsonaro, compared to 12 percent and 15 percent respectively for Haddad. Meanwhile, 42 percent of those self-defining as white planned to vote for Bolsonaro, compared to 15 percent for Haddad. (That said, the relationship between race and class in Brazil is complex and should be treated with caution. While the middle and upper classes are predominantly white, whites are not predominantly well-off. Furthermore, racial self-classification varies significantly according to both income level and region of the country.)[...]

As with any trend involving large numbers of people, there is no single explanation for “Bolsonarismo popular” — ie. Bolsonaro’s appeal to lower-income people. Some, thanks to the media’s relentless attacks on the PT, have developed antipetista attitudes similar to those of elites, complaining about everything from PT corruption to high taxes to the unfairness of racial quotas in universities. However, in my experience, such attitudes are relatively rare. [...]

It is true that neo-Pentecostal churches have grown precipitously among the poor and built a powerful clientelistic machine. It is also true that Bolsonaro’s agenda fits with a broader popular conservatism among lower-income groups. As shown by a Datafolha survey last year on Brazilians’ social attitudes, poorer people are more likely to think that those who believe in God are better people, that abortion is a crime that should be punished, and that drugs should be prohibited. They respond well to Bolsonaro’s claim to be resisting the “deconstruction of heteronormativity” and to proposals of forced internment for drug addicts.[...]

However, few poor people ever saw the mainstream right as offering a meaningful alternative. I would suggest that their anger about the economic crisis and corruption scandals are fundamentally motivated by a desire for more redistribution, whereas the elite’s embodies indignation about the limited redistribution that already occurred under the PT. In any case, with the mainstream parties all implicated in the crises, both groups became receptive to any candidate who was sufficiently distant from the incumbents to look like an “outsider” and who sounded as angry as they were.

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Vox: “Welcome home, Matt”: Bishop Robinson welcomes Matthew Shepard — and gay Christians — back to the church

Robinson’s words, and those of the Shepard family, provided a powerful blueprint for a politically progressive, radically inclusive Christianity. Like the sermon of Bishop Michael Curry, the presiding — and thus most senior — bishop of the American Episcopal Church who delivered a fiery liberation theology-tinged sermon about social justice at the wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, Robinson’s words seemed designed to present a religiously radical Christianity — and, in particular, a mainline Protestant tradition — as a viable and necessary alternative to the political conservatism and pro-Trump nationalism increasingly associated with white evangelicalism in America.[...]

Robinson’s speech, like Curry’s before it, should be seen in a much wider context: the potential resurgence of the mainline Protestant tradition for political progressives. While historically centrist Protestantism has been in decline for the past few decades — ceding its cultural and political influence to the evangelical right — prominent mainline figures and institutions have become increasingly political in recent years.[...]

These numbers might not be significant. Political liberals, particularly young ones, are far more likely to be religiously unaffiliated than, say, Episcopalian — nearly 40 percent of liberals self-identify as religious “nones.” But Robinson’s words, like Curry’s, offer a vision of a religious tradition that marries a commitment to fight social injustice with a theologically robust account of why that fight is so important. For Robinson and Curry alike, a commitment to inclusion and justice isn’t just part of political progressivism, but part of the Christian message itself.

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Wisecrack Edition: Kanye and The End of Reality

Welcome to this Wisecrack Edition on the Wide World of Kayfabe – a wrestling concept by which we choose to consume fiction as 'reality.' Learn how this one principle as it work in so much of the content we consume today – from celebrity gossip and rap beefs to spicy political campaigns and beyond!

Vox: Can technocracy be saved? An interview with Cass Sunstein.

That approach earned Sunstein considerable scorn from some progressives, who thought the process wound up junking or delaying invaluable life-saving regulations. More broadly, Sunstein’s philosophy represents a commitment to technocracy that a growing number of liberals and leftists are increasingly rejecting as politically naive at best, and suicidal at worst given the realities of asymmetric polarization and Republican interest in minority rule. Why strand your own policies in a procedural quagmire of your own making when the other side just does what it wants when its party is in power?[...]

I think some people on the left think we underestimate the benefits of regulation and overestimate the costs, so cost-benefit analysis is inadequate or it needs to be accompanied by a discounting of the costs we see or a boosting of the benefits we see. The data on the past 30 years doesn’t justify that broad conclusion. Such data as we have suggests that agencies do err — sometimes in understating and overstating both costs and benefits — without a systematic skew toward benefits understatement.[...]

My observation from afar says that the Trump administration in some ways has been admirably committed to cost-benefit analysis, which is why the assault on the administrative estate has been less severe than widely reported.[...]

The book is not an unambivalent celebration of the revolution. We’ve referred to distributional factors, which matter, and the knowledge factor, which matters. Cost-benefit analysis is the best way of capturing human welfare right now. But we’re increasingly learning that something might have increasingly high costs and not as high benefits, but it might make people’s lives better regardless. Something Trump just endorsed, which is a tribute to this, is mandatory cameras in cars so you can see behind you. That saves lives, and driving is a lot easier. You can see if you’re about to hit something.

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The Atlantic: A Brief History of Anti-Semitic Violence in America

Saturday’s shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where 11 people were murdered and six more were injured, is believed to be the deadliest attack against the American Jewish community in U.S. history. The massacre is an unprecedented act of violence against American Jews—but it is by no means the first time that anti-Semitism has manifested in deadly violence against Jews in the United States.

American anti-Semitism is as old as America itself. For decades, American Jews have faced social discrimination, acts of vandalism against sacred spaces, and, in recent years, social-media harassment—and the number of reported anti-Semitic incidents has risen dramatically since 2016. Fatal attacks against American Jews have been far less common than these other forms of discrimination. And yet American history is full of episodes of physical violence against Jews and Jewish institutions. What follows is a list, far from comprehensive, of some of the many violent attacks targeting Jews in recent history.

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Politico: Merkel’s coalition lives to fight another day — just

Angela Merkel’s “grand coalition” of conservatives and Social Democrats (popularly known as the “GroKo”) suffered substantial, though not crippling, losses in a regional election in the state of Hesse on Sunday. While the result was somewhat better than predicted for the major parties and should quiet fears of an imminent coalition collapse, it highlighted how fragile and unloved the Berlin government has become after little more than half a year in office.[...]

The chancellor’s CDU won 27 percent of the vote in Hesse, down from 38.3 percent in the last election in 2013, while the Social Democrats (SPD) finished second with 20.1 percent, dropping from 30.7 percent, according to a projection by Infratest dimap, a polling institute, for ARD public television. The Greens won 19.6 percent, nearly doubling their 2013 result.[...]

National issues dominated the campaign in Hesse, a wealthy region that is home to Germany’s financial capital Frankfurt. That turned the election into a referendum on the performance of Merkel’s coalition with the SPD, which has been plagued by infighting since it took office in March.[...]

Above all, the result signals that German politics have become more volatile than at any time since World War II, meaning established parties are no longer able to rely on the allegiance of core constituencies. For example, nearly 75 percent of voters who abandoned the CDU and more than 50 percent of those who left the SPD said they did so in order to “send the party a message.”

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Al Jazeera: How much power does Saudi Arabia wield over the global economy?

Saudi oil is "actually quite important, particularly in the short-run," according to Chris Garcia, CEO of Vicar Financial and former deputy director of the US Department of Commerce under US President Donald Trump. "This is why when we look at some of the potential retaliation tactics that the Saudis have threatened, we have to take them seriously."[...]

"It's the short-run repercussions of the Saudis cutting [oil] output that would send shockwaves throughout the global economy, but I would say that's leverage that would diminish in the long run unless they diversify as the world continues to diversify itself from its energy resources," explains Garcia.[...]

Saudi's sovereign wealth fund is called the Public Investment Fund, which traditionally had a strategy of low-risk investments. But everything changed in 2016 when the kingdom's sovereign wealth fund invested $3.5bn in Uber, making it the largest single investment ever made in a privately-held company at the time.

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Haaretz: Israel's Chief Rabbi Refuses to Call Pittsburgh Massacre Site a Synagogue Because It's non-Orthodox

The country’s ultra-Orthodox newspapers, in reporting on the event, have also refused to acknowledge that it took place in a Jewish house of prayer because Tree of Life is a Conservative congregation, and they do not recognize the non-Orthodox movements.

In the interview with Makor Rishon, a newspaper popular in the Israeli Modern Orthodox community, Rabbi David Lau said that “any murder of any Jew in any part of the world for being Jewish is unforgivable.” But rather than acknowledge that the crime had been carried out in a synagogue, he referred to the location as “a place with a profound Jewish flavor.”[...]

Israel’s ultra-Orthodox newspapers all reported on the attack, but likewise, refused to refer to Tree of Life as a synagogue, preferring instead to call it a “Jewish center.”

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99 Percent Invisible: The Modern Necropolis

In the town of Colma, California, the dead outnumber the living by a thousand to one. Located just ten miles south of San Francisco, it is filled with rolling green hills, manicured hedges, and 17 full size cemeteries (18 if you include the pet cemetery). 73% of Colma is taken up by graveyards. Their motto? “It’s great to be alive in Colma.”[...]

From a distance, Colma looks a bit like a sprawling city , its landscapes dotted with mausoleums, monuments, towers and tombstones. It is home to just 1,600 living citizens but also houses the remains of a million and a half humans.[...]

Even though Colma’s deceased residents had no idea they would wind up miles from their original grave sites in San Francisco, leaving only bits of their memorial markers behind in the beaches and parks of the city of the living .

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99 Percent Invisible: Plat of Zion

The urban grid of Salt Lake City, Utah is designed to tell you exactly where you are in relation to Temple Square, one of the holiest sites for Mormons.

Addresses can read like sets of coordinates. “300 South 2100 East,” for example, means three blocks south and 21 blocks east of Temple Square. But the most striking thing about Salt Lake’s grid is the scale. Blocks are 660 feet on each side. That means walking the length of two football fields from one intersection to the next. By comparison, nine Portland, Oregon city blocks can fit inside one Salt Lake block.

Created by Mormon settlers, the grid of Salt Lake was part of an effort to create a spiritual utopia. Joseph Smith, founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, began this plan with a document called the Plat of Zion. The plat provided details as to the measurements of roads, how lots would be arranged, how many people would live there. The original document can be found on display in the Church History Museum in Temple Square.

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Vox: The biggest corruption scandal in Latin America’s history

In 2014, the largest corruption scandal in Latin America’s history erupted in Brazil. It involved bribes between Petrobras, the largest state-owned oil company on the continent, and dozens of engineering firms. It also involved politicians, including three Brazilian presidents, Lula, Dilma Rousseff, and Michel Temer, as well as almost a third of Brazil’s congress.

Politicians all over Latin America were found guilty of taking bribes and profiting immensely from infrastructure and energy projects all over the continent. The scandal hit places like Itaborai especially hard. The companies involved were fined billions of dollars and laid off hundreds of thousands of workers as their projects abruptly stopped. Four years later, Brazil is still dealing with the fallout.

IFLScience: There Aren't Enough Fruit And Vegetables To Give The World A Healthy Diet, Claims Study

"We simply can't all adopt a healthy diet under the current global agriculture system," Professor Evan Fraser from the University of Guelph, a co-author on the study, said in a statement.

Professor Fraser added that while we are currently overproducing grains, fats, and sugars, production of fruits and vegetables are “not sufficient to meet the nutritional needs of the current population.”[...]

One reason for this might be that developing countries tend to focus on carbohydrates, which are easier to produce. These countries have also spent more money researching and developing such crops, rather than fruits or vegetables.

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IFLScience: Scientists Invent Algorithm That Can Predict Depression Diagnosis From Your Facebook Updates

It turns out your Instagram filter can be a surprisingly good indicator of whether or not you are depressed, and now computer scientists at Stony Brook University and the University of Pennsylvania have invented an algorithm that uses Facebook language to predict a user's diagnosis of depression. [...]

The algorithm, described in a paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Scientists, was built using 524,292 Facebook updates, some of which were from individuals who were later diagnosed with depression. Researchers singled out the words and phrases most frequently used and categorized them into 200 topics to identify so-called "depression-associated language markers". The language of the depressed group could then be compared to that of the control group to spot patterns between the two.[...]

Language markers associated with emotional, cognitive, and interpersonal processes (including hostility, loneliness, rumination, and sadness) could all help predict depression up to three months before an official diagnosis. As previous research has shown, the algorithm found that people with depression were more likely to use first-person singular pronouns like I, my, and me. They were also more likely to use words associated with depressed moods (tears, cry, pain), loneliness (miss, much, baby), hostility (hate, ugh, fuckin), anxiety (scared, upset, worry), and rumination (mind, alot).

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Quartzy: Research suggests that vegans really are more judgmental than vegetarians

A recent Gallup poll found that about 8% of Americans identified as either vegetarian (no meat) or vegan (no animal products including dairy, eggs, sometimes honey, and even avocados). Among people younger than age 50, that ratio jumps to 10%. And that doesn’t take into account conscientious eaters who regularly observe meatless Mondays or food writer Mark Bittman’s “part-time vegan” lifestyle.[...]

While vegetarians and vegans self-reported similar levels of dietary strictness—how likely they were to stray from their chosen diet—the two groups differed significantly in other areas. Vegans derived a greater sense of identity from their diet than vegetarians, felt more strongly aligned with other vegans, and both felt more judged by others for their dietary choices and had lower regard for omnivores than vegetarians did.[...]

Daniel Rosenfeld, the study’s author, points out that it isn’t just limited in size, but also scope. His research looks at how important vegetarians and vegans believe diet is to their identities. It doesn’t investigate why or how that came to be.

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National Public Radio: 'You Are Safe Now': Matthew Shepard Laid To Rest At National Cathedral

The public remembrance at the filled 4,000-seat cathedral was led by the Right Rev. Mariann Edgar Budde, Episcopal bishop of Washington, and the Right Rev. Gene Robinson, the first openly gay man elected a bishop in the Episcopal Church. After, his ashes were interred at the cathedral's crypt in a private family ceremony.[...]

Shepard's parents' requested that their sons ashes be interred at the cathedral after 20 years of reluctance. They feared his gravesite would be desecrated.[...]

In the years since, the circumstances surrounding the case have been disputed, but Shepard's murder has nevertheless come to be seen as a classic hate crime, highlighting anti-gay bigotry. Four months before Shepard was killed, white supremacists in Texas had tied an African-American man, James Byrd Jr., to a pickup truck and dragged him to his death. Outrage over the two brutal murders ultimately led to the passage of the Shepard/Byrd Hate Crimes Prevention Act in 2009.

The act expanded an existing federal hate-crimes law to include crimes based on a victim's sexual orientation, gender identity or disability. Shepard's killing became the basis for a play, The Laramie Project, which brought widespread attention to the problem of homophobia. Shepard's parents, Dennis and Judy Shepard, established the Matthew Shepard Foundation and became activists for gay rights and more vigorous prosecution of hate crimes.

Shepard's funeral in 1998 was met with noisy protests by anti-gay militants. The decision to seek his interment at Washington National Cathedral came as a result of the Shepards' friendship with Bishop Robinson. Robinson contacted the cathedral dean, the Rev. Randolph Marshall Hollerith, and Washington's Episcopal bishop, Budde, both of whom readily agreed to the placement of Shepard's ashes in the cathedral crypt.

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The Guardian: How TripAdvisor changed travel

Advertisement As the so-called “reputation economy” has grown, so too has a shadow industry of fake reviews, which can be bought, sold and traded online. For TripAdvisor, this trend amounts to an existential threat. Its business depends on having real consumers post real reviews. Without that, says Dina Mayzlin, a professor of marketing at the University of Southern California, “the whole thing falls apart”. And there have been moments, over the past several years, when it looked like things were falling apart. One of the most dangerous things about the rise of fake reviews is that they have also endangered genuine ones – as companies like TripAdvisor raced to eliminate fraudulent posts from their sites, they ended up taking down some truthful ones, too. And given that user reviews can go beyond complaints about bad service and peeling wallpaper, to much more serious claims about fraud, theft and sexual assault, their removal becomes a grave problem. [...]

Soon, Kaufer noticed that users were gravitating away from expert opinion and towards the crowdsourced reviews, so he abandoned his original concept and began focusing exclusively on collecting original consumer input. He hoped that selling ads on the site would be enough to keep the company afloat, but when it became clear that this wasn’t bringing in enough money, his team shifted to a new model. From late 2001, every time a visitor clicked on a link to a given hotel or restaurant, TripAdvisor would charge the business a small fee for the referral. Within three months, the company was making $70,000 a month, and in March 2002, it broke even. “I think they call it a pivot now,” Kaufer said in 2014. “I called it running for my life back then.”[...]

TripAdvisor’s in-house forensic analysts use fraud-detection software – the same kinds used to detect credit card fraud – to flag suspicious patterns. But given the sheer amount of reviews on TripAdvisor and the increasing sophistication of the fakes, there is no hope of identifying and removing them all. Last year, Vice writer Oobah Butler managed to get his shed listed as the #1 restaurant in London by soliciting fake reviews from family and friends and posting images of gourmet-looking dishes made from shaving cream and bleach. Before joining Vice, Butler wrote fake TripAdvisor reviews for restaurants, £10 per entry; “this convinced me that TripAdvisor was a false reality,” he wrote of the experience. For Young, the tendency of businesses to rush to litigation in order to protect their reputations is symptomatic of “an iceberg problem”. As he explained: “TripAdvisor can see the 10% that is sticking out of the water. [But] there is 90% or some unknown percent that is very dangerous and problematic that it is not visible to us.”[...]

From 2015 to 2017, TripAdvisor users removed more than 2,000 reviews from the site as a result of harassment by business owners, according to Kevin Carter, TripAdvisor’s associate director of corporate communications. Businesses have also developed more subtle tactics designed to stop critical reviews from appearing in the first place. In July, Australia’s largest property developer was fined $3million for suppressing negative reviews of its rental apartments by withholding the email addresses of disgruntled guests from TripAdvisor, ensuring that the company could not prompt them to write a review. In an infamous case a few years ago, a boutique guesthouse in Hudson, New York added a provision, in the fine print of its contract with guests, stating that a single negative review posted online would result in a fine of $500. In this case, the hotel’s strategy backfired. After the policy was mocked in the pages of the New York Post, the hotel received more than 3,000 negative reviews on its Yelp and Facebook pages. Soon afterwards, it shut down.

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VICE: This Town Is Tearing Itself Apart Over Non-Christians Owning Houses

For over a century the “Chautauqua on Lake Michigan,” perched on a hillside overlooking a particularly scenic expanse of coastline, has served as a local cultural center and sacred retreat for families like Sheaffer’s, who mostly have been visiting for generations. But for the past decade idyllic, serene Bay View has been embroiled in a bitter internal conflict that’s sharply divided the tight-knit community and—because of its echoes of the ugly housing discrimination fights of past decades—resonated far beyond, tapping a nerve in the country’s culture wars and the broader debate about the role of religion in American life. The core of this dispute is that while anyone is welcome to visit Bay View or participate in its events—and many outsiders do—for decades only Christians have been allowed to actually own cottages and act as voting community members. In early August, after years of escalating tension, members voted to finally amend the bylaws to allow non-Christians to own property, but the dispute remains ongoing. A group of plaintiffs, arguing the new provisions still amount to religious discrimination, are forging ahead with a federal lawsuit against the Bay View Association.[...]

Bay View was clearly established as a Protestant retreat. Members opposed to changing the requirements point to its mission statement outlining the centrality of Christian values, and to historical documents that suggest the founders’ religious intent. “We did not enter this wilderness to make money, nor build a city of pleasure,” one 1900 brochure reads. “We came to worship God, to establish a center of Christian influence.”[...]

At the time he joined, Duquette liked Bay View’s Christian association, he said, but he didn’t give the membership requirements much thought until the mid-00s, when the dispute started catching fire. One member, poking around in the archives, discovered that Bay View’s explicit Christian-only requirement didn’t originate with its founding but was actually added around 1942, when the board adopted a resolution that members must be “of the white race and a Christian.” (By 1959 Bay View had dropped the race requirement; from the 1960s to 1980s it implemented a 10 percent quota on Catholics. Bylaws later changed “Christian” to “Christian persuasion.”) [...]

This summer’s vote was billed as a kind of compromise that would finally end the dispute. The “Christian persuasion” and minister-letter requirements would be removed, although a new amendment would require prospective members to agree to “respect the principles of the United Methodist Church” and support Bay View’s Christian mission. It would also add a requirement that a majority of the nine-person board is Methodist.

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The Atlantic: Trumpism Is ‘Identity Politics’ for White People

That explanation ignored the uncomfortable fact that Trump’s economic vision was centered on a politics of white identity, charging that immigrants and unqualified minorities were obtaining advantages the average white American could not claim. That left his opponents with a choice: Contest that vision, or let him attack those groups uncontested. In the meantime, Trump’s administration has seen that economic message almost entirely subsumed by the focus of congressional Republicans on tax cuts for the wealthy and plans to shrink the social safety net. But even as the message has shifted, there hasn’t been a corresponding erosion in Trump’s support. The economics were never the point. The cruelty was the point.

Nevertheless, among those who claim to oppose identity politics, the term is applied exclusively to efforts by historically marginalized constituencies to claim rights others already possess. Trump’s campaign, with its emphasis on state violence against religious and ethnic minorities—Muslim bans, mass deportations, “nationwide stop-and-frisk”—does not count under this definition, but left-wing opposition to discriminatory state violence does. (A November panel at the right-wing Heritage Foundation on the threat posed by “identity politics,” with no apparent irony, will feature an all-white panel. )

But the entire closing argument of the Republican Party in the 2018 midterm elections is a naked appeal to identity politics—a politics based in appeals to the loathing of, or membership in, a particular group. The GOP’s plan to slash the welfare state in order to make room for more high-income tax cuts is unpopular among the public at large. In order to preserve their congressional majority, Republicans have taken to misleading voters by insisting that they oppose cuts or changes to popular social insurance programs, while stoking fears about Latino immigrants, Muslim terrorists, and black criminality. In truth, without that deception, identity politics is all the Trump-era Republican Party has.

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openDemocracy : Debates about poppies are nothing new, but the tone has changed in Brexit Britain

For others, it’s a moved from a quiet sign of Remembrance to an icon of Brexit nationalism. The author Matt Haig tweeted “I'm not wearing a poppy this year. I think it is shifting from a symbol remembering war's horror, to a symbol of war-hungry nationalism.”[...]

When the government had organised a number of victory parades, some of the soldiers refused to participate. When they instead held the first, more sombre Armistice Day, in 1919, a number of the veterans protested against the conditions they were expected to live in.[...]

Similarly, the poppy hasn’t just recently become a nationalist symbol. It always has been. Until last summer, there was a famous memorial on the Gallipoli peninsula in Turkey, to the Anzac soldiers who fought against the Ottoman empire there. Supposedly quoting Ataturk, the father of modern Turkey, it reads, “There is no difference between the Johnnies and the Mehmets to us where they lie side by side here in this country of ours”.

The contrast with the British legion’s statement, under the banner “what we remember” on their website: “The Legion advocates a specific type of Remembrance connected to the British Armed Forces, those who were killed, those who fought with them and alongside them.”

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Foreign Policy: Germany’s New Politics of Cultural Despair

If the 1990s marked a high point for the New Right, the meaning of all this attention was debated; it became the stuff of op-eds and academic argument. One commentator, the Swedish sociologist Goran Dahl, saw the development as a revival of Weimar Germany’s conservative revolution—that broad movement of proto-fascist writers, academics, and activists who supplied an aura of respectability to the ultranationalist politics that culminated in Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich (a cause in which some, though not all, of those right-wing radicals would eventually enlist).[...]

One key to the New Right’s success, as Dahl predicted, has been its effort to capture a hip style of political engagement usually associated with the left. Starting in the late 1970s, the New Right appropriated environmentalism, anti-imperialism, and the sort of active citizenship for which the Greens became best known. Like the leftist counterculture that emerged from the 1968 student protests throughout Europe, the New Right is adept at styling itself as an “alternative milieu.” This is partly due to its origins in the same anti-establishment zeitgeist as the New Left, but it is also partly a self-conscious co-option of leftist notions, another way in which members of the New Right, as Weiss puts it, “seem to have learned from the left and offer themselves as ‘new ’68ers.’” [...]

As he shows, radical conservatism can accommodate a host of causes and enemies, with salvation of the West from a tide of Muslim immigrants the current favorites. But for today’s New Right, like the illiberal German right of earlier generations, the absolute enemy is always liberal modernity and the forces of universalism, which are seen as a threat to traditional identities and communities and the comforting authority they provide. [...]

Islamic fundamentalism, Weiss argues, is also an authoritarian revolt against the materialism and rootlessness supposedly spawned by liberal globalization. Ironically, Europe’s identitarians are ideologically closest not to their cosmopolitan fellow nationals but to the most pious among the Muslim immigrants who insist on holding onto their culture and religious identity.

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RSA: The Truth About Algorithms | Cathy O'Neil

We live in the age of the algorithm - mathematical models are sorting our job applications, curating our online worlds, influencing our elections, and even deciding whether or not we should go to prison. But how much do we really know about them? Former Wall St quant, Cathy O'Neil, exposes the reality behind the AI, and explains how algorithms are just as prone to bias and discrimination as the humans who program them.  

Wired: Estonia may actually have a use for the blockchain: green energy

The company began to use blockchain to link business buyers of energy – companies that buy electricity – directly with the producer, after striking a deal with Elering, one of Estonia‘s independent electricity and gas system operators. The idea was to use energy ‘tokenisation’ – by linking energy consumption and production data to the blockchain, in an attempt to digitise the country’s energy sector. Now the pilot project is yielding its first results.[...]

The bulk of energy in the Baltic country is produced by fossil fuels – only 18 per cent come from renewables. The main aim is to test the limits of what’s possible with blockchain technology, says WePower’s CEO Nick Martyniuk. At the same time it is trying to increase the percentage of eletricity generated from renewables. “Even though the cost of renewables has dropped significantly, small to medium size companies don't have a good way to start buying green energy.[...]

It's not clear, though, that scaling up will actually work, as it would mean using blockchain technology for data that is flowing at high speed and in huge volume. One concern is transaction capacity: WePower mainly uses the public ethereum blockchain that applies the so-called proof-of-work (PoW) approach that requires a lot of energy and computing power that only professional ethereum miners can provide (although ethereum may at some point switch to the environmentally-friendlier and easier “proof-of-stake” approach). So PoW means the transaction capacity might be limited, says Fei Wang, senior research analyst at Wood Mackenzie, energy research and consultancy firm. “This may not be an issue during the pilot phase, but this would be a hurdle if the project were to expand to a full commercial deployment.”

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Bloomberg: Poland’s Populists Are Suddenly Vulnerable

The party won a resounding victory when compared with local elections in 2014, based on the results tallied by Oct. 24. It took regions it didn’t control before. But it was clear the share of the vote was down from 2015, when the numbers swept it to power with a record parliamentary majority. Questions are being asked why it couldn’t build on that success. “People realized that Law and Justice isn’t immortal,” says Joanna Mucha, a lawmaker for the opposition Civic Platform group.

Until now, nothing seemed to faze the leadership. A protracted impasse with the EU over a power grab of the independent judiciary and public media and a confrontation with the U.S. and Israel over a law making it a criminal offense to suggest Poland played any role in the Holocaust were met with kudos among supporters. They bought into the narrative of a plucky government standing up for their nation against what the party calls “anti-Polonism.” In April, as relations with allies deteriorated, Law and Justice still commanded an average lead in the polls that was wider than its sweeping victory in 2015. It helped that the economy was—and still is—growing at a healthy clip. That’s because Poland is the biggest net recipient of EU aid, and consumers are enjoying Law and Justice’s increased spending on social welfare such as subsidies for families.[...]

“It’s a clear verdict that the populist revolution is getting weaker,” says Marcin Zaborowski, senior associate at Visegrad Insight, a journal of analysis and opinion focusing on central Europe. “It’s also a personal defeat for Morawiecki, who has been a better, modern face of the party, geared to more centrist voters, and this bid has failed. The result will weaken the position of Morawiecki within the party.”

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Reuters: Steve Bannon drafting curriculum for right-wing Catholic institute in Italy (SEPTEMBER 14, 2018)

Benjamin Harnwell, director of the Dignitatis Humanae Institute based in a mountaintop monastery not far from Rome, told Reuters Bannon had been helping to build up the institute for about half of its eight-year life.

Cardinal Raymond Burke, a leading Vatican conservative who is president of the Institute’s board of advisers, said Bannon would be playing a leading role there.[...]

Bannon’s increased engagement with the Institute demonstrates how his involvement in Europe extends beyond electoral politics to an effort to build a populist faction inside the Catholic Church.[...]

Harnwell said he founded the institute while working as an aide to a British Conservative European Parliament member. At the time, one of the legislature’s committees was trying to block Rocco Buttiglione, a confidant of Pope John Paul II, from becoming European Commissioner for justice and security.

During a confirmation hearing, Buttiglione, who was nominated to the European Commission by then-Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, described homosexuality as a sin and said the principal role of women was to have children. Amid political uproar, Buttiglione withdrew from consideration for the Commission.

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The Atlantic: So Is Living Together Before Marriage Linked to Divorce or What?

It’s not unheard of for contemporaneous studies on the same topic to come to opposite conclusions, but it’s somewhat surprising for them to do so after analyzing so much of the same data. Both studies analyzed several cycles of the National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG), a longitudinal dataset of women (and men, starting in 2002) between the ages of 15 and 44, though Kuperberg’s study incorporates some data from another survey as well. Still, this isn’t the first time researchers have come to differing conclusions about the the implications of premarital cohabitation. The phenomenon has been studied for more 25 years, and there’s been significant disagreement from the start as to whether premarital cohabitation increases couples’ risk of divorce. Differences in researchers’ methodology and priorities account for some of that disagreement. But in the curious, still-developing story of whether cohabitation does or doesn’t affect odds of divorce, subjectivity on the part of researchers and the public may also play a leading role.[...]

However, over the years, many researchers began wondering whether earlier findings that linked cohabitation to divorce were a relic of a time when living together before marriage was an unconventional thing to do. Indeed, as cohabitation has become more normalized, it has ceased to be so strongly linked to divorce. Author Steffen Reinhold, of the University of Mannheim’s Research Institute for the Economics of Aging, pointed out in 2010 that in European countries, the correlation disappeared when the cohabitation-before-marriage rate among the married adults reached about 50 percent; the U.S. seemed to have just gotten to this threshold. In 2012, a study in the Journal of Marriage and Family concluded that “since the mid-1990s, whether men or women cohabited with their spouse prior to marriage is not related to marital stability.” This is the same journal that just published a study finding the opposite.

Galena Rhoades, a psychologist at the University of Denver, has a few theories as to why it’s so difficult to glean what effect, if any, cohabitation has on marital stability. For one, she says, it’s hard to study divorce in ways that are useful and accurate, because the best data sets take so long to collect. Many people don’t get divorced until many years into their marriages, and the social norms around cohabitation in the U.S. have evolved quickly, so “if we study a cohort of people who got married 20 years ago, by the time we have the data on whether they got a divorce or not, their experience in living together and their experience of the social norms around living together are from 20 years ago,” Rhoades says. In other words, by the time researchers have enough longitudinal data to know whether one is meaningfully linked to the other, the social norms that shaped the findings will hardly be of use to couples today trying to figure out how how cohabitation could affect their relationship. Thus, Rhoades says, longitudinal studies tend to paint a fuller picture of the relationship between living together and divorce, while also simultaneously telling Americans today less about the time they actually live in.[...]

As researchers moves toward a more nuanced understanding of what cohabitation means for the future of unmarried romantic partners, there are several factors that the experts I spoke with believe urgently need to be taken into account. Lehmiller says studies of cohabitation should start working with data sets that include same-sex couples and move away from equating the stability of a marriage with its success. “Some people have views about marriage that would lead them to stay in one even if it’s not satisfying,” he says. In other words, just because a marriage lasts doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the best outcome for either party involved.

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Political Critique: The far right knocks on the the door of Spanish politics

On Sunday October 7, the Spanish far right party Vox achieved what they had been looking for for a long time: their baptism as a relevant political actor in the Spanish public sphere. They did it by filling the Vistalegre palace in Madrid with 10,000 supporters and leaving a thousand people out for lack of space. In the past few years, Vistalegre has symbolically become the venue used by Podemos for their annual congresses. The choice of the venue for this event is not coincidental: Vox is explicitly looking for parallels with the first Podemos. They want to turn the political indignation of a certain sector of the Spanish right into political capital. And to achieve this they hope to use the springboard of the European elections. In this sense, it’s fundamental to note that there are people within the Vox party who are studying the political campaign and strategy of Podemos in 2014, when the party entered candidates for the 2014 European Parliament election, polling with 7.98% of the national vote.[...]

In the arena, well beyond the burladero, there is a first row where writers, historians, journalists and even bullfighters, all identifying within the far right spectrum in Spain, gather together looking at the audience. However, the absences are more surprising: Vox had invited international personalities from other European political parties, both from the ENL parliamentary group (which brings together in Brussels the National Front, the Northern League, the Austrian FPÖ or the Freedom Party of Geert Wilders) and from the parliamentary group of the European Conservatives and Reformists, where Polish, Czech and British conservatives meet. But none of them attended. Not even Steve Bannon, whose presence was speculated a few weeks before.[...]

Vox’s strategy for the next year’s electoral cycle rests on three pillars: appeal to a vote of conviction, use politically incorrect language and indicate very clearly who the enemies are. Namely: the Catalan independence movement, feminism and immigration.With these wicks, the party led by Santiago Abascal will try to be involved in all the decisive issue on Spanish agenda and, in the end, win everything. Some polls indicate that Vox will foreseeable reach parliamentary representation in the European Parliament and that it could be decisive when it comes to deciding the balances between left and right in some regions such as Madrid or Murcia.

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Aeon: What do we consent to when we consent to sex?

If the presumption of the hypothetical fistee is ableist, the presumption of the complainants, juries and judges that masculine-presenting intimate partners have a penis is heteronormative (and the convictions are transphobic). One might reasonably expect her masculine-presenting partner to be penis-bearing. But if that expectation is unmet, the state should not thereby prosecute that partner for rape. Consider a partner with an unforgivingly large, disappointingly small or stubbornly flaccid penis. Here too expectations have been unmet, but no crime is committed.[...]

Second, it is important to understand that some questions are or should be unanswerable as legal truth claims. When it comes to sex, there should be no legally actionable way to answer the question: ‘Are you a man?’ Is gender a matter of genitals, hormones, chromosomes, secondary sex characteristics, social inequality or self-identification? The law cannot bring any clear answer to this question. One should not be convicted of sexual assault for failing to live up to a phallocentric standard of manhood.[...]

As for applicability: many people suppose that sex with nonhuman animals is wrong because animals cannot consent. But are animals really the kinds of creatures capable of consenting? Can Fido ‘consent’ or not to fetch? If you do believe animals such as cows can proffer consent, I would wager they are less likely to consent to becoming a cheeseburger than to sex.

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