Foreign Policy: Extreme Nationalism Is as Polish as Pierogi

The question is why, in Europe’s most economically successful post-communist country, has a ruling party ended up struggling to separate itself from openly extremist nationalists? In answering that question, and deciding what to do about it, it’s not enough to examine Law and Justice’s rise to power—one must also understand the peculiar culture of Polish nationalism that the party appeals to. In Poland, perhaps more than anywhere else in Europe, there is no necessary contradiction between a commitment to democracy and to the most extreme forms of nationalism. [...]

Wladyslaw Gomulka, the communist party leader from 1956 to 1970, thus promised communism would be implemented the “Polish way.” In practice, this entailed blending nationalism with communism, the former aimed at reassuring Poles the national identity forged in the 19th century would be preserved in the new order. From the late 1950s, the red-and-white Polish flag thus “became much more prominent than the red communist flag,” while “state propaganda intensified the use of the adjective ‘Polish’ before standard communist slogans,” Porter-Szucs wrote. [...]

This conspiratorial view is exemplified in the writings of Rafal Ziemkiewicz, a prominent nationalist author and participant in previous far-right Independence Day marches, who described post-1989 Poland as a “post-colonial state” built not to serve Poles, but to exploit its resources for foreign overlords (Western capital) and their “local collaborators.” In a society with abundant experience of living under state structures serving foreign interests, much psychological fertile ground exists for such conspiratorial beliefs to germinate, and germinate they have in the past three decades, egged on by no less than Poland’s current ruling party. [...]

This camp believes that the only pathway to preventing these hated lefty ideologies from permeating Poland is via a robust defense of the country’s “independence.” Whatever the result of the current face-off over Sunday’s independence march, it represents the opening salvo in an inevitable civil war on Poland’s right between Law and Justice, which wants a controlled nationalism, and those who crave it unleashed in its rawest and crudest form. The battle for who best represents the ideals of God, honor, and Fatherland has just begun.

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The New York Review of Books: How Brexit Broke Up Britain

But that’s not actually what Brexit is about. The real agenda of the Hard Brexiteers is not, in this sense, about taking back control; it is about letting go of control. For people like Dominic Raab, the Brexit secretary, the dream is not of a change in which regulation happens, but of a completion of the deregulating neoliberal project set in motion by Margaret Thatcher in 1979. The Brexit fantasy is of an “open” and “global” Britain, unshackled from EU regulation, that can lower its environmental, health, and labor standards and unleash a new golden age of buccaneering hyper-capitalism. Again, this is a perfectly coherent (if repellent) agenda. But it is not what most of those who voted for Brexit think it is supposed to be. And this gap makes it impossible to say what “the British” want—they want contradictory things.

The second question is who is supposed to be taking control: Who, in other words, are “the people” to whom power is supposedly being returned? Here we find the other thing that dare not speak its name: English nationalism. Brexit is in part a response to a development that has been underway since the turn of the century. In reaction to the Belfast Agreement of 1998 that created a new political space in Northern Ireland and the establishment of the Scottish Parliament in 1999 that did the same for another part of the UK, there has been a rapid change in the way English people see their national identity. Increasingly, they are not British, but English. This resurgent identity has not been explicitly articulated by any mainstream party and surveys have shown a growing sense of English alienation from the center of London government in Westminster and Whitehall. Brexit, which is overwhelming an English phenomenon, is in part an expression of this frustration. In Anthony Barnett’s blunt and pithy phrase from his 2017 book The Lure of Greatness: England’s Brexit and America’s Trump, “Unable to exit Britain, the English did the next-best thing and told the EU to fuck off.”

There is stark and overwhelming evidence that the English people who voted for Brexit do not, on the whole, care about the United Kingdom and in particular do not care about that part of it called Northern Ireland. When asked in the recent “Future of England” survey whether “the unravelling of the peace process in Northern Ireland” is a “price worth paying” for Brexit that allows them to “take back control,” fully 83 percent of Leave voters and 73 percent of Conservative voters in England agree that it is. This is not, surely, mere mindless cruelty; it expresses a deep belief that Northern Ireland is not “us,” that what happens “over there” is not “our” responsibility. Equally, in the Channel 4 survey, asked how they would feel if “Brexit leads to Northern Ireland leaving the United Kingdom and joining the Republic of Ireland,” 61 percent of Leave voters said they would be “not very concerned” or “not at all concerned.”

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The Guardian: About time: why western philosophy can only teach us so much

Yet, for all the varied and rich philosophical traditions across the world, the western philosophy I have studied for more than 30 years – based entirely on canonical western texts – is presented as the universal philosophy, the ultimate inquiry into human understanding. Comparative philosophy – study in two or more philosophical traditions – is left almost entirely to people working in anthropology or cultural studies. This abdication of interest assumes that comparative philosophy might help us to understand the intellectual cultures of India, China or the Muslim world, but not the human condition. [...]

But there are other ways of thinking about time. Many schools of thought believe that the beginning and the end are and have always been the same because time is essentially cyclical. This is the most intuitively plausible way of thinking about eternity. When we imagine time as a line, we end up baffled: what happened before time began? How can a line go on without end? A circle allows us to visualise going backwards or forwards for ever, at no point coming up against an ultimate beginning or end. [...]

In Chinese thought, wisdom and truth are timeless, and we do not need to go forward to learn, only to hold on to what we already have. As the 19th- century Scottish sinologist James Legge put it, Confucius did not think his purpose was “to announce any new truths, or to initiate any new economy. It was to prevent what had previously been known from being lost.” Mencius, similarly, criticised the princes of his day because “they do not put into practice the ways of the ancient kings”. Mencius also says, in the penultimate chapter of the eponymous collection of his conversations, close to the book’s conclusion: “The superior man seeks simply to bring back the unchanging standard, and, that being correct, the masses are roused to virtue.” The very last chapter charts the ages between the great kings and sages. [...]

The universalist thrust has many merits. The refusal to accept any and every practice as a legitimate custom has bred a very good form of intolerance for the barbaric and unjust traditional practices of the west itself. Without this intolerance, we would still have slavery, torture, fewer rights for women and homosexuals, feudal lords and unelected parliaments. The universalist aspiration has, at its best, helped the west to transcend its own prejudices. At the same time, it has also legitimised some prejudices by confusing them with universal truths. The philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah argues that the complaints of anti-universalists are not generally about universalism at all, but pseudo-universalism, “Eurocentric hegemony posing as universalism”. When this happens, intolerance for the indefensible becomes intolerance for anything that is different. The aspiration for the universal becomes a crude insistence on the uniform. Sensitivity is lost to the very different needs of different cultures at different times and places.

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The Atlantic: The Sex Drought

Both young people and adults are having less sex than ever before. In the space of a generation, sex has gone from something most high-school students have experienced to something most haven’t. The average adult used to have sex 62 times a year; now, that number is 54.

Research continues to show that a healthy sex life is linked to a happy life, and having a partner is a stronger predictor than ever of happiness. Why, then, in this modern era, is sex on the decline?

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Vox: Why ramen is so valuable in prison

Instant ramen noodles have become like cash among inmates in the US. And behind bars, it can buy you anything. 

Cash is illegal in prisons. And that means everything from tuna to stamps to cigarettes have their own unique value in a trade and barter market.

But ramen has quickly taken over as the most in demand products the prison system offers.

Watch this video to see how ramen took over prison economies and why it’s the default item for trade among inmates.

The Atlantic: American Catholic Bishops Miss Their Big Chance to Implement Sex-Abuse Reforms

Had they passed, the proposed measures would have created a code of conduct for bishops and a special commission, including six lay members, tasked with working with the apostolic nuncio, the pope’s diplomatic representative to the United States Church, to investigate allegations of bishop misconduct. These would have been small but significant moves toward making bishops more accountable when they fail to report abusive priests, or when they are accused of abuse themselves. But even these limited actions were delayed. [...]

The Vatican’s top-down involvement is far different from the way the Holy See approached an earlier iteration of the sex-abuse crisis in 2002, under Pope John Paul II, when American bishops were essentially left to their own devices after The Boston Globe’s explosive reporting on clergy’s abuse of children. That year, the bishops conference wrote the Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People, known colloquially as the Dallas Charter, which set forth guidelines for addressing child abuse by members of the clergy. During Tuesday’s discussion on the proposed reforms, DiNardo said the measures would fill gaps in the Dallas Charter relating to bishop oversight and where people should go to report allegations of abuse by bishops or bishops’ failure to address alleged abuse. [...]

Massimo Faggioli, a historian at Villanova University, believes that the Vatican is putting together its own proposals for bishop oversight, which it could deploy worldwide in February, rather than let bishops of each country develop slightly different solutions. “I expect that [Vatican officials] are preparing guidelines that they will issue as mandatory,” Faggioli said. “At this point, [the February meeting] seems it will not just be a moment for sharing ideas.” Cardinal Blase Cupich of Chicago told me that there was also some concern from the Vatican that the American bishops’ proposals, as written, were not in accordance with canon law. [...]

On the whole, bishops and observers seemed to have two very different reactions to the Vatican’s request to delay the vote. On the side of some bishops, the Vatican’s move is bad for American Catholicism, because it prevents the bishops from taking any cohesive, large-scale action until the spring. But many liberal Catholics, such the National Catholic Reporter’s Michael Sean Winters, believe this could be good for the Church, and for American Catholics, in the long term, because it shows that the Vatican is taking greater responsibility for sexual abuse than it has in past decades. The Vatican, they believe, has an opportunity to change the culture of the Church—and will keep the bishops more accountable than they could keep themselves. Either way, however, the ball is now unquestionably in the Vatican’s court.

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CityLab: Cities Around Paris Strike a Rare Agreement to Ban Diesel Cars

On Monday, a large group of suburban municipalities agreed to ban all diesel-fueled cars built before 2000 inside the A86 Beltway, starting in July. In 2025, this will be upgraded to a ban on all diesel vehicles from before 2010, plus a ban on more polluting gasoline-powered cars built before 2006.

What’s ground-breaking about the law is the vast area in which it would ban a set of cars. The A86 is a major highway that lies far outside the borders of the official City of Paris. The new ban would thus extend far into the suburbs (themselves far more populous than the official city), into a region that has battled Paris’s mayor over anti-pollution measures in the past.

The zone it covers is very large, covering 79 of the 131 communes in the Greater Paris area, and it’s expected to remove 118,000 vehicles from the road. For this step, the participating municipalities deserve great credit. Not only will the size of their diesel-free zone have a major impact, it will also be implemented in a relatively car-dependent area where the political stakes for such a decision are potentially high. [...]

Then again, there’s yet another key factor making it much easier to push through legislation. France (like Britain) has already agreed to ban gasoline-powered cars by 2040—a date that’s far enough away that it doesn’t force immediate action, but not so far off as to be meaningless. Paris is going further by promising a ban on gasoline cars as early as 2030—still five years after all of Norway introduces its own ban.

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The Atlantic: Britain Is Rushing to Seal a Brexit Deal Few Support

May needs at least 320 lawmakers to back her deal in a final vote for it to pass. Without a parliamentary majority or a unified party behind her, it’s estimated May can only count on as many as 235 party loyalists, as well as four to five Labour lawmakers. Those who have already pledged to vote against her deal include a group of as many as 40 Hard-Brexit Conservatives, a majority of Labour lawmakers, as well as the SNP (35 lawmakers), Liberal Democrats (12), Plaid Cymru (four), and the Greens (one). [...]

Though May appears to have avoided the high-profile cabinet resignations that have plagued these negotiations, a figure who could be key to the deal’s success in the days and weeks ahead is Brexit Secretary Dominic Raab, the prime minister’s pick to usher the deal through to its final phase after Davis’s resignation over the summer. A committed Brexiteer, Raab has been among the most vocal in cabinet against a deal that risks keeping the U.K. closely aligned with the EU. If he is able to accept a provision to maintain some regulatory and customs alignment with the bloc to maintain the status quo at the Irish border, there is a chance others will too. [...]

Ultimately, however, the fate of May’s plan won’t be decided by cabinet, but by parliamentary calculus. Conservative Brexiteer Peter Bone warned the prime minister in the House of Commons on Wednesday that if reports of the draft deal’s contents are true, the agreement could be dead on arrival. “You are not delivering the Brexit people voted for,” he said, “and today you will lose the support of many Conservative MPs and millions of voters across the country.”

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statista: The most popular political figures in the UK

In a time of political upheaval and uncertainty in the UK with key figures pulling in very different directions, where do the public's affections lie? Unsurprisingly, it is as split as the political landscape itself. According to the latest YouGov 'Ratings', Boris Johnson and Theresa May enjoy the most positive opinions from the public, both of which having a 32 percent favourability rating. The Labour leader Corbyn is in third place with 30 percent of respondents saying they view him positively.

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