BBC4 Beyond Belief: Transgender

For many years, transgender people have remained silent. But today they are affirming publicly that they have a rightful place in society and religious groups are now grappling with transgender issues. The Church of England General Synod recently debated a motion to draw up a prayer to welcome people who have transitioned from one sex to another. The House of Bishops turned it down.

The Bible asserts that God made mankind in his own image; so what's the problem? Presumably he made people whose gender does not sit comfortably with the sex they were assigned at birth? But debate still rages within the church because the Bible also says that "male and female, God created them" which suggests that there should be no ambiguity when it comes to a person's gender.

The issues are complex and they can multiply if a trans person is living a religious life within a religious community. What is the attitude of religious traditions towards transgender people? Are the problems more cultural than religious?

Joining Ernie Rea are Kamalanandi, and Philippa Whittaker, A Buddhist and a Christian who have both transitioned. With them in discussion is the academic Dr Susannah Cornwall whose work concentrates on contextual theologies, particularly those relating to sex gender and sexuality.

Ernie also talks to Indian transgender activist Vyjayanti Vasanta Mogli about the role that the Hijra play within the Hindu community in India. The Hijra are transgender people who are invited to bless new born babies and married couples but they find themselves outcast within Indian society despite a change in the law in 2014 which recognises their right to be who they are.

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The New York Review of Books: The Revolution That Wasn’t

These two answers essentially span the spectrum of explanations for the phone calls: few attribute noble motives to President Poroshenko. Even officials only a step or two down from the president often seem loath to explain or justify his more controversial behavior, such as his unwillingness to replace corrupt military officers or ministers. Among Ukrainians, this translates into a deep malaise. Four years after the flight from Kiev of Poroshenko’s predecessor, Viktor Yanukovych, who was forced out by months of protests that paralyzed the capital, many Ukrainians are disillusioned with their leaders and the political class in general, demoralized by the weak economy, worried about the frozen conflict in eastern Ukraine, and frustrated by the president’s failure to address the systemic corruption that permeates all aspects of life. In many cases Poroshenko has fought hard to protect controversial figures like Prosecutor-General Viktor Shokin, whom he defended for over a year before firing him only when US Vice President Joe Biden threatened to withdraw a $1 billion loan guarantee. [...]

Gerard Toal’s Near Abroad is a rich and dense study of geopolitics in and around the now-independent states that once composed the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics,1 probably the best available today.2 He argues forcefully against reducing complicated geopolitical issues to facile formulas, and particularly against the US tendency to back leaders who talk a good line, preferably in English. “Embracing Bonapartism in the Caucasus or shoring up select Ukrainian oligarchs, no matter how good a game they talk, is not ‘support for freedom,’” he writes. At the center of Toal’s book is the 2008 NATO summit in Bucharest, where the alliance declared that Georgia and Ukraine would eventually become members. Putin warned that this would be viewed as a “direct threat” to Russian security. That summer he invaded Georgia, consolidating Moscow’s control over the two breakaway territories of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Russian troops continue to nibble away at Georgia’s border with Russian-occupied South Ossetia, a few yards at a time. [...]

Toal quotes the US political scientist John Mearsheimer’s description of Putin as “a first-class strategist who should be feared and respected by anyone challenging him on foreign policy,” but does not seem convinced by it. He suggests that Putin’s character can be more usefully understood with reference to his hypermasculinity and the role of affect, or emotion, in his political choices. Putin’s lengthy record indeed indicates that his reactions are often provoked by a sense of spite or revenge. Russian analysts—some loyal, others critical—have long noted that under Putin action often precedes policy. Some have resorted to slang to define his leadership style, perceiving elements of the sovok—the constantly aggrieved, misogynist, racist post-Soviet man in the street—in his behavior. He is clearly a gosudarstvennik, a firm believer in the dignity of the state (gosudarstvo), who believes that this dignity must be protected at any price, including that of the truth. Another intriguing glimpse of Putin’s psychological makeup comes from Putin himself. In an early political biography he confided with apparent pride to one of his interviewers that he had not gone through the Soviet youth movements but had instead been a shpana, a young tough or punk.

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The Atlantic: New Zealand’s War on Rats Could Change the World

Until the 13th century, the only land mammals in New Zealand were bats. In this furless world, local birds evolved a docile temperament. Many of them, like the iconic kiwi and the giant kakapo parrot, lost their powers of flight. Gentle and grounded, they were easy prey for the rats, dogs, cats, stoats, weasels, and possums that were later introduced by humans. Between them, these predators devour more than 26 million chicks and eggs every year. They have already driven a quarter of the nation’s unique birds to extinction. [...]

In recent years, many of the country’s conservationists and residents have rallied behind Predator-Free 2050, an extraordinarily ambitious plan to save the country’s birds by eradicating its invasive predators. Native birds of prey will be unharmed, but Predator-Free 2050’s research strategy, which is released today, spells doom for rats, possums, and stoats (a large weasel). They are to die, every last one of them. No country, anywhere in the world, has managed such a task in an area that big. The largest island ever cleared of rats, Australia’s Macquarie Island, is just 50 square miles in size. New Zealand is 2,000 times bigger. But, the country has committed to fulfilling its ecological moonshot within three decades. [...]

Other skeptics say that the task is simply too huge. So far, conservationists have successfully eradicated mammals from 100 small islands, but these represent just 10 percent of the offshore area, and just 0.2 percent of the far larger mainland. It’s one thing to cull pests on small, waterlocked pimples of land whose forests are almost entirely owned by the government. It’s quite another to repeat the feat in continuous stretches of land, dotted by cities and private homes. [...]

Through mathematical simulations conducted with colleagues at Harvard, he has now shown that gene drives are even more invasive than he expected. Even the weakest CRISPR-based gene drives would thoroughly invade wild populations, if just a few carriers were released. They’re so powerful that Esvelt says they shouldn’t be tested on a small scale. If conservationists tried to eliminate rats on a remote island using gene drives, it would only take a few strongly swimming rodents to spread the drive to the mainland—and beyond. “You cannot simply sequester them and wall them off from the wider world,” Esvelt says. They’ll eventually spread throughout the full range of the species they target. And if that species is the brown rat, you’re talking about the entire planet.

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CityLab: What Happens When a City Bans Non-Resident Drivers?

You may remember Leonia. A borough in Bergen County with a population just over 9,000, it made headlines at the end of 2017 when local officials here did something that no other town in America had done before: It shut off 60 of its public roads during rush hour to non-local drivers. Navigation apps like Google Maps and Waze had made traffic unbearable, said Leonia’s mayor, Judah Zeigler: An estimated 2,000 city-bound motorists were now being rerouted each day through its side streets as a turnpike shortcut. “We have had days when people can’t get out of their driveways,” Leonia’s police chief, Tom Rowe, told The New York Times in December.

Just days after Leonia police began issuing $200 fines to non-local drivers, the nearby town of Weehawken followed its lead, albeit slightly, enacting rush-hour restrictions on a specific right turn in an effort to ease traffic to and from the Lincoln Tunnel. And many other small towns across the country have floated similar complaints about diverted drivers taking over local streets—a growing backlash against the so-called ‘Waze Craze.’ [...]

The biggest issue I heard was about the ban’s effect on local business. In February, several shop owners marched on the mayor’s office to protest the road laws. Some small businesses cited revenue drops as high as 40 percent since December. One employee told me that Leonia was a “ghost town” in the first few weeks after the traffic ordinance was signed. [...]

This might serve as a rare reminder that navigation apps also offer potential economic positives to those communities that find themselves targeted by rerouted drivers, who might come upon eateries or businesses they wouldn’t have found otherwise by using the apps. Gladys Calero, who has owned Rumba Cafe for 15 years, told me that “people from all over” North Jersey come to eat at her cozy Colombian restaurant. But since the restrictions, she has seen a “big decline in foot traffic,” and that every local business she knows has been affected. “There are just less cars here now,” she said. The banner, she said, “was one of the solutions they think will help,” but she’s not holding her breath. “Let’s see when the seasons change,” she told me around lunchtime. “Maybe things will get better.”

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Jacobin Magazine: The Fall of the Norwegian Trump

For a long time the Norwegian establishment refused to collaborate with the FrP, seeing it as too extreme. They changed their mind out of electoral expediency. Needing votes to secure a majority, right-wing parties invited the FrP into the mainstream tent and welcomed their collaboration. Since then, mainstream right parties have assured the public that the Norwegian populist right is not like it is in others parts of Europe — it’s milder and moderate, less historically noxious. While the Sweden Democrats have an outright Nazi past, the FrP’s roots are in an anti-tax liberal party. [...]

Listhaug became city commissioner (byråd) of welfare and social services in Oslo in 2006, where she pressed for more competition and more private-sector involvement in government. After working for a consulting firm, she then entered the right-wing coalition government in 2013 as minister of agriculture and food. While still largely unknown, she stirred controversy and fear among farmers for her statements in 2010 that Norway’s agricultural policy was a “communist system.” [...]

Then that December, Listhaug was appointed to a newly created cabinet position: minister of immigration and integration. It was both shocking and expected. Shocking because the conservative right, who claimed to be moderate, chose the most prominent anti-immigrant voice as minister of immigration. And expected because the FrP’s had netted 16 percent of the votes when they joined the coalition. They were strong enough to get what they wanted, and they wanted Listhaug in charge of immigration and a platform to spread the party’s views. Listhaug quickly made the best of it. Shortly after she stepped into the new position, in late December 2015, Listhaug vowed to make Norway’s asylum policies “one of the strictest in Europe.”

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Political Critique: Poland’s child-like state

Whereas Western European countries are mature enough to handle and even learn from past sins – including those committed by the Nazis – Eastern Europe apparently is not. As the Russian intellectual historian Nikolay Koposov recently observed, the “memory laws” being enacted there “differ fundamentally from memory laws in Western Europe, because they actively protect the memory of the perpetrators, rather than the victims, of state-sponsored crimes.”

The PiS’s politicization of history is similar to that of Russian President Vladimir Putin, whose regime has taken to glorifying medieval autocrats such as Ivan the Terrible. But Poland was supposed to be different. Russia’s authoritarianism and political culture are rooted in its imperial past. By contrast, when Poland was liberated from the Soviet version of the Russian imperial yoke, it was seemingly eager to put as much cultural distance between itself and Russia as possible. That meant embracing liberal democracy and the rule of law, and joining the West and its institutions – namely, NATO and the European Union – as quickly as possible. [...]

Joanna Tokarska-Bakir of the Polish Academy of Sciences goes even further: “In a psychoanalytical sense, [PiS] policies – running away from shame and responsibility – are dragging us back into childhood, even into the womb, in which the child is indistinguishably entwined with its host – the nation.” She notes that children are “uncritical and innocent,” and that “shame only comes with socialization.” A national “pedagogy of pride,” on the other hand, “amounts to reversing socialization back to a fetal state.” The result is the “sinless nation” envisioned by the PiS.

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CityLab: Dead Brutalist Buildings

Over the last few years, Grimley noticed that an increasing number of Brutalist buildings around the country were being demolished and photographers were there to document them. “Eventually—unfortunately—there were enough of them to cull together into the show,” he said. Some of the photographers featured in “Brutalist Destruction” had worked with Grimley before, while others he reached out to after finding their work online. [...]

Such structures are seen by some as “monstrosities” but, Grimley noted, regardless of style, they are simply products of and testaments to their time. He pointed out that 50 years after the rise of Victorian architecture there was a wave of “venomous dislike” for such buildings, which led to many of them being destroyed. “Now, we’d be like, ‘that’s so short-sighted and narrow-minded,’” said Grimley. And yet, he added, critics of Brutalism and those who call for their demolition are following the same course. [...]

Girmley said he hopes that visitors to the exhibit will confront their own biases about the polarizing architectural style as more and more of these buildings face the wrecking ball.  

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Quartz: What will Cuba’s revolution look like without a Castro in charge?

The National Assembly on Thursday confirmed the only candidate for the post, Miguel Díaz-Canel, the country’s first vice president and a Communist Party loyalist. He replaces Raúl Castro, who took over the country’s leadership from his brother Fidel in 2006. [...]

Still, in many ways, Cuba’s presidential transition is far from revolutionary. It’s part of the periodic updating the Castro brothers have carried out to maintain Cuba’s socialist regime, whether it be by opening up the economy or dialing back state repression. Like his predecessors, Cuba’s new president will have to rejigger the definition of the Castro revolution to handle the island’s economic and political reality—currently in a precarious state. [...]

The latest iteration of the revolution, as shaped by Raúl, is still in dire need of revision, observers point out. It remains hobbled by its two-currency system—one for locals, another pegged to the dollar for tourists and international business—that stalls economic growth. Cuba must also deal with the collapse of Venezuela, which it relied upon for cheap oil.

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The Guardian: Don’t be fooled by Emmanuel Macron the ‘moderate’

Macron is far more popular internationally than in France, where dissatisfaction with his presidency has surged to 58% less than a year after his election. Here is a man who owes his power to good luck rather than any vindication of his political philosophy. In the first round of the French presidential election, he scored less than a quarter of the vote, and not dramatically more than three other candidates including the far-right Marine Le Pen and radical left Jean-Luc Mélenchon. Macron’s thumping second-round victory was less an endorsement and more a rejection of fascism.

French scepticism towards Macron contrasts sharply with his own lack of self-doubt. He refused to be questioned by journalists because his “complex thought processes” were ill-suited for such a setting. His denunciations of his opponents would not be out of place on Donald Trump’s Twitter feed: they are “slackers” and “do-nothings”, while workers protesting over job losses should stop “wreaking havoc” and look for a job elsewhere. Macron is a pound-shop Margaret Thatcher, redistributing wealth to those with too much of it, while assaulting workers’ rights and France’s hard-won social model. His tax changes have gifted the hundred wealthiest households more than half a million euros a year: the top 1% captured 44% of his new tax breaks. [...]

So-called centrists are supposed to be socially liberal. Macron exposes this pernicious myth for what it is. A man who courted left-leaning voters by promising a humane policy towards migrants and refugees now has them firmly in his sights. The number of days a person without papers can be imprisoned in a detention centre is to be doubled; the consideration time period for asylum has been halved, meaning fewer refugees will be accepted. Charities warn that refugees fleeing war will be deported. Macron’s interior minister, Gérard Collomb, claims that communities are “breaking up because they are overwhelmed by the inflow of asylum seekers”. No wonder the far-right Front National has described his policies as a “political victory”.

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