Jacobin Magazine: Time After Capitalism

The obligation to profit shapes our experience of time: minute to minute, as we hustle to catch the train to work; day to day, as we calculate whether we have enough cat food to avoid the 6 PM supermarket crush; and decade to decade, as we spend years preparing for work and equate our adulthood with climbing the professional ladder. Anyone who has had to cancel plans with friends, put an infant into day care before he or she felt comfortable doing so, or work through a migraine knows how unforgiving the demands of profit are, how they brook no disruption, from personal trauma to simple fatigue. [...]

Other sectors, particularly service and retail, have instituted just-in-time scheduling, leaving employees with no idea when or how long they will be working. These workers cannot enroll their children in regular childcare, buy a weekly bus pass, or make plans with friends and family. They often get stuck near their jobs in airports or outlying shopping centers with hours of “garbage time” between shifts — time they could be relaxing at home or enjoying a hobby.  [...]

In a society free from the burdens of profit, leisure could become more central to human experience. Today, we often conflate leisure with idleness and idleness with immorality, but it need not be so. Indeed, a Latin word for “business,” negotium, reveals how seriously some societies used to take non-laboring time. Negotium literally means the absence (indicated by the prefix neg-) of leisure (otium). Romans, in other words, described business in negative terms, as the mundane stuff one does when not attending to the enjoyable aspects of living. While we would not wish to return to ancient Rome’s patriarchal, slave-owning society, we could do with taking leisure more seriously. [...]

Would we still live our lives according to workweeks and career paths? Many might. But instead of seeking a work/life balance, we might just have life: our time on earth in which the activities of living — convalescence, child rearing, friendship, daydreaming, bereavement — get their due alongside labor.

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Jacobin Magazine: The Void Stares Back

Don’t get Blinder wrong. He didn’t want to disenfranchise the population, but, rather, to give their values and long-run welfare more effective expression in government. In his scheme, “value judgments” would still be made by elected representatives, but “technical judgments” were left to the technocrats, allowed to pursue the broad objectives set by the representatives who appointed them. The voters were cast as both Ulysses’ sailors and the sirens: binding government to the mast so it couldn’t respond to them later. In case of regret, they could always choose to undo the shackles, though that process should be neither easy nor quick. [...]

What if, Zakaria asked, racists and fascists prevailed in the free and fair elections of the Balkans? Would you rather live in democratic Haiti or the “liberal semi-democracy” of Antigua? Should we promote the spread of democracy in the Middle East if this created regimes that “would almost certainly be more illiberal than the ones now in place?” In Zakaria’s account, it was the liberal part of liberal democracy that had led to the flourishing of the West, and when the two sides come into conflict, it was the liberal part that should be defended. [...]

It may seem odd to forecast the end of “the age of party democracy” at a time when, by many measures, democracy is more pervasive than ever before. In 1900, almost no country in the world extended universal suffrage. By 2000, almost two-thirds did, covering 58 percent of the world’s population. [...]

In theory, there is nothing stopping sovereign power from altering or repealing the legal framework on which capital depends. Once upon a time, democracy was seen as a genuine threat to capitalism. This fear motivated the composition of all the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century classics Zakaria draws from in his defense of the “basic liberties” against the encroachment of “illiberal democracy.” The prospect of extending the vote to the propertyless terrified the propertied. And not without reason — redistribution and regulation were the point of getting the vote for many who fought for it. [...]

Mair helps us understand the decline of the social-democratic party, and therefore the conditions for its potential rebirth. Parties do not simply reflect a set of preferences that are out there in the electorate — they help shape and articulate those preferences. Parties have to be successful on two fronts: they must build and maintain electoral popularity, and they need effective policy strategies that account for the economic context in which the capitalist state is embedded.

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FiveThirtyEight: Why Dozens Of Mass Shootings Didn’t Change Americans’ Minds On Guns

The exact number of mass shootings is hard to pin down, but gun violence is disturbingly common in the United States, especially compared with other developed countries. And repeated exposure to acts of violence — even when that exposure comes secondhand through the news — can have a numbing effect, according to Yuval Neria, a professor of psychology at Columbia University.

This effect has been mostly studied with regard to terrorist attacks in countries like Israel that have experienced chronic violence, but there’s no reason to imagine that it wouldn’t extend to mass shootings or other acts of gun violence as well, Neria and other psychologists said, because the two events aren’t psychologically distinct. “There isn’t a difference between mass shootings and acts of terrorism in terms of how they affect the brain — they’re both intentional, man-made acts that inflict horror and fear,” he said. [...]

Slovic’s research has shown that because feelings and intuition play such a strong role in our evaluations of risk, we’re less likely to instinctively perceive items that are familiar or beneficial as something that’s hazardous and should be banned or regulated. This has particularly strong implications for gun owners. “A lot of people own guns or know someone who owns a gun or see a general benefit to guns,” Slovic said. “Positive feelings about something like guns can dampen the emotional response to an event like a shooting and make it feel less risky.” [...]

Another crucial distinction between terrorist attacks and mass shootings, from a psychological perspective, is that terrorists’ ideologies and goals are relatively clear, while mass shooters’ motives tend to be diverse or opaque. The apparent randomness of mass shootings makes it hard to collectively focus blame or anger, according to Sarah Lowe, a professor of psychology at Montclair State University. This could help explain why repeated exposure to terrorist attacks in Israel is seen as having helped strengthen national unity, while mass shootings in the U.S. seem to sow divisions.  

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Politico: Blueprint for a democratic renewal of the eurozone

Since the eurozone crisis, the intellectual consensus has gradually solidified around the hope that once the financial system is repaired, the creation of a banking union, extended with a capital markets union, would allow for enough risk sharing as in an insurance system to stabilize the currency union. If properly designed, this might convincingly redress the worst flaws of the initial architecture, but it is not enough to ensure its success. [...]

Institutional and political issues, rather than the economic solutions, should be at the heart of the reform debate. The last few years have shown that the institutions governing the eurozone are not fit for purpose in preventing crises and even less so in managing them. Economic policy orchestrated by an ineffective combination of complex rules, erratic market discipline and loose inter-governmental cooperation arrangements cannot continue to be the way forward for the eurozone.

Instead, a new political approach would include a real European executive that is democratically accountable before a parliament of the eurozone and leads economic policy with expertise and a larger degree of political autonomy. [...]

Third, unlike the current EU budget, this eurozone budget should entail the ability to raise taxes, decide on expenditures and issue debt. The last point means it would be a supplier of eurozone risk-free assets in times of crisis, thereby complementing the constrained capacity of member states to supply safe assets. This would be crucial if member countries were to default on their national sovereign debt.

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The Local: Is Italy’s League a ‘far-right’ party?

The League was founded 27 years ago on the pipe dream of separating northern Italy from “Roma ladrona” (“thieving Rome”) and southern Italians, whom it characterized as layabouts and criminals. But under Matteo Salvini, the League’s leader of just over four years, the party has dropped references to secession from its programme, aiming instead at national power. Its anger has been redirected at Brussels and most especially, immigrants. [...]

“If today many people confuse it with the far right, it’s essentially because it fiercely opposes immigration and demands national sovereignty as regards the European Union and its policies. But it’s a question of specific convergences, not a deep affinity.” [...]

In its former life, the Northern League converged with the centre and the left, counting former communists, socialists, anti-fascists, federalists, libertarians and others among its ranks. Throughout its first decade it talked about teaming up with centrist and leftist movements, and in some cases did so; one left-wing prime minister described the League as a “rib” of Italy’s left. [...]

“Its programme has aspects that put it mainly near the right (for example, defending small and medium businesses, criticizing the tax system) and others that place it less far from the left (policies that favour working people and those at the lower end of society – provided they’re Italian by birth),” says Tarchi.

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Independent: Why Acid Corbynism is the new counterculture we need

Part of what Acid Corbynism is about is finding ways of exploring what it would mean in cultural and political terms to really act like you’re conscious of that. On a philosophical level, I’m part of a tradition which is very sceptical of the whole liberal, European view of the self. If you accept that the bourgeois, individual subject is a myth, the European tradition is to be a revolutionary and the Buddhist tradition says you should give up all your possessions and live in a monastery. They’re quite different but there’s a whole terrain in between to explore. I don’t think we would so hubristic as to think we could be that point of conversion but we would want to create a space where people explore those kinds of ideas.

Before Blair, especially in the Nye Bevan/Tony Benn tradition there was always a sense that our enemy wasn’t just the Tories, but a whole culture and whole cultural hierarchy, and anything that was opposed to that we should be sympathetic to. In the 1960s and 1970s, for the first time you have a generation not growing up worrying about how to feed their children. The consequence of that are people start to ask, why given they no longer have to experience scarcity, why they have to continue to experience any degree of exploitation. [...]

Every political project will implicitly have an ideal human in mind. Thatcher wanted to create entrepreneurial, hard working individuals. Without imposing a template, we would want to develop humans who would find it easy to collaborate with others in a creative way in as many contexts as possible, without paranoia and fear. Someone who’s comfortable with their own complexity and the complexity of the society they live in.

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Quartz: You probably won’t remember this, but the “forgetting curve” theory explains why learning is hard

Ebbinghaus made a second discovery: The downward slope of the forgetting curve can be softened by repeating the learned information at particular intervals. This principle is the foundation of the learning method known as “spaced repetition,” where material is learned then reviewed after increasingly large time gaps. [...]

Overcoming the forgetting curve is about more than raw repetitions. There has to be space between the reviews. It doesn’t work to just study a new fact 15 times in 1 hour and overcome the curve. If the fact is already at the front of the mind, no work is being done in recalling it again. But if information is repeated at intervals, the brain has to reconstruct that memory, strengthening it like a muscle. [...]

The forgetting curve shows how brains are different. They can learn anything, which means they need to filter out the important from the trivial. Luckily, understanding how the curve works makes it easier to learn things that may not be necessary for survival, but are deeply rewarding. Like a new language, a musical instrument, or the name of Chewbacca’s father (it’s Attichitcuk).

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Deutsche Welle: Stealthy sleuths: Lithuania calls for 'cyber Schengen' zone

As NATO and the European Union team up to cut red tape for troops to move more quickly through Europe to counter a potential crisis, Lithuania is leading an effort to do the same for cyber defenders. Lithuanian President Dalia Grybauskaite has called on fellow EU leaders to support the creation of a "cyber Schengen," modeled on the area of free movement of people within the European Union, to better battle online crime and aggression which operate border-free. [...]

Besides being deployed to protect civilian infrastructure under attack, including EU institutions themselves, "it's easier to talk about joint efforts in cyberspace in Europe than in NATO," Kerza told DW.

He said that in his meetings with counterparts on both the military and civilian sides, he constantly hears discussion about trust. "When you talk about NATO, normally you talk about secrets and when it comes to secrets, countries do not want to open doors very widely. When we're talking about cyber in the EU...about 80 percent of incidents are open, not classified." [...]

But the incident itself was serious. The false information was also sent as an "alert" by email from the genuine "tv3.lt" email address. "The messages were sent to high-level politicians including the president and prime minister, representatives of the parliament, and journalists," Karoblis explained. Clicking on it unleashed a virus in users' computers. "The aim was to extract information and actually take over the IT systems," he said.

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statista: The German Military Is Woefully Unprepared For Action

Germany has attempted to modernize its military in recent years, introducing new types of equipment such as the NH-90 helicopter and the A400M transport aircraft. Despite the new and more modern hardware, a report has revealed that less than half of German military assets are operational. The "Report on the Operational Readiness of the Bundeswehr's Primary Weapons Systems 2017" revealed that only 39 out of 128 Eurofighter jets are ready for action, while 26 out of the 93-strong fleet of Tornado fighter-bombers are operational.

New and state of the art equipment such as the A400M, NH-90 and Tiger attack helicopter all suffer from appalling rates of availability. Only three A400Ms are ready for action out of a total of 15 while 13 NH-90s are up and running out of 58 altogether. If the Bundeswehr had to fight a conflict against a modern adversary using armour tomorrow, it could only muster 12 Tigers out of 62 in total, along with 105 Leopard 2 tanks out of 224 in the army. The situation at sea isn't much better with less than half the frigate fleet available for operations along with absolutely no submarines.

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