The Atlantic: Can France's Far-Right Reinvent Itself?

But today, eight months after the French presidential election, the FN seems flummoxed by Emmanuel Macron, the country’s centrist president, who, with his hefty budget cuts and far-reaching welfare reforms, would seem to be the party’s ideal adversary. Instead, the Front’s deputies in the Assembly largely abstained from debates on pro-business labor reform and have kept similarly quiet on tax cuts that benefit the ultra-rich. When voters are asked to identify who they consider to be the primary “opposition” to the government, most pick the left-wing populist La France Insoumise over the FN. Tellingly, it was the fiery Jean-Luc Mélenchon, La France Insoumise’s leader, and not Le Pen, who coined “president of the rich,” a popular epithet for Macron. [...]

Perhaps nothing better exemplifies the FN’s identity crisis than the departure of Florian Philippot, the party’s former vice president and national spokesperson. He had embodied the FN’s “de-demonization” strategy—less racism and xenophobia, more education, healthcare and progressive economics. A graduate of the prestigious École Nationale d’Administration, he joined the FN in 2011, working with Le Pen to refine its critiques of globalization and reframe French politics as a clash between “globalists” and “patriots.” Electoral success followed, thanks largely to low-income voters, many of them from former bastions of the left. In the first round of the 2017 presidential election, Le Pen won more support from working-class voters than any other candidate, according to an Ipsos poll. [...]

On social issues, too, Chenu said the party must evolve: While Le Pen’s 2017 platform called for the repeal of same-sex marriage, “we won’t say we’re against marriage next time,” Chenu said, referring to same-sex marriage. (Shortly after I spoke with Jean Messiha, he landed in hot water: In reference to the party’s former vice president, who is gay, Messiha told Le Monde that “you don’t work with Philippot if you’re not gay.”) “We need to appear like a party that wants to govern France and not just [as] a protest party,” Chenu said. [...]

It’s difficult to see anything changing until another FN politician rises to challenge Le Pen. To some degree, the party still operates as something of a personality cult. (At the national party headquarters, a non-descript building in a residential neighborhood in the Parisian suburb of Nanterre, guests are greeted by intense security checks from armed guards sporting blue patches that read “Marine.”) In a recent opinion poll, she yet again proved herself to be the most disliked politician in France. If the nation isn’t exactly smitten with Emmanuel Macron, it continues to despise Marine Le Pen.

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Vox: Richard Rorty’s prescient warnings for the American left

Before the 1960s, the American left was largely reformist in its orientation to politics. Think of the people who engineered the New Deal or the Ivy-educated technocrats that joined Kennedy in the White House. John Kenneth Galbraith, the liberal economist and public official who served in the administrations of FDR, Truman, Kennedy, and Johnson, is a favorite of Rorty’s. These were the liberals who weren’t socialist radicals but nevertheless worked to promote the same causes within and through the system. They were liberal reformers, not revolutionary leftists, and they got things done. [...]

The reformers had their flaws. FDR, a classic reformist liberal, delivered the New Deal and encouraged the growth of labor unions, but he also shamefully ignored the interests of African Americans and interned Japanese Americans during WWII. Lyndon Johnson did as much as any president to improve the lives of poor children, but he also doubled down on the unjust and illegal war in Vietnam. The Harvard technocrats in the Kennedy administration were complicit in countless horrors in Vietnam. But they also created lasting domestic policies that advanced the cause of social justice. [...]

There was a shift away from economics towards a “politics of difference” or “identity” or “recognition.” If the intellectual locus of pre-’60s leftism was social science departments, it was now literature and philosophy departments. And the focus was no longer on advancing alternatives to a market economy or on the proper balance between political freedom and economic liberalism. Now the focus was on the cultural status of traditionally marginalized groups. [...]

Rorty doesn’t object to these aims; indeed, he (rightly) celebrated them. The cultural left succeeded in making America a better, more civilized country. The problem, though, is that that progress came at a price. “There is a dark side to the success story I have been telling about the post-sixties cultural Left,” Rorty writes. “During the same period in which socially accepted sadism diminished, economic inequality and economic insecurity have steadily increased. It’s as if the American Left could not handle more than one initiative at a time — as if it either had to ignore stigma in order to concentrate on money, or vice versa.” [...]

Big business benefits most from the culture wars. If the left and the right are quarreling over religion or race or same-sex marriage, nothing much changes, or nothing that impacts wealth concentration changes. Rorty is particularly hard on Presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, both of whom he accuses of retreating “from any mention of redistribution” and of “moving into a sterile vacuum called the center.” The Democratic Party, under this model, has grown terrified of redistributionist economics, believing such talk would drive away the suburbanite vote. The result, he concludes, is that “the choice between the major parties has come down to a choice between cynical lies and terrified silence.”  

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The New York Review of Books: This Land Is Our Land

This British policy represented a victory for the Zionist movement. It made it possible for more Palestinian land to be sold to Zionist Jews. Yet although many offered lucrative sums for the land, not all landowners were tempted to sell. In some places, Najib wrote, landowners were establishing an agricultural school and planting more olive trees to stand against the encroachment. Enough Palestinians refused to sell that the Zionists ended up acquiring little land. The Palestinian writer and educator Khalil Sakakini was an educational inspector under the British Mandate. In his diary he described a trip he took on December 13, 1934:  [...]

The state only began to use this legal ploy in earnest after 1982. Until then, the authorities acquired land for settlement primarily by requisitioning it for military purposes. A smaller percentage of land had been acquired by declaring it absentee land or territory formerly held by the Jordanian government. By 1979, when I cofounded the organization Al-Haq with several other lawyers to bring legal challenges against the Israeli occupation, Israel had gained control of roughly 30 percent of the land in the West Bank. But those acquisitions were for the most part scattered and separated by plots of private land, rendering most of them unsuitable for settlement building. [...]

In his chapter on the colonization of North America and the subjugation of Native Americans, Fields describes how “the law emerged as a crucial instrument in dispossessing Amerindians and transferring their land to colonists.” In the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, he argues, the English “tended to favor acquisition of Amerindian land through what colonists considered lawful purchase,” although it was invariably the colonists who had the advantage in such transactions. By the early nineteenth century, in contrast, “the law had become an instrument…enabling the transfer of Amerindian land to settlers through forcible seizure.” A crucial moment in this development, for Fields, was Chief Justice John Marshall’s ruling in the 1823 Supreme Court case Johnson v. M’Intosh that “conquest gives a title which the courts of the conqueror cannot deny.” In this way, Fields concludes,

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Social Europe: Restoring Social Cohesion: A Project For 2018 And Beyond

May I contend that at the heart of our present discontents lies a deep and growing disjunction in the distribution of power and authority, not simply between the citizen and the state, but between the state and legally protected concentrations of wealth and power, namely incorporated and non-incorporated organisations, and then in turn between the citizen and the actions and policies of those same organisations. In short, we are coming from a period when the state has retreated, or been ideologically pushed to retreat, or redefine its role, the citizen’s social opportunity to fully participate or flourish, as many social philosophers would put it, has been diminished, and unaccountable sources of wealth and power have advanced. [...]

To achieve any new departure, we must be very clear of the causes of our present distempers, and so I am very pleased that many of the papers presented here today reflect on and describe some of the manifold sources of the fracturing of the triadic relationship between citizen, state and society: growing inequalities in wealth and income within and between nations and regions, the rise of new forms of work characterised by precarity, and the threat to, or even curtailment of some of the most foundational elements of our systems of social protection.

May I suggest that we must first acknowledge that these changes in our society are not natural phenomena – the result of the inevitable laws of history or economics – they are the result of a distinctive set of policies and a political philosophy which has been pursued over the past forty years to the point that it has become what the French call the pensée unique, the single permitted form of political and economic thought. [...]

Many of the sources of the fractured relationship between citizen and state – increasing inequality in income, power and wealth, the breakdown, in some countries of a positive relationship between productivity and wage growth, the continuing power of over-mighty financial markets in misallocating and distorting investment, the increased precariousness of employment, particularly for young people, and even the reduction in the labour share of the proportion of national income – may be traced to the retreat and transformation of the role of the state in the neoliberal era. As I have outlined I believe that this commenced in the 1970s and still, without perhaps the same self-confidence as before, continues today.

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The Atlantic: What the Hell Happened in Hawaii?

This is, to be clear, a catastrophic error. It quite justifiably undermines the American public’s confidence in the emergency alert system (EAS) and the competence of government authorities. Given President Donald Trump’s emotional volatility and unitary nuclear-launch authority, paired with North Korea's breakneck technological developments on its ballistic-missiles and nuclear-weapons programs, nuclear anxieties are higher today than at any time since the end of the Cold War. A false alarm, as a result, can inflict serious and undue psychological stress, particularly for Americans already feeling quite vulnerable to an ICBM-armed North Korea. [...]

In February 1971, the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) issued a teletype notification to every American radio and television broadcaster warning of an impending thermonuclear war. It later had to retract the message. Information moved slower at the time from government authorities to the American public; broadcasters largely did not pause their programming to relay the entire message. [...]

Issuing a false alert of an impending ballistic-missile strike through a legitimate EAS may be among the most pernicious forms of “fake news.” At a time when state and non-state actors alike are resorting to disinformation operations, it’s all the more important for the U.S. government to ensure the inviolability of critical communication systems like the EAS. The Hawaii and South Korean incidents at least have an important point in common: Both exploit common fears about a possible scenario involving North Korea.

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Quartz: The scientific reason collective narcissists are so dangerous

In these examples, those who felt that their group had been insulted must have held the group in high esteem. But not all who hold their group in high esteem feel insulted and retaliate after real or imagined threats to their group’s image. So why do some feel that their group was insulted while others do not? And why do some feel that their group has been insulted even when no insult was intended and alternative explanations have been offered?

Research from my PrejudiceLab at Goldsmiths, University of London shows that people who score high on the collective narcissism scale are particularly sensitive to even the smallest insults to their group’s image. As opposed to individuals with narcissistic personality, who maintain inflated views of themselves, collective narcissists exaggerate offenses to their group’s image, and respond to them aggressively. Collective narcissists believe that their group’s importance and worth are not sufficiently recognized by others. They feel that their group merits special treatment, and insist that it gets the recognition and respect it deserves. In other words, collective narcissism amounts to a belief in the exaggerated greatness of one’s group, and demands external validation.

Collective narcissists are not simply content to be members of a valuable group. They don’t devote their energy to contributing to the group’s betterment and value. Rather, they engage in monitoring whether everybody around, particularly other groups, recognize and acknowledge the great value and special worth of their group. To be sure, collective narcissists demand privileged treatment, not equal rights. And the need for continuous external validation of the group’s inflated image (a negative attribute) is what differentiates collective narcissists from those who simply hold positive feelings about their group. [...]

Such collective narcissism is so toxic it explains phenomena such as anti-Semitism and perhaps even two world wars. It might explain the 2015 terrorist attack on the headquarters of Charlie Hebdo, the French satirical weekly that published controversial caricatures of the prophet Muhammad. Recent research by Katarzyna Jaśko and her colleagues at the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism at the University of Maryland, College Park demonstrates that collective narcissists in radicalized social networks are ready to engage in political violence and terrorism.

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IFLScience: New Study Attempts To Explain Why People Cheat

Another reason included them simply wanting more variety in sexual partners (74 percent). The top reason for why those who took part in the survey cheated was because they felt a lack of love (77 percent). [...]

The main reason why men and women engaged in infidelity was because their partners weren’t completely invested in “fulfilling their needs for interdependence”, leaving them to feel as if they should look elsewhere for it (73 percent). Interdepence in a relationship is described as a healthy mutual reliance on each other. On the other hand, 20 percent yearned for more independence. [...]

In fact, a past study published in The Journal of Sex Research surveyed individuals to find out why some changed their minds when thinking about cheating. The study included 423 individuals who rated 29 given reasons for why they avoided infidelity. The highest answer was their morality and being scared of ending up alone. What’s more, the chances of women cheating were most likely to occur within six to 10 years of marriage, while for men it was after 11 years.

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The Washington Post: Beirut civil war museum is haunting, but few Lebanese want to disturb the ghosts

Funded with an $18 million grant from Lebanese and French authorities, Beit Beirut was envisioned by its architects as the first memorial of its kind: a museum, archive and visitor center to commemorate the country’s civil war. The renovation has merged the building’s skeleton into a light-filled glass one, adding archive space for a raft of documents and pods in which research staff could examine them.  

Inside the old apartment building, ceilings are scorched black and a barrier of sandbags divides a room on the second floor. In makeshift bunkers — one them formerly a blind woman’s bedroom that had been reinforced with concrete — slits have been gouged into the stonework, offering killers a view of the surrounding streets. They left graffiti, too. One just reads: “Hell.” [...]

It is not taught in history books. There is no official death toll, and thousands of families remain without answers over the fate of disappeared husbands, brothers or daughters.  [...]

For the project’s supporters, the delays reflect the unwillingness of the political establishment to interrogate painful memories. The municipality’s cultural office says the building is in a “transitional period” while officials establish a legal framework for its operations.

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Associated Press: Pope: It's a sin if fear makes us hostile to migrants

New arrivals must "know and respect the laws, the culture and the traditions of the countries that take them in," he said. Local communities must "open themselves without prejudices to their rich diversity, to understand the hopes and potential of the newly arrived as well as their fears and vulnerabilities." [...]

"These fears are legitimate, based on doubts that are fully comprehensible from a human point of view," Francis continued in his homily.

"Having doubts and fears is not a sin," the pope said. "The sin is to allow these fears to determine our responses, to limit our choices, to compromise respect and generosity, to feed hostility and rejection."

Francis elaborated: "The sin is to refuse to encounter the other, the different, the neighbor," instead of seeing it as a "privileged opportunity" to encounter God.

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