DW Documentary: Italy's populists reach for power - Five Stars for Rome (May 27, 2018)

The Five Star Movement celebrated an historic victory in the Italian parliamentary elections. Luigi di Maio has been under consideration for prime minister. But what does the movement stand for?

The Five Star movement defines itself as grassroots and post-ideological. Its program of environmentalism, criticism of Italian refugee policy and the promise of financial aid for the socially disadvantaged appeals to both right and left-wing voters. A camera team accompanied the populist "anti-system party" on the campaign trail. Its core voters are in southern Italy, where unemployment is high and average incomes are low. Salvatore Micillo, who won 58 per cent of the votes cast in his constituency north of Naples, says, "Populism means addressing the people, and that's not bad: it's more about providing answers. The promise of a basic income of € 780 is intended to signal our intention of looking after our citizens. It doesn’t mean letting them stay at home, it means that the state will take you under its wing, protect you, give you work and trys to train you.” The candidates themselves project an image of modesty. "The ultimate goal of politics is not to do extraordinary things, but to prevent crap from happening," proclaims Party founder Beppe Grillo. But is the "MoVimento 5 Stelle" really ready for the responsibilities of government?

The New York Review of Books: Modi’s Full Court Press in India

The rule of law in India has been imperiled ever since the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) took power in 2014. Some threats, such as vigilantism by Hindu extremists, have been largely ignored by the state. Others, like the intimidation of journalists, have often featured Internet trolls encouraged by BJP leaders. The most troubling instances have come directly from the government: when it has used investigative agencies to prosecute political opponents—which, in the case of the Indian state of Bihar, enabled the BJP to join the ruling coalition—or when it has elevated people accused of violent crimes to the top rungs of leadership, such as the Uttar Pradesh chief minister, Yogi Adityanath. Yet recent events in the Supreme Court suggest something even graver is afoot—that the basic structure of India’s democracy may be shakier than it had seemed.  [...]

More than once has the Supreme Court been called upon to preserve liberal democracy in India. In 1973, the court ruled against attempts by the government of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi to circumvent judicial authority and curtail the basic rights of citizens, such as the right to property. This was part of what one of her ministers called an effort to remake “the entire socio-economic fabric of our country [through] greater and greater State intervention.” The Gandhi government responded to its legal defeat by installing a sympathizer as chief justice, provoking other judges to resign. Two years later, when the government argued that the rights of citizens to life and liberty could be suspended, the Supreme Court agreed. Months of summary detentions, forced sterilizations, and press censorship followed, during the 1975–1977 period known as “the Emergency.” It’s unclear how Indian democracy would have survived if Gandhi had not called elections, anticipating victory—and then lost.

The behavior of the current chief justice has called into question once again the independence and credibility of the Supreme Court. In April, when opposition parties sought to impeach Misra—the first such attempt in Indian history—they listed five allegations against him, including involvement in a pay-to-play scheme, the falsification of official documents, and behind-the-scenes manipulation of sensitive cases. The outcomes of these cases have favored either Misra personally or the BJP.

read the article

The Atlantic: The Tipping Point When Minority Views Take Over

Decades of work in sociology, physics, and other disciplines have supported this idea. Small groups of people can indeed flip firmly established social conventions, as long as they reach a certain critical mass. When that happens, what was once acceptable can quickly become unacceptable, and vice versa. Two decades ago, most Americans opposed gay marriage, bans on public smoking, and the legalization of marijuana; now, these issues all enjoy majority support.  [...]

After running a creative experiment, Damon Centola from the University of Pennsylvania says that the crucial threshold is more like 25 percent. That’s the likely tipping point at which minority views can overturn majority ones. “A lot of models have been developed, but they’re often people speculating in the dark, and writing equations without any data,” Centola says. “Our results fit better with the ethnographic data. It’s really exciting to me how clearly they resonate with Kanter’s work.” [...]

He stresses that the 25 percent figure isn’t universal, and will likely vary depending on the circumstances. Indeed, the stakes in his experiment were very low. Volunteers jostled over arbitrary norms, rather than, say, politically charged beliefs. And both the established group and the incoming activists had similar amounts of power—something that’s rarely the case in real life. [...]

This isn’t necessarily an uplifting message, Centola stresses. “It’s really important to be aware of how easily populations can be co-opted by people with an agenda,” he says. Russian-linked Facebook accounts bought a significant number of ads that targeted U.S. voters during the 2016 presidential election. The voter-profiling company Cambridge Analytica used information from millions of people on Facebook to create psychographic profiles, and then used those to target ads supporting Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign and the Brexit “Leave” campaign. The Chinese government has been seeding groups of activists into online communities to subtly shift discussions towards national pride, and to distract from collective grievances. (“We’re now looking at times in which these activists became more active to see if they reached this 25 percent threshold,” Centola says.)

read the article

The Atlantic: The Price of ‘Machismo Populism’ in the Philippines

Displays of sexism are nothing new for the 73-year-old Duterte, who often flaunts his machismo. During the 2016 campaign, he was often photographed with young women sitting on his lap, and sometimes kissed them on the cheek or lips. Later, he drew repeated condemnation for his insults and misogynistic remarks: A rape joke about an Australian nun, and another joke about ordering soldiers to shoot female rebels in the vagina because “they are nothing without it,” an assurance to soldiers fighting ISIS affiliates in southern Philippines that they could rape up to three women and he would protect them. [...]

Duterte’s blatant sexism and misogyny, and the way his supporters applaud it and other Filipinos seems to tolerate or ignore it, come into direct tension with the advancements of women in Philippine society. Two women have served as president of the Philippines, an achievement that many developed nations cannot claim. (Both came into power by overthrowing a sitting male president.) A recent McKinsey Global Institute report also showed that the Philippines leads the Asia-Pacific Region on gender equality in the workplace. The country has also consistently ranked among the top 10 countries in the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap report, which recognizes gender equality in labor force participation, education, health, and political empowerment. [...]

Duterte capitalizes on this.“Duterte’s brand of machismo is familiar to many Filipinos. It is combination of a tough father who would fight until the end for his family and a drunk uncle who is usually charming but would make people uncomfortable in family reunions for his inane comments. The president's personality is both complex yet familiar, which perhaps explains why some people give him a free pass because they have given a lot of other men a free pass before,” explained the sociologist Nicole Curato.

read the article

Jacobin Magazine: It’s Not Just the Drug War

The African-American incarceration rate of about 2,300 per 100,000 people is clearly off the charts and a shocking figure. The black-white incarceration rate in the United States is about 6 to 1. Focusing so intently on these racial disparities often obscures the fact that the incarceration rates for other groups in the United States, including whites and Latinos, is also comparatively very high, just not astronomically high as in the case of blacks. [...]

Even if you released every African American from US prisons and jails today, we’d still have a mass incarceration crisis in this country. I do not mean to minimize the enormity of the problem of the carceral state for African Americans but rather to make a larger point about how we need to think about racial disparities and criminal justice in a more nuanced way and in a wider context.[...]

The lack of a consensus on what caused the alarming increase in violent crime opened up enormous space to redefine the “law-and-order” problem and its solutions. Foes of civil rights increasingly sought to associate concerns about crime with anxieties about racial disorder, the transformation of the racial status quo, and wider political turmoil, including the wave of urban unrest and riots and the huge demonstrations against the Vietnam War that gripped the country in the 1960s and 1970s.

The construction of the carceral state was deeply bipartisan from early on and not merely a case of New Democrats like Bill Clinton belatedly following in the punitive footsteps laid down decades earlier by Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon, George H. W. Bush, and other leading Republicans. [...]

As I explain in my previous book, The Prison and the Gallows: The Politics of Mass Incarceration in America, some key social movements and liberal interest groups, including the victims’ rights movement, women’s movement, prisoners’ rights movement, and the anti-death penalty movement, developed in ways that reinforced the punitive turn in penal policy.

read the article

Quartz: Everything we thought we knew about the gig economy is wrong

The share of people working in “alternative” work arrangements, an important government measure of the prevalence of “gig” work, is shrinking rather than rising, according to newly released BLS data. Alternative in this case means people who are not employed directly or regularly at the place they usually work, including independent contractors and temp workers.

The new data show that the share of Americans in gig work fell to 10.1% of the labor force last year, from 10.9% in 2005, the last time the BLS studied these work arrangements. This challenges research from renowned economists Lawrence Katz of Harvard and Alan Krueger of Princeton, who estimated in December 2016 that alternative work had jumped to 15.8% of all workers, accounting for almost all of US job creation since 2005.

Independent contract work saw the largest decline. Contractors accounted for 7.4% of all workers in 2005, but just 6.9% in 2017. The share of workers in temp jobs, on the books of contract firms, or who work on-call held steady between 2005 and 2017.

read the article

Quartz: The first 3D printed houses for rent will be built in the Netherlands this year

That’s the solution the Dutch construction company Van Wijnen and researchers from Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands came up with. The city of Eindhoven soon hopes to boast the world’s first commercially-developed 3D-printed homes, an endeavor known as Project Milestone. [...]

“The first aim of the project is to build five great houses that are comfortable to live in and will have happy occupants,” developers say. Beyond that, they hope to promote 3D concrete printing science and technology so that printed housing “will soon be a reality that is widely adopted.”

The “printer” in this case is a big robotic arm that will shape cement of a light, whipped-cream consistency, based on an architect’s design. The cement is layered for strength.  [...]

These futuristic homes, chosen for development by the Eindhoven municipality during Dutch Design Week 2016, will be part of an architectural “sculpture garden” in the green neighborhood. Eventually, the developers hope to 3D print and construct many more odd dwellings onsite in Bosrijk and beyond.

read the article

Atlas Obscura: Revisiting the Heyday of California’s ‘Crazy’ Novelty Architecture

The unusual businesses he saw weren’t on some Hollywood backlot, but were California’s classic coterie of mimetic architecture—that is, buildings shaped like, well, anything but buildings. According to Cristina Carbone, a professor of art and architectural history at Bellarmine University in Louisville, Kentucky, the practice dates back to at least the Renaissance. By the 18th century, says Carbone, who is working on a book on the style, English gardens were sprinkled with follies, such as dining pavilions masquerading as pagodas, churches, and pyramids. In America, the first known example—a six-story wooden elephant named Lucy—rose over the seaside community of Margate, New Jersey, in 1881.

When this style of vernacular architecture landed in California a few decades later, it emerged into a sea of mission-inspired structures. But soon, these roadside curiosities—built with a wink and a whole lot of plaster—were perhaps more densely clustered there than in anywhere else in the world.  [...]

As California’s open spaces were tamed by roads and cars, business owners scrambled to find ways to entice drivers to pull off the highways and reach for their wallets. Automobiles became more widely accessible after World War I, and “the middle class was able to get out, and that had never happened before,” Carbone says. Mimetic buildings were, for a time, a useful tactic—both functional architecture and large, loud advertisement. “If Californians were going to be fully committed to this ‘automania,’” Gebhard writes, “then why not cultivate a set of architectural images which would instantly catch the eye, and which we would continue to remember?” These buildings were “not necessarily near anything terrifically important,” Carbone says, but they could draw the attention of drivers just passing through.

read the article and see the phots

CityLab: This Circular Bridge Actually Has a Point

A new bridge spanning (or circumnavigating) Laguna Garzón, a coastal lagoon in southeastern Uruguay, poses just that question. It’s a circular bridge, or rather two joined semicircular bridges, that crosses the lagoon, which runs along the border of the states of Maldonado and Rocha. At a glance, it’s the sort of ridiculousness that you might expect of a bridge in London.  [...]

Uruguay’s bridge also smacks of iconic-architecture-posing-as-infrastructure. The circular bridge only cost $11 million, and Constantini, the Argentinian developer, picked up about $10 million of that price. That’s the point, according to the Architect’s Newspaper: Constantini owns property in Rocha, where development has been considerably slower than in Maldonado.  

Viñoly’s bridge ought to do the trick. But to his credit, the excesses of this pretty bridge serve a larger aim. Just like a roundabout, it will slow down drivers heading over the environmentally sensitive lagoon, while providing new pavilions and views for pedestrians and adding to the simple beauty of the land.

read the article and see the photos