BBC4 Beyond Belief: Spinsterhood

There is a certain way of saying the word 'spinster' that gives it implications of disapproval or even pity; as if for a woman, not being married is an inferior state. Why does it sound so unpleasant? And why is it more acceptable to be a bachelor than a spinster? Could part of the blame lie in religious traditions with their stress on the centrality of the family? Today women are forging careers and putting off marriage and babies. Is there a positive role for single women in religious structures which lay great stress on producing children? Is spinsterhood a holy state? Is it better for a woman with strong religious convictions to remain unmarried rather than being, what St Paul called, "unequally yoked together."

In an attempt to find answers to these questions, Ernie Rea is joined by Shelina Janmohamed - an author and commentator on Muslim social and religious trends - Jewish journalist Angela Epstein and former MP Ann Widdecombe, who is a Christian.  

Ernie also talks to Dr Fauzia Ahmad. She is an unmarried Muslim woman whose own experience has informed 25 years of research into why young Muslim women are finding it increasingly difficult to meet suitable Muslim husbands.

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Business Insider: The average American worker takes less vacation time than a medieval peasant (Nov. 7, 2016)

The Church, mindful of how to keep a population from rebelling, enforced frequent mandatory holidays. Weddings, wakes, and births might mean a week off quaffing ale to celebrate, and when wandering jugglers or sporting events came to town, the peasant expected time off for entertainment. There were labor-free Sundays, and when the plowing and harvesting seasons were over, the peasant got time to rest, too.

In fact, economist Juliet Shor found that during periods of particularly high wages, such as 14th-century England, peasants might put in no more than 150 days a year. As for the modern American worker? After a year on the job, she gets an average of eight vacation days annually. [...]

But Americans have long since kissed the 40-hour workweek goodbye, and Shor's examination of work patterns reveals that the 19th century was an aberration in the history of human labor. When workers fought for the eight-hour workday, they weren't trying to get something radical and new, but rather to restore what their ancestors had enjoyed before industrial capitalists and the electric light bulb came on the scene.  [...]

According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) the Greeks, who face a horrible economy, work more hours than any other Europeans. In Germany, an economic powerhouse, workers rank second to last in number of hours worked. Despite more time off, German workers are the eighth most productive in Europe, while the long-toiling Greeks rank 24 out of 25 in productivity. 

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Politico: Vestager keeps Commission presidency options open

With French President Emmanuel Macron — a liberal in search of a Europe-wide political family — hinting at support for a Vestager European Commission presidency, and many in her own party pressuring her to run, the commissioner’s Mechelen trip looked very much like pre-candidate activity. [...]

Vestager’s path to the Commission presidency would not be straightforward. She would need backing from the Danish government, which doesn’t seem keen to give her another term in Brussels. The liberal ALDE alliance has little chance of coming first in the European Parliament election so its candidate would not be in pole position for the job. And she may have too much star power to win the endorsement of national leaders, who do not like to be upstaged. [...]

Speaking later in her office at the Commission’s headquarters, Vestager said that while she agrees there remain “systemic threats to the rule of law” in Poland and Hungary, she’s determined that Brussels should not impose a narrow view of rule of law on EU member countries. “Dialogue is still a possibility,” she said, emphasizing that “rule of law can be achieved in a number of different ways.”

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BuzzFeed: The Housing Crisis Is So Bad That Men Are Having To Sleep In Gay Saunas

Overseeing this comparative safety is the owner, Mark Ford. At 54, he has been running Sweatbox for over a decade and in the last few years has been balancing two competing stresses: trying to help gay men falling victim to the housing crisis, but also ensuring he sets boundaries that adhere to the restrictions on his business. There are, he says, no easy solutions.

“There was a point at which a Polish guy – who was very sweet – had his post redirected to us,” he says. “At that point we had to say, ‘You cannot live here.’ I’m not licensed as a hotel or as accommodation in any other way, so there are legal requirements.” As such, says Ford, “I might even shorten [customers’ stay] to a six-hour rule.” [...]

Against a backdrop of having to have sex with a succession of landlords, Sweatbox, for Spurr, was a break from exploitation. His use of such venues is typical among many who spoke to BuzzFeed News, describing it as part of the mix of ad-hoc, short-term arrangements on which they relied to avoid sleeping on the street: a few nights on a friend’s sofa, a night with someone they meet on Grindr, a couple of nights at a sauna, then repeat. [...]

“We had a period when we would get itinerant workers – non-gay guys coming over from Eastern Europe and wherever else – who were coming to London to work and they found out about this amazing place on the cheap,” says Ford.

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Quartz: Capitalism is unfolding exactly as Karl Marx predicted

“[O]nce adopted into the production process of capital, the means of labor passes through different metamorphoses, whose culmination is the machine, or rather, an automatic system of machinery,” he wrote in his then-unpublished manuscript Fundamentals of Political Economy Criticism. “The workers themselves are cast merely as its conscious linkages.” [...]

Marx showed that recurrent crises were not an accidental side effect of capitalism, but a necessary and inherent feature, explains Nick Nesbitt, Princeton University professor of French and Italian and editor of The Concept in Crisis: Reading Capital Today. “​He shows that the source of value in capitalism is living labor. He also shows that capitalism nonetheless tends to eliminate living labor as a necessary dimension of its development,” Nesbitt says. That contradiction means capitalism is never stable, but forever shifting in and out of crises: The system depends on human labor while simultaneously eradicating it. [...]

It may be tempting to dismiss Marx’s analysis given that his communist vision failed in practice. However, the politics that developed in the Soviet Union were “not part of Marx’s vision of a social structure” says Nesbitt, but “developments of Leninism and the Russian revolution.” Most of Marx’s work was focused on critiquing capitalism, and he wrote relatively little about exactly what it would take for communism to become reality, or how it would function. Marx famously popularized the slogan, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs,” meaning that all would have the opportunity to reach their highest potential and to receive the needed goods, such as food and shelter in turn. But, notes Carol Gould, philosophy professor at Hunter College, City University of New York, Marx didn’t say much about what this mantra would look like in practice.

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Jacobin Magazine: Revisiting the Cult of the Supreme Being

Instead of the liberal doctrine of the separation between church and state, these figures promoted the institutionalization of a secular morality to strengthen popular sovereignty and combat injustice. They all addressed oppression and social alienation in contrast to the elitist “New Atheist” approach of directly attacking the religious beliefs of the poor and the marginalized as a political solution. [...]

Spinoza is usually seen as a liberal on religious and philosophical matters, and he was. In order to counter the theocratic tendencies Calvinism represented, Spinoza proposed a liberal national civic religion that would include all subjects. The liberal norms of the state would be enforced by a public cult promoting an ideology of “justice and charity,” which meant the practice of solidarity and love of our neighbors. [...]

Robespierre had a deistic aversion to atheism, but he was practically opposed to the de-Christianizers who wanted to resolve political contradictions through one-sided ideological warfare. Robespierre’s main opponent in this struggle was the radical journalist Jacques Hébert, who called on the French people to exterminate Christianity root and branch.

Robespierre’s position on religion holds important lessons for the Left today. To wage war against Christianity or religion as abstractions, instead of attacking the more mundane sources of alienation and oppression, is politically foolish. There is nothing inherently progressive or revolutionary about being an atheist, since atheism in itself is not a positive basis for politics.

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IFLScience: The Science Behind The Mysterious Blue People Of Kentucky

This is because of a condition called methemoglobinemia, which causes methemoglobin levels in the red blood cells to rise above 1 percent. It turns the skin blue, the lips purple, and the blood a chocolate brown. Methemoglobinemia can be triggered by exposure to particular chemicals (benzocaine and xylocaine, for example), but in this case, it was inherited and the product of a faulty gene that most probably caused a deficiency in an enzyme called cytochrome-b5 methemoglobin reductase.

Fortunately for the Fugates and their kin, there are no physical health problems associated with their blue skin. In fact, most survived well into their eighties and nineties.

That isn't to say it wasn't a deep source of shame and psychological trauma. The family were embarrassed and discriminated against by their local community because of their skin color. This caused them to seek greater social isolation, which somewhat ironically, exacerbated the problem. This is because methemoglobinemia is, in almost all cases, a product of inbreeding. [...]

After a few medical tests to make sure it wasn't heart disease, the doctor and the nurse created a family tree. He suspected methemoglobinemia but couldn't be sure what was causing it. There were several suspects, including abnormal hemoglobin formation and excessive vitamin K consumption, but blood tests eventually revealed the true culprit: The blue Fugates lacked the enzyme diaphorase.   

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Al Jazeera: Alexey Navalny: Putin's sole political nemesis

The demonstrations, which came just days after some 10,000 people attended a major rally in Moscow against the banning of popular messaging app Telegram, were held under the banner "He's Not Our Tsar!" in 90 cities across the country. [...]

A lawyer by profession, Navalny entered politics through the liberal opposition party Yabloko, of which he became a member in 2000. He climbed to the ranks of the party eventually becoming a deputy head of its Moscow branch only to be forced to resign in 2007 over his dealings with ultranationalists.

Navalny has not only attended the far-right "Russian march" and engaged with its organisers, but has also made a number of racist statements, including calling Georgians "rodents" during Russia's war with Georgia in 2008 and comparingmigrants to "insects". He also was the cofounder of a short-lived nationalist movement aimed at fighting for democracy and the rights of ethnic Russians. [...]

"During the [2012] Bolotnaya protests, Navalny was one of the leaders of the Russian opposition, along with Boris Nemtsov, Garry Kasparov, Mikhail Kasyanov, etc," says Kashin. "Then, it was like the nursery rhyme in Agatha Christie's novel 'And then there were none' - one by one, [these leaders] either got killed, left the country or just decided to retire from active work."  [...]

His campaign has maintained vast and sophisticated social media presence, which has emerged as an alternative source of information and criticism of the regime. It has been producing live and recorded high-quality content for YouTube and actively engaging with supporters on all major social media networks.

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