Quartzy: Trump is what happens when postmodernism goes too far, Michiko Kakutani argues

It’s safe to say that Trump has never plowed through the works of Derrida, Baudrillard, or Lyotard (if he’s even heard of them), and postmodernists are hardly to blame for all the free-floating nihilism abroad in the land. But some dumbed-down corollaries of their thinking have seeped into popular culture and been hijacked by the president’s defenders, who want to use its relativistic arguments to excuse his lies, and by right-wingers who want to question evolution or deny the reality of climate change or promote alternative facts. [...]

This viewpoint that “all truths are partial (and a function of one’s perspective),” says Kakutani, is how creationists conclude that schools should “teach both”: their view, intelligent design, alongside the one supported by the scientific method, evolution. And how Donald Trump was able to say there were “some very fine people on both sides” at the alt-right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia last year.

“[Deconstruction] promulgated an extreme relativism that was ultimately nihilistic in its implications: anything could mean anything; an author’s intent did not matter, could not in fact be discerned; there was no such thing as an obvious or common-sense reading, because everything had an infinitude of meanings,” writes Kakutani. “In short there was no such thing as truth.”

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The Washington Post: Toronto medical official calls for decriminalizing drugs as opioid overdoses skyrocket in Canada

In a report released Monday, Eileen de Villa, Toronto’s chief medical officer, urged the city’s board of health to pressure the federal government to eliminate legal penalties for the possession of drugs and to scale up “prevention, harm reduction and treatment services.”

The report also recommended assembling a task force “to explore options for the legal regulation of all drugs in Canada,” which she hopes would destroy an illegal drug market contaminated with fentanyl — a synthetic opioid 100 times more potent than morphine — and other drugs like it.

“When we criminalize people who take drugs, we inadvertently contribute to the overdose emergency,” de Villa said. “It pushes people into unsafe drug use practices and creates barriers for people to seek help.” [...]

In response, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government has embraced a number of “harm reduction” measures, including supervised injection sites, prescription heroin programs for those with severe addictions and even vending machines that dispense prescription opioids. [...]

Canada’s New Democratic Party this year became the first major political party to endorse decriminalization. And at a Liberal Party convention in April, backbenchers and members of the party’s grass roots voted to make decriminalization a top policy priority during the 2019 federal election campaign. (Those votes are nonbinding.)

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The Guardian: Brexit Britain is out of options. Our humiliation is painful to watch

We have been vindicated on every point. The Trump visit ought to be a moment of national awakening. Instead, it has been a national humiliation. A government and an opposition with an ounce of self-respect would have responded to Trump’s ultimatum that he would not allow a trade deal unless we delivered the Brexit he wanted by reassessing our decision to leave the EU. A Conservative party that still respected itself and the country would have revolted at the impertinence of the leader of an increasingly hostile foreign power telling them to see Boris Johnson as “a great prime minister”.

Instead, Theresa May’s government allowed the special relationship to become an abusive relationship. Like a battered wife lying to the police, it pretended that Trump had not insulted May and that a trade deal would go ahead and then waited for a pathological liar to lie that he had never said what he had said, on the record and on tape.   [...]

A second defeat is worth noting. To its proponents, Brexit was never meant to threaten Britain’s security. By last week, it was clear that Trump’s America, on which the Tory right has gambled our futures, is a clear and present danger to Nato. With a wonderful serendipity, as Trump was meeting the Queen, the US Department of Justice indicted 12 alleged Russian spies for helping Trump to power. We already know that Russia wanted Trump because he was against Nato and because, in all his foul harangues, has never once uttered a bad word about Putin.

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The Observer view on how Trump’s scorn has laid Britain’s isolation bare

Britain’s response to this global uncertainty beggars belief. On the one hand, we are turning our backs on the European Union, trying and failing to figure out how to disentangle ourselves from the world’s most successful – even if imperfect – diplomatic and trade alliance. On the other, we are putting ever greater store in the “special relationship” with the US, just at the very moment Trump is undermining multilateralism and co-operation in the west. [...]

Second, Trump’s values fundamentally clash with those of modern Britain. Attitudes to immigration in Britain have become more, not less, positive in recent years; where issues about immigration exist, they are driven mainly by pragmatic concerns. The proportion of people whose hostility to immigration is driven by opposition to other ethnicities or religions shrank from 13% in 2011 to 5% today. The president, on the other hand, was comfortable using his visit to sound his anti-immigration dog whistles and to continue his hateful attacks on Sadiq Khan, London’s Muslim mayor. On Thursday, it emerged that one of Trump’s envoys complained to the British ambassador to the United States about the imprisonment of Tommy Robinson, founder of the English Defence League, for disrupting a British trial. [...]

But there is one big difference: while the global might of the US imbues Trump with the power to act unilaterally, the Jacob Rees-Moggs of this world have an utterly inflated view of Britain’s place in the world that harks back to Britain as a 19th-century colonial power. They want us to leave a trading bloc, whose rules and regulations we have had a powerful role in shaping, in order to become a rule-taker through free trade deals with economies much bigger than ours. The US would undoubtedly dictate the terms of a trade deal with Britain – a race to the bottom on regulatory standards.

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Quartz: Europe keeps setting clean-energy records

The UK’s electrical grid has not burned any coal for about 1,000 hours so far this year. Though it’s just a symbolic achievement, the pace at which the UK is reaching such figures shows the pace of the energy transition. In 2016 and 2017, the comparable figures for the full year stood at 210 hours and 624 hours, respectively.

There are two reasons for the shift: a carbon tax on coal has made cleaner natural gas more attractive, and subsidies for solar and wind power have ensured wider deployment of new clean-energy technologies [...]

But as the costs of renewable energy have come down, change is finally showing. In 2018 so far, coal generated about 35.1% of the country’s electricity. In comparison, renewable sources, such as solar, wind, and biomass, generated about 36.5%. At the half-year mark, it’s the first time in Germany’s history that renewables sources have generated more electricity than coal.

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