The Atlantic: The Return of the Iraq War Argument

Fifteen years after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, hardliners are applying one of the arguments for attacking Saddam Hussein to Kim Jong Un: that war now, when a rogue leader is on the verge of possessing weapons of mass destruction, is preferable to a much worse war later, when that leader or his vicious allies would be in a position to use those weapons. Conflict is characterized as a calling on behalf of future generations, rather than a choice by the present ones. “As we learned the hard way with Iraq, if a rogue regime is deemed undeterrable, and diplomatic compromise is seen as untenable, the allure of preventive war can quickly become irresistible,” the former Obama administration official Colin Kahl, who opposes military strikes against North Korea, has written. [...]

Prominent Trump administration allies in Congress have sounded similar notes. Given their “recklessness” and “maliciousness,” North Korean leaders are “entirely different than the civilized people we’re dealing with who are nuclear powers,” such as Russia and China, the Republican Senator James Risch told me earlier this month. His colleague Lindsey Graham is more concerned about North Korea, an “unstable regime, cash-starved, controlled by a crazy man,” shopping weapons of mass destruction on the black market, where they could be snatched up by U.S. adversaries like Iran or terrorist groups that wouldn’t hesitate to use such weapons. [...]

North Korea’s nuclear arsenal has since grown far more sophisticated, to the point where the United States is now in its crosshairs, and it now has a brash new leader. But it’s still worth keeping in mind that if the Trump administration were to launch a preventive war against the Kim regime, it would be based on an assessment of its adversary that is fundamentally at odds with the conclusion the Bush administration reached 15 years ago. Bush, too, confronted the specter of a North Korea armed with chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons. And in that case, he did not choose war.

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Slate: A Disproportionate Number of Autistic Youth Are Transgender. Why?

“We have enough evidence, across multiple studies internationally, to say that autism is more common in gender-diverse youth than in the general population,” said John Strang, a neuropsychologist and founder of the Gender and Autism Program at Children’s National Health System in Washington. Strang authored a 2014 analysis that found that more than 5 percent of autistic youth sampled for his study also displayed some level of desire to be the other gender, according to parental reports. (He cautioned that it’s too soon to say what the exact percentage in the overall population may be.) Another widely referenced study found that 7.8 percent of young people being treated for gender dysphoria at a clinic in Amsterdam had a confirmed diagnosis of ASD.

These studies seem to support the hypothesis that transgender identities are rooted in biology, especially when combined with other studies pointing to a strong heritable component of transgender identity. A biological basis for transgender identity is still highly contested, although the science has been pointing toward that explanation for several years. Researchers believe that autism itself is highly heritable, so a link between autism and gender identity could even provide some direction for researchers hunting for genes associated with transgender identity. [...]

One practical outcome of this research is that clinicians are recommending that autistic youth should be screened for gender dysphoria—and that clinics that work with gender-dysphoric youth should screen clients for autism as well. Young people who are found to have both need individualized, compassionate care, and they and their families also need to know that they are not alone. Strang cautioned that ASD should not be viewed as a negative for transgender people, because the ability to ignore social pressure can be very freeing for this group: “Autistic people may be more bold and individualistic, less swayed by social expectations. Some of the front-line leaders of the trans rights movement have been trans and autistic—and there’s a beautiful focus, for many of them, on being themselves and not bending to social expectations of what others expect them to be.”

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Broadly: As Ukraine's Rape Epidemic Goes Largely Ignored, Survivors Plead for Help

Sexual violence—including rape, sexual slavery, and forced prostitution—is a common method of torture in Ukraine’s conflict zone, according to local NGO Justice for Peace in Donbas (JPD). One in three women and one in four men have suffered or witnessed sexual violence at the hands of officers on both sides of the conflict, JPD documented in a December 2017 report based on 300 interviews with survivors and witnesses.

Human rights organizations disagree over the extent to which sexual violence can be considered a weapon of war in Ukraine. While EUCCI says it has been used "consciously and deliberately" as a form of torture and political intimidation to achieve victory in the conflict, a 2016 UN monitoring mission report concluded that it found no evidence of either side using it systematically for strategic ends. [...]

According to the UN, by the end of 2016, Ukraine’s Chief Military Prosecutor’s Office had launched only three criminal proceedings involving allegations of conflict-related sexual violence. The military prosecutor’s office said the cases have been closed due to lack of evidence, and derided allegations of impunity as "unjustified rumors," Newsweek reported.

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The Calvert Journal: Concretopia

The Soviet concept of the dormitory suburb was a progressive and future-oriented ideal. Those idealistic images seem to endure in the mind even though they’re wholly divorced from reality nowadays. We live among the ruins of a vast empire. Utopia has proved itself a dystopia several times and to some extent we’re all traumatised by the disappearance of the future-oriented idea of socialist progress, even those who never wanted anything to do with it. It’s why our native land is the way it is today. [...]

My new project dedicated to the idea of socialist suburban housing consists of photos taken in Russia, Belarus, Croatia, Bulgaria, Romania, and other eastern European and ex-communist bloc countries. Each country has its own quirks determined by the quality of its architectural projects, the types of construction materials used, and the current condition of the buildings. In Tito-era Yugoslavia, for example, architects enjoyed considerably more freedom than their counterparts in the USSR and many other socialist countries, which gave them the opportunity to carry out projects that were daring and progressive by the standards of the time. But the principles of spatial organisation were universal, so it’s often difficult to tell at first glance where a particular photo was taken. [...]

Architecture interests me as an integral part of the lived processes of human endeavour, as a discipline with complex links to the spheres of civic life, politics, economics and culture. It’s always sensitive to ongoing social processes, to embodying and documenting society’s hopes — and the defeat of said hopes. The subject matter I work with does, of course, call for an understanding of these processes, but I’m not sure whether Soviet literature on architectural history and theory, highly ideological as it is, is of any real help in this regard. Having said that, I do have a copy of the chunky History of Soviet Architecture, which I spent ages tracking down and which now serves me well, if only as a source of creative inspiration. I’m influenced by old Soviet architectural photography (which explains, in large part, my decision to combine colour photographs with black-and-white ones) and also by Soviet realist painting, which was always more representative of hopes and dreams than of reality, embedding as it did workaday situations into idealised scenarios.

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Politico: Spain’s hyperactive parliament stalls reform

The scant results, however, suggest all this hyperactivity is mucho ruido y pocas nueces (much ado about nothing). For Prime Minister Rajoy, who hailed the delayed approval of the 2017 budget as proof of his deal-making abilities within a fragile multiparty coalition, there remains the nagging doubt of whether he will be able to repeat the trick with this year’s budget. [...]

These parvenus — especially Podemos — are determined to strike down existing laws without proposing anything sensible in their place, he said. They call pointless plenary sessions, invite random experts to speak and deliver two-minute speeches tailor-made for Twitter. But their labor “has had no impact whatsoever on the lives of citizens.”  [...]

Rajoy’s conservatives control just 137 seats in the 350-seat chamber, with the Socialists on 85 seats, Podemos and its allies on 71, and Ciudadanos on 32. That means any of the four big parties wanting to pass a law now needs the support of either two other big players, or one of them plus regional parties (which have become a less reliable source of support thanks to the Catalan independence crisis). [...]

Of all of the 41 bills Congress has passed so far in Rajoy’s second term — including those proposed by the opposition and by the government — many were national translations of EU regulations or amendments to local laws mandated by EU court rulings. In contrast, the 63 bills approved at the same stage of his first mandate included key policies such as a labor reform that made it cheaper to fire workers.

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Social Europe: A European Germany Returns?

There also was something in the same briefing to Kohl of which he had been unaware and that Merkel may not yet appreciate: EIB bonds do not count on the debt of Germany or any other major member state of the Union, nor need count on the debt of others. In this regard, they parallel US Treasury bonds which do not count on the debt of California or Delaware. What’s more, the servicing of EIB bonds is by the member states which gain from the investments that they fund, not by fiscal transfers from others, or from the Commission’s tax funded Own Resources. Further, aided by the Amsterdam criteria for social and environmental investments, the EIB quadrupled its investment finance in the decade from 1997 until the financial crisis to four fifths of Own Resources. [...]

Moreover, the joint EIB-EIF case has been fully grasped by Emmanuel Macron. When minister of economy and industry in the second Valls government he argued in September 2014 that to offset the low subscribed capital of the EIF the EU should access unused resources from the European Stability Mechanism. As an adviser put it : “If we could mobilise €20 to €40 billion from the ESM, for example to recapitalise the EIF, you then have a multiplier effect on the EIB that can reach almost €200 billion of public money”.

Wolfgang Schäuble opposed Macron, claiming that this was not within the ESM’s remit. But legal advice to the European Parliament declared that it was not excluded that the ESM should ‘fulfil other tasks’ to assure the stability of the euro for which a sustained recovery of the European economy is vital. Besides which the private sector multipliers from EIB investments range up to three, which could mean that the total public and private investment generated could reach some €600 billion, with further employment and income multipliers. And, because the Roosevelt New Deal was bond financed, it managed to reduce unemployment from 22% to 8% in the seven years from 1933 to 1940 with an average annual federal deficit of only 3%, i.e. the Maastricht limit.  

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The Conversation: Americans should welcome the age of unexceptionalism

It shapes conversation about domestic policy too. It leads us to think that America’s internal divisions and problems are distinctive—and by implication, that the experience of other countries cannot tell us much about how to handle them. [...]

By itself, having a national mission is not unusual. The European empires of the 19th century were also driven by grand ambitions. The French talked about their mission to civilize the world. The British promoted “British ideals” such as liberty and the rule of law. They even promised eventual self-government for colonies—when London judged that the colonies were ready for it. 

The American practice was not entirely different. The country’s leaders declared their mission to civilize the continent. They acquired territory, often by force, and then decided whether people were ready to govern themselves. The empowerment of African-Americans, Hispanic-Americans, native peoples, and immigrants was delayed because they were considered by the white Anglo-Saxon majority to be “ill-fitted for self-rule.” [...]

The first step is adopting a new point of view. Call it unexceptionalism: an attitude that acknowledges the commonalities, as well as the differences, in the American experience.

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Social Europe: A Road To Right Wing Authoritarian Government

The message is that if you want to investigate populist regimes (using populist in the Müller sense) you need to look at political elites rather than the electorate. I think he is right. But what makes an elite adopt an authoritarian path? I am sure there are many answers to that question, but what I will try to do below (in no doubt a very ‘untutored’ way) is to show one route in which a formerly pluralistic democracy can be moved in a populist, authoritarian direction by elites from the right. I’m an economist, so I use a simple model. [...]

If the right has more influence on the media than the left, they can campaign on a platform that differs from the platform they intend to implement. If you can pretend that you are a moderate party on economic issues rather than an extreme right party, and this pretense works, then your party wins. So in terms of voter perception, the party on the right moves along the upper arrow from position P to C. The left party might respond in kind by pretending they are less liberal than they are, but because they have less media influence they cannot move so far from their true position. If we look at the campaign positions of the two parties, marked by C, it is intuitively clear that the right wing party wins any election. The dotted lines show a proof: to see which party wins (assuming my geometry is correct), draw a line between the two positions, and then draw a line at right angles that bisects it. Every voter on that line is indifferent (equidistant) between the two parties, and therefore every voter either side of the line votes for each party.  [...]

The path to authoritarianism I set out here is not meant to be the whole story, and is not meant to correspond with any particular country. What I hope it does illustrate is how an authoritarian government can emerge when a party adopts a very right wing economic policy, and pretends it has not. It happens without voters changing their views or preferences in any way. It is authoritarian populism that comes from the behaviour of right wing elites.

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The Guardian: 'Christianity as default is gone': the rise of a non-Christian Europe

The survey of 16- to 29-year-olds found the Czech Republic is the least religious country in Europe, with 91% of that age group saying they have no religious affiliation. Between 70% and 80% of young adults in Estonia, Sweden and the Netherlands also categorise themselves as non-religious.

The most religious country is Poland, where 17% of young adults define themselves as non-religious, followed by Lithuania with 25%. [...]

But there were significant variations, he said. “Countries that are next door to one another, with similar cultural backgrounds and histories, have wildly different religious profiles.”  [...]

In the Czech Republic, 70% said they never went to church or any other place of worship, and 80% said they never pray. In the UK, France, Belgium, Spain and the Netherlands, between 56% and 60% said they never go to church, and between 63% and 66% said they never pray.  

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