99 Percent Invisible: Dollhouses of St. Louis

Back in the 1950s, St. Louis was segregated and The Ville was one of the only African-American neighborhoods in the city. The community was prosperous. Black-owned businesses thrived and the neighborhood was filled with the lovely, ornate brick homes the city has become famous for.

Samuel Moore, who became a local alderman in 2007, grew up in The Ville. Moore’s father worked as bricklayer and helped build some of the stately brick houses in this area. “He was a great bricklayer,” says Moore. “He did quite a few jobs around this town and I still see some of my dad’s work — beautiful homes. Triple brick, three-story buildings that would cost a million dollars to duplicate.”

But driving around The Ville today, where Moore has lived for almost his entire life, the neighborhood looks very different. Some buildings are simply rundown or abandoned, but others are missing large chunks entirely. Walls have disappeared. The bricks are gone. “We call them dollhouses,” says Moore, “because you can look inside of them.”

In the past fifty years, the city of St. Louis has lost more than half its population. Vacancy has skyrocketed in The Ville and other neighborhoods on the north side of the city. Entire blocks in this area have returned to pastureland, punctuated by the occasional dilapidated building slowly surrendering to the landscape around it.

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Haaretz: How Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince's Rise Led to the Fall of the Bin Laden Business Empire

Three Bin Laden brothers, senior executives in the family firm, were among more than 200 businessmen, royals and officials detained in November 2017 in an anti-corruption drive ordered by the prince. Bakr and two of his brothers, Saleh and Saad, eventually transferred their combined 36.2 percent stake in the family firm to the state in April 2018. Bakr, in his late 60s, is still in custody, although no charges have been made public. [...]

The Bin Ladens' undoing exposes the contradictions in Prince Mohammed's plan to build a modern economy, some economists say. He has embraced privatisation, hoping to inject dynamism, yet the state has intervened in firms such as Saudi Binladin Group. He has tackled corruption, yet there has been little transparency around the process. One Saudibusinessman said the Bin Laden saga had become a "symbol of what's happening between the government and the private sector - a breakdown of trust." [...]

Then, in September 2015, a construction crane owned by Saudi Binladin Group collapsed in Mecca's Grand Mosque, killing 107 people just before the start of Islam's annual haj pilgrimage. The government moved against the company, suspending it from receiving new state contracts and barring its board members and senior executives from traveling abroad. It also ordered the Finance Ministry to review the firm's existing projects, citing unspecified "shortcomings."

A senior Saudi Binladin Group executive and a source close to the family said the crane accident gave the government an opening to act against the firm. The executive said SaudiBinladin Group wasn't responsible for the site at the time - the work fell under the supervision of local authorities in Mecca. The senior government official disputed this, saying it was standard practice that the contractor supervised the site. A legal case over the incident was still pending, he added.

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Aeon: A truly African philosophy

The ambitious African philosopher finds herself between the devil and the deep blue sea. She has to convince the West that she has something interesting to say about philosophy. She has to insist that African philosophy is not the same as ‘philosophy in Africa’. And by insisting on African philosophy, she stamps her foot hard on the ground and defends the virtue of originality: innovative thinking that’s not subservient to the dominant Western tradition of philosophical thinking and which, at the same time, transcends traditional African thought. The other front of her struggle is Africa. She has to confront a very limited local audience averse to radical creative thinking. Most of her colleagues don’t think that ‘originality’ is possible or even desirable. These are colleagues who studied Western philosophy all through college, and had come to see Western philosophy as the supreme and only universal template of philosophy. [...]

The idea of ‘consolation’ philosophy does not imply an attempt to comfort philosophers. Rather, it suggests a philosophy of life, a project similar to the human-centred philosophical projects of Western existentialists such as Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Friedrich Nietzsche, Gabriel Marcel, Søren Kierkegaard, Miguel de Unamuno, Emmanuel Levinas and German idealists such as Arthur Schopenhauer. Here I offer a brief presentation of this African philosophical synthesis, which I hope will help to resolve the dilemma eloquently put forward in 1997 by professor of philosophy at Penn State University Robert Bernasconi: ‘Either African philosophy is so similar to Western philosophy that it makes no distinctive contribution and effectively disappears; or it is so different that its credentials to be genuine philosophy will always be in doubt.’ [...]

The human being as a melancholy being is the entity defined first by emotion, which is fundamental, and secondly by reason, which is a structured intellectual capacity with roots in the nature of the melancholy being as a creature of mood. Mood is an originary intelligence, the basis of feeling, a primordial reason, a proto-mind from which advanced reason, thought, affects and attitudes arise. The conception of mood in the dimension of a proto-mind – and the results that this conception produces for speculative metaphysics – distinguishes my thought-system from the existentialism of Heidegger and Sartre, for example. In other words, consolation philosophy understands the human being as a unity of emotion and reason, with both aspects of her nature having a real efficacy in the physical world and, therefore, equally important, without the one diminishing the value of the other. Emotion supplies the primal, motivational energy of life while reason structures the realities we embrace by simple faith. [...]

Given the impossibility of freedom, I hold that the meaning of existence, from the human standpoint rather than from the standpoint of an omniscient mind, is the realisation of ‘consolation’. While the goal of existence (perfection) is unrealisable, there is meaning (consolation) in existence that is realisable. Consolation is realisable and has been realised in human beings in the moment-to-moment maximisation of the emotion of joy in the life of the melancholy being who defines her intellectual project from an understanding of herself as a being thrown into a world whose purpose she doesn’t know but can only speculate about. Consolation is realisable – and has been realised in nonsentient nature at the micro level of atomic and subatomic impulses in the endless striving for what I speculate as consciousness as a step on the road to perfection.

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Aeon: How to tell the difference between persuasion and manipulation

Suppose that Amy just left an abusive-yet-faithful partner, but in a moment of weakness she is tempted to go back to him. Now imagine that Amy’s friends employ the same techniques that Iago used on Othello. They manipulate Amy into (falsely) believing – and being outraged – that her ex-partner was not only abusive, but unfaithful as well. If this manipulation prevents Amy from reconciling, she might be better off than she would have been had her friends not manipulated her. Yet, to many, it could still seem morally dodgy. Intuitively, it would have been morally better for her friends to employ non-manipulative means to help Amy avoid backsliding. Something remains morally dubious about manipulation, even when it helps rather than harms the person being manipulated. So harm cannot be the reason that manipulation is wrong.

Perhaps manipulation is wrong because it involves techniques that are inherently immoral ways to treat other human beings. This thought might be especially appealing to those inspired by Immanuel Kant’s idea that morality requires us to treat each other as rational beings rather than mere objects. Perhaps the only proper way to influence the behaviour of other rational beings is by rational persuasion, and thus any form of influence other than rational persuasion is morally improper. But for all its appeal, this answer also falls short, for it would condemn many forms of influence that are morally benign. [...]

What makes an influence manipulative and what makes it wrong are the same thing: the manipulator attempts to get someone to adopt what the manipulator herself regards as an inappropriate belief, emotion or other mental state. In this way, manipulation resembles lying. What makes a statement a lie and what makes it morally wrong are the same thing – that the speaker tries to get someone to adopt what the speaker herself regards as a false belief. In both cases, the intent is to get another person to make some sort of mistake. The liar tries to get you to adopt a false belief. The manipulator might do that, but she might also try to get you to feel an inappropriate (or inappropriately strong or weak) emotion, attribute too much importance to the wrong things (eg, someone else’s approval), or to doubt something (eg, your own judgment or your beloved’s fidelity) that there is no good reason to doubt. The distinction between manipulation and non-manipulative influence depends on whether the influencer is trying to get someone to make some sort of mistake in what he thinks, feels, doubts or pays attention to.

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SciShow Psych: Why Do People Join Cults?

It’s easy to assume that people who join cults have something wrong with them, but usually the people who join cults are just like the rest of us. So, how does it happen?

UnHerd: Can we really call Jeremy Corbyn an antisemite?

These are somewhat trivial examples. But it applies just as much to more sensitive subjects. For instance, a large amount of public debate at the moment is dedicated to whether or not Jeremy Corbyn is an antisemite. But once again, the disagreement comes down to definitions (ironically enough, given that the row is in part inspired by the Labour Party not wanting to use the International Holocaust Remembrance Association definition of antisemitism). [...]

The trouble is that there can be no right answer here. Words don’t have ‘correct’ meanings; they are defined by how they’re used, and if enough people use them differently, there’s nothing but personal taste to choose between them. So someone can very angrily insist that the definition of antisemitism includes Corbyn; others can equally insist that it doesn’t. Neither will ever be proved correct. A dictionary won’t help; it just tells you how some people use the word. All you can do is go back and forth: “I define it to mean this!” “But I define it to mean that!” [...]

If you want to argue about real differences, though, you have to get past the definitions to what the thing is underneath. Find what your real disagreements are, and what you expect to happen. I don’t expect Jeremy Corbyn ever to call a Jewish person a racist epithet, but I do expect that we’ll keep finding out stuff about him hanging around with people who repeat the blood libel.

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Bloomberg: Bannon’s Meeting With a Populist European Leader Ends in Trade Clash

The mastermind of Donald Trump’s 2016 election victory met Czech President Milos Zeman, an early fan of the U.S. leader, this week in Prague. Zeman also welcomed Petr Bystron, a lawmaker for the euroskeptic, anti-immigration Alternative for Germany party that is part of Bannon’s push to bring together anti-establishment groups to challenge the EU’s liberal order. [...]

“He asked for an audience, got 30 minutes, and after 30 minutes I told him that I absolutely disagree with his views and I ended the audience,” said Zeman, an economist and former prime minister who’s also a leading supporter in the EU of Russian President Vladimir Putin. “The reason why I disagree with his views is because he was defending American trade restrictions.” [...]

Zeman, who won a second term in January after waging an anti-refugee campaign, has triggered outrage among some mainstream Czech political parties for endorsing an anti-Muslim party. He didn’t comment to the newspaper on any other parts of his discussion with Bannon or on his plans to mobilize support for nationalists before the May EU Parliament ballot.

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Quartz: India’s supreme court strikes down a colonial-era adultery law

Unlike the country’s sexual assault laws, which hinge on the consent of the woman, the 158-year-old adultery law did not consider the woman’s will. Though women couldn’t be punished under the provision, a husband could prosecute the man who had sexual relations with his wife, even if the wife was a voluntary participant in the act. [...]

The Narendra Modi government had supported the colonial-era law on the grounds that it preserved the sanctity of marriage and served a public good. [...]

The Modi government was open to making the law gender-neutral by allowing for the prosecution of a woman who has sex with a married man. However, the court has consistently refused to allow for prosecution of women.

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Quartz: India’s top court won’t re-examine if mosques are essential to Islam

With a 2:1 majority, a three-judge bench consisting of chief justice Dipak Misra and justices Ashok Bhushan and S Abdul Nazeer has declared that there is no need for a larger bench to reexamine a 1994 supreme court ruling that said that a mosque is not essential to Islam. [...]

Since the 16th century, the Babri mosque had stood on a site that some Hindus believe is the birthplace of Lord Ram, the protagonist of the epic Ramayana. Determined to build a Hindu temple by replacing the mosque, thousands of kar sevaks (religious volunteers) descended upon the mosque in December 1992 and tore it down. The incident sparked large-scale communal violence that killed over 2,000 people across the country, and raised concerns over the rule of law, freedom of worship, and the secular identity of India. The courtroom battle over the land has remained unresolved ever since, but the final hearing in the case began earlier this year. [...]

But the fact remains that, in the years since the mosque was demolished, the dispute has pitted India’s Hindu majority against its Muslims. When the final verdict does come for the closely watched case, it will have a bearing on the very identity of India, especially as it approaches the 2019 national elections.

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