UnHerd: 2017: when the US woke up to its drugs shame

This was the year the US finally woke up to what was happening in its midst. There were 70,200 overdose deaths, a sharp rise on the previous year and more than the toll from guns, car crashes or AIDS at the peak of its epidemic. At least 10 million people were misusing opioids, wasting an estimated $80 billion from the economy.

The awful scale of abuse and addiction raises issues over prohibition, exposing the futility of trying to curb the flow of illicit drugs in a globalised world where chemists in Asia can cook up new drugs for immediate sale across the 50 states of America. The Dayton coroner told me his team would monitor the dark web to determine the products that would soon be found inside bodies in their morgue.

But it sparks other issues too: over the US health system, which leaves so many poorer people without healthcare to tackle problems. Over the rapacious nature of unchecked capitalism, since the epidemic was fostered by a pharmaceutical firm pushing highly-addictive new painkillers and callous doctors signing dozens of daily prescriptions in ‘pill factories’. It has even provoked debate over rich philanthropists who profit from misery then launder their images with donations to major museums.[...]

The British Nobel laureate Sir Angus Deaton and his equally-brilliant wife Anne Case, economists at Princeton University who have tracked this plague of pointless fatalities among middle-aged white people, called them ‘deaths of despair’. They published a paper in 2017 called ‘Mortality and morbidity in the 21st century’. It revealed death rates of white people with no more than a high school diploma had grown to be 30% higher than those of black people — having been 30% lower at the turn of the century.

read the article

UnHerd: How liars become leaders

This is the magic of some lies, and some of the liars who tell them. We willingly conspire in our own deception because of the way it makes us feel, and the comfort it brings. It’s even used as the inspirational finale of the Christmas classic Miracle on 34th Street. “Which is worse: a lie that draws a smile or a truth that draws a tear?”. In the last decade, we’ve decided, quite firmly, to choose the lie. After all, who wants what Al Gore described as “inconvenient truth” when you can willingly suspend your disbelief and go along with promises of the moon and the stars, delivered yesterday and paid for by someone else? [...]

This trend for unreliable narrators feels like part of the same phenomenon that enables people who play this game to make it to the top. We are now caught in a permanent twilight where every fact can be questioned, every truth undermined. Photos and videos can be faked. Every anecdote is questioned with the accusation that it “didn’t happen”. Social media has been a powerful force for the democratising of information but it’s also made it harder to tell what’s true and what’s false.[...]

We love being sucked into the dramatic aura of an Amy or a Boris: into a vortex where we are released from the gravitational pull of the truth. We never really believe them. But we suspend our disbelief because it is convenient and comfortable. It offers us a chance to play out the fantasy of being able to shape our own reality: to say that this is so simply because I say it is. We get to be Gods for a moment. How can uncomfortable truths ever compete?

read the article

CNN: Why movie villains love modern architecture

Oppenheim explores his darker road not traveled in "Lair," a recent book from Tra Publishing, that renders 15 highly secretive dwellings in black-and-white architectural drawings. They include the Nordic alpine hideaway in "Ex Machina," the spidery underwater sea home in "The Spy Who Loved Me," the sleek Mount Rushmore abode in "North By Northwest," and the eerie Brutalist Wallace Corporation HQ in "Blade Runner 2049."

The lairs generally share commonalities: They are pristine, awe-inspiring, high-tech, otherworldly, often impractical, and draw heavily on the tenets of modernism. The book poses the question: Why do bad guys live in good houses? [...]

Oppenheim and his team came up with a rubric for which hideouts made the final cut -- and what counted as true villainry. "First, primarily, the lairs had to be aspirational. They also had to be incredibly beautiful from an architectural standpoint," he explained. They omitted the lavish John Lautner-designed mansion of porn director Jackie Treehorn in "The Big Lebowski," not deeming him a real antagonist. Darth Vader's hellfire stronghold in "Star Wars" also lost out in favor of the Death Star because Oppenheim decided nobody would actually want to live on an untenable volcanic planet.

read the article

The New York Times: A New Secularism Is Appearing in Islam

The rise of Islamism, a highly politicized interpretation of Islam, since the 1970s only seemed to confirm the same view: that “Islam is resistant to secularization,” as Shadi Hamid, a prominent thinker on religion and politics, observed in his 2016 book, Islamic Exceptionalism. [...]

Some of those signs are captured by Arab Barometer, a research network based at Princeton and the University of Michigan whose opinion surveys map a drift away from Islamism — and even Islam itself. The network’s pollsters recently found that in the last five years, in six pivotal Arab countries, “trust in Islamist parties” and “trust in religious leaders” have declined, as well as attendance in mosques.

Granted, the trend isn’t huge. Arabs who describe themselves as “not religious” were 8 percent of those polled in 2013, and have risen to only 13 percent in 2018. So some experts on the region, like Hisham A. Hellyer, an Egyptian-British scholar, advises caution.[...]

The disillusionment is often only with Islamism as a political instrument, but it can turn against Islam, the religion, itself. In Turkey, the latter is manifested in a social trend among its youth that has become the talk of the day: the rise of “deism,” or belief in a God, but not religion. Pro-Erdogan Islamists are worried about this “big threat to Islam,” but perceive it, tragicomically, as yet another Western conspiracy, rather than their own accomplishment.

read the article

Associated Press: Pope denounces 'rigidity' as he warns of Christian decline

Francis’ message appeared aimed at conservative and traditionalist Catholics, including within the Vatican Curia, who have voiced increasing opposition to his progressive-minded papacy. Their criticisms have accelerated over the past year, amid Vatican financial and sex abuse scandals that may have predated Francis’ papacy but are nevertheless coming to light now.[...]

He cited the late Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini, a leader of the progressive wing of the Catholic Church, who in his final interview before dying in 2012 lamented that the church found itself “200 years behind” because of its inbred fear of change. [...]

In a tangible sign of change, Francis issued a new decree Saturday limiting the term of the dean of the College of Cardinals, an influential job that had previously been held for life. Francis accepted the resignation of the current dean, Cardinal Angelo Sodano, and decreed that going forward, the future top cardinal would only have a five-year renewable term.

read the article

RSA Minimate: Winners Take All | Anand Giridharadas

In this powerful new RSA Minimate, TIME’s Editor-at-Large Anand Giridharadas argues that while the winners of our age might be well meaning in their desire to give back, too many stop short at the kinds of real change that would see power more radically distributed.

The minds behind the award-winning RSA Animate series are back! RSA Minimates are super-short, information-packed animations for busy people. All audio excerpts are taken from live, FREE events at the RSA’s HQ in London, and animated by Cognitive. This animation was produced by RSA Senior Events and Animations Producer, Abi Stephenson.

UnHerd: The mother of all protests

The Arab Spring challenged the stability of long-standing dictatorships that many scholars and pundits saw as unassailable — either because the dictators had apparently mastered the political techniques of authoritarianism, or because they simply enjoyed the luxury of living in a region that did not value democratic principles. When Francis Fukuyama asked in 1989 whether humanity had reached “the end of history” with the universal acceptance of liberal democracy, cultural relativists offered the so-called incompatibility between Islam and democratic values as a rebuttal to his argument. But even though dictatorship mostly endured in the region (although specific rulers like Muammar Gaddafi and Hosni Mubarak fell), the tens of millions of people who came out into the streets showed that authoritarianism was contrary to the will of the people. [...]

The Arab Spring’s demonstration of widespread support for democracy also highlighted the role of youth in the movement. The Middle East is experiencing a youth bulge, and these young people are technologically savvy and significantly more educated than their parents. But they are also frustrated by mass unemployment and the lack of the political freedoms they are able to observe in other parts of the world. Using both old-fashioned mobilisation techniques and social media, these young people drove the push for democracy and freedom in their countries. More recent protests in countries like Lebanon and Iraq show that this desire for change has not abated. [...]

Beyond their effects on mainstream politics, both the Arab Spring and the Occupy movement shaped the nature of protests that have proliferated across the world in the last decade. The Arab Spring successfully merged 21st century, youth-led social media activism with old-fashioned, ‘to the streets’ protests. Whereas ‘hashtag activism’ threatened to undermine more substantive forms of mass political action — why carry a sign and perhaps risk arrest when you could simply forward a tweet? — the Arab Spring used various media, social and otherwise, as tools to complement and magnify the crowds that gathered in the streets and public squares to demand change. [...]

As we enter 2020, the legacy of 2011 has morphed into seemingly countless movements around the world. But as in any uprising, counter-revolutions have also materialised. The backlash has taken the form of governments and powerful conservative forces responding to the outpouring of often young, often leftist or radical protestors. The outpouring of progressive anger has created a conservative backlash — not just with fringe Right-wing populist groups, but within mainstream politics as well. Although Jeremy Corbyn, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren ascended to the top of their respective opposition parties, they remain far from number 10 or the Oval Office.

read the article

New Left Review: Zion Lights, Hot Earth Rebels

Yes. Its precursor was a group called Rising Up, started eighteen months before by some long-standing direct-action campaigners. There was Gail Bradbrook, who’d been involved in environmental campaigns since she was a teenager and had led anti-fracking protests around Stroud in Gloucestershire. There was Simon Bramwell, a builder and bush-craft teacher, who founded the Stroud-based Compassionate Revolution group in 2015 with Gail and George Barda, an Occupy and Greenpeace activist. Roger Hallam was studying civil disobedience at King’s College, London; originally he’d been an organic farmer in Wales, but he could see the impact of climate change on his crops and began reading up about it. Clare Farrell was a fashion designer, she does a lot of xr’s art work—the block printing, for example. Robin Boardman was a student from Bristol, a bit younger than the rest. [...]

The starting point was the need to find a more effective form of protest than what we’d all been doing to date. Pretty much none of this came out of our own innovative thinking. It was about looking at the research, adding up the facts. Conventional A-to-B marches don’t work: millions of us demonstrated against the Iraq War and it didn’t make any difference. A key piece of research was Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan’s Why Civil Resistance Works. They take data from hundreds of 20th-century social movements and analyse what they did right and what they did wrong. The most successful ones, those that had their demands met, used forms of decentralized, non-violent civil disobedience—large-scale direct action. The tipping-point, Chenoweth and Stephan found, was to get 3.5 per cent of the population involved. That’s not a huge number—it’s about two million in the uk. But it’s not just about getting them to demonstrate, because unfortunately that doesn’t make any difference. It’s about getting them involved at a higher level. If two million people bring the capital city to a stand-still, what can the government do? They can’t arrest that many people. We saw that in the April and October Rebellions this year: even when the number of people arrested was in the thousands, the police and the judicial system were overwhelmed. [...]

Number one is for the government to tell the truth about the climate and ecological emergency; we need the state to mobilize all-out, like in war-time, to halt the crisis. The second demand is to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions to net zero by 2025 and to halt bio-diversity loss—the 2019 ibpes Report on bio-diversity says that one in seven species is now at risk of extinction. Third, a Citizens’ Assembly on climate and ecological justice, to decide which policies to push forward. This would be a jury-like structure, chosen by lot to get a cross-section of society. Parliament will remain, but it will play an advisory role to the Citizens’ Assembly.

read the article

The Guardian: There is an antidote to demagoguery – it’s called political rewilding

In Finland, on the day of our general election, Boris Johnson’s antithesis became prime minister: the 34-year-old Sanna Marin, who is strong, humble and collaborative. Finland’s politics, emerging from its peculiar history, cannot be replicated here. But there is one crucial lesson. In 2014, the country started a programme to counter fake news, teaching people how to recognise and confront it. The result is that Finns have been ranked, in a recent study of 35 nations, the people most resistant to post-truth politics. [...]

But this is the less important task. The much bigger change is this: to stop seeking to control people from the centre. At the moment, the political model for almost all parties is to drive change from the top down. They write a manifesto, that they hope to turn into government policy, which may then be subject to a narrow and feeble consultation, which then leads to legislation, which then leads to change. I believe the best antidote to demagoguery is the opposite process: radical trust. To the greatest extent possible, parties and governments should trust communities to identify their own needs and make their own decisions. [...]

But in some parts of the world, towns and cities have begun to rewild politics. Councils have catalysed mass participation, then – to the greatest extent possible – stepped back and allowed it to evolve. Classic examples include participatory budgeting in Porto Alegre in Brazil, the Decide Madrid system in Spain, and the Better Reykjavik programme in Iceland. Local people have reoccupied the political space that had been captured by party machines and top-down government. They have worked out together what their communities need and how to make it happen, refusing to let politicians frame the questions or determine the answers. The results have been extraordinary: a massive re-engagement in politics, particularly among marginalised groups, and dramatic improvements in local life. Participatory politics does not require the blessing of central government, just a confident and far-sighted local authority.

statista: Venezuela Is Fast Becoming World's Biggest Refugee Crisis

According to UN data, Venezuela is fast becoming the world's biggest refugee crisis. By the end of 2020, 6.5 million Venezuelans are expected to have been forcibly displaced outside of their home country. This is up from just 300,000 in 2017. Syria, the biggest global refugee crisis to date, reached its height in 2018 with 6.7 million displaced people. With resettlement programs ongoing, that number is expected to have been reduced to 5.6 by the end of 2019 and might further fall in 2020.

While the number of Syrian refugees and those in a refugee-like situation had been rising since 2011, Venezuelan refugee numbers jumped up quickly, testing the preparedness of humanitarian organizations in the region.

Brookings Institution, which analyzed the data, notes that compared to the Syrian crisis, the Venezuela refugee situation is severely underfunded, putting the lives of hundred thousands of people at risk because of the lack of food and medical assistance.

see the graph

Beautiful News Daily: Suicides in Russia Are at 50-Year Low

see the graph

Lapham’s Quarterly: How to Survive Winter

A heat wave is unpleasant and can be deadly, but low temperatures pose a far greater threat to life. Protection from this danger required humans to mobilize their powers of invention. For generations, winter’s icy embrace posed an enormous challenge. What can people eat when there’s nothing to harvest? How can they keep from freezing to death? And how can they move from one place to another when snow blocks every path and road? Answers to these stark questions represent many of civilization’s grand achievements. Having enough to eat, for example: from drying apples and pears to smoking fish and meat, pickling vegetables, canning plums, and curing bacon, nearly all techniques for preserving food emerged to help adapt to winter. The cold also fueled the development of heating and insulation systems. For vast stretches of time, the common way to heat an indoor space was simply to light an open fire. Stone fireplaces first emerged in the eighth century. By 1200 an efficient masonry oven was a fixture not only in monasteries and castles but in many private residences as well. While the subsequent centuries brought improvements in ovens, the underlying technology had its limits. One eighteenth-century aristocrat, Elisabeth Charlotte of the Palatinate, Duchess of Orléans, left a vivid account of an insufficient oven in the otherwise sumptuous palace of Versailles. “It is such a fierce cold that it cannot be expressed,” she wrote on January 10, 1709, in a letter to Sophia of Hanover. “I sit by a large fire, have screens in front of the doors, have a sable around my neck, a bearskin wound about my feet, and for all the good that does I am shivering with the cold and can barely hold my quill. In all the days of my life I have never lived through a winter as raw as this one; the wine freezes in the bottles.” [...]

Heating systems went along with another technique for softening winter’s sting: keeping the cold out. When people first began to build small windows in their dwellings, they covered them with animal skins or linen designed to let in at least some light while retaining as much warmth as possible. Later, wooden shutters could seal windows when winter storms raged outside. Windowpanes were reserved for churches until well into the twelfth century and were considered the height of luxury for long afterward. If it got too cold, the solution for millennia was simply to seek refuge in bed: an entire family, along with their servants and guests, might find mutual warmth under the covers. Hanging curtains to create canopy beds or even building alcove beds into the wall provided another layer of heat-trapping protection. [...]

While winter offered certain pleasures, the idea that a winter landscape could be beautiful remained a rare sentiment for centuries. Snow, ice, and glaciers evoked negative associations. Traveling through the mountains during winter was dangerous, and people simply avoided it unless their obligations as tradesmen or pilgrims required it. It took a revolution in perception to make the wintry wilderness appealing. In the late eighteenth century a new obsession with nature as “wild” and “sublime” swept through much of the Western world. Mountains with snow-crowned peaks no longer seemed solely threatening—they also exerted an irresistible fascination. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, always ahead of his time, embodied this shift. He wrote about his Eislust, or passion for ice, which fed both his interest in mountains and his love of skating. In addition to local winter excursions into Germany’s Harz region, he made three trips to Switzerland’s majestic Gotthard Pass, starting in November 1779. Unlike the vast majority of Gotthard travelers, Goethe was not primarily interested in passing from one side of the Alps to the other. Instead he felt magically drawn to the “jagged ice cliffs” of the Rhône Glacier and the “vitriol-blue chasms” he glimpsed there. At the same time, the famous man of letters appreciated civilization’s adaptation to the winter. He became a particular fan of the Swiss masonry oven: “Indeed, it is most delightful to sit upon it, which in this country, where the stoves are made of stone tiles, it is very easy to do.”

read the article

BBC: Crows could be the smartest animal other than primates

Rutz is unequivocal. Some birds, like the New Caledonian crows he studies – can do remarkable things. In a paper published earlier this year, he and his co-authors described how New Caledonians seek out a specific type of plant stem from which to make their hooked tools. Experiments showed that crows found the stems they desired even when they had been disguised with leaves from a different plant species. This suggested that the birds were selecting a kind of material for their tools that they knew was just right for the job. You wouldn’t use a spanner to hammer in a nail, would you? [...]

You might think that some animals are smarter than others – with humans at the top of the proverbial tree. Certainly, humans do rely excessively on intelligence to get by. But that doesn’t mean we’re the best at every mental task. Chimps, notes Dakota McCoy at Harvard University, have been shown to possess better short-term memories than humans. This might help them to memorise where food is located in the forest canopy, for example.

Ranking the intelligence of animals seems an increasingly pointless exercise when one considers the really important thing: how well that animal is adapted to its niche. Intelligence is, first and foremost, a means towards specialisation. [...]

The crows McCoy studies have a natural curiosity, she says. They cheekily grab scientific equipment and fly off with it in the aviary. Young birds especially, she says, love to play. Humans are not so different, she argues: “We have these incredibly huge brains but we use them to do crossword puzzles – that’s not something that is evolutionarily selected for.”

read the article

The Bell: Romanticism, nostalgia, regret: why are Russians discussing the 1990s?

For much of the last two decades, the 1990s have been used by supporters of President Vladimir Putin as a bogeyman to highlight the contrast with post-2000 stability. But the period still evokes some romanticism: a survey (Rus) released Thursday showed most business people think that, despite the lawlessness and real physical danger, running a business was easier in the 1990s than in the 2010s. [...]

As many as 53 percent of Russians aged between 18 and 24 want to leave the country, according to a survey (Rus) published Tuesday by independent pollster the Levada Center. This is the highest figure in a decade: put simply, more and more young people do not have faith in the path the country is taking. [...]

Everyone worries about their children’s futures and healthcare. But the mood is changing among young people; the post-Crimea annexation euphoria that led to less talk of emigration has definitely passed. And it will be challenging to convince them otherwise: between 2016 and 2018, the number of young people getting their news primarily from tightly controlled state-owned television fell from 75 percent to 42 percent. [...]

It emerged this week that U.S. tech giant Apple has decided to label Crimea as a part of Russia, more than 5 years after the region was annexed. For Russian users in Russia, Apple’s ‘Weather’ and ‘Maps’ apps now show Crimea as being Russian territory — while, for Ukrainians, Crimea remains Ukrainian and for other users around the world it is a disputed territory. The move prompted furious protests from Ukrainian officials, but Apple is following in the footsteps of Google, which made the same switch in March. The changes come after months of negotiations between Apple and Russian Duma deputies.

read the article

TLDR Explains: The Election Results Don't Match the Voters

In this video, we discuss the results of the 2019 general election further as well as examining the system of election used in the UK. The results of the First Past the Post system don't seem to be pleasing a percentage of the electorate, so other alternative systems are being proposed. We talk about what they could have meant for this election and ask you what you think.

The Economist: Why Britain's election won't end the political chaos (Dec 12, 2019)

Britain, a land of green pastures, tea drinking and centuries of political stability until now. The British people are heading to the polls for the fourth time in five years to try to break the deadlock over how to leave the European Union. But this election is unlikely to heal Britain’s divided politics.

Before the Brexit referendum, Britain had enjoyed decades of relative political stability with one of the Conservatives or Labour almost always in power. But their success was built on increasingly shaky foundations. One study found that British voters’ trust in government suffered a long decline from 1986 until 2012. And two events in particular became emblematic of that loss of trust.

And then a few years later the elite appeared to be proven wrong again. The financial crisis of 2008 challenged the competence of Britain’s ruling class.

These two events began to undermine the political centre on which both Labour’s Tony Blair and the Conservatives' David Cameron had built their success. The collapse in trust in this elite then gave way to active revolt. The election of Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the Labour Party signalled a rejection of the ruling consensus and a decisive shift to the left. Then in 2016 the public had their opportunity to turn on the establishment. [...]

TLDR News: What Johnson's Win Means for Brexit & Britain's Future - Explaining Brexit

So the UK voted and chose to elect a Conservative government. In this video, we examine the result, the winners and losers. We also discuss how Johnsons win will affect the UK going forward as well as the Brexit process.

The Intercept: The Bernie Blackout

Bernie Sanders faced a media blackout that helped sink his 2016 run for president. Today, the trend continues: Sanders gets less media coverage and a higher rate of negative coverage than his top rivals for the Democratic nomination in 2020.

Prospect Podcast: Meritocracy and the social mobility trap, with Daniel Markovits

Is it a rewards-based social system that works, or a sinister trap?

Sure it’s a good idea in theory, but does meritocracy really work in practice? Yale law school professor Daniel Markovits joins the Prospect podcast and tells us why he’s sceptical. Far from seeing a world where people can get ahead regardless of one’s social background, Markovits instead argues that meritocracy has also emerged alongside a greater concentration of wealth and privilege, more so than ever.

listen to the podcast

UnHerd: How Boris can cement his new coalition

Brexit, rather like immigration in the past couple of decades, has become an “emblem” policy. Support for Brexit is not so much about the details of EU regulation, rather it has become part of a wider, defensive reaction to the radicalism of the post-Cold War “double liberalism” of free market and cultural opening, represented in the EU by the two central post-national policies of the Euro and free movement. [...]

There will also be genuine conflicts of interest between different parts of the new Tory coalition. The small-state, low-tax Toryism of the affluent suburbs has hardly been in the ascendancy in recent years. But it will have to concede further ground to the new Tory voters who want quite high public spending and good public infrastructure. How much ground it will have to concede will be the stuff of battles to come. [...]

This election result is a big blow to the confidence and cultural power of educated, left-liberal Britain. A new coalition of people from many different backgrounds, by no means all Tories, now has an opportunity to push back against the extremes and pathologies of that cultural hegemony.

read the article

Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell: Overpopulation & Africa

For most of our history, the human population grew slowly. Until new discoveries brought us more food and made us live longer. In just a hundred years the human population quadrupled. This led to apocalyptic visions of an overcrowded earth. But the population growth rate actually peaked in the 1960s. Since then, fertility rates have crashed as countries industrialize and develop. World population is now expected to balance out at around 11 billion by the end of the century. But the big picture conceals the details.

Let us look at one region in particular: Sub-Saharan Africa. In 2019 it was home to a billion people living in 46 countries. Although its growth rate has slowed down in the last few decades, it is still much higher than in the rest of the world. While some projections expect around 2.6 billion people others reckon with up to 5 billion by 2100. Such growth would be a huge challenge for any society. But Sub-Saharan Africa is also the poorest region on earth. So is Sub-Saharan Africa doomed? And why do the projections vary by 2.4 billion people?

PolyMatter: Why Kazakhstan is Changing Alphabets

The Daily Beast: Fish and Fascism: How Italy Is Turning the Tide Against the Far Right

The movement started in Bologna just one month ago when Italy’s far-right leader Matteo Salvini held a rally promising to draw 6,000 people to spread his anti-immigrant message and capture the city ahead of regional elections in January. A group of four friends started sending messages on social media to stage a counter protest and “pack the piazza like sardines” to stand up to Salvini. Nearly 15,000 people showed up, and the movement was born. [...]

One of the group’s founders Andrea Garreffa, a 34-year-old tour guide, said Saturday that the group is more of a phenomenon than a real political movement. They just want to start a conversation. “We are trying to get people to start talking about the direction of this country, to get them involved in politics and not give up,” he said. [...]

Whether the sardines can really turn the tide is yet to be seen. The Five Star Movement, which is currently in power and was previously aligned with Salvini, started in the country’s piazzas just like this and grew against all odds to a mainstream political party that has fallen as quickly as it rose.

read the article

The Guardian: Tactical voting was set to be Remainers’ saviour, so what went wrong?

Why so few successes? It was not the fault of Deltapoll’s data. Almost everywhere, they identified the correct challenger. Most dramatically, they showed rightly that the Liberal Democrats were snapping at Dominic Raab’s heels, despite the foreign secretary’s apparently impregnable 23,000 majority. [...]

Deltapoll’s data showed what tactical voting was up against. Lib Dem supporters were reluctant to help Corbyn become prime minister. Likewise, Tory Remainers feared voting for a badly led Lib Dem party that might support Corbyn. These Tories preferred a Brexit Britain governed by Johnson to a stop-Brexit government led by Corbyn.

The big lesson is that tactical voting needs not just a common enemy, but a broadly common vision, shared by the Labour and Lib Dem leaders. This was the case with Tony Blair and Paddy Ashdown in 1997; it was not with Corbyn and Swinson last week.

read the article

Politico: The Labour civil war has already started

The Labour left was not scrabbling to save the blushes of Corbyn. Rather, it was seeking to frame the inevitable battle for the soul of the party in its own terms. For decades, the left longed to hold the levers of power in Labour, and it will not release its grip without a fight.

Blaming the historic drubbing on anything other than the left-wing leader and his policy platform was a no-brainer. The Labour left needed a scapegoat, and Brexit, an obvious factor in the defeat but far from the whole story, was it.

After the 2017 election, in which Corbyn deprived Theresa May of a majority, many critics of the leader in the centre and centre-right of the party sucked up their differences and put on a united front. Despite splits over Brexit deepening the rifts in the shadows, Corbynism became a vast umbrella under which various factions could sit, claiming to be represented by the squirming, triangulating positions the Labour leader settled on over different issues. [...]

The difficulty for the contestants is that Labour is an unpredictable beast. The 500,000-strong membership, many of whom joined the party in 2015 specifically to elect Corbyn into the top job, is pro-EU, pro-left and pro-Corbyn.

read the article

statista: An election battle drawn on Brexit lines

As this infographic shows though, parties whose stance was either anti-Brexit or pro-second referendum actually won a majority of the votes - 51.2 percent. The parties looking to 'get Brexit done' - based either on conviction or the desire to honour the referendum - garnered just 46.8 percent. That though is of course irrelevant in practical terms and something which will be made very clear in the coming weeks as Boris Johnson and the Conservatives press on with their now large parliamentary majority.

see the graph

The Atlantic: Russia’s Twin Nostalgias

Long before Stalin’s rule, the Russian elite would relax here, valuing the distance from Moscow both geographically (it is about 1,000 miles away) and culturally (it lies a short distance from what is now Georgia, and across the water from Turkey). Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s widow, Anna, moved to Sochi to escape violence in St. Petersburg surrounding the Bolshevik revolution, buying a piece of land on the outskirts of the city where she built a house and planted a garden, calling her little retreat “Joy.” (Dostoyevskaya lost that home soon after she moved in, when a soldier attacked her as part of the Bolshevik campaign against property owners, saying the house now belonged to the working classes, and forcing her to flee once again. Along with the personal cost to her, she also lost a part of her husband’s archive—handwritten copies of The Brothers Karamazov are still missing as a result.)

After coming to power, Stalin in 1926 ordered his commissars to plant botanical gardens here. Hoping to curry favor with the leader, each one—among them Kliment Voroshilov, Genrikh Yagoda, and Sergo Ordzhonikidze—also built and ornately decorated hotels in their name. These structures included enormous neoclassical columns, pompous arches, grandiose fountains, and statues of naked Greek gods next to busts of Soviet heroes. In less than a decade, a dozen such palaces emerged, each one next to the other, along Sochi’s hills, offering healing mineral water, spas, and baths. [...]

After that, the city cultivated a reputation as a vacation destination for workers across the U.S.S.R.—thanks to state-provided packages that included stays at health resorts and various healing programs. Miners, engineers, or factory workers as far away as the northern reaches of Siberia knew that after a year of hard work, they would be able to take a month-long break here. Millions living in grim industrial cities dreamed of warm Sochi nights, where the tropical air added to the sense of excitement. Here, residents of closed and secretive towns could even see foreign tourists visiting from Eastern Europe, or African countries allied with Moscow, all together on open dance floors. For locals, Sochi was a beloved place, its quiet and romantic embankment populated by old people playing chess, the city’s pace relaxing and peaceful.

read the article

Politico: This Impeachment Is Different—and More Dangerous

When Republicans impeached Andrew Johnson for obstructing Reconstruction in 1868, there was no broadcasting. There was no polling, at least not in the scientific sense of today. “Media” in America meant newspapers, which were largely partisan, but whose effect on the public was hard for politicians to gauge. The trial of Andrew Johnson was thus conducted by a relatively small political elite that, because focused on the crisis, at least understood the facts. [...]

As the Watergate hearings progressed, Americans weren’t just focused on the story: They were focused on the same story. The networks were different in how they broadcast news, but not much different. And thus, as widespread polling would reveal—to the public and the administration—views about the President were highly correlated across a wide range of America. When support for Nixon fell among Democrats, it also fell among Republicans and independents at the same time. America had heard a common story, and what it heard had a common effect. [...]

That division will have a profound effect on how this impeachment will matter to Americans. In short, it will matter differently depending on how those Americans come to understand reality. In a study published last month, the research institute PRRI found that 55% of “Republicans for whom Fox News is their primary news source say there is nothing Trump could do to lose their approval, compared to only 29% of Republicans who do not cite Fox News as their primary news source.” That 26-point difference is driven not just by politics, but in part by the media source. [...]

Social media platforms have responsibilities here as well. We don’t yet know the consequences of those platforms forgoing political ads in the context of an entire election season — even as, and importantly, some are experimenting with this right now. But impeachment could be an important moment to experiment even more fully. This is precisely the kind of question for which we do not need interested ad-driven spin. It is precisely the moment when Facebook and Twitter together could take the lead in turning away ads aimed at rallying a base or trashing the opposition. Whether or not political ads make sense on social media platforms during an election—at least for races not likely to be targeted by foreign influence—there is no reason for them here. America’s understanding of this critical event could come through the organic spread of the views of Americans—and it is just possible that the organic spread alone is not as poisonous as the spread spiked by advertising.

read the article

Europe Elects: Alliance Party of Northern Ireland | APNI | UK, Parliament Election 2019

This is the YouTube service of Europe Elects. Poll aggregation and election analysis for countries in the European Union. Europe Elects introduces the main political parties ahead of the 12 December 2019 parliament election in the UK.

Europe Elects: Sinn Féin | SF | UK, Parliament Election 2019

This is the YouTube service of Europe Elects. Poll aggregation and election analysis for countries in the European Union. Europe Elects introduces the main political parties ahead of the 12 December 2019 parliament election in the UK.

The Guardian: 'I haven’t seen a healthy version of marriage': children of divorce on the lasting impact

The legislation transformed society, changed attitudes, emancipated women, and arguably saved many children from the emotional damage of being raised in miserable homes. According to the latest figures from the Office for National Statistics, an estimated 42% of all marriages in England and Wales currently end in divorce; and in 2017, 62% of divorces of opposite sex couples were on the petition of the wife.

Divorce is now so common that its impact on children and their emotional wellbeing can sometimes be downplayed. Yet almost every child of divorce I have spoken to acknowledges that it has shaped the way they see the world. It feels almost childish to speak of the emotional legacy of my own parents’ divorce, how it left its mark on me in a hundred perceptible and imperceptible ways; after all, it was so many years ago. Yet however well you do it, divorce determines who we become as adults. [...]

As we near the end of the 2010s, there has been significant progress in attitudes towards divorce. Gay marriage has been legalised, and blended, non-traditional families are increasingly the norm. Even Prince Harry married a divorcee. In April, the government announced fresh plans to introduce no-fault divorce – though it is hard to know if and when this will happen. The reforms will include a minimum timeframe of six months from petition stage to a marriage being ended, designed to allow couples to reflect on their decision. They will also prevent people from refusing a divorce if their spouse wants one.

read the article

The Conversation: Why Americans have stopped moving geographically, even for work

A total of 13.6% of Americans today were born in another country, and most of us are descended from immigrants. This story of migration also includes moving within the country. Over the last 200 years, Americans have settled the frontier, moved away from cities toward suburbs, and migrated away from cities in the Northeast toward the South and West. [...]

Between March 2018 and 2019, only 1.5% of Americans moved from one state to another, and 5.9% moved from one home to another while remaining in the same county. [...]

The increase in both family and personal debt both makes selling a house more difficult and reduces financial resources available for a move. Meanwhile, the growth of dual-income households restricts moves, because any long-distance move would require both partners to find a suitable job in a new destination. [...]

What’s more, advanced information and communications technologies improves the quality of information available about possible places to move. We believe this makes decisions about whether and where to move more efficient and reduces the chances that people will move to a place that they don’t like. [...]

An important principle of migration is that it is self-reinforcing—having moved once enhances the chances of moving again. Moving is expensive and stressful, especially for people who have not migrated before. But having moved once, additional moves become less stressful, new opportunities become available and additional moves become more efficient and less costly.

read the article

The Guardian: How our home delivery habit reshaped the world

John Lewis’s appetite for shed space is, at its heart, the story of the explosion of home delivery – a story in which we have all been willing participants, since it is our clicking and swiping that has powered the boom. The e-commerce industry lives and dies by metrics, a few of which give us some grasp over this phenomenon. The sprawl of sheds like Magna Parks 1 to 3 are a particularly vivid measure, because they host the final moment of relative stasis for millions of products that are then sprayed out to homes in every direction. Amazon’s biggest fulfilment centre in the UK, in Tilbury, Essex, occupies 2m sq ft. (In comparison, Amazon’s first shed, leased in 1997, was 93,000 sq ft.) The volume of daily deliveries to homes has soared – from fewer than 360,000 a day in New York City in 2009 to more than 1.5m today. In China, Meituan’s scooter drivers, in their banana-yellow helmets and jackets, delivered 30m food orders during a single weekend in July. There are numbers for distressing waste: the packaging of home-delivered products now accounts for 30% of the solid rubbish the US generates annually, and the cardboard alone costs 1bn trees. And there are numbers for frenzied growth: the $3.8tn (£2.95tn) in global online sales in 2017 will near $6tn by 2024.[...]

Houchens refers to the last mile’s tribulations as “hazards,” and her job is to engineer the cardboard box to withstand them. As a materials scientist, she knows plenty about harsh conditions. In the past, she worked for a Nasa contractor that designed spacesuits, and for another firm that developed military parachutes and ballistic vests for Operation Desert Storm. That is the calibre of person who, in the age of express delivery, is working on sciencing-up the plain cardboard box. Universities have packaging design labs now; at the Rutgers School of Engineering laboratory, they even test “decoration adhesion”, to see how well labels stick to the box. UPS and FedEx keep in-house researchers to study corrugated cardboard. Houchens’s team has grown from seven members in 2014 to 85 today, and they work with more than 800 sizes and classes of boxes. For an artefact that lasts just minutes at its destination before proceeding to the recycling bin, the box is subject to an astonishing volume of thought. [...]

The environmental impact of all that paper and plastic is just one part of Amazon’s overall carbon footprint: equivalent to 44.4m tons of carbon dioxide, as the company revealed for the first time in September. That is less than Walmart’s, but bigger than that of Apple, UPS or Denmark. The statistic doesn’t really clarify whether home delivery is worse for the planet than a trip to the shop, though. In 2009, researchers at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh estimated that a shopper emits 24 times more carbon dioxide if she drives 12.8 miles to buy a single item than if she orders it online. Admittedly, in the world of last-mile logistics, 2009 feels like a lifetime ago – a gentle era predating two-hour delivery or chronic try-and-return behaviour, which make an online shopper’s carbon footprint bigger than that of a traditional shopper. [...]

At first glance, the Well-line, as Chetwoods calls it, feels like an example of this – an asset funded by taxpayers, built by a public utility that has itself been privatised. And we might say the same about other new wrinkles in e-commerce. The mixed-use Shed of the Future, as described to me by the architect James Nicholls, would incorporate housing, retail, transport and logistics. “Beds and sheds,” he said, “like the model villages of the 19th century.” Several logistics executives told me that if half-full freight vans from multiple firms kept congesting the streets, the best solution might be for every retailer to use a single firm instead. One delivery service to rule them all – just like the postal service of yore. The lockers now offered by numerous startups as well as by Amazon and UPS – born out of the frustration of failed deliveries to shoppers who aren’t home – resemble regular PO boxes. The alternative to lockers is to deposit parcels for pick-up at a convenient point near the house: a greengrocer’s or a cafe or a bodega. It put me in mind of a business plan: a neighbourhood outlet that exists to hold deliveries that customers can collect for a small fee, and that stocks some bare essentials besides. Milk, perhaps, and eggs and bread, and some stationery and detergent. A general store in all but name.

read the article or listen to the podcast

Foreign Policy: It’s Time for Ukraine to Let the Donbass Go

The Donbass has consistently supported Ukraine’s most retrograde, anti-reformist, anti-European, pro-Russian, and pro-Soviet political forces. It was the Donbass that made Viktor Yanukovych, whose political career was dedicated to bringing Ukraine back into Russia’s orbit, president in 2010. It was out of the Donbass that came his corrupt Party of Regions. And it was the Donbass that opposed popular pro-democracy uprisings in 2004 and 2014.

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s occupation of the eastern Donbass in the summer of 2014 effectively disenfranchised its voters. That was bad for the voters, but it enabled pro-democratic forces in unoccupied Ukraine to win the presidency and control of the country’s parliament, the Verkhovna Rada, in 2014. Most of the reforms that have been adopted in the past five years—along with Ukraine’s steady march toward Europe—would have been impossible had the Donbass remained a part of Ukraine. [...]

The Donbass and its residents have been the war’s greatest losers. Thousands have died in the fighting; houses and infrastructure have been destroyed. The region’s economy, once an integral part of Ukraine’s, went into a tailspin, unemployment went through the roof, inflation soared—and the new regime and its thugs took advantage to enrich themselves. The separatist government helped promote the decay by dismantling viable factories and selling them to Russia. Small wonder that, for many Donbass residents, the best source of employment is the separatist armed forces. [...]

Thanks to Putin’s occupation of the eastern Donbass, his leverage over Ukraine also decreased. As long as a pro-Russian, anti-Western region was part of Ukraine, he could—and did—insist on being able to intervene on its behalf—ostensibly to protect the rights of Russian speakers, but in reality to interfere in the internal affairs of democratic neighbors. If the eastern Donbass is brought back into Ukraine’s fold, Putin’s leverage will increase once more. He’d be given an inroad back into the country’s politics as a whole.

read the article

The MIT Press Reader: Why Choosing to Have Children Is an Ethical Issue

The lack of acknowledgment that childbearing can be a moral choice may be due to its assimilation to other processes thought to be normal parts of human life — like the phenomena of “falling in love” or being sexually attracted to another person. These aspects of human life are often regarded as the product of drives or instincts not amenable to ethical evaluation. For example, philosopher James Lenman claims that asking why we want children is “foolish,” for “it is partly just because we’re programmed that way much as we are for sex.” Some people, women in particular, believe that there is a “biological clock” inside them that generates a deep drive to have a child. It appears to be more than a simple desire to have a child; it is felt more like a biological force and is therefore very compelling. This drive is sometimes explained in evolutionary terms: Our very biological constitution determines that we bear children. The popular press likes to refer to the existence of a supposed “mommy gene.” Biologist Lonnie Aarssen writes about an apparently nongendered “parenting drive,” which he describes as “an explicit desire to have children in the future” and which involves “an anticipated experience of contemporaneous pleasure derived directly from ‘real-time’ parenthood per se.”

The questions we should ask are whether such a desire is either immune to or incapable of analysis and why this desire, unlike virtually all others, should not be subject to ethical assessment. There are many urges apparently arising from our biological nature that we nonetheless should choose not to act upon or at least be very careful about acting upon. Even if Aarssen is correct in postulating a “parenting drive,” such a drive would not be an adequate reason for the choice to have a child. Naturalness alone is not a justification for action, for it is still reasonable to ask whether human beings should give in to their supposed “parenting drive” or resist it. Besides, the alleged naturalness of the biological clock is belied by those growing numbers of women who apparently do not experience it or do not experience it strongly enough to act upon it. As psychologist Leta S. Hollingworth wisely noted almost a century ago, “There could be no better proof of the insufficiency of maternal instinct as a guaranty of population than the drastic laws which we have against birth control, abortion, infanticide, and infant desertion.”

read the article

VICE: Boris Johnson Constantly Gets Away with Lying – This Is Why

Today, the problem is of a different order: we are no longer dealing with mistakes. We are dealing with a conservative political elite whose core strategy is falsehood. And – as Marr's interview showed – the normal journalistic strategies are not working.

The authoritarian right now speaks to us through a carefully constructed echo chamber, where partisan amateur news websites, right-wing tabloids and shady "think-tanks" take any given lie, amplify it until it becomes accepted and then force reputable news outlets to respond to it as if it were true. [...]

If they were, Marr would have said to Johnson: "I'm sorry, Prime Minister, you are systematically lying to me in this interview and I am going to read out the facts..." And the next news bulletin would have started: "The Prime Minister lied four times today..." [...]

Even so, there's a lot of room for talented people to move through that system on one condition: you do not rock the boat. People who rock the boat do not get promoted; they are accused of "having an agenda"; their journalism becomes a percentages game: how much crap do I have to produce to get away with one good exposé? And because the pay of senior onscreen journalists – and their managers – is spectacularly good, there is always a lot to lose.

read the article

Atlas Pro: How to Build a Forest

The Guardian: 'I don’t see anything changing': despair as India rape crisis grows

Yet while the horrific crime has prompted hundreds to take to the streets, and calls for lynching and hanging in parliament, it was far from an isolated incident. According to statistics, a woman is raped in India every 20 minutes.

India is the most dangerous place to be a woman, according to a survey by the Thomson Reuters Foundation last year, and the stark reality of this was brought to the fore this week. As well as the Hyderabad case, there was the abduction, gang rape and murder of a young lawyer in Jharkhand; the rape and murder of a 55-year-old cloth seller in Delhi’s Gulabi Bagh neighbourhood; and a teenager in the state of Bihar was gang raped and killed, before her body was set on fire on Tuesday. [...]

But seven years on, the consensus among activists and women is that the problem is getting worse. The key social issues behind the crisis remain unaddressed and the culture of impunity for sexual crimes remains firmly embedded.

In the courts there are 133,000 pending rape cases. In May, a panel of judges dismissed allegations of sexual harassment against the chief justice of India, made by a former court employee, as being of “no substance”, in a ruling that triggered anger and protests. He denied the claims. [...]

“The cry for the death penalty is nothing but a red herring,” she said. “It’s the easy option because it avoids any institutional accountability and doesn’t cost a thing, it’s just lawmakers reassuring themselves that all it will take to solve this problem is to eliminate one or two of these devils. We are still not having the conversation which needs to happen, so nothing changes.”

read the article

The Conversation: This small German town took back the power – and went fully renewable

Addressing the climate emergency demands huge amounts of investment, but it also requires drastic changes to the forms of ownership and governance that underpin the contemporary capitalist economy. We need to move towards models of economic democracy, where everything from investment decisions to wages are decided democratically by workers and citizens. [...]

With 100% of its electricity coming from renewable sources (and more to spare), the German town of Wolfhagen is particularly demonstrative of what can be achieved when municipalities adopt innovative approaches to the ownership and governance of key infrastructure. Significant lessons can be drawn from Wolfhagen’s hybrid model of ownership, which can – and must – be applied to sectors beyond energy production. [...]

What the experience of Wolfhagen shows is that the rapid decarbonisation of our energy supply is wholly compatible with new models of economic democracy. Strong and effective action to address the climate crisis can be met through processes of collective empowerment, without resorting to ecological authoritarianism.

read the article

The New York Review of Books: The Rise and Fall of Evo Morales

Beyond politics and ideology, it was the wild informality and humility of it all that made me love Bolivia that night as much as I ever had in my family’s nineteen years there (from 1998 to 2017). And that is why watching Evo’s resignation on Bolivian television on a Sunday morning three weeks ago was so dreadfully sad. Something that had begun beautifully, Bolivia at its best, had ended in a familiar scene of a leader chased out by the anger of the people, flying off to another country. And then it unleashed a wave of violence that has already claimed more than a dozen lives, and counting.[...]

With his base solid, Evo began to do some very good things. By bringing the nation’s once-privatized natural resources back under state control at the start of the global commodities boom, he built an industrial foundation that produced solid economic growth through the entire global recession following the 2008 financial crash. His government used those funds to build schools and health clinics, to pave roads, and to establish a cash subsidy program to help children stay in schools. Poverty rates fell and indigenous pride was on the rise. In his second election, in 2009, Morales dispatched his opponent by a thumping margin of almost three to one. On the platform of his national popularity, he also thrust himself forward as a potent international symbol, making powerful speeches around the globe on indigenous rights and the protection of Mother Earth.

Back home in Bolivia, however, Evo’s actual commitment to both those causes was increasingly called into question. This tension came to a head in 2011 when Morales declared that he would ignore the vehement objections of local indigenous communities and build a highway through the TIPNIS rainforest in the country’s east. In protest, those communities mounted a long and difficult but high-profile march to the capital. Morales met this demonstration with brutal police repression that was broadcast on national television. When the women marchers yelled their dissent, Morales’s police bound their faces with masking tape to shut their mouths. Dozens of people were injured in the conflict, and a baby died. The shine on Evo’s presidency began to look tarnished.

read the article

The New York Review of Books: How China’s Rise Has Forced Hong Kong’s Decline

China has sought to explain the unrest by blaming socio-economic reasons for tensions that could be defused by technocratic solutions—and indeed this is what Ms. Lam implied in a statement Monday, referring to “people’s dissatisfaction with the current situation and the deep-seated problems in society.” This reasoning holds that if certain public policy issues, especially unaffordable housing, could be solved then many of the protesters could be won over. A few conspiracy theorists, or those inside China’s Great Firewall, might buy Beijing’s other line of argument—that “foreign forces” are behind the protests (whereas systematic opinion surveys show most protesters to be well-educated, middle-class people motivated by fear of losing their liberties). [...]

In reality, the city has lost its global allure. Tourism is booming but only because of Chinese tourists, who now account for nearly 80 percent of arrivals. These aren’t savvy Chinese travelers—that rising class has long since written off Hong Kong as a backwater—but people for whom a visit is their first “foreign” experience. As for the rest of the world, despite a global tourism boom, the number of non-Chinese visitors this decade has stagnated or declined. [...]

Again, one can argue that if Hong Kong feels left behind, it is because China’s rise made wealth and prosperity flow elsewhere in the region. But this is another indictment of China’s stewardship: it failed to install visionary leaders who might have helped Hong Kong retain its place among the handful of truly key global cities. Instead, the city has been run by a series of Beijing-approved mediocrities, all of whom have either resigned in disgrace or been engulfed in crises. All the city’s chief executives were fatally hampered by having to defer on all important decisions to Beijing, making them more like colonial governors than autonomous rulers of a dynamic metropolis. [...]

Debating these contingent points, though, may cause one to miss something more important: that the protesters’ anger stems from the structural violence that Beijing has stealthily inflicted on them over the past decade. This includes the gradual but steady erosion of liberties, from putting Chinese customs officers in the territory and limiting use of the local dialect to the kidnapping of critical book publishers. Combined with Beijing’s unwillingness to follow through on written promises of universal suffrage, these measures make clear that China intends to assert control now and not in 2047, as promised in the 1997 handover agreement with Britain.

read the article

Jacobin Magazine: In Sri Lanka’s Ethnocracy, Tamils Will Always Lose

Tamil families of the disappeared, some of whom last saw their loved ones in one of Gotabaya’s infamous “white vans,” recently marked their one-thousandth day of protest. In Sri Lanka, there are at least 60,000 to 100,000 unresolved cases of enforced disappearances — most of which were perpetrated by the state against Tamils during the final phase of the armed conflict between the state and Tamils. [...]

In a press conference last weekend, a white-van driver spoke plainly of his experience abducting and torturing people during the armed conflict. Without flinching, he explained this was done under the authority of former defense minister and now freshly elected President Gotabaya Rajapaksa. He provided gruesome details of the torture campaign run by Gotabaya — at one particular site in Monaragala, victims’ organs were removed and flung into a nearby reservoir to be fed to crocodiles.[...]

Following the Easter Sunday bombings, in which three churches and three luxury hotels were targeted in attacks by militant Islamists that killed 259 people, Rajapaksa capitalized on the severe failure in state security that led to the worst terror attack this year. He gallantly announced his presidential bid post-attacks and built his campaign around being Sri Lanka’s strongman. His counterpart, Premadasa, was considerably the “lesser evil,” though he too ran on a platform of securitization and bolstering intelligence networks. Neither intended to address the issues of concern to Tamils, including enforced disappearances, military occupation, land grabs, and security sector reform. [...]

This fails to recognize the ferocity with which Sinhala-Buddhist nationalism is protected by the state and the intensity with which it infiltrates its institutions and structures. The constitution itself places Buddhism as having the “first and foremost” place in the country, a testament to the island’s nationalist politics following independence. This analysis further ignores the decade of impunity following the end of the armed conflict that has enabled genocidaires to be treated as “war heroes” and elected to Sri Lanka’s highest office.

read the article

openDemocracy: Catalonia mon amour

The answer wasn’t too difficult to find. First, there was the “great recession” of 2008-2014 which led to record high rates of unemployment, in particular among young people (Spain’s unemployment rate was twice the eurozone average in 2012, with a staggering 57.9% of youth unemployment in 2014). Then, there were the politicians eager to tap into the “pool of rage” created by the unprecedented economic crisis to further their own agendas. Chief among these was Artur Mas, former President of the Government of Catalonia (2010-2015) and the former leader of the centre-right Convergència i Unió (Convergence and Union), who succumbed to intraparty pressures in 2012 and decided to break with the traditional – middle-of-the-road – approach of his predecessor Jordi Pujol to carry the banner of independentism, till then brandished by Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya (The Republican Left of Catalonia) and other groups; and Mariano Rajoy, the notorious Prime Minister of Spain between 2011-2018 whose centre-right Partido Popular (Popular Party) initiated the process which ended with the amendment of the 2006 Estatut on Catalonia’s autonomy by the Spanish Supreme Court in 2010, after it was approved by both the Catalan and Spanish parliaments, and by the Catalan people in a referendum – thereby partially crushing Catalonia’s hopes for more self-rule. [...]

Yet facts can help only so much when it comes to understanding the current crisis in Catalonia where reality is bifurcated, with few, if any, points of contact between the opposing secessionist and unionist visions. In this bifurcated world, one’s “independence referendum” is another’s “illegal consultation” just as one’s “political prisoner” is another’s “imprisoned politician”. But truth is not the only casualty of this battle of realities. Another important casualty is rule of law, the sine qua non of any democracy. After voicing his concerns on la sentencia, or the final ruling of the Spanish Supreme Court on independentist leaders, Xavier Arbós, a professor of constitutional law at the University of Barcelona told me, “The Spanish government acted as if the only thing that exists is the law whereas the Catalan government acted as if the law didn’t exist.” [...]

First, independence means different things to different people. According to the latest barometer of the Catalan Centre for Opinion Studies, only 34.5% of the population believes that Catalonia should be an independent state – as opposed to 27% who would want Catalonia to remain as an autonomous community in Spain (status quo). But there are also those who believe that Catalonia should be a state within a federal Spain (24.5%), thereby bringing the total percentage of people who would like to see a change in the existing state of affairs to 59%.

read the article

In Defence of Marxism: Marxism vs. Queer Theory

The main premises of Queer Theory, which we will examine more closely below, are the following: our (gender) identity is nothing but a fiction. Hence, hetero-and homosexuality is also a cultural fiction. This fiction is produced by discourses and power in society. We must uncover how these discourses function and parody them (ridicule them, show their contradictions, “displace” them). [...]

Feminist theories that portray class struggle as secondary to the cultural struggle against patriarchy, or that deny the existence of class struggle altogether, gained influence. It was no longer about fighting against class society and women’s oppression rooted within it, but about fighting against “transhistorical patriarchy” (i.e. remaining the same throughout different forms of society). The revolutionary subject was no longer the working class but woman oppressed by man. From this premise an abundance of texts and discussions were launched that dealt with the question of the essence of patriarchy and how “woman”, who had become the main subject of analysis, could be defined. The idea of differentiating between biological sex and social, acquired gender became prominent. [...]

If we translate this pompous formulation into comprehensible English, Butler tells us that every form of Being is simply an effect of ‘discourses’ (language), that is to say: Idea, the word, language is primary, matter an effect derived from it, ultimately also only language. This means that, for her, anatomy, biology and the natural sciences are all language constructs. That’s why sexes are not “artificial” – because from her point of view there is nothing outside of cultural constructs. To think of material reality as something that exists independently from our ideas only means to be hoodwinked by the ruling discourse, which tells us that there is such a thing as a Dualism between “matter” and “culture”. This ruling opinion (“hegemony”) makes us believe that there is a “real” sex and an “unreal” gender. But Butler has seen through it all! ALL is culture, all is language – all is Idea! [...]

This division of labour, however, did not mean that women were deemed lower than men – on the contrary. As those who ensure the reproduction of our species, they were held in high esteem. Only when humans, in their struggle with nature, found ways of creating a surplus product, which in turn led to the emergence of private property, did the division of labour lead to the oppression of women. In the words of Engels, this was the basis for “the world historical defeat of the female sex” – that is, a historical, not a “biological” event. This means that, while women’s oppression in the last instance does have a biological foundation , it is not an iron natural law. Women’s oppression, over thousands of years, sank deep roots within our society, and it can assume many forms that are not strictly derived from the fact that women can bear children, and were in turn adapted to the respective dominant system. [...]

In critiquing one crude philosophy, Queer Theory goes to the other extreme and adopts its mirror image. No phenomenon coincides directly with the general categories by which we know them. No man or woman fits perfectly with the universal category that we know them by. Nevertheless, men and women exist. Nature expresses itself in patterns that we as humans can learn to recognise. Our ideas of a man or a woman, stripped away from all the accidental and inessential attributes, are crucial for our understanding of any individual man or woman. Queer Theorists, like their postmodern brethren, however, deny the existence of any form of category or patterns in nature. Instead of understanding the dialectical relationship between the individual and the universal, they renounce the universal and raise the individual and accidental to the level of principle.

read the article

Los Angeles Times: Is There a Crisis of Truth?

What we’re now experiencing is not, I suggest, a Truth Crisis or even a Scientific Authority Crisis. The problems we are confronting are real but they are quite specific. Reflect back on the problems introduced at the outset. I’ve asked many people over the past months about the Crisis of Truth. They seemed to know what I meant and they agreed that there was such a Crisis. But, when asked to provide examples, practically all of them mentioned the same three instances — climate change denial, anti-vaccine sentiment, and various forms of anti-evolutionary thought. There’s no denying their importance. Material consequences follow from belief or disbelief in anthropogenic climate change or the safety of vaccines, but, although it’s depressing that anti-evolutionary attitudes are so widely distributed, it’s not evident that much of practical significance — beyond what’s taught in schools — flows from skepticism about Darwinism. [...]

Those who offer More Science in the curriculum and in the media as solutions of the Truth Crisis tend to equate science with accomplished science, textbook science, secure scientific facts and well-supported theories. A public better educated in these things will, it’s presumed, be better able to sort out reliable science from junk, pseudoscience, errors, and lies. But recall the shortlist of wrongly challenged knowledge that, on reflection, actually constitutes the alleged scientific Crisis of Truth. Evolution by natural selection is disputed in part because it opposes cherished articles of faith in strands of fundamentalist religion; vaccine safety is disputed in part because parents are desperately concerned to avoid risk to the health of their kids; human-caused climate change is disputed in part because, if it’s the case, people may have to ride a bike, eat less meat, and bring reusable bags to do their shopping. To put it in the blandest terms: disputed science is science that seems worth dispute. In the 17th century, Thomas Hobbes noted, and accounted for, a crucial difference between geometry and ethics — the deliverances of the latter are endemically subject to dispute, those of the former almost never: [...]

The problem we confront is better described not as too little science in public culture but as too much. Given the absurdities and errors abroad in the land, it may seem crazy to say this, yet the point can be pressed. Consider, again, the climate change deniers, the anti-vaxxers, and the creationists. They’re wrong-headed of course, but, like the Moon-landing deniers and the Flat-Earthers, their rejection of Right Thinking is not delivered as anti-science. Instead, it comes garnished with the supposed facts, theories, approved methods, and postures of objectivity and disinterestedness associated with genuine science. Wrong-headedness often advertises its embrace of officially cherished scientific values — skepticism, disinterestedness, universalism, the distinction between secure facts and provisional theories — and frequently does so more vigorously than the science rejected. The deniers’ notion of science sometimes seems, so to speak, hyperscientific, more royalist than the king. And, if you want examples of hyperscientific tendencies in so-called pseudoscience, there are now sensitive studies of the biblical astronomy craze instigated in the 1950s by the psychiatrist Immanuel Velikovsky, or you can consider the meticulous methodological attentiveness of parapsychology, or you can reflect on why it might be that students of the human sciences are deluged with lessons on The Scientific Method while chemists and geologists are typically content with mastering just the various methods of their specialties. The Truth-Deniers find scientific facts and theories shamefully ignored by the elites; they embrace conceptions of a coherent, stable, and effective Scientific Method that the elites are said to violate; they insist on the necessity of radical scientific skepticism, universal replication, and openness to alternative views that the elites contravene. On those criteria, who’s really anti-scientific? Who are the real Truth-Deniers? [...]

Rather, a difference between the two — and a consideration pertinent to links between expert Truth and political consequences — isn’t knowing science but knowing where science lives: who to recognize as knowledgeable and reliable; who to trust; which institutions to consider as the homes of genuine knowledge. Knowing this sort of thing — call it a kind of social knowledge — is a different matter than knowing the laws of motion, the nucleotide makeup of DNA, or the statistical means of determining global temperature and establishing its rate of change. This type of knowledge involves rightly knowing the scientific reputation of institutions; rightly knowing the integrity of those who testify to those reputations; rightly knowing the ascribed virtues and vices of the institutions and their procedures; and even rightly knowing the personal characteristics and material interests of the spokespersons for these institutions and those who testify to their qualities. It involves knowing whose opinion to take, and to take seriously, about matters of which you happen to be ignorant. That sort of knowledge isn’t technical, and people might say that it isn’t scientific, or even that it isn’t really knowledge — but almost all of the technical knowledge that we have is held on that basis. In the distant past, I did advanced scientific work (in genetics, as it happens), but — and I speak here just for myself — everything that I know about climate change, including my knowing that Trump is wrong, is held courtesy of this social knowledge. Being a knowledgeable person may mean knowing a lot of stuff, but it certainly means knowing who knows and who does not know.

read the article

FiveThirtyEight: There Are Now 16 House Republicans Retiring. What Does This Mean For 2020?

This isn’t that far off from the 23 Republicans who voluntarily hung up their House spurs in the 2018 cycle — even though there are comparatively fewer potential GOP retirees this time around, as the party lost 40 seats in the midterms. It’s not always easy to nail down why someone has decided to leave public office, and there could be a number of factors at play, including dissatisfaction with President Trump, reelection worries or loss of institutional clout. But given that many of these recent retirees have been members of the House for at least two decades and would have been safe bets for reelection, their retirements could be taken as a sign that many Republicans aren’t confident in their party’s ability to win a majority in 2020. By contrast, only six Democrats have said they won’t seek reelection in 2020. [...]

So what do we know about these recent retirees other than the majority of them are from safe Republican districts? Well, age could have played a role in many of these departures. Combined, these seven retirees share about 150 years of experience in the House and Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, for instance, is the second-longest serving House member, having first been elected in 1978. But only two — King (75) and Sensenbrenner (76) — are actually older than 70. The others are still in their early-to-mid 60s, which isn’t that far off from 58, which is the average age of a congressional member in the 116th Congress. In fact, because Reps. John Shimkus of Illinois, Mac Thornberry of Texas and Greg Walden of Oregon are all still in their early 60s, the relatively young age of these retirees reinforces the idea that Republicans might have misgivings about winning back the House.[...]

In sum, Republican retirements since early August — particularly those by veteran GOP members — collectively suggest a lack of confidence in winning back the House in 2020. That’s understandable, too, given the last time control of the House changed hands in a presidential cycle was 1952. Big swings are just more likely in midterm years. Moreover, the electoral environment doesn’t look all that promising for Republicans: Democrats have about a six-point lead in early generic ballot polling, a measure that even this far out tends to be fairly predictive.

read the article

VICE: NASA’s Solar Probe Found Things Near the Sun That We Can’t Explain

During its two encounters, Parker traveled within 15 million miles of the Sun’s surface, far surpassing the 25-million-mile record first set by NASA’s Helios 2 mission in 1976. Parker has also claimed the title of the fastest human-made object in history from Helios 2, as it surfed near the Sun at over 153,000 miles per hour. [...]

“To our big surprise,” Kasper said, “by the time we got to our closest approach, [the solar wind] was flowing between 35 and 50 kilometers per second around the Sun. That’s something like 15 to 25 times faster than the standard solar models predict, so we’re missing something really fundamental in our standard models of the Sun—how it rotates and how the wind escapes—and that’s really interesting.” [...]

Though the mechanism behind these waves is still unknown, the sheer force of them may help explain two of the most persistent mysteries about the Sun: Why is solar corona, or the atmosphere of the Sun, about 1,000 times hotter than its surface? And why does the solar wind suddenly accelerate to supersonic speeds at a certain distance from the Sun?

read the article