Jacobin Magazine: Fidesz’s Two-Thirds

The plan had been brewing for some time. Various political and civil organizations, united under the umbrella of “Country for All Movement,” ran a series of surveys to determine the strongest anti-Fidesz candidate in the most competitive districts; the weaker candidates were then supposed to step aside. This call for tactical voting sparked much discussion both inside and outside the country, with liberal editorialists like Cas Mudde even suggesting that in order to overcome the Orbán regime, the liberal opposition should join forces with the Jobbik party, an extreme-right formation that has tried, like Marine Le Pen in France, to clean up its image and present itself as more moderate. [...]

Aside from anti-corruption rhetoric, opposition parties offered nothing new to voters. The election program of the ostensibly socialist party — as well as that of its liberal spin-off, Democratic Coalition — contained little progressive content. Discredited due to past betrayals, lacking a strategy to expand beyond partisan die hards, these parties failed to offer voters a credible left-wing alternative. Their opposition was stylistic, rather than substantive. [...]

Orbán is a liberal at his core, topped off with some colorful nationalism and racism. The same could be said of Italy’s Berlusconi or France’s Sarkozy or, more recently, Austria’s Sebastian Kurz. Has Western Europe already forgotten Italy’s anti-immigrant Bossi Fini law, or France’s ban on face-covering (which Kurz is now considering implementing)? Do we really have to remind aghast liberals that Switzerland voted for a constitutional amendment, proposed by the far-right Swiss People’s Party, to ban the building of minarets?  

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Jacobin Magazine: Liberalism and Gentrification

As Zukin remarks, “What Jacobs valued — small blocks, cobblestone streets, mixed-uses, local character — have become the gentrifiers’ ideal. This is not the struggling city of working class and ethnic groups, but an idealised image that plays to middle-class tastes.” In the absence of true diversity in income and ownership, a simulacrum can be easily substituted. In my “up-and-coming” neighborhood in Washington, the superficially eclectic mix of bars and restaurants are owned by the same developer. [...]

Within Washington city limits, 15 percent of families earn $200,000 or more a year, 15 percent exist below the poverty line. Washington has one the highest percentages of college graduates (46 percent) and one of the highest rates of functional illiteracy (33 percent). Poverty is entirely racialized: the median income for a white household is over $100,000; for black families it’s under $40,000. In the poorest neighborhoods, HIV infection rate approaches double-digits, and like every other indicator of inequality, it’s only getting worse. [...]

Tying up your assets, your middle-class future, in home values does something to people. It alters their interests. It sutures a professional class, of liberal and even progressive beliefs, to the rapacious capitalist expansion into the city. The people who move to gentrifying areas tend to have liberal, tolerant, cosmopolitan sympathies. But they are aligned materially with reactionary and oppressive city restructuring, pushing them into antagonism with established residents, who do nothing for property values. Behind every Jane Jacobs comes Rudy Giuliani with his nightstick.

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The Atlantic: Europe Was Once Obsessed With Fake Dilapidated Buildings

At the time Rochfort built the Jealous Wall, the fashion for false ruins, or “ruin follies,” was spreading all over Europe. Everywhere, the aristocracy was building ruins from scratch or ruining their existing buildings to create dramatic and picturesque effects. In 1836, one English landowner at Scotney Castle in Kent went so far as to move out of his beloved country home, an opulent Elizabethan mansion with a great hall and oak staircase, and build a new house for himself at the top of a nearby hill. He then smashed the stones of his old country house and blew several picturesque holes in its walls. [...]

False ruins were used to celebrate British imperialism, too. The “Temple of Augustus” at Surrey’s Virginia Water used genuine columns and capitals from the Libyan ruins of Leptis Magna to position the British Empire as a natural successor to the legacy of Rome. [...]

 But these false ruins also carry with them a strange kind of melancholy. It’s only with the coming of the 20th century, its cataclysmic changes and the genuine ruins its wars spread across Europe and the rest of the world, that the trend for ruin-building faded. In the ashes of Dresden, Coventry, and Stalingrad, the romantic ideal of the ruin in the European imagination was changed forever.

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SciShow Psych: Why Do So Many People Share and Believe Fake News?

The Conversation: What is hell?

The earliest parts of the Hebrew Bible, around the eighth century B.C., described the afterlife as Sheol, a shadowy, silent pit where the souls of all the dead lingered in a minimal state of silent existence, forever outside of the presence of God. By the sixth century B.C., Sheol was increasingly viewed as a temporary place, where all the departed awaited a bodily resurrection. The righteous would then dwell in the presence of God, and the wicked would suffer in the fiery torment that came to be called “Gehenna,” described as a cursed place of fire and smoke. [...]

Beginning in the fourth century B.C., after the Greek King Alexander the Great conquered Judea, elements of Greek culture began to influence Jewish religious thought. By time of the first gospels, between 65 and 85 A.D., Jesus refers to the Jewish belief in the eternal fire of Gehenna. Elsewhere, he mentions evildoers’ banishment from the kingdom of God, and the “blazing furnace” where the wicked would suffer sorrow and despair and “where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” Jesus also mentions the Greek Hades when describing how the forces of evil – “the gates of Hades” – would not prevail against the church. [...]

In early Christianity, the fate of those in hell was described in different ways. Some theologians taught that eventually all evil human beings and even Satan himself would be restored to unity with God. Other teachers held that hell was an “intermediate state,” where some souls would be purified and others annihilated.

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CityLab: Why New York City Stopped Building Subways

Then it stopped. Since December 16, 1940, New York has not opened another new subway line, aside from a handful of small extensions and connections. Unlike most other great cities, New York’s rapid transit system remains frozen in time: Commuters on their iPhones are standing in stations scarcely changed from nearly 80 years ago. [...]

Three broad lines of history provide an explanation. The first is the postwar lure of the suburbs and the automobile—the embodiment of modernity in its day. The second is the interminable battles of control between the city and the private transit companies, and between the city and the state government. The third is the treadmill created by rising costs and the buildup of deferred maintenance—an ever-expanding maintenance backlog that eventually consumed any funds made available for expansion. [...]

Now, New York’s economy has turned around, the population is growing, and the city is in a relatively good financial position. Still, the maintenance backlog is devouring capital spending. Staggering subway construction costs—by far the highest in the world—mean that whatever funding is available does not go very far at all. Old problems that precluded subway construction in the past echo in the present day: There is still no meaningful integration between the subway and suburban transit, the mayor and governor carry on the same types of jurisdictional battles, and the subway has not managed to step off the treadmill of deferred repairs. These problems have deep roots, and overcoming them will not be a simple matter.

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IFLScience: Vaginal Implant Could Provide Cheap, Reliable Protection Against HIV

An experiment summarized in the latest issue of the Journal of Controlled Release showed that the flexible polymer device successfully induces a prolonged state of “immune quiescence” in rabbits by slowly releasing an anti-inflammatory drug called hydroxychloroquine. If subsequent trials prove effective, the simple, low-cost invention could assist in reducing the spread of HIV among the world’s most vulnerable populations.

HIV can only replicate in the human body after it attaches to the surface of one of several types of white blood cells – or lymphocytes – whose purpose is to detect and destroy pathogens. Thus, although it may sound counter-intuitive, inhibiting the immune system’s reaction against viral particles present in the female genital tract actually interferes with the virus’s ability to gain its initial foothold in the body. [...]

Following decades of public health campaigns and clinical outreach, HIV transmission rates have declined in developed nations in recent years, yet the threat of HIV and AIDS remains very real in low-income areas. Eastern and southern Africa account for approximately 70 percent of the world’s current HIV infections and 43 percent of the global total of new HIV infections occurring yearly.

Woman and girls are disproportionately affected by the epidemic due to lack of access to prophylactic medications and an inability to protect themselves against exposure from male sexual partners who have sex with multiple other partners without protection.

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Jacobin Magazine: The Gender Pay Gap Is Bigger Than You Thought

The latter point has been the sophisticated argument about the gender wage gap for some time, an argument that seems quite persuasive to me. Unequal pay for identical work is not the only way that a labor market can be sexist. A labor market that sorts men into higher-paying jobs and women into lower-paying jobs is still sexist, just in a different way. [...]

The correct statistic for those partial to the sophisticated argument should be a completely uncontrolled comparison of the median earnings of all men and women who are in their prime working years (ages twenty-five to fifty-four), including those who work less than full time and those who do not do any paid work. Unlike the NWLC statistic, this comparison reflects the gendered sorting that results in women being more likely to have part-time work and more likely to be out of the labor market altogether. [...]

The difference between the conventional 20 percent finding and the correct 39 percent finding is, as you would expect, completely driven by gendered differences in who engages in full-time work. When I compare full-time workers (those working fifty or more weeks) between the ages of twenty-five and fifty-four, I find the median woman earning $40,000 and the median man earning $50,000. Even though this calculation is slightly different than the NWLC wage gap, it nonetheless shows women earning 20 percent less than men. When I compare all workers (those working one or more weeks) between the ages of twenty-five and fifty-four, I get women earning $35,000 and men earning $47,750, meaning a wage gap of 27 percent. And then when I compare all people in that age band, including non-workers, I get the 39 percent wage gap figure.

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Bloomberg: Brexit Is Causing Ripples in Iceland Inbox x

Iceland’s parliament, the Althingi, has backed opposition calls for a review of its membership of the European Economic Area, which grants the small Nordic nation access to the EU’s lucrative single market. The Foreign Ministry’s report is to look at the potential fallout on Icelandic trade posed by the U.K.’s decision to leave the bloc, as well as the scope for Iceland to have a greater say in EEA decisions. [...]

According to a recent study by Nordic political scientists Baldur Thorhalsson and Anders Wivel, Brexit poses a particular challenge for small countries such as Denmark or Iceland, which have been relying on Britain to defend free trade and counter what they call France and Germany’s “cooperative hegemony over Europe.” [...]

According to Throstur Olafsson, an economist who advised the Foreign Ministry when Iceland negotiated it’s EEA membership, lawmakers who are critical of the EEA are simply using Brexit as a pretext, noting that any changes would have to be agreed by all of its member states.

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