Social Europe: The Three Mistakes Of Centrism

But doesn’t Corbyn’s victory mean that the UK today needs centrists, because we have not just got a Conservative government, which has morphed into UKIP, but also an opposition led by the hard left? Here is Philip Stephens attacking the Labour leadership peddling snake oil populism of the left variety. If you search my blog you will see that I normally think Stephens gets things right, but I think there are three major problems with this diagnosis of where we are. [...]

But why wasn’t the 2017 manifesto like 1983, given the current Labour leadership? The answer leads us to the second mistake many centrists make: to imagine that any leader from the hard left can impose their will on a soft left parliamentary party. Stephens mentions this, but it is far more central than he suggests. Labour will be extremely lucky to get an overall majority at the next election, and even if they do there are plenty of MPs that will happily vote against their government the moment that Corbyn and McDonnell overstep the centre left mark. Give them 20 years and it is possible to imagine that they might be able to create a PLP more in their image, but they do not have 20 years and those who follow will be from a different generation with different reference points.

There is a third mistake which is in some ways the most important. I cannot beat Anthony Barnett’s way of expressing it: if all you want to do is stop Brexit and Trump and go back to what you regard as normal, you miss that what was normal led to Brexit and Trump. It all goes back to austerity. Even if you like aspects of neoliberalism, as centrists surely do, what happened with austerity and the scapegoating of immigrants is what I describe as neoliberal overreach. It was overreach not just because it was wrong and immensely destructive, but it laid the grounds for Brexit.

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Jacobin Magazine: Defending Afrin

But Kurds in Turkey have mounted considerable resistance to this process since the foundation of the Turkish nation state — be it in form of regional rebellions in the early years of the republic, attempts at participating in civil politics after the introduction of the multi-party system, or with the formation of an armed liberation movement, the PKK. Finally, the emergence of the HDP, an umbrella for anti-establishment left-wing parties and organizations with a focus on women’s liberation and the Kurdish question, marked a significant shift in combating state-led Kurdophobia in Turkey. Not only was 2015 a year where the HDP’s vision of a radically democratized Turkey found an electorate and denied Erdoğan the absolute majority he needed for his attempts to establish authoritarianism through constitutional amendments. But also, on the other side of the Syrian-Turkish border, the resistance of Kobanê against the darkness of the so-called Islamic State (IS) echoed across the world. This resistance explicitly exposed the foreign policy of the Erdoğan government, forcing its alliance with jihadist militias to become public. [...]

After the two-day meeting, a declaration was made that expressed the Rojavan and Northern Syrian people’s will to not engage in the establishment of national independence in the classical sense. The declaration proposed a federative system as part of the wider conflict resolution. Grassroots democracy, women’s liberation, and a full representation of all groups in society organized in a council system were determined as the constitutive principles of the new social contract. In September 2017 the first federal elections were held in the Democratic Federation Northern Syria-Rojava, with co-chairs of 3,700 communes across the three cantons being elected, followed by local councils in November and an assembly in January. Grassroots democracy was developed out of the ashes of war. [...]

Russia was also prepared to authorize Turkey’s military intervention because there is a Russian-Western competition for good relations with Turkey. Russia has an interest in breaking Turkey out of the Western bloc, and in the long term, placing it in its sphere of interest. Western countries want to keep Turkey a member of the NATO family, hence its strategic rapprochement with Russia, which Erdoğan repeatedly references, does not sit well with the United States.

No wonder then that the West has decided to tolerate Turkish aggression in northern Syria. With the exception of France, although perhaps here only in the role of a fig-leaf, no government has explicitly taken a stance against Turkey’s breach of international law and crimes against humanity. Not to mention against Turkey’s outspoken cooperation with the ideological inheritors of Al-Qaeda. The United States tried to disassociate itself from the Canton of Afrin in attributing influence over the region to the Russians. However, they continue to find themselves in a difficult situation, as Erdoğan has already announced he will pursue an attack on Menbic, an area where US soldiers are stationed, once Afrin is “done.”

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FiveThirtyEight: These Researchers Have Been Trying To Stop School Shootings For 20 Years

It’s difficult to say definitively how many school shootings have happened in the years since Columbine — or in the years before it. It’s harder still to prove how many would-be shootings were averted, or how many others could have been if additional steps had been taken. But the people who have spent the last two decades trying to understand this phenomenon are still here, and still trying to sell politicians and the public on possible solutions that are complicated, expensive and tough to sum up in a sound bite.

Any research into school shootings is made more difficult by how uncommon such shootings are. In 2016, FiveThirtyEight wrote about the more than 33,000 people killed by guns in America every year. Of those deaths, roughly one-third — about 12,000 — are homicides, but hardly any are due to mass shootings.1 If you define mass shootings as as an event where a lone attacker indiscriminately kills four or more people, in a public place, unrelated gang activity or robbery, then mass shootings account for a tiny portion of all gun homicides — probably a fraction of a percent. [...]

Randazzo found that the project’s findings echoed what she was learning about school shootings. For instance, the Secret Service had once focused its energy on threats made by people with a history of violent crime or who had a mental illness that caused them to act irrationally. But the Exceptional Case Study Project analysis showed that most people who actually carry out attacks didn’t meet either of those criteria. Instead, a better way to figure out who was a really a threat was to talk to friends, family and coworkers — most attackers had discussed their plans with other people. [...]

But those systems seem to break down over time. Randazzo told me that her team had trained numerous school districts in school shooting prevention back in the early 2000s and, as of this year, many of those districts no longer had prevention systems in place. Thanks to staff turnover and budget reprioritization, that institutional knowledge simply withered away. And ironically, that happens precisely because school shootings are so rare. “It takes time and effort for a school to create a team and get training,” Randazzo said. “And, fortunately, threatening behavior doesn’t happen often enough” to spur schools to action.

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BBC4 Thinking Allowed: Mixed-race families, Racial inequality now

Mixed race families: Around 50% of Black Caribbean men have white partners and the figure is just under a third for Black women. Inter-racial unions are now an unremarkable feature of British life. Miri Song, Professor of Sociology at the University of Kent, talks to Laurie Taylor about the meanings that these parents attach to their racial identity. Also, Nasar Meer, Professor of Race, Identity and Citizenship at the University of Edinburgh asks why racial and ethnic disparities continue to be fundamental to our society.

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Haaretz: Getting the Democracy We Deserve

There’s also no one to struggle with. Aligned against Netanyahu is nothing, an empty space. No one stands up to him. The prime minister is being questioned as a criminal suspect and no one challenges him seriously, except for the police commissioner and protest organizer Eldad Yaniv. Just imagine similar allegations against Shimon Peres, with Menachem Begin or even Yitzhak Shamir in the opposition – heaven and earth would be shaking. But Israel has in recent years developed a regime with no opposition, like in Putin’s Russia or Erdogan’s Turkey – but with a global innovation Made in Israel: It’s the opposition’s fault that there’s no opposition, not the government’s.

The so-called opposition has nothing to sell. It has nothing to offer other than “Netanyahu is corrupt,” as if Netanyahu would be fit to continue in office if he were modest, morally pure teacher of Jewish law. There is no alternative to be found, even if you search with a microscope. This can be seen on the Facebook page of Labor candidate Avi Gabbay: It’s empty. “Together we will turn Israel into the greatest country in the world.” The populists Netanyahu and Yair Lapid couldn’t have put it any better. [...]

From the other contender, Yesh Atid’s Yair Lapid, we could of course expect much less. “Mr. Prime Minister, you’ve done good things for the Jewish people. But enough.” What a fighting opposition! Lapid’s Facebook page deals mainly with corruption and conscripting the ultra-Orthodox. We all know that Israel that has no other issues to deal with – or maybe Lapid just doesn’t have anything else to say.

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Politico: Will Italian populism save Europe?

For the first time in Italy’s history, nearly every party mentioned the European Union in its electoral program. But while the parties presented a wide variety of options — ranging from the creation of a “United States of Europe” to holding a referendum on the country’s membership in the eurozone — the public debate remained superficial and misinformed. As a result, Europe never truly became part of the national conversation. [...]

Signs suggest that Italy may actually do neither, but rather set its own course of action within Europe — one that leads to an entirely new understanding of what EU citizens want, starting from a discussion on universal basic income and the best ways to reform the eurozone. [...]

Euroskepticism doesn’t mean the same thing in Italy as it does elsewhere. Over the last 20 years, prime ministers on from the right (Silvio Berlusconi) and the left (Matteo Renzi) have used Europe as a scapegoat for everything that is wrong in the country. [...]

In other words, the 5Stars have none of the baggage of the old-fashioned mainstream parties. Indeed, when it comes to their prowess at community organizing, the party has more in common with Macron’s La Republique En Marche party — which at the time of its creation drew inspiration from the 5Stars — than with Renzi’s Democratic Party.  

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FactsMaps: Top 30 countries with the greatest projected population increase and decrease between 2020-2100

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MapPorn: Adherents of Christianity and Islam by Country

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Quartz: The German parliament is split over a Nazi-era abortion law that punishes doctors

In a country as progressive as Germany, it may surprise some people to know that under section 219a of the criminal code, a medical professional is forbidden to publicly “offer, announce, or advertise” abortion services. Breaking the law is punishable with a fine or up to two years in prison. [...]

Then, on Tuesday (Mar. 13), the Social Democrats—partners in the new coalition—suddenly did an about-face, announcing they didn’t want to put their proposal to strike the law to a vote, as they’d originally promised, but would seek a common solution with their conservative partners. They were slammed for giving in to the CDU before the new government even got off the ground. [...]

Abortion is still a crime in Germany and an “offence against life” under section 218 of the criminal code. However, a woman won’t be prosecuted if she has the abortion in the first 12 weeks of her pregnancy, but she’s legally obliged to have a counseling session with a doctor and then have three days “thinking time” before she goes ahead with the procedure. She still has to pay for the abortion herself though, as medical insurance will normally only cover her if the pregnancy is deemed risky.

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