The Atlantic: Italy’s Voters Aren’t Anti-Immigration—But Their Government Is

It’s hard to map out, let alone quantify, the political impulses in Italy today, but a new study complicates the narrative that the right-wing government was brought to power on a wave of anti-immigration sentiment. Instead, the study finds Italian voters are generally sympathetic to asylum seekers but have wound up with a government that’s not. Conducted by More in Common, a nonprofit initiative aimed at combating authoritarianism and xenophobia, and the polling firm Ipsos MORI, and based on a sample of 2,000 people, the study found that more than 70 percent of Italians believe in granting asylum to some immigrants. In one telling result, when asked if Italy should start sending the people-smugglers’ boats back across the Mediterranean, even at the cost of some people’s lives, only 15 percent of those polled said they agreed with the idea. That figure rose to 46 percent for League voters, but was at 17 percent for Five Star Movement voters, underscoring an incoherence in the coalition that won’t easily be resolved. (In a dramatic example in June, Salvini barred Italian ports from receiving a ship operated by an NGO carrying more than 600 immigrants who had been rescued at sea; after more than a week of political brouhaha, it docked in Spain instead.)

Above all, the study found the main divisions in Italy to be between those who favor a more open society and those who want a more closed one—currents that are also at play in the United States under Trump and the Britain of Brexit. The study paints a picture of Italy as a fragmented society where the moral impulse to welcome the stranger runs up against economic instability, a sense that the European Union has failed to help Italy contend with nearly half a million immigrants who have arrived in recent years, and a sense among many Italians that they no longer feel at home in their own country. Those emotions are reflected in a coalition that, for all its differences, came to power on a wave of anti-establishment sentiment and economic anxiety. The study found that 80 percent of Italians believe globalization has harmed Italy, but are divided about questions of identity and immigration, torn between what can loosely be defined as humanitarianism and nationalism.

The More in Common study also found a majority of respondents believe that to fix Italy’s problems, the country needs “a strong leader willing to break the rules.” (Another study released on Monday by the Italian sociologist Ilvo Diamanti, in the center-left daily La Repubblica, also found a majority of Italians wanted a strong leader, and it identified a divide between party leaders and their electorates.) Italy is, after all, a country with a history of strongmen, from Mussolini to Berlusconi and now Salvini, who is playing the role for the social-media era. “This is Salvini’s government,” Paolo Flores d’Arcais, the editor of MicroMega, a left-wing journal of ideas, told me in Rome this month. “The Five Star Movement are completely subordinate for a simple reason—because if Italy voted tomorrow, Salvini would win by a landslide. He’s acting like prime minister and even like the president of the republic.”

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Nautilus Magazine: Why We Should Think Twice About Colonizing Space

In a recent article in Futures, which was inspired by political scientist Daniel Deudney’s forthcoming book Dark Skies, I decided to take a closer look at this question. My conclusion is that in a colonized universe the probability of the annihilation of the human race could actually rise rather than fall.   [...]

Consider what is likely to happen as humanity hops from Earth to Mars, and from Mars to relatively nearby, potentially habitable exoplanets like Epsilon Eridani b, Gliese 674 b, and Gliese 581 d. Each of these planets has its own unique environments that will drive Darwinian evolution, resulting in the emergence of novel species over time, just as species that migrate to a new island will evolve different traits than their parent species. The same applies to the artificial environments of spacecraft like “O’Neill Cylinders,” which are large cylindrical structures that rotate to produce artificial gravity. Insofar as future beings satisfy the basic conditions of evolution by natural selection—such as differential reproduction, heritability, and variation of traits across the population—then evolutionary pressures will yield new forms of life. [...]

In other words, natural selection and cyborgization as humanity spreads throughout the cosmos will result in species diversification. At the same time, expanding across space will also result in ideological diversification. Space-hopping populations will create their own cultures, languages, governments, political institutions, religions, technologies, rituals, norms, worldviews, and so on. As a result, different species will find it increasingly difficult over time to understand each other’s motivations, intentions, behaviors, decisions, and so on. It could even make communication between species with alien languages almost impossible. Furthermore, some species might begin to wonder whether the proverbial “Other” is conscious. This matters because if a species Y cannot consciously experience pain, then another species X might not feel morally obligated to care about Y. After all, we don’t worry about kicking stones down the street because we don’t believe that rocks can feel pain. Thus, as I write in the paper, phylogenetic and ideological diversification will engender a situation in which many species will be “not merely aliens to each other but, more significantly, alienated from each other.”

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Quartz: What is a “real” antisemite?

Following on from this cycle of offenses and denials, the Labour party saw it fitting last month to create a new definition of antisemitism. Their resulting guidelines were promptly condemned by 68 rabbis, making it the first time ultra orthodox rabbis and progressive female rabbis have co-signed the same letter. In response, secular Jewish MP Margaret Hodge called Corbyn a “racist and antisemite,” and the Labour Party in turn launched a disciplinary inquiry into Hodge. Clearly, Corbyn believes he’s been falsely maligned. [...]

“Usually, prejudices are discourses of inferiority: women are less capable than men, sexual minorities are deviant and sinful, racial minorities are less capable,” says Eric Heinze, a human rights law professor at Queen Mary University of London and consultant on antisemitism for the London-based Media Diversity Institute. “The most powerful forms of antisemitism, including those deployed by the Nazis and the Soviet Union, are just the opposite. It’s that Jews are too clever by half, too powerful. Historically, antisemitism is the very first conspiracy theory.” [...]

The fact that Jewish people are often indistinguishable from a majority-white population further feeds conspiracy theories: Antisemitism is the fear of the outsider passing as insider, the suspicion and hatred of an invisible network pulling the strings. This dynamic is obvious in tropes about Jewish people controlling capitalism, the media, and Hollywood, and feeds into attempts to blame all Jews for the actions of the Israeli government. The narrative, which views Jews as oppressors to be overthrown, also makes it a better fit for left-wing politics than most other forms of discrimination. Hence antisemitism has been called the “fool’s socialism.” [...]

“Antisemitism is a politics of aggression against the wrong things. It’s a politics of deflection and untruth,” says Wisse. “It will never be able to solve the real and actual crises and problems of society. That’s why it’s very dangerous. It will always destroy its users.”

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Like Stories of Old: The Fantasy of Ultimate Purpose – How Films, Series and Video Games Reveal What Really Drives Us

Quartz: “It is a pretty nasty world”: Why more Indians choose not to have kids

My reasons are not unusual. Parenthood is not for everyone; raising a child is a huge financial and emotional investment; the compromise and commitment required is enormous; and my husband and I find fulfillment in many other ways. But over the last decade, another reason has crept in and has only grown stronger with time.

This is not a world into which I want to bring a child. A child will inevitably be affected by the problems and stressful times we live in, from which I would never be able to guarantee him or her protection. In India, doomsday headlines scream out environmental and lifestyle-related problems every day. It all stems from overpopulation, many of the reports say. Though everyone agrees that environmental issues need to be dealt with, are we considering the impact our decision to have children has on these issues? Do ecological concerns feature in the decision-making process for individuals in India who decide to be child-free or adopt children?  [...]

Radical antinatalists view birth as morally wrong, encouraging people not to procreate: This will gradually extinguish the human race and, thus, the inevitable suffering that human life endures as well as its causes. There are echoes of this thought in Marvel Studios’ Avengers: Infinity War, in which the antagonist Thanos explains to his daughter Gamora his reasons for destruction to restore balance: “Little one, it’s a simple calculus. This universe has finite its resources…if life is left unchecked, life will cease to exist. It needs correcting.”

Other subscribers of antinatalism are less extreme in their views. They understand that it is virtually impossible for everyone to stop procreating, but a contribution can be made to slow down the population growth—by abstaining from having one’s own children; adopting a child rather than having their own; or stopping at one biological child and adopting more children if they want to have a larger family. [...]

“There are already too many children in the world in need of love, and I can’t see why having a child of my own would be better,” said Kondvikar. “At least in this way I’d be taking on responsibility for a good reason, rather than just because it’s the norm.” José agreed, “If and when I ever choose to have children it’ll definitely be only through adoption. There are millions of homeless, orphaned kids who are way more worthy of a family than me bringing another kid into our already overpopulated country.”

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The New York Review of Books: Pakistan’s Promised Day?

Like so much else in Pakistan’s labyrinthine politics, proving the military’s involvement in the Sharifs’ criminal convictions is impossible. It is clear, though, that the Sharifs had been leading in polls until that point, but that the army favored Imran Khan and his Islamist party, Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (Pakistan Movement for Justice). In an interview in May, Khan declared his loyalty to the military. “It is the Pakistan Army and not an enemy army,” he said. “I will carry the army with me.” Two months later, the Sharifs were sitting in Adiala prison, and Khan was giving a victory speech to a rapt Pakistan—promising “open borders” with Afghanistan and an Islamic renaissance of Pakistan (already officially an Islamic Republic). [...]

Khan has played along. In another dog-whistle to hardline Islamists—those like Maulana Fazlur Rehman Khalil, himself a pioneer of the Afghan jihad, who are already in his alliance, and others he hopes to attract—Khan last week reiterated his promise to create the “type of state that was established in Medina,” referring to the first Muslim city-state during the lifetime of the Prophet Muhammad. Seconds earlier, Khan had also promised to make Pakistan the country that Pakistan’s founder Mohammad Ali Jinnah had dreamed of.” The two, Jinnah’s secular democracy and Medina’s Islamic state, are polar opposites, but this Janus-faced leader is not bothered by the contradiction. [...]

The Pashtun-dominated Islamic state may be closer to Khan’s truth, and he doesn’t care whom he sacrifices to get it. In the past, Pakistani rulers of doubtful legitimacy have used religious strictures that control women, their clothing and behavior, as a convenient means of rallying support and consolidating political control. Khan looks likely to follow suit. In the past, he has opposed legislation criminalizing domestic violence and expressed his support for enforcing the Zina and Hudood Ordinances, which have been used to imprison women on the basis of unproven accusations of illicit sexual relations.

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Vox: Jeff Sessions announces a religious liberty task force to combat “dangerous” secularism

The task force will be spearheaded by Associate Attorney General Jesse Panuccio and Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Policy Beth Williams. The Advocate reports that in 2010, Panuccio, as an attorney, defended supporters of Proposition 8, a 2008 ballot measure that banned same-sex marriage in California for nearly five years. More specific details of the task force’s structure and organization have not yet been announced.

Sessions painted a nightmarish portrait of what he described as a lack of religious liberty protections plaguing American society. “We have gotten to the point,” he said, “where courts have held that morality cannot be a basis for law, where ministers are fearful to affirm, as they understand it, holy writ from the pulpit, and where one group can actively target religious groups by labeling them a ‘hate group’ on the basis of their sincerely held religious beliefs.” [...]

He’s advocating for the kind of Christian nationalism — blending patriotism and evangelical Christianity — that the administration has consistently used to legitimize its aims and shore up its evangelical base. [...]

Sessions’s vision of religious liberty as, fundamentally, active and interventionist government support of religious identity seems to be in line with his wider political philosophy. Last month, for example, Sessions used the Bible verse Romans 13 to justify separating migrant families at the US-Mexico border. He used it on the grounds that the verse — part of a letter written by St. Paul urging an early Christian Roman community not to participate in a political uprising — legitimized absolute submission to government authority.

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Quartz: A plan for the free movement of Africans across the continent is being held up by fears of xenophobia

The free movement of Africans between African countries could unquestionably facilitate growth. Allowing freer movement would encourage trade, tourism and investment between African countries. And it would allow students to study in other African countries and Africans with suitable skills to find rewarding jobs. [...]

But there are major obstacles that need to be cleared before the ambition of free movement across the continent can be achieved. The biggest is posed by concerns raised by the continent’s major economies like South Africa and countries in North Africa where unemployment rates are high and there are fears that increased immigration could contribute to increasing domestic tensions.

There are also concerns that if not well managed the free movement could worsen brain drain for poorer countries. Because of these concerns, among others, only 30 countries have signed the protocol. This is much lower than the 44 that have signed the African Continental Free Trade Agreement. [...]

A stronger African coordination around population registration, leading ultimately to an African ID or an African standard ID would be a neat way to address these technical issues. The technical committee could focus first on the obstacles to implementing Phase 1. Once that hurdle is crossed it could move on to Phase 2, and eventually to Phase 3.

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