Rich Russians: Laurie Taylor talks to Elisabeth Schimpfossl, Lecturer in Sociology at Aston University, about her study of the changing nature of the Russian elite, from oligarchs to bourgeoisie. Also, millionaire tax flight - myth or reality? Cristobal Young, Associate Professor of Sociology at Cornell University, suggests that location is surprisingly important to the rich.
23 October 2018
The New York Review of Books: The Menace of Eco-Fascism
Across Europe, for example, a longstanding cultural relationship between Nature and Nation permeates environmental debate with a nativist sentiment stronger than is typically visible in the United States. In Germany, beginning around the turn of the twentieth century, die Wandervögel (the hiking birds) began to coalesce around a disdain for modernity and a romantic conception of the nation’s Teutonic agrarian past. The Hitler Youth eventually appropriated a lot of the Wandervögel aesthetic—including its early use of the swastika and its militant Boy Scout look—and the movement’s ideological obsessions; the way it tied local ecology to ethnicity in a “Blood and Soil” mythology is still echoed today by many on the far right. (The German Green Party has been periodically plagued by this tension, sometimes leading to the creation of splinter groups such as the Unabhängige Ökologen Deutschlands, the Independent Environmentalists of Germany, whose platform pairs ecological goals with the protection of “cultural identity” and racial purity.)
Russia today is seeing the rise of a similar eco-nationalist homesteading movement, sometimes dubbed “Ringing Cedars” after a series of fantasy novels by the Siberian author Vladimir Megre, whose mysticism and Old World nostalgia inspired readers to go “back to the land.” The catalyzing force of a popular fantasy series is oddly something that the Ringing Cedars communities share with the United Kingdom’s mid-century Green movement, which arose in tandem with a largely conservative longing for the English countryside, rekindled by the works of J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. [...]
In that disturbing and carefully calibrated statement, Spencer clearly hoped to bridge the divide between those on the far right who believe that climate change is a hoax, that the environmental movement is a crypto-socialist bid for state intervention (effectively, the Koch-funded Tea Party line), and those who actually find the science undergirding environmental causes persuasive (even if they ultimately care more about intrusions into their own personal sphere, like GMO crops and fluoridated water, than international problems like rising sea levels and ocean acidification). Spencer’s goal here is to build a consensus on preserving the natural environment—for the privileged ownership, use, and pleasure of Western ethno-states. [...]
There’s a strain within environmentalism that shares this primordial outlook, holding fast to a belief in “climax” or “deep ecologies”—perfectly balanced states of nature that would be enduring and eternal were it not for the interference of man. The unresolved tension surrounding this concept has been a feature of ecological debates since at least the early twentieth century, when the English botanist Arthur Tansley sparred with American ecologist Frederic Clements over the latter’s view of the ecosystem as organism, striving for total symbiotic balance. Finally putting this to rest, with the help of decades of continuing research, will probably be an essential step toward saving the cause of environmentalism from one of its more dangerous foundational myths.
UnHerd: Could Spain’s Pedro Sánchez save Europe’s centre-Left?
Down but not out, Sánchez subsequently toured the country in his beaten-up Peugeot, meeting with grassroots PSOE members and drumming up support. Like Corbyn – and in contrast to figures from the political centre – Sánchez draws his support predominantly from the grassroots. As a result of reaching out to Socialist Party activists he was easily re-elected as party leader in June 2017. A year later he became the first politician in Spain’s history to unseat a prime minister through a no-confidence motion. [...]
Sánchez’s ruthlessness in deposing the stale and corrupt Rajoy government changed that. A poll taken shortly after Rajoy’s departure had the PSOE on 28.8% of the vote, ahead of the PP on 25.6% and Ciudadanos on 21.1%. Support for the PSOE’s Left-wing rivals Podemos also fell, slipping to 13.1% – less than half of what the insurgent party were polling three years earlier. [...]
Sánchez is therefore under huge pressure to call an election. He had initially promised to do so – a move calculated to win support from other parties during the no confidence vote against Rajoy. Yet since becoming Prime Minister he has done a swift about-turn, announcing recently that he would stay on until his mandate expires in 2020 so as to “normalise” the country. [...]
The biggest sticking point for the new government, however, will be in delivering a budget that moves Spain firmly away from austerity. This week Sánchez agreed a deal with Pablo Iglesias, the leader of Podemos. The deal proposes a raft of Left-wing measures for next year’s budget, including a 22% increase in the minimum wage, heavy investment in education, longer paternity leave and higher spening on benefit payments. The deal seeks to avoid an early general election, which benefits both men: if one were held, Podemos would likely do poorly and there is no guarantee the PSOE would win a majority.
The Atlantic: Trump’s Powerful Theory of Politics
Until now, that strategy has worked relatively well—allowing him to retain much of his support, even as he has pushed the envelope rhetorically and with policy. Trump has survived a multitude of scandals and crises by holding the support of the congressional majority and much of the Republican electorate. And this weekend, a Wall Street Journal/NBC poll found that Trump’s approval ratings are up to 47 percent—the best of his term.[...]
The president’s method has pretty strong support from social scientists. The overwhelming weight of recent scholarship points to two major trends in American politics over the past three decades to justify his theory. The first is that partisan polarization in Washington has greatly intensified since the 1960s. The distance that separates the parties on most issues has vastly increased. The ideological homogeneity of each party has solidified. In other words, centrists faded as a major force in politics and policy making. The second and related trend is that the phenomenon has been much more pronounced within the Republican Party. The GOP has moved further to the right than Democrats have moved to the left. Republicans are more ideologically cohesive as a party than are Democrats, who still exhibit greater division and fragmentation relative to their counterparts (although not as much as they did in the 1950s and ’60s, when Democrats were fundamentally divided between southern and northern wings).[...]
Trump has not left this to chance. He has been extremely aggressive staying on the campaign trail, holding rallies to build his own support and to make sure that candidates in key states understand the risk of opposing him. Many Republican candidates have declared their allegiance to the president as the head of the party. With Trump counting on the fact that Republican legislators will always come home, he has been able to employ a parliamentary governing style, in which the White House and the congressional majority act with a degree of unity that even the late President Woodrow Wilson would have admired.
The New Yorker: Why Are Americans Still Uncomfortable with Atheism?
By the time Seeger submitted his form, in the late nineteen-fifties, thousands of conscientious objectors in the U.S. had refused to fight in the two World Wars. Those who belonged to pacifist religious traditions, such as Mennonites and Quakers, were sent to war as noncombatants or to work as farmers or firefighters on the home front through the Civilian Public Service; eventually, so were those who could prove their own independent, religiously motivated pacifism. Those who could not were sent to prison or to labor camps. But while Selective Service laws had been revised again and again to clarify the criteria for conscientious objection, they still did not account for young men who, like Seeger, refused to say that their opposition to war came from belief in a Supreme Being.[...]
Seeger’s victory helped mark a turning point for a minority that had once been denied so much as the right to testify in court, even in their own defense. Atheists, long discriminated against by civil authorities and derided by their fellow-citizens, were suddenly eligible for some of the exemptions and protections that had previously been restricted to believers. But, in the decades since U.S. v. Seeger, despite an increase in the number of people who identify as nonbelievers, their standing before the courts and in the public sphere has been slow to improve. Americans, in large numbers, still do not want atheists teaching their children, or marrying them. They would, according to surveys, prefer a female, gay, Mormon, or Muslim President to having an atheist in the White House, and some of them do not object to attempts to keep nonbelievers from holding other offices, even when the office is that of notary public. Atheists are not welcome in the Masonic Lodge, and while the Boy Scouts of America has opened its organization to gays and to girls, it continues to bar any participant who will not pledge “to do my duty to God.” [...]
With nonbelievers starting to assert themselves, believers began more aggressively protecting their faith from offense or scrutiny. Blasphemy laws were enforced against those who insulted God, Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit, or the Bible. A former Baptist minister turned freethinker named Abner Kneeland was arrested in Massachusetts for an article that he wrote explaining why he no longer believed in a monotheistic God; not even the prominent Unitarian preacher William Ellery Channing or the former Unitarian pastor Ralph Waldo Emerson, both of whom rose to Kneeland’s defense, could spare him jail time. In New York, a man named John Ruggles was sentenced to three months for insulting Jesus; in Pennsylvania, another man, Abner Updegraph, was fined for calling the Bible “a mere fable” that contained “a great many lies.” (Laws against blasphemy, though rarely enforced, still exist in Massachusetts, Michigan, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and Wyoming.) All but three states passed Sabbatarian laws, which were imposed on everyone, including religious observers whose Sabbath did not fall on Sunday. (Such prohibitions linger in blue laws, which now mostly restrict the sale of alcohol on Sunday.) One Jewish merchant took his case all the way to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, only to be denied an exemption because, in the words of the court, “Whatever strikes at the root of Christianity tends manifestly to the dissolution of civil government.”[...]
Gray is especially interested in those atheists who, in addition to having no faith in the divine, have none in humanity. (Given his own intellectual bent, one suspects him of delighting equally in their pessimism and their unpopularity.) These aren’t misotheists—those who hate God, like the Marquis de Sade, many new atheists, and the literary critic William Empson, whose “Seven Types of Ambiguity” Gray cites as an influence. They are thinkers like George Santayana, a thoroughgoing materialist who scoffed at human progress to the point of indifference to human suffering yet loved Catholic traditions so much that he chose to live out the end of his days in the care of nuns. Similarly, the novelist Joseph Conrad had no faith in God, and lost his faith in progress after witnessing the colonization of Congo, but he wrote beautifully about those who faced their empty fate head on: sailors surviving the indifference of the sea. Such men—and almost all the atheists in Gray’s book are men—would not recognize the hopeful atheism that is all the rage today. (Gray does make space for Ayn Rand, who briefly steals the show, as her followers raise their cigarette holders in tandem with hers, marry mates chosen by “the Collective,” and tap-dance at their weddings because Rand deemed it the only truly rational form of dance.)
The Calvert Journal: Tokyo masks
Bulgarian-born photographer Pepa Hristova has always drawn inspiration for her work from issues of identity. Her travels in Japan for this series brought home to her the importance of questions surrounding work, sexuality and leisure, and the way that old and new coexist in a modern metropolis. [...]
Tokyo is the biggest metropolis in the world. It is like a gigantic machine: everything feels very disciplined and well-connected. Even the people seem to “work” with order and mechanical precision — and they work constantly. If you meet up with a Japanese man for dinner, you may find that he returns to his office straight after, even if it is midnight, even on a weekend. I’ve never heard anyone say, “I’m tired, I really need to go home,” as would be the norm at home in Germany. At the same time, it is hard to tell what the Japanese are really thinking as they often wear a mask of politeness.[...]
I went to the meido cafés in Electronic Town Akihabara, a part of Tokyo, where many young women work wearing school or servants’ uniforms. They follow the principle “17 forever”, behaving intentionally in a submissive and childish way and preparing dishes and drinks clumsily which they then serve on their knees. They also paint little hearts with ketchup on the plates and address the predominantly male clientele as “My Lord”. For an additional charge, the meidos offer their customers foot massages, too. There are hundreds of meido cafés in Tokyo; they are an integral part of Japanese society. I intended to take pictures of these girls while they were not “performing”. This was a great challenge, since they just always appear sweet and cute, with their kitty-voices and twinkling eyes. I wasn’t sure if they actually still manage anymore to distinguish their parallel existence.
Politico: Green wave set to sag ahead of 2019 election
At present, the Greens and their EFA partners (parties pushing for either full political independence or greater sovereignty) make up the fifth biggest group in the Parliament, with 52 lawmakers. Expectations aren’t exactly high of improving on that, especially with six British Green MEPs on their way out the door. [...]
In the European Parliament, the Greens have often collaborated with other left-wing forces, including the Socialists or the far-left GUE-NGL group, to pass legislation. But Green leaders say they will not join any group with the Socialists or Liberals, even in the face of a populist surge across the Continent. [...]
Green parties have done well in Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands but they are almost nowhere to be seen in Portugal, Spain, Italy and Eastern Europe. In Germany, their approach to issues like migration has won praise from conservative parts of society, while in other places they are affiliated with traditionally left-wing parties. [...]
The big unknown is France, where Europe Ecologie is still relatively low in the polls. A survey conducted in September by IFOP put the party at just 7.5 percent in the European election — lower than the 9 percent they won in 2014 and much lower than the 16.28 percent their list won in the 2009 European election.
Jacobin Magazine: A Pale Shade of Green
But the performance spike comes as somewhat of a surprise: the Greens netted a mediocre 8.5 percent in last year’s federal elections, almost unchanged from 2013. The party hasn’t veered much from its centrist path since its failed attempt to form a federal coalition with Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic alliance (CDU/CSU) and the pro-business Free Democrats (FDP) following the 2017 general election — moves that disgruntled the Greens’ more radical youth wing. But if the party hasn’t changed, what else has?
The answer lies in the performance of Germany’s ruling parties, today joined in a grand coalition. Following multiple cabinet showdowns this summer, each of which brought the gears of government to a halt, discontented voters from all the ruling parties — the CDU/CSU and the social-democratic SPD — seem to be drifting toward the Greens. Just over two-fifths of the Green’s new supporters have migrated from the SPD and a quarter have wandered over from the CDU/CSU, according to a poll published in Die Welt newspaper.[...]
Where a critical stance towards capitalism and the ecological damage wreaked by profit-makers in industrialized societies once featured highly in the Greens’ manifesto, the party now offers centrist solutions palatable to German capital. At one point the Greens stopped saying “the system is broken” and started talking about “capitalism in service of the people.”[...]
More recently, the Greens have set their sights on becoming a Volkspartei, a big-tent party attracting voters from different sections of society. Traditionally, their voter base has been somewhat elitist: highly educated, largely western German, urban and middle class.
IFLScience: Scientists Believe They Have Finally Discovered What Easter Island's Statues Were For
An 18th-century account of European first contact with the Pacific Islanders detailed natives being able to drink seawater without harm – a feat we all know is impossible today (the human body cannot process high concentrations of seawater, eventually killing a person through dehydration). By 1887, the local population of Easter Island dropped to just 110 largely due to slave trading and disease, decimating any chance of uncovering the people’s oral history. [...]
When it rains, water beneath the ground flows downhill and exits the ground where the rock meets the ocean. When tides are low, this “results in the flow of freshwater directly into the sea.” The fresh and saltwater mix to create a “brackish but potable water along the coastline” that contains low enough levels of salt to be safely consumed by humans, which the researchers think the islanders must have done.
“Although coastal groundwater sources are of poor quality, they were apparently sufficient to support the population and allow them to build magnificent statutes for which Easter Island is famous,” wrote the authors in their study published in Hydrogeology. [...]
However, others argue that small cisterns found on the island could have been used for collecting rainfall. Lipo argues that if collecting rainfall was central to the culture, then the cisterns would have been much larger (they only hold between 2-4 liters of water each). Furthermore, Rapa Nui only receives 1,240 millimeters of rainfall every year. Paired with the rate of water evaporation here, the cisterns would likely have only been a viable source of water for less than one-third of the year.
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