99 Percent Invisible: Lessons from Las Vegas

On the University of Pennsylvania Campus, the Library of Fine Arts is a richly ornate and eclectic structure belonging to the School of Design. Completed in 1890, it is currently designated a National Historic Landmark. But in the late 1950s and early 60s, there was serious discussion of tearing it down altogether. Denise Scott Brown, then a new faculty member at Penn, was very much against the demolition proposal.

In the early 60s, a lot of architects were very into tearing down old frilly buildings, and replacing them new, sleek modernist buildings. The dean wanted the historic library gone — “it was what a Modernist would do, you see,” explains Denise.

Denise herself wasn’t against all of Modernism — she liked the look of sleek glass and steel buildings themselves. The thing is, she was getting tired of paternalistic Modernist ideology. Many Modernists thought they knew better than other people did how a building (or city) should function. They were building for people without asking people what they wanted. Still, Denise saw value in some of aspects of the Modern Movement. “Yes, I am a Postmodernist, but,” she clarifies, “also a Modernist, an admirer of the principles of early Modernism of the 20s and 30s and of their ‘New Objectivity.'” Although she rejects the “Modernism of the 50s and 60s, and also today’s Neomodernism,” she sees “Postmodernism as updating Early Modern principles for today.” [...]

To this day, architects tend to turn their noses up at Las Vegas, or simply dismiss it as irrelevant to serious design theory. “From an architecture perspective, its a city that’s known for neon, a city known for kitsch,” explains Stefan Al, a practicing architect and author of the book The Strip: Las Vegas and the architecture of the American Dream. “It’s exactly the opposite of what conventionally trained architects would like.”

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The Guardian: Denialism: what drives people to reject the truth (Fri 3 Aug 2018)

Denialism, and related phenomena, are often portrayed as a “war on science”. This is an understandable but profound misunderstanding. Certainly, denialism and other forms of pseudo-scholarship do not follow mainstream scientific methodologies. Denialism does indeed represent a perversion of the scholarly method, and the science it produces rests on profoundly erroneous assumptions, but denialism does all this in the name of science and scholarship. Denialism aims to replace one kind of science with another – it does not aim to replace science itself. In fact, denialism constitutes a tribute to the prestige of science and scholarship in the modern world. Denialists are desperate for the public validation that science affords. [...]

Denialism is not a barrier to acknowledging a common moral foundation; it is a barrier to acknowledging moral differences. An end to denialism is therefore a disturbing prospect, as it would involve these moral differences revealing themselves directly. But we need to start preparing for that eventuality, because denialism is starting to break down – and not in a good way.[...]

Those who were previously “forced” into Holocaust denial are starting to sense that it may be possible to publicly celebrate genocide once again, to revel in antisemitism’s finest hour. The heightened scrutiny of far-right movements in the last couple of years has unearthed statements that might once have remained unspoken, or only spoken behind closed doors. In August 2017, for example, one KKK leader told a journalist: “We killed 6 million Jews the last time. Eleven million [immigrants] is nothing.” A piece published by the Daily Stormer in advance of the white nationalist rally in Charlottesville that same month ended: “Next stop: Charlottesville, VA. Final stop: Auschwitz.” [...]

Not all denialists are taking these steps towards open acknowledgment of their desires. In some fields, the commitment to repressing desire remains strong. We are not yet at a stage when a climate change denier can come out and say, proudly, “Bangladesh will be submerged, millions will suffer as a result of anthropogenic climate change, but we must still preserve our carbon-based way of life, no matter what the cost.” Nor are anti-vaxxers ready to argue that, even though vaccines do not cause autism, the death of children from preventable diseases is a regrettable necessity if we are to be released from the clutches of Big Pharma. [...]

It is hard to tell whether global warming denialists are secretly longing for the chaos and pain that global warming will bring, are simply indifferent to it, or would desperately like it not to be the case but are overwhelmed with the desire to keep things as they are. It is hard to tell whether Holocaust deniers are preparing the ground for another genocide, or want to keep a pristine image of the goodness of the Nazis and the evil of the Jews. It is hard to tell whether an Aids denialist who works to prevent Africans from having access to anti-retrovirals is getting a kick out of their power over life and death, or is on a mission to save them from the evils of the west.

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Vox: How Christianity can be an “alternative” to consumerism

When I was at Moody Bible Institute, the intellectual culture there was very intense and academically rigorous, even though we were studying the Bible from a literalist point of view. We weren’t studying liberal theologians. It was a very insular world. But we read the Bible with a kind of attention and depth that I think would be familiar to academics. It’s hard to explain that to a secular audience because a lot of the things we were studying in depth sound insane to a secular audience. We’re talking about how to prove that the Earth was actually created in six days based on all of these theologically arcane methods. But it did function within its own insular world as a system of rational thought. [...]

When I was writing many of these essays, my biggest criticism of the church is that it didn’t provide an antidote to capitalism. And it could have! I grew up in the 1990s during the megachurch era. There was still this idea that they could compete with secular youth culture. I have an essay in here, for example, about the phenomenon of Christian music, and how a lot of Christian artists in the 1990s were trying to compete with bands, which were on MTV, to compete with whatever was popular and add a Christian “twist” and sell whatever was popular. It leads to an inauthenticity. 

I talk about this in my piece on hell. In the 2000s, people stopped talking about hell to appeal to a larger audience. Pastors started running churches like a business. They did market research and found that hell made people uncomfortable. People didn’t want to hear about hell, or how they were sinners. But the gospel message doesn’t really work if there’s no stakes, nothing to be saved from. And I think there was a missed opportunity to reinterpret hell — as a metaphor for evil, for these difficult experiences that people go through, like addiction or war.

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Jacobin Magazine: Bernie’s New Internationalist Vision

Coming from the Left, criticisms have often been founded in legitimate concern that Sanders’s foreign policy hasn’t departed from the bipartisan consensus as much as his domestic economic policy has. For example, while all of the above is true, he doesn’t support the movement for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel, and he cast his vote for US military intervention several times during his decades-long tenure in the Senate. He has spoken on occasion about the need to preserve American military might, even while he inveighs against the waste and the abuses of the US military at other times. [...]

Sanders identified as a major threat the rise of right-wing leaders, naming Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the Philippines’ Rodrigo Duterte, Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, Russia’s Vladimir Putin, and Hungary’s Viktor Orbán among others. These leaders differ in many respects, he said, but share an “intolerance toward ethnic and religious minorities, hostility toward democratic norms, antagonism toward a free press, constant paranoia about foreign plots, and a belief that the leaders of government should be able use their positions of power to serve their own selfish financial interests.” [...]

But Trump did not cause this rot in the system, Sanders insisted. He is a consequence of it.

Like others on the authoritarian right, he has risen to power by stoking hatred and division that was already endemic in a stratified and hypercompetitive society, and tapping into well-established corporate networks that likewise predated his political career.

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Haaretz: Is Brazil About to Vote in the Far-right Executioner of Its Democracy?

At the same time, revelations that executives of Petrobras, the state-owned oil company, and other enterprises, had siphoned off millions of dollars in contract manipulations further weakened the Workers’ Party’s image among broad sectors of the middle classes, who, in the current elections, have mostly moved to the far-right.

On-going urban violence, in part linked to the drug trade, but also a result of the worsening economic situation, has also fueled support for Bolsonaro’s law and order discourse. His proposals to arm all citizens, offer impunity for police involved in shootings, and crudely racist language against people of color have alarmed human rights advocates. [...]

Bolsonaro calls for the retraction of legislation that protects battered women. He criticizes affirmative action programs that have allowed tens of thousands of Afro-descendants and indigenous people to enter the country’s universities, diversifying higher education for the first time in the country’s history.

In televised comments he has condemned interracial marriages, defended the rape of women, and called for violence against LGBT people. His opposes teaching the concept of gender in public schools, and decries the influence of the ideas of the late world-renowned and anti-authoritarian Brazilian educator Paulo Freire.

Supported by evangelical Christians and conservative sectors of the Catholic Church, he has explicitly condemned minority religions, although Brazil’s constitutions have separated the church and state for the last 140 years.

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Politico: The curious rise of the ‘white left’ as a Chinese internet insult

The question has received more than 400 answers from Zhihu users, which include some of the most representative perceptions of the 'white left'. Although the emphasis varies, baizuo is used generally to describe those who “only care about topics such as immigration, minorities, LGBT and the environment” and “have no sense of real problems in the real world”; they are hypocritical humanitarians who advocate for peace and equality only to “satisfy their own feeling of moral superiority”; they are “obsessed with political correctness” to the extent that they “tolerate backwards Islamic values for the sake of multiculturalism”; they believe in the welfare state that “benefits only the idle and the free riders”; they are the “ignorant and arrogant westerners” who “pity the rest of the world and think they are saviours”. [...]

However, Chinese netizens’ fierce attacks against the ‘white left’ seem curiously devoid of experiential motivation, since all these problems that conservatives in the west are concerned about – immigration, multiculturalism, minority rights, and affirmative actions – are largely unknown to Chinese society. This is not to say that discrimination against women and ethnic, religious and sexual minorities do not exist in China. They are no less serious or structural here than in any other societies. But cultural and identity politics has never gained much salience as political issues under an authoritarian regime, although feminist activists have received increased attention recently. Overall, there has been ‘too little’, rather than ‘too much’ political correctness as perceived by conservatives in the west. [...]

The term first became influential amidst the European refugee crisis, and Angela Merkel was the first western politician to be labelled as a baizuo for her open-door refugee policy. Hungary, on the other hand, was praised by Chinese netizens for its hard line on refugees, if not for its authoritarian leader. Around the same time another derogatory name that was often used alongside baizuo was shengmu (圣母) – literally the ‘holy mother’ – which according to its users refers to those who are ‘overemotional’, ‘hypocritical’ and ‘have too much empathy’. The criticisms of baizuo and shengmu soon became an online smear campaign targeted at not only public figures such as J. K. Rowling and Emma Watson, but also volunteers, social workers and all other ordinary citizens, whether in Europe or China, who express any sympathy with international refugees. [...]

The anti-baizuo discourse in Chinese social media gained stronger momentum during the US presidential election campaign. If criticisms of the ‘white left’ in the context of the refugee crisis were mainly about disapproval of ‘moralist humanitarianism’ mixed with Islamophobia, they became politically more elaborate as Chinese critics of the ‘white left’ discovered Donald J. Trump, whom they both identify with and take inspiration from. Following the debates in the US, a number of other issues such as welfare reforms, affirmative action and minority rights were introduced into online discussions on the ‘white left’. Baizuo critics now began to identify Obama and Clinton as the new epitome of the ‘white left’, despite the fact that they were neither particularly humanitarian nor particularly kind to migrants. Trump was taken as the champion of everything the ‘white left’ were against, and baizuo critics naturally became his enthusiastic supporters.

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Politico: Macron and Rutte form liberal dream team

Rutte’s People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD) is a core member of ALDE, which is the predominant liberal political family in Europe, and the Dutch prime minister has emerged as a centrist, liberal powerbroker on the European Council in the wake of Brexit. Macron upended the French political establishment by catapulting into the Elysée Palace as an independent in 2017. [...]

Operatives who described the plan said the parties in the coalition would campaign around a common platform, but that the partnership would formally take effect after next May’s European Parliament election. They hope they will do well enough to form the second-largest group in the Parliament — giving its leaders additional leverage in both the backroom negotiations over filling EU leadership posts and stronger numbers in the vote for Commission president, which will require a majority in the 705-seat Parliament. The center-right European People’s Party is expected to win the most seats in the next chamber. [...]

The partnership between ALDE and En Marche would overcome this by potentially forcing him out after the election. It would also be boosted by an alliance that Macron has forged with the Spanish liberal leader Albert Rivera and his party Ciudadanos. And it would present a bold, new challenge to the long-dominant, center-right European People’s Party (EPP), which currently holds the most seats in the Parliament and all three of the EU’s top jobs — the presidencies of the Commission, the Council and the Parliament. [...]

ALDE has struggled in part because its membership includes an extremely broad political spectrum, from ardent federalists like Verhofstadt, to Euroskeptic populists like Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babiš. ALDE’s eight Spanish MEPs alone represent four different national parties, as well as include three independents.

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Politico: UK Supreme Court rules ‘gay cake’ refusal not discrimination

“It is deeply humiliating and an affront to human dignity to deny someone the service because of that person’s race, gender, sexual orientation, religion or belief,” the president of the Supreme Court, Brenda Hale, said after Wednesday’s ruling, the Guardian reported. “But that is not what happened in this case and it does the project of equal treatment no favors to seek to extend it beyond its proper scope.” [...]

Hale ruled that freedom of expression, which is guaranteed by Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights, includes the right “not to express an opinion which one does not hold.” [...]

“In Northern Ireland, I’m a second-class citizen and that’s unfortunate,” said Gareth Lee, the customer who ordered the cake in 2014, after the ruling. “We don’t have the same rights in Northern Ireland as gay people as we do in the rest of the United Kingdom,” he said. The nation is the only part of the U.K. where same-sex marriage is not allowed.

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Political Critique: Czech Local Elections: a sharp turn to the right

Probably the sharpest, most explicit messages showed up in the northern parts of the country, namely the city of Most – a peripheral area devastated by heavy industry (and subsequent job loss when the coal mines closed) which suffers from a prolonged housing crisis caused by real estate brokers tied into local politics. Curiously enough, it is the party most intertwined with the poverty business that fans the flames driving proper the proper, good folk into a racist frenzy: the Mostians for Most Association (SMM) were openly advocating segregation, establishing locations excluded from housing social support and, yes, building “scum villages” to which they would move the “rabble”. As for determining who exactly the “rabble” is supposed to be, the procedure is not exactly clear but one can assume it will involve a color filter. [...]

SMM did not win the elections in Most, but they came third; enough to leave a mark on the city’s future (un-)social policy. Their campaign did, however, echo with that of the party which came fourth – the traditional, conservative Civic Democrats (ODS), a party that has been a determining factor in Czech politics since the nineties and has fallen on hard times with the advent of mass populism. Undeterred, they got the message – ODS has been promising Zero Tolerance To Foreigners (this particular slogan coming from Mladá Boleslav – a city whose economic lifeline happens to be foreign workers from the Škoda automobile factory) and scoring great successes with it; if there is an overall winner to this election, they are it. What the hell? [...]

The xenophobic SPD ended up with a disaster, with only 155 representatives across the whole country. Their leader, famously fearmongering fraudster Tomio Okamura, promptly amended his previous statement of expecting “hundreds of SPD representatives” to “I meant a three-figure sum”. His people were a lot less phlegmatic, though; “enjoy your immigrants”, tweeted a failed SPD candidate in Prague. And for all the horrible things to be said about the results in Brno, the openly neo-Nazi party Decent People flunked the election hard.

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