Spiegel: Germany's Anti-Trump Strategy Begins to Take Shape

But the guest from Germany brought more with him in his suitcase than just friendly words. In Tokyo, Maas presented the Japanese leader with his idea for a new alliance between states. It could fill the geopolitical vacuum created by Trump. In the coming months, a network of globally oriented states is to be created that closely coordinates its foreign, trade and climate policies. "We need an alliance of the multilateralists," says Maas -- which is to say, an alliance that stands for the global rules and structures of the postwar order that Trump rejects. "It's better to bend than break" would be the wrong maxim in these times," Maas argues. [...]

The strategy won't likely be fully formed until the end of the year, but the allies have already been determined. In addition to Japan, they are likely to also include South Korea, which Maas will also be visiting this week. Both countries would like to sign wide-ranging free trade agreements with the EU.

Maas is also considering South Africa, Australia and Argentina as strategic partners, as well as, of course, the U.S.'s two neighbors, Mexico and Canada. In late August, Canada's Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland is expected to be a guest at the German Foreign Ministry's Ambassadors Conference in Berlin. [...]

Maas plans to float the first trial balloon during the General Assembly of the United Nations in late September. Together with India, Brazil and Japan, the German foreign minister is planning a proposal for a reform of the Security Council. Germany will serve on the Security Council for two years starting in 2019. If Berlin is assigned to chair the council, that would be the point at which the new alliance would appear together for the first time. Maas wants to define the new seat as "European," in "radical alliance" with France.

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Slate: What Is the F--kboy? (AUG. 18 2015 8:29 AM)

A good insult requires no elaboration. We feel it before we understand it. That’s why some slurs resonate even when we’re not sure who or what they’re defaming. Consider the strange case of fuckboy, which plays a central role in Nancy Jo Sales’ controversial article, “Tinder and the Dawn of the ‘Dating Apocalypse,’ ” in this month’s Vanity Fair. Here are two true statements about the word: Everyone knows what fuckboy means. And no one knows what fuckboy means. [...]

This array of meanings is almost certainly a consequence of the complicated uptake and appropriation of fuckboy. Sales nods to the term’s history—“The word has been around for at least a decade with different meanings”—though she fails to explore that history at all. In our conversation, Massey claimed that fuckboy had entered her social world sometime in the past year, but acknowledged that it had a fuzzier past. “I was told that we stole it from gay men,” she told me. “I don’t actually know.” [...]

It’s not uncommon to locate the origins of fuckboy in prison slang, where, according to some accounts, it refers to “men who are ‘gay for pay.’ ” Other sources directly connect the term to prison rape, or suggest that it operates in the space where those two meanings overlap. The word has also been associated with gay male culture—though there too it takes on a variety of specific connotations. I’ve heard it used to refer to men who take a submissive role in sex. But one acquaintance told me that, “to gay men like me it means a rich and powerful man’s kept boy.” [...]

As the Huffington Post’s Sara Boboltz notes, fuckboy has appeared “in a growing number of rap and hip-hop songs” in the decade since Cam’ron first employed it. Unsurprisingly, listeners started noticing the word before journalists did. A 2009 thread in the Hypebeast forums finds users wondering over the word’s derivation while others mock them for arriving late to the party. Significantly, the commenters evince little agreement about fuckboy’s significance or etymology. They propose a variety of possible meanings, all ugly but widely divergent in the specific onus of their ugliness, except insofar as they tend toward a homophobic register.

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Vox: It’s much safer to back into parking spaces. Why don’t we do it?

Incidentally, the photograph shows cars parked closest to campus being more likely to have backed in. This is a consistent day-to-day trend and suggests that early arrivers are go-getters and more willing to do a little work at the outset so as to have a smooth and clear exit. The go-getter idea is consistent with the thesis of the only academic study of this topic that has ever been undertaken. [...]

“Needless to say, back-in parking takes more time and effort than head-in parking. Yet, it is easier, quicker, and safer when exiting. Thus we may conjecture that people take the trouble to back in demonstrate the ability to delay gratification; they want to invest more time and effort now so they can enjoy the fruits of their labor later. They demonstrate a culture of long-term orientation.” [...]

“Americans are not taught to back into stalls either during instruction or by observation of the habits of other drivers. This results in the average American not being comfortable backing into a parking stall.… Europeans are more often challenged to get cars into and out of tight spaces and learn to back cars into parking spaces at an early age.” [...]

Still, there is a difference between men and women — and more generally, within the overall population — on the skills that go into parking, especially parking while backing up. The most important such skill is what psychologists “mental rotation,” or the ability to imagine objects in other than their actual position. (You can test your own mental rotation skills here.) For reasons that are still widely debated, men are on the whole better mental rotators than women.

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The Atlantic: The Scientific Case for Two Spaces After a Period

“Increased spacing has been shown to help facilitate processing in a number of other reading studies,” Johnson explained to me by email, using two spaces after each period. “Removing the spaces between words altogether drastically hurts our ability to read fluently, and increasing the amount of space between words helps us process the text.”

In the Skidmore study, among people who write with two spaces after periods—“two-spacers”—there was an increase in reading speed of 3 percent when reading text with two spaces following periods, as compared to one. This is, Johnson points out, an average of nine additional words per minute above their performance “under the one-space conditions.” [...]

Others were less ecstatic. Robert VerBruggen, the deputy managing editor at National Review, shared the study with the comment: “New facts forced me to change my mind about drug legalization but I just don’t think I can do this.” [...]

Such an argument is extremely difficult to make when it comes to sentence spacing, because the evidence is not there for either case. The fact that the scientifically optimal number of spaces hasn’t been well studied was odd to Johnson, given the strength of people’s feelings on the subject. The new American Psychological Association style guidelines came out recently, and they had changed from one space to two spaces following periods because they claimed it “increased the readability of the text.” This galled Johnson: “Here we had a manual written to teach us how to write scientifically that was making claims that were not backed with empirical evidence!”

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The New Yorker: Can Imran Khan Really Reform Pakistan?

Khan’s tiny political party, Tehreek-e-Insaf, or P.T.I., expanded rapidly, and it surged in national and provincial elections, ultimately leading a provincial government for a number of years, to mixed reviews. But Khan fell short of winning a high national office and, in recent years, he has largely played a role of opposition agitator and provocateur. Now he appears to be within close reach of his ambition to serve as the Prime Minister. According to results in Pakistan’s general election, held on Wednesday, the P.T.I. won the most seats, by far, in Parliament, although not an absolute majority. The expectation is that Khan will be able to negotiate a majority coalition by attracting support from smaller parties and independent members of parliament. [...]

There can also be little doubt that the office of Prime Minister of Pakistan will remain the country’s second most powerful position, after the Chief of Army Staff, currently held by General Qamar Javed Bajwa. Bajwa and his senior generals exercise authority well beyond their constitutional role, influencing the media, politics, and the judiciary. Their power has only consolidated in recent years, as evidenced in military-sanctioned crackdowns on media outlets critical of the “establishment” (as the military is euphemistically known in Pakistan), human-rights activists, and other sections of civil society. However, for more than a decade, the Army has found it preferable to rule Pakistan indirectly, focussing on national security and foreign policy, and leaving the messy and intractable problems of poverty, energy deficits, and development to the Prime Minister and the Cabinet. Imran Khan is only the latest in a series of junior partners whom the Army will expect to concentrate on the economy and other domestic matters but tread lightly on foreign affairs. [...]

Khan’s attitude toward the Taliban has shifted over the years, but his current outlook seems aligned with the Army’s. That is, where Taliban factions leave Pakistan alone and seek to be accommodated in Afghan politics, he is sympathetic to, or at least tolerant of, the movement’s legitimacy. (Since the Afghan Taliban emerged, in 1994, the Pakistan Army and its principal intelligence service, Inter-Services Intelligence, or I.S.I., has sought to use the movement as a source of influence in Afghanistan, and as a check on India’s ambitions in the country.) Khan also describes Pakistan as a victim of the American-led war in Afghanistan. He has denounced U.S. drone strikes inside Pakistan and rejected the premises of U.S. counterterrorism policy in the region. “I never thought the Taliban were a threat to Pakistan,” he told me in 2012, when I interviewed him for a Profile in The New Yorker. Still, it has always been hard to think of Khan as anti-Western, in the sense that he was educated in Pakistan’s finest British-inspired prep school, attended Oxford University, married a British woman (the first of three wives), and thrived as one of the first English-speaking global athletic superstars of the satellite-TV age. His Westernness has always been a part of his identity, and even of his political appeal inside Pakistan. [...]

If Khan does become the Prime Minister, he will inherit an economy in crisis, with debts rising and foreign reserves shrinking, likely presaging yet another painful round of bailout negotiations with the International Monetary Fund. The economy is growing, with the gross domestic product forecast to rise nearly six per cent this year, but corruption, persistent terrorist violence, and decades of bad government have saddled the country with an almost bottomless list of structural problems, such as illiteracy, sectarianism, and public-health crises. It’s no wonder that the Army does not wish to run Pakistan directly these days. Better to let ambitious civilian politicians like Khan take on the intractable problems, while the generals take care of themselves offstage. If Khan actually changes Pakistan in the ways that he has promised, it will be a greater miracle than any of those he achieved on the cricket pitch.

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Social Europe: Why Such Disparity Between Unemployment Rates In Europe?

But the statistics do not explain why some countries have much higher rates of joblessness than others with Greece posting nearly ten times the rate of unemployment as the Czech Republic and Spain, the same size as Poland, having nearly five times as many out of work as the EU’s most easterly member state.

One of the most curious aspects is how well the former communist countries have done in getting unemployment down to very low levels. The transition to a market economy has been rough but with Czechia, Hungary and Poland all posting unemployment rates below that of Britain, where commentators boast endlessly of the UK’s high levels of job creation, it would seem that former communist economies have adapted well. [...]

There seems no correlation either with the colour of the government. Spain was ruled by socialists until 2012 and has just booted out the centre-right PP government but unemployent remains stubbornly high. Greece switched from a conservative New Democracy team in 2015 to Europe’s most left government – at least in terms of the rhetoric of Yanis Varoufakis – but has been unable to tackle unemployment seriously (It was 22.1 per cent a year ago). [...]

Nor is it possible to read across trade union density with unemployment. France has the lowest number of workers paying membership dues to trade unions – eight per cent of the workforce – but twice the level of unemployment as Hungary and Poland where unions organise 12 per cent of the workforce according to European Trade Union Institute figures.

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Social Europe: Turkey’s New Regime And Its Neoliberal Foundations

A very important turning point for Turkey came with the June 24, 2018 elections. These brought a complete change in the Turkish political system. Turkey had gone through a referendum on April 16, 2017 to change its parliamentary system into a ‘superpresidential’ system, which resulted in a small majority (51.4/48.6%) in favour of the change. Later, the government called for early elections in June 2018 to put these constitutional changes into effect. Erdoğan again prevailed over his rivals and officially changed the Turkish regime into a despotic one-man rule. There may be some people who see this regression in Turkey as due to the Republic’s persistent democratic deficiencies since its inception, or this can be seen as simply an ordinary example of eastern despotism. However, I’d argue that the Turkish case should be examined rather in the context of the global rise of right-wing populism which is itself a consequence of failing neoliberal globalisation.

Neoliberal economic governance and the right-wing populist and the authoritarian currents it has generated are posing serious threats to democracies all around the world. Although this regressive trend was already in place, it intensified after the 2007-2008 global financial crisis. The countries with weak institutions and immature democracies, like Turkey, have been most severely affected by it. The origins of this trend should be sought in the late 1970s and early 1980s when the neoliberal form of capitalism began to emerge and destroy the balance established between the state and the market after the Second World War. [...]

After its 2001 economic crisis, Turkey implemented deeper neoliberal reforms which subsequently brought AKP to power. Since 2002, Turkey has been governed by AKP’s neoliberal regime which has acquired hegemonic characteristics. Although the party brought an end to the military’s tutelage in politics, Turkey radically shifted away from democracy over time. The society was already depoliticised and the organised sections of civil society were effectively neutralized, so it was not difficult for AKP to construct an authoritarian regime. In fact, with the accumulated negative effects of the neoliberal policies, Turkey was already a fertile ground for authoritarian populism. Therefore, AKP and Erdoğan should be seen both as products and promoters of neoliberalism.

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The New Yorker: The 1968 Book That Tried to Predict the World of 2018

Much of “Toward the Year 2018” might as well be science fiction today. With fourteen contributors, ranging from the weapons theorist Herman Kahn to the I.B.M. automation director Charles DeCarlo, penning essays on everything from “Space” to “Behavioral Technologies,” it’s not hard to find wild misses. The Stanford wonk Charles Scarlott predicts, exactly incorrectly, that nuclear breeder reactors will move to the fore of U.S. energy production while natural gas fades. (He concedes that natural gas might make a comeback—through atom-bomb-powered fracking.) The M.I.T. professor Ithiel de Sola Pool foresees an era of outright control of economies by nations—“They will select their levels of employment, of industrialization, of increase in GNP”—and then, for good measure, predicts “a massive loosening of inhibitions on all human impulses save that toward violence.” From the influential meteorologist Thomas F. Malone, we get the intriguing forecast of “the suppression of lightning”—most likely, he figures, “by the late 1980s.”

But for every amusingly wrong prediction, there’s one unnervingly close to the mark. It’s the same Thomas Malone who, amid predictions of weaponized hurricanes, wonders aloud whether “large-scale climate modification will be effected inadvertently” from rising levels of carbon dioxide. Such global warming, he predicts, might require the creation of an international climate body with “policing powers”—an undertaking, he adds, heartbreakingly, that should be “as nonpolitical as possible.” Gordon F. MacDonald, a fellow early advocate on climate change, writes a chapter on space that largely shrugs at manned interplanetary travel—a near-heresy in 1968—by cannily observing that while the Apollo missions would soon exhaust their political usefulness, weather and communications satellites would not. “A global communication system . . . would permit the use of giant computer complexes,” he adds, noting the revolutionary potential of a data bank that “could be queried at any time.”

What “Toward the Year 2018” gets most consistently right is the integration of computing into daily life. Massive information networks of fibre optics and satellite communication, accessed through portable devices in a “universality of telephony”—and an upheaval in privacy? It’s all in there. The Bell Labs director John R. Pierce, in a few masterful strokes, extrapolates the advent of Touch-Tone to text and picture transmission, and editing the results online—“This will even extend to justification and pagination in the preparation of documents of a quality comparable to today’s letterpress.” And it’s Ithiel de Sola Pool—he of the free love and controlled economies—who wonders, five decades before alarms were raised over Equifax, Facebook, and Google, how personal information will be “computer-stored and fantastically manipulative” in both senses of the word: “By 2018 a researcher sitting at his console will be able to compile a cross-tabulation of consumer purchases (from store records) by people of low IQ (from school records) who have an unemployed member of the family (from social security records),” Pool predicts. “That is, he will have the technological capacity to do so. Will he have the legal right?”

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Vox: One chart that shows how much worse income inequality is in America than Europe

From 1980 to 2016, the poorest half of the US population has seen its share of income steadily decline, and the top 1 percent have grabbed more.

In Europe, the same trend can’t be observed. In 1980, the top 1 percent’s share of income was about 10 percent in both Western Europe and the US, but since then, the two have severely diverged. In 2016, the top 1 percent in Western Europe had about a 12-percent share of income, compared to 20 percent in the United States. And in the US, the bottom 50 percent’s income share fell from more than 20 percent in 1980 to 13 percent in 2016. [...]

According to estimates from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the top fifth of earners get 70 percent of the bill’s benefits, and the top 1 percent get 34 percent. The new tax treatment for “pass-through” entities — companies organized as sole proprietorships, partnerships, LLCs, or S corporations — will mean an estimated $17 billion in tax savings for millionaires in 2018. American corporations are showering their shareholders with stock buybacks, thanks in part to their tax savings, and have returned nearly $700 billion to investors this year.

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