BBC4 Beyond Belief: The Good Friday Agreement

What role should the churches in Northern Ireland be playing now that peace has come to the Province? More than any other organisations, they should know the meaning of compassion, truth, mercy and forgiveness but are they providing enough leadership in these areas and what have they done to facilitate community cohesion since the signing of the Good Friday Agreement twenty years ago on the 10th April 1998?

Joining Ernie Rea are the Rev Norman Hamilton, former Moderator of the Presbyterian Church in Northern Ireland and Father Martin Magill, the parish priest at St John's on the Falls Road. Also in the discussion will be Dr Gladys Ganiel of Queens University Belfast, an expert in conflict transformation.

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Politico: How Putin’s Folly Could Lead to a Middle East War

It was all very predictable, the moment that Putin began to partner with Iran and its lethal proxy, Hezbollah. They shared intelligence, patrolled together and fought together against the Sunni jihadists and other rebels who were warring against the Assad regime.

Iran’s motivations for this unlikely marriage were crystal clear: The regime viewed Syria as a crucial territory to maintain a land bridge from their borders to the Mediterranean. For Iran, Syria was key to regional domination. It was also key to maintaining military supply routes to Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Russia, by contrast, had more global ambitions. For one, Putin was putting a finger in the eye of the Obama administration. The message was that Russia could dominate territory once seen as under American influence. Putin also sought to convey to the rest of the Arab world that Russia was a strong and reliable ally for the region, and that Russia was willing to provide advanced weaponry at the right price—and without American-style red tape and oversight. [...]

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov criticized the Israelis on Monday, calling the strike “a dangerous development.” Lavrov is right about that. The Israelis have shown that they can operate repeatedly inside of Syria, with or without Russian deconfliction. And with Trump signaling outrage over Sunday’s chemical weapons attacks in Damascus, the United States is not likely to restrain the Israelis from protecting their interests.

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The New Yorker: Will Pope Francis Cause a Schism in the Catholic Church?

Francis seems less intent on altering the Church’s most controversial doctrines than on exhibiting boredom with the whole angst-ridden discourse that surrounds them. When he was asked about footnote 351, shortly after “Amoris Laetitia” was published, he said that he couldn’t remember it. Earlier in his papacy, while fielding questions from the Vatican press corps on a plane, he was asked about the Church’s stance on homosexuality. He replied, “Who am I to judge?” It sounded more like a plea to move past the issue than like an actual invocation of humility. (After all, when it comes to society’s market-driven indifference to the poor, or even to Francis’s pet theological causes, such as devotion to the Virgin Mary, he is not shy about offering judgments.) Francis quickly became popular in the press, and among liberal non-Catholics. After the worst years of the clerical-abuse crisis in the Church, here was a leader who embodied Catholicism’s lastingly positive, if comparatively abstract, associations. (Few of us imagine ourselves as opposed to love, mercy, and human dignity.) He sounded willing, even eager, to leave the less comfortable conversations—about divorce, contraception, homosexuality—behind.

But the appeal of the institution of the Papacy, for many, lies in its promise of constancy. According to Catholic teaching, the office was created when Christ named the apostle Peter the first leader of the Church, saying, in a pun on the Greek meaning of Peter’s name, “Upon this rock will I build my church.” The more impressive the edifice you’d like to build, the more important a stable base becomes. Today, under Francis, and in the wake of Benedict’s resignation—he is now Pope Emeritus, a title that has never existed before—the Papacy has become the site for unexpected shifts and discontinuities. Hence, in part, the fierce reactions of Francis’s critics, some of whom, like Spaemann, have come to understand the clash over “Amoris” as a crisis. In becoming implicitly more amenable to divorce—and, by extension, to other ills of the wider culture—the Church, they worry, might cease, permanently, in any recognizable way, to be itself. [...]

Benedict is surely right to push back against those depictions. For all Francis’s facility with symbols and grand gestures, he has not instituted a break from Church teaching but, rather, a shift in focus from text to practice, from household rules to daily life. He is not, as some of his most strident critics have implied, indifferent to doctrine; it is more that his emphases, and his cryptic silences, have helped coax into view an ideal long cherished by liberal—and, often, lapsed—Catholics: a Church whose appeal lies in its engagement with, and not its retreat from, the wider world. It is unclear whether Francis sees himself in this light. Sometimes he seems to be a figure of convenience for political and cultural élites who have tried, mostly unsuccessfully, to marshal his universalist message against the recent global upswing of nativist-nationalist political sentiment—while, at the same time, and mostly successfully, resisting or ignoring his critiques of modern technology and economics.

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Vox: Why you keep using Facebook, even if you hate it

Before many people join a network, it may not be so useful. But the more people join, the more useful it becomes. That’s the network effect. Facebook is a step beyond that — it’s the network effect on steroids.

This is what makes facebook so great — it knows everything about you! — and what makes facebook so awful — IT KNOWS EVERYTHING ABOUT YOU. And while its network of 2.13 billion monthly users doesn’t pay any money to use the core service, Facebook makes plenty of money — millions daily — *buy providing advertisers access to that user data*. And everyone on the site agreed to this when they signed up.

The Guardian: About the boys: Tim Winton on how toxic masculinity is shackling men to misogyny

I like the teasing and the joking that goes on, the shy asymmetrical conversations, the fitful moments of mutual bewilderment and curiosity. A lot of the time I’m just watching and listening. With affection. Indulgence. Amusement. Often puzzled, sometimes horrified. Interested, but careful, of course, not to appear too interested. And the wonderful thing about getting older – something many women will understand – is that after a certain age you become invisible. And for me, after years of being much too visible for my own comfort, this late life waterborne obscurity is a gift. [...]

True, the blokes around me in the water are there, like me, for respite, to escape complexity and responsibility for an hour or two, to save themselves from going mad in their working lives, but their dignified silence in response to misogynistic trash talk allows other messages, other poisonous postures to flourish. Too often, in my experience, the ways of men to boys lack all conviction, they lack a sense of responsibility and gravity. And I think they lack the solidity and coherence of tradition. Sadly, modernity has failed to replace traditional codes with anything explicit, or coherent or benign. We’re left with values that are residual, fuzzy, accidental or sniggeringly conspiratorial. [...]

n the absence of explicit, widely-shared and enriching rites of passage, young men in particular are forced to make themselves up as they go along. Which usually means they put themselves together from spare parts, and the stuff closest to hand tends to be cheap and defective. And that’s dangerous. 

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The Guardian: Only Assad’s victory will end Syria’s civil war. The west can do nothing

Assad’s use of toxic gas in rebel-held Douma last week follows ceaseless outside condemnation of previous chemical bomb attacks. When, after their use last year, 59 American missiles rained down on the Syrian airbase of Shayrat, it clearly had zero impact. Regimes fighting for their existence do not care about condemnation or the niceties of international treaties. Nor do their backers, in this case Russia and Iran. They see only a cynical foreign policy coup in the offing. [...]

Inhumanity lies in the killing of any civilians in war. There is something peculiarly abhorrent in the targeting of civilian areas of suburban Damascus. But for all its denials the west does it too. Last summer, the monitor Airwars estimated that more than 8,000 civilians died in the fall of Mosul, mostly from inevitably indiscriminate Iraqi, American and British missiles. Even the Pentagon accepts that it has killed hundreds of civilians in Iraq and Syria. As the British commander Maj Gen Rupert Jones says, civilian deaths are “the price you pay” for fighting in cities. Assad would agree.

 The laws of war are enveloped in hypocrisy, largely because they are written by the winners. The US has still not signed the convention against delayed-action cluster bombs, one of the most immoral weapons ever devised. They went out of production only last year. Such weapons are still being used by the west’s Saudi allies in Yemen. This whole argument is not over morality, merely degrees of obscenity.

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Quartz: New research explains why moving abroad is the best way to find yourself

Cliché as it may sound, a lot of people can testify from personal experience that moving abroad helps you find yourself. Now a new study by Hajo Adam, an assistant professor of management at Rice University in Houston, Texas, explains why that is.

His meta-analysis looked at six studies that examined subjects’ “self-concept clarity”—a scale used to measure how well people know themselves. The scale includes a series of twelve statements, such as “my beliefs about myself often conflict with one another,” or “I spend a lot of time wondering about what kind of person I am.” [...]

Adam’s study found that what makes the expat experience so clarifying is not the number of countries people live in, but how long they live there. “It’s better to live 10 years in one country than two years in five countries,” he said. That’s because when you’re new to a country, you’re more absorbed with practical considerations. “In the first weeks, you think where you are going to live, how to get a doctor, but once you settle, you have more time to focus on yourself,” Adam told me. [...]

Another 2010 study conducted by Adam found that living abroad and interacting with many different cultures made people more creative. For my own part, in the Netherlands, I started seeing stories around me everywhere. For example, when I picked up a Dutch magazine at the supermarket and read an article about niksen—the Dutch trend of doing… nothing—I knew I had to write about that. I started developing an eye for stories that are quirky, such as American crayfish invading Delft, or people yelling at rice.

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The New York Times: The Failures of Anti-Trumpism

We have persuaded no one. Trump’s approval rating is around 40 percent, which is basically unchanged from where it’s been all along.

We have not hindered him. Trump has more power than he did a year ago, not less. With more mainstream figures like H. R. McMaster, Rex Tillerson and Gary Cohn gone, the administration is growing more nationalist, not less.

We have not dislodged him. For all the hype, the Mueller investigation looks less and less likely to fundamentally alter the course of the administration.

We have not contained him. Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party is complete. Eighty-nine percent of Republicans now have a positive impression of the man. According to an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, 59 percent of Republicans consider themselves more a supporter of Trump than of the Republican Party. [...]

Why has Trump dominated? Part of it is tribalism. In any tribal war people tend to bury individual concerns and rally to their leader and the party line. As late as 2015, Republican voters overwhelmingly supported free trade. Now they overwhelmingly oppose it. The shift didn’t happen because of some mass reappraisal of the evidence; it’s just that tribal orthodoxy shifted and everyone followed.

Part of the problem is that anti-Trumpism has a tendency to be insufferably condescending. For example, my colleague Thomas B. Edsall beautifully summarized the recent academic analyses of what personality traits supposedly determine Trump support.  

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The Guardian: Brexiters seek campaign memorabilia for 'museum of sovereignty'

 The brainchild of a small number of people closely connected to Ukip and the wider leave campaign, it has been launched with a website containing details of places where people can donate items, anything from drafts of major speeches to campaign memorabilia and photographs.

While a location for the planned museum is yet to be determined, the organisers stress the project is as much about gathering an archive of material connected to a pivotal moment in the UK’s postwar history that might otherwise be lost. [...]

The hope, he said, would be to collate an academic trove of artefacts, papers and books chronicling not just Brexit, but also the decades of often fringe Eurosceptic activism that preceded it – the bulk of it not preserved in digital form – going back to 1973, when the UK joined the European Economic Community. [...]

Farage will also be asked for a donation, Towler said. “I know Nigel is a supporter of the project. I haven’t got anything specific from him yet. Maybe an ashtray and an empty pint glass.”

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