Aeon: Return of the city-state

This is an enormous pain for the nation-state in all sorts of ways. It’s now possible for the British National Health Service to be targeted by ransomware launched in North Korea, and there are few ways to stop it or bring perpetrators to justice. App technology such as Uber and Deliveroo has helped to produce a sudden surge in the gig economy, which is reckoned to cost the government £3.5 billion a year by 2020-1. There are already millions of people using bitcoin and blockchain technologies, explicitly designed to wrestle control of the money supply from central banks and governments, and their number will continue to grow. It’s also infusing us with new values, ones that are not always national in nature: a growing number of people see themselves as ‘global’ citizens. [...]

Trump’s tweet was set against the German chancellor Angela Merkel’s offer, one year earlier, of asylum for Syrians. The subsequent movement of people across Europe – EU member states received 1.2 million first-time asylum applications in 2015 – sparked a political and humanitarian crisis, the ramifications of which are still unfolding. It certainly contributed to the United Kingdom’s decision to leave the EU. But 1.2 million people is a trickle compared to what’s coming. Exact numbers are hard to come by, and notoriously broad, but according to some estimates as many as 200 million people could be climate-change refugees by the middle of the century. If the EU struggles to control its borders when 1.2 million people move, what would happen if 200 million do? The lesson of history – real, long-lens human history – is that people move, and when they do, it’s hard to stop.  

This is the crux of the problem: nation-states rely on control. If they can’t control information, crime, businesses, borders or the money supply, then they will cease to deliver what citizens demand of them. In the end, nation-states are nothing but agreed-upon myths: we give up certain freedoms in order to secure others. But if that transaction no longer works, and we stop agreeing on the myth, it ceases to have power over us. [...]

According to Katz, the world is moving beyond a nation-state world. ‘We’re entering a period where cities have new kinds of power. They have enormous chances to leverage their economic and financial advantages to augment their position and effect change,’ he told me. I’m used to thinking about power in binary terms: you either have it or you don’t. But according to Katz, we need to re-think because there is something in between, where cities are not fully independent of their nation-states, but not supplicant to them either: ‘Cities are not subordinate to nation-states, they are powerful networks of institutions and actors that co-produce the economy. Power in the 21st century belongs to the problem-solvers. National governments debate and mostly dither. Cities act, cities do. Power increasingly comes from the cities up, not handed down from the nation-state.’[...]

Nation-states are unlikely to collapse overnight. There are no barbarians at the gate. Even Rome did not collapse in a day. But it evolved during a time of industrialisation, centralised ‘command and control’ bureaucracies and national loyalty. Modern technology tends in the opposite direction: it’s distributed, decentralised and uncontrollable. If our political arrangements are a mirror of the modes of production and assumptions of the time, the future doesn’t look rosy for this 19th-century relic. It looks far brighter for the modern, connected, agile city, whether that’s on land, on borders, or out in the ocean. And anyway: doesn’t it pay to have some experiments going on, just in case?

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The Atlantic: America Alone?

There are a number of ways to interpret Trump’s response. It may signal his preference to upend global alliances because of his feelings about Trudeau. Trump has also never cared much for multilateral forums like the G7, where he is one among several world leaders trying to achieve a compromise. He prefers the go-it-alone style of negotiation, of the sort he is engaged in with North Korea, for which, if it’s successful, he will get sole credit. This could explain part of his preference for bilateral trade agreements—which few nations in the world are keen on—over multilateral ones with large trading blocs. Trump is also trying to infuse some unpredictability into the atmosphere ahead of his summit meeting Tuesday with Kim Jong Un, the North Korean leader. The American president honed his skills in the world of New York real estate. Perhaps he thinks it’s better to go into a meeting with Kim—until recently, viewed as the world’s most unpredictable leader—after making it clear that he won’t think twice about abandoning his own closest allies, even after committing to a communique with them. This has been referred to as the so-called “madman theory.”

But for each of those explanations, there is a counter-explanation. Consider the rationale for Trump’s response to Trudeau’s news conference. Macron’s office issued a statement that said “international cooperation can not be dictated by fits of anger and throwaway remarks.” In other words, this wasn’t merely a difference of opinion over policy. It was personal. When you factor in Trump’s preference to go it alone, the issue becomes even more complicated. U.S. allies, as I have written, have little choice but to go along with Trump’s seemingly erratic behavior. They have no other allies. Trump has made his own preferences clear, praising China’s Xi Jinping and Russia’s Vladimir Putin while bizarrely seeking Russia’s inclusion in the G7, a grouping from which it was suspended following its invasion in 2014 of Ukraine’s Crimea. [...]

Trump’s view of U.S. alliances has been consistent from the start. U.K. Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson’s charitable notion that there is a “method to [Trump’s] … madness” appears to be marked by a clear absence of a method. Trump views America’s allies as freeloaders who have relied excessively on the United States for decades while treating it unfairly. While there may be something to this, with the U.S.-created global order under major strain and U.S.-Canada relations at perhaps their lowest point in modern times, Trump’s reaction to Trudeau undermines the idea that alliances are forged between democratic nations, not their leaders.

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Jacobin Magazine: The Catastrophe of the Rohingya

In March, the US Holocaust Museum joined several organizations that have taken back humanitarian recognition from Suu Kyi: it revoked its prestigious Elie Wiesel award, stating, “We had hoped that you — as someone we and many others have celebrated for your commitment to human dignity and universal human rights — would have done something to condemn and stop the military’s brutal campaign and to express solidarity with the targeted Rohingya population.” [...]

The UN Secretary General’s Special Envoy on sexual violence Primila Patten of Mauritius has also gone public with her exasperation over Suu Kyi’s refusal to engage substantively on the issue of Burmese military’s systematic sexual violence against literally thousands of Rohingya women and girls – many of whom did not make it to Cox Bazaar’s [in Bangladesh] camps. Suu Kyi should know that inactivity in the face of genocidal actions can carry moral and legal responsibility.” [...]

There are two main reasons behind the genocide: racism and greed. Militant Buddhist groups such as the Rakhine Nationalities Development Party voice the dominant anti-Rohingya sentiment. One of its leaders, U Shwe Mg asserts: “the so-called Rohingya are just illegal immigrants. We allowed them to settle down here because we are generous people and we thought they would just stay a while. But the Bengali had a lot of children, paid Buddhist women to convert to Islam and marry them, stole our land, squeezed our resources, and now they demand equal rights and citizenship. It can’t be.” [...]

Amnesty International has called the system the Rohingya live under “apartheid”: “This system appears designed to make Rohingyas’ lives as hopeless and humiliating as possible.  The security forces’ brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing … is just another manifestation of this appalling attitude.”   [...]

To give a sense of the immensity of this human-made horror, Shirin Ebadi asserted that refugee camps in Syria and Palestine are like “five-star hotels” compared to the refugee sites in Bangladesh.  The present conditions are bad enough, with the monsoon season is fast approaching, disease, hunger, and death will rise exponentially very soon.

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Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell: 3 Arguments Why Marijuana Should Stay Illegal Reviewed

Aeon: What happens when refugees start to outnumber residents on a small tourist island

The Greek island of Kastellorizo is normally a sleepy tourist destination, with its population of just a few hundred mostly isolated from the events of the outside world. But life on the picturesque island shifted dramatically with the outbreak of the Syrian war in 2011 and the ensuing refugee crisis. Located just a mile off the south coast of Turkey, for a while Kastellorizo became an impromptu waypoint for Syrian refugees arriving on smugglers’ boats, seeking asylum elsewhere in Europe. With limited resources to accommodate the enormous influx of people, the residents received them in varying ways: some did everything they could to help; others lashed out in anger; most landed somewhere in the middle, struggling to provide aid without upending their own lives. Intertwining the perspectives of several Syrian refugees and Kastellorizo residents, Alexandra Liveris’s documentary humanises the bitter realities of the ongoing migrant crisis, in which both displaced people and those receiving them are pushed to their limits.

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The Guardian: Is marriage really on the decline because of men's cheap access to sex?

“Marriage is not in decline, it is in delay,” says historian Stephanie Coontz, author of Marriage, a History and director of research and public education at the Council on Contemporary Families. [...]

Coontz explains what I already know to be anecdotally true, having graduated college in 2008, the year the economy collapsed: both women and men want to be economically and educationally set before they marry – an ambition increasingly harder for a generational cohort facing crippling debt, poor healthcare and an economy where stable career ladders have been replaced by part-time freelance gigs.

Watching half of our parents’ generation get divorced was probably not the biggest advertisement for marriage either. But dragging our feet may end up helping us on that front too. If you care about the quality of the marriage you enter into, putting marriage off is good thinking: marrying young heightens the probability of divorce, and the longer people know each other before tying the knot the more likely they are to stay together.

The one group where marriage appears to be in actual decline, rather than delay, is adults who are at the very bottom of the socio-economic hierarchy.  [...]

Caroline Rusterholz, a historian of sexuality at Birkbeck College, University of London, says that the idea of harmonious sex within marriage began in the 1930s – enabled by the publication of pamphlets and the first opening of family clinics, among other factors – but ideas about sex were taught in ways in line with gender expectations of the time.  

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The Economist: The calculations of Muhammad bin Salman

Prince Muhammad has loosened the kingdom’s social restrictions. The decades-old ban on female drivers will be lifted on June 24th. But when citizens demand new rights, instead of waiting patiently to be granted them by royal decree, they are often locked up. The effect has been stifling. Before talking politics over the phone, Saudis take precautions, such as using virtual private networks and encrypted dialling services. Many have purged their Twitter accounts or closed them. “Sorry. I’m not ready to talk,” writes a once-verbose activist. They are all terrified, says a diplomat.

Prince Muhammad sees no contradiction in all this. His social contract apes that of the United Arab Emirates, which grants subjects social freedoms provided they forgo political ones. In less than a year as crown prince, he has taken direct control of media outlets and big businesses, or appointed his men to their boards. Once-powerful clerics and princely challengers have been squashed. Gone is talk of holding elections for the Shura council, a royally appointed proto-parliament. [...]

Western firms, skilled in secret psychological operations, have been hired to help shape public opinion. They include SCL Group, the parent company of Cambridge Analytica, the political-data firm that claims to have helped President Donald Trump win election. Before Prince Muhammad’s economic- and social-reform drive, SCL Group, a British firm, conducted dozens of focus groups with ordinary Saudis and found evidence of widespread discontent with the monarchy. It advised the regime on how to stay in power.

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IFLScience: Scientists Think They Have Found The Reason Some People Are Left-Handed – And It's Not What You Might Think

Research since the 1980s has found that our preference for our left or right hand is most likely determined before we are born — ultrasound screenings suggest as early as the eighth week of pregnancy. From the 13th week in the womb, babies tend to suck either their right or their left thumb.  [...]

The research — by Sebastian Ocklenburg, Judith Schmitz, and Onur Gunturkun from Ruhr University Bochum, along with other colleagues from the Netherlands and South Africa — found that gene activity in the spinal cord was asymmetrical in the womb and could be what causes a person to be left- or right-handed. [...]

Why exactly people are left-handed is still a bit of a mystery — partly because left-handed people are often excluded from scientific research, experts say — and it's hard to predict whether a child will be left or right-handed once they are born.

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Independent: Theresa May’s refusal to accept her responsibility for the Windrush scandal is shameful

If you create a hostile environment for illegal immigrants it means a presumption by officials against anyone with gaps in their documentation. It means making it hard for people who “are British”, as Ms May put it, to prove it, and it means preventing them from working or claiming benefits while they try to do so. 

Which is why we are disappointed by the prime minister’s refusal to countenance a change to the hostile environment policy in an interview with The Independent on her trip to the G7 summit in Canada. She refused three times to say it should change, arguing all that was required was it for to be carried out more carefully so people are not “mistakenly caught up”. [...]

Since the outcry over the Windrush cases, the Home Office has made the hostile environment less hostile. People whose attempts to confirm their status had been delayed and disbelieved for years suddenly found themselves issued with papers after short interviews – something a reasonable bureaucracy would have been capable of doing all along. 

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