The blog will resume on the 18th March 2019
28 February 2019
The Guardian Today in Focus: The fall of Cardinal George Pell
One of Pope Francis’s trusted advisers is now the most senior member of the Catholic church to be convicted of child abuse. The Guardian’s Melissa Davey was in court every day and describes the trial that brought about Pell’s downfall. Plus: Alex Hern on Facebook’s decision to permanently ban the far-right activist Tommy Robinson.
The New York Times: The Dying Art of Disagreement (Sept. 24, 2017)
Nor is this just an impression of the moment. Extensive survey data show that Republicans are much more right-leaning than they were twenty years ago, Democrats much more left-leaning, and both sides much more likely to see the other as a mortal threat to the nation’s welfare.[...]
The polarization is personal: Fully 50 percent of Republicans would not want their child to marry a Democrat, and nearly a third of Democrats return the sentiment. Interparty marriage has taken the place of interracial marriage as a family taboo. [...]
As I think about it, I’m not sure we were taught anything at all. What we did was read books that raised serious questions about the human condition, and which invited us to attempt to ask serious questions of our own. Education, in this sense, wasn’t a “teaching” with any fixed lesson. It was an exercise in interrogation.[...]
In other words, to disagree well you must first understand well. You have to read deeply, listen carefully, watch closely. You need to grant your adversary moral respect; give him the intellectual benefit of doubt; have sympathy for his motives and participate empathically with his line of reasoning. And you need to allow for the possibility that you might yet be persuaded of what he has to say. [...]
According to a new survey from the Brookings Institution, a plurality of college students today — fully 44 percent — do not believe the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution protects so-called “hate speech,” when of course it absolutely does. More shockingly, a narrow majority of students — 51 percent — think it is “acceptable” for a student group to shout down a speaker with whom they disagree. An astonishing 20 percent also agree that it’s acceptable to use violence to prevent a speaker from speaking.
The Times Literary Supplement: Believers without belief
However, this belief-orientated – or “doxastic” – conception of religion is not universally accepted. According to the historian of religion Karen Armstrong, the doxastic conception of religion is a relatively recent development, shaped by the Protestant Reformation and the scientific revolution of the sixteenth century. Armstrong goes so far as to argue that our modern doxastic conception of religion is largely the result of mistranslation. In terms of Christianity, one difficulty with translating the Greek of the New Testament into English is that the English word “faith”, unlike the Greek equivalent “pistis”, does not have a verb form. Hence what should really be the verb “to faith” comes out as “to believe”. When the Bible was first rendered in English in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, this was not a bad translation. The word “bileven” in middle English meant to prize or to hold dear (related to the German “belieben”) and when the King James Bible was published, “believe” was close in meaning to the Greek pistis, which has connotations of engagement and commitment. As one piece of evidence for this, Armstrong offers a line from Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well (written shortly before the publication of the King James Bible) in which Bertram is urged to “believe not thy distain”; in other words, he is being told not to engage his contempt (in this case for the low-born Helena) and let it take root in his heart.[...]
Separating “faith” from “belief” also makes sense outside a religious context. Suppose a loved one is seriously ill and the prognosis is not good. You might say to that person, “I have faith that you’re going to live”. This does not necessarily mean that you believe that your loved one will live; you might be entirely realistic about the chances of survival. What you mean is that you are rooting for that possibility: you are personally committing to living in hope that the illness will be overcome. Faith is a matter of hopeful commitment. To take another example, anyone taking a cold hard look at the facts must accept that the odds of humans preventing climate catastrophe do not look great; certainly, it is more likely that we will fail than that we will succeed. Nonetheless, many continue to have faith that our species will rise to the occasion. Again, this is not a matter of believing, against all the evidence, that climate change will be dealt with. It rather means committing to live, and more importantly to act, in the hope of a better outcome. Such leaps of faith are not irrational; they are what give life meaning and significance. It would be a sad world if everyone apportioned their aspirations for the future in the manner of an insurance broker.[...]
Religious fictionalists hold that the contentious claims of religion, such as “God exists” or “Jesus rose from the dead” are all, strictly speaking, false. They nonetheless think that religious discourse, as part of the practice in which such discourse is embedded, has a pragmatic value that justifies its use. To put it simply: God is a useful fiction. In fact, fictionalism is popular in many areas of philosophy. There are, for example, moral fictionalists and mathematical fictionalists, who think that there are pragmatic benefits to using moral/mathematical language even though such discourse fails to correspond to a genuine reality (there are, on these views, no such things as goodness or the number 9, any more than there are dragons or witches). Religious fictionalists merely extend this approach to the statements of religion. [...]
While many atheists will no doubt see the benefit of shared traditions, they may find it hard to see the point of prayer and worship. In response, the fictionalist will point out that we are not cold-blooded creatures of reason motivated purely by an accurate understanding of the world around us. Moral character is cultivated and sustained, at least in part, through emotional engagement with fictional scenarios. For the fictionalist, immersion in the religious ritual is akin to losing yourself in a book or a film, the only difference being that the effect is accentuated through our active and corporate participation in the act of worship.
Pindex: Brexit 3: Globalists vs Nationalists. Facts, Illusions and Hidden Threats
Are nationalists really just racists? Or are globalists simply corporate sellouts? There are dark truths, strange surprises and true threats lurking in the shadows.
In Brexit part 3, we explore Trump’s nationalism, an alarming problem with the English identity, illusions about nationalists and globalists, and what it all means for Brexit.
In Brexit part 3, we explore Trump’s nationalism, an alarming problem with the English identity, illusions about nationalists and globalists, and what it all means for Brexit.
Quartz: Working long hours and weekends affects men and women differently
Men in the study tended to work longer hours than the women, with almost half working longer than 35-40 hours, which was used in the study as the benchmark of a “standard” working week. Less than a quarter of women worked over the standard week hours, and half worked part time (compared to only 15% of men). Among men, working even the longest hours hours wasn’t associated with any significant increase in depressive symptoms, measured using a health questionnaire designed to study psychological distress.
The researchers took into account other factors, including education level, marital status, the physicality of people’s jobs, chronic illness, and whether the subjects had children. Though it’s not touched on in this study, women with children are more likely to choose part-time work—often to the detriment of career and pay progression—while their male partners tend to work full-time, which accounts for some of that asymmetry. The UCL study found that if women were married and had children, they were less likely to work very long hours, while men in the same situation were more likely to.
Over two-thirds of the men and half the women worked weekends. Working weekends did have an effect on men’s wellbeing, but only when other factors were accounted for. Men with “poor psychosocial working conditions”—for example, being unhappy with their pay or their job—who also worked weekends were significantly more likely to be depressed than the rest of the population.
The researchers hypothesized that women who work very long hours might be working in male-dominated industries, while those working weekends were likely to be engaged in low-paid and arduous jobs like working on public transport, cleaning, and care-giving.
27 February 2019
The Calvert Journal: Photography Moscow Culture Travel Cruising past: photographer Yevgeniy Fiks resurrects Moscow’s forgotten gay history
Homophobia has never been in a “better” state in Russia than it is today. The horrific murder of 23-year-old Vladislav Tornovoy in Volgograd this May — he was raped with a bottle, castrated and stoned — shook the public. But not enough, it seems: little has been done to prevent a repeat. One of the murderers admitted the reason for the killing was the “provocative” dress of the victim and his sexual orientation, which, apparently, “hurts patriotic feelings”. The authorities did have to admit it was a hate crime and to acknowledge Russia’s homophobia problem; but this is a problem that the government themselves have exacerbated with the recent introduction of a new nationwide law “against the propaganda of homosexuality”.[...]
These spaces — the city’s hidden topography of gay life — have recently been brought to light in the work of New York-based Russian photographer Yevgeniy Fiks. A self-proclaimed “post-Soviet artist”, Fiks sees it as his duty to react against the collective amnesia surrounding the Cold War period; previously he commemorated the overlooked history of communism in New York. At first glance, Fiks’s plainly titled new book, Moscow, could be just an ordinary photo album of public places in the Russian capital: we see parks, squares, boulevards, riverside embankments and public toilets. We admire the splendid architecture of the capital, its greenery and its striking constructivist-classicist constructions and we are impressed by the care taken by the Soviet authorities to make even toilets look beautiful. The pictures emanate a sense of peace and silence. But the way in which we see the locations depicted in these photographs is transformed when we learn that each and every one of them was a Soviet cruising ground.
What we suddenly perceive in these pictures is the eye of the original viewer. Yes, there are a lot of public toilets, but we now see these facilities in a different way, as sites that enable spontaneous relations between adults. These prohibited actions had to take place in hiding, away from prying eyes; paradoxically, this was only possible in public. Fiks has ordered the photos chronologically according to the period in which certain haunts were popular, from the Twenties to the Eighties, which means here we’re looking at the complete history of Moscow cruising. But the timescale seems to leave one question unanswered, quite deliberately: what about the years after the transition from communism? Fiks’s photographs seem to distance the author from Soviet, and specifically, Stalinist, times, and to reclaim the public space for a different version of history (not one much promoted in official versions of the Soviet past) and to reclaim homosexuality from today’s horrifically homophobic climate.[...]
More central to contemporary arguments around gay rights are Stalin’s repressions. In fact some commentators argue that the current disputes aren’t strictly between homosexuals and heterosexuals, but are rather products of a conflict between two different versions of homosexuality — “Soviet” and “Western.” After Stalin banned it in the mid-Thirties — a letter of protest written to the Soviet leader by openly gay British communist Harry Whyte is included in Fiks’s book — discourses around homosexuality in Russia became deeply intertwined with the practice of male-only sex, on a huge scale, in the gulag. Prisoners were deprived of any possibility of expressing their sexuality (men and women were imprisoned separately) and all sexual acts were associated with the criminal hierarchy in the camps and the further humiliation of prisoners, especially those in a “passive” role. The consequent taboo attached to homosexual identities prevents them from being seen as something “natural” in Russia.
The New York Review of Books: Mitch McConnell, Republican Nihilist
Writing for the Review last fall, the American historian Christopher R. Browning said of the Senate majority leader, “if the US has someone whom historians will look back on as the gravedigger of American democracy, it is Mitch McConnell.” In Browning’s view, McConnell is not dissimilar from the German conservative politicians, who in the 1930s brought Adolf Hitler to power, “thinking that they could ultimately control [him] while enjoying the benefits of his popular support.” With Hitler as Chancellor, the conservatives saw their fulsome policy agenda enacted: rearmament, suspension of civil liberties, the outlawing of the Communist Party, and the abolition of labor unions, among other moves. But as they would later find out, controlling the monster they put in power would be something else altogether.[...]
What separates McConnell from other destructive political actors, such as former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and his fellow congressional Republican revolutionaries, or President George W. Bush and his vice president, Dick Cheney, is that McConnell’s political actions are unmoored from ideology and policy. For McConnell, politics is fundamentally about accruing political power for the sole purpose of accruing more political power.[...]
McConnell seemed almost to relish the anger his positions engendered. When reformists began referring to him as Darth Vader, he appeared at a press conference toting a light saber. In playing this part, McConnell earned the gratitude of his fellow Republicans, something that would pay off when he sought to become the party’s leader in the Senate. McConnell would adopt a similar position in 2009 after Barack Obama’s inauguration. He became the public face of opposition to Obama’s policies, as he expertly wielded the Senate’s limitless tools for obstruction and delay to block the new president’s legislative goals. In his willingness to again play the role of villain, McConnell displayed a unique understanding of how modern American politics works: the more liberals hated him, the more Republicans loved him.[...]
There was, however, a political downside to McConnell’s unrelentingly rejectionist approach: it played directly into the hands of the extremists in his own party. Indeed, the Senate GOP’s inflexible opposition to Obama, the venomous attacks of Republican partisans (including questions about Obama’s birthplace and religion), and McConnell’s declaration that “the single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president” gave oxygen to the fledgling Tea Party movement. In 2010, the victory of extremist conservative Republicans in party primaries would help cost McConnell the chance to become majority leader in the Senate (postponing that outcome until 2014).
The Atlantic: France’s Double Standard for Populist Uprisings
The yellow vests have effectively become a movement of middle-class and lower-middle-class people afraid of slipping further down the economic ladder. The demonstrations began as rural protests, but they now also draw support from cities. Calling the participants the “white working class” is tricky, but it’s become clear that those in the banlieues—which have large populations of several generations from across Africa—haven’t been a major force. And even if those from the banlieues identify with some of the main issues the yellow vests are raising, for the most part, they have not seen themselves reflected in the movement.[...]
But Nordine said he and others from the banlieues haven’t been joining in the Saturday demonstrations, which have often been marred by violence. “If we did that, we’d immediately be stigmatized and people would say, ‘The yellow-vest movement is going to turn into a guerilla war because you’re going to have kids from the suburbs showing up and trashing things,’ ” he said. Nordine didn’t talk about the ethnic makeup of the banlieues, but his remarks point to a recurring frustration: If you’re from “la France profonde”—rural France, largely white France—the demonstrations start a national debate (even if thousands of people have been questioned by police since the start of the yellow-vest protests); if you’re from the banlieues—and most likely of immigrant descent—and take to the streets, the demonstrations are seen as threats to public order.[...]
The banlieues have faced similar problems of unemployment and purchasing power for years. Over decades, they have also become a shorthand for people of color and problems of “integration”—code for a thicket of problems around economics, schools, social mobility, and even Islamic radicalism. These issues have simmered for years, without the kind of media attention that the yellow-vest protests have drawn. In December, a woman from Chanteloup-les-Vignes in Yvelines, a Paris suburb, who identified herself only as Yasmine F., wrote a blog post about why she wasn’t joining the yellow-vest protests. “To have trouble paying for gas means you already need to be able to pay for a car, have a job and degrees, and to get degrees and a job you need to be able to benefit from a better education and not to constantly be the victim of racism, discrimination and disdain from the upper classes,” she wrote. “For me, all those struggles come before the one about rising gas prices.”
Vox: Why safe playgrounds aren't great for kids
The stereotypical modern playground — with its bright colors and rubberized flooring — is designed to be clean, safe, and lawsuit-proof. But that isn't necessarily the best design for kids.
US playground designers spent decades figuring out how to minimize risk: reducing heights, softening surfaces, and limiting loose parts. But now, some are experimenting with creating risk. A growing body of research has found that risky outdoor play is a key part of children’s health, promoting social interactions, creativity, problem-solving, and resilience.
Some communities are even experimenting with “adventure playgrounds,” a format with origins in World War II Denmark, where bomb sites became impromptu playgrounds. Filled with props like nails, hammers, saws, paint, tires, and wood planks, these spaces look more like junkyards than play spaces — and parents are often kept outside of the playground while children are chaperoned by staff. Now, that question of keeping children safe versus keeping children engaged is at the heart of a big debate in playground design.
Slate: The Troubling Resilience of the Queer Closet
What’s weird about this love affair with the closet is that it is not a structure that queer people hammered together ourselves. With the invention of the homo/hetero binary in the late 19th-century, various forms of persecution and harassment were brought to bear against alleged sexual deviants. As George Chauncey chronicled in his definitive history Gay New York, terms like “leading a double life” or “wearing a mask” arose to describe the sense of being split or divided into multiple selves. Only after 1960 did “the closet” take precedence as the authoritative term. The new metaphor, however, did different work than those it supplanted, in that it summoned a new ideal of total exposure: Out and proud gays would have no “skeletons in the closet,” no secrets, no hiding—total integration of a unified self.[...]
So, what’s wrong with using the closet as the defining architecture of the queer experience? For one thing, coming out—out of the dark, solitary closet and into the sociable light—makes queerness responsible for clarity of expression to others. By its very nature, queerness should reside in a sea of ambiguity, unstably morphing through androgynous and fluid forms, as brilliantly depicted in Virginia Woolf’s novel of spontaneous gender transformation, Orlando. By contrast, acquiescing to the demand to come out entails a tacit willingness to be pinned down, defined, made intelligible—in effect, to halt and freeze queerness at the very instant of its assertion. I’d prefer that we allow queer exteriors to more closely resemble, by analogy, Joan Crawford’s disposition: icy, enigmatic, alluring—but never transparent or laid bare. The requirement to come out places a particularly cruel burden on trans people, who endure enormous pressure to explain and categorize themselves in binary ways that are understandable and comforting to outside audiences. Katie Couric’s notorious shift from inquisitive to inquisitional in interviewing transwomen Carmen Carrera and Laverne Cox in 2014 stemmed from the closet-based assumption that an instance of “coming out” entitles straight people to audit queer bodies.[...]
To some extent, our love of invoking the closet could just be a defensive posture. But I suspect, too, a more troubling motive, for the closet gets wielded by queer people themselves to cement status. To imagine queer people as beginning in the closet, from infancy if not birth, permits a smug smirk among the victoriously “out”—in the advertising parlance of Virginia Slims, you’ve come a long way, baby!—who laud themselves in contrast to the cowards still shut up in the closet. Let’s be real: Flipping on the gaydar isn’t typically some humane outreach of sympathy. More often, it’s a catty exercise in penetrating the pretenses of closet-trapped queers. To makes matters worse, scouring youth for latent signs of queerness does the dirty work of policing gender expression, which in turn breeds paranoia as closeted queer folks strain to repress telltale signs of their secret—the lisp of a dude’s s that lingers too long, or fingernails trimmed to dykish bluntness. The closet turns the queer gaze prosecutorial.
Haaretz: Poland vs Israel: Who's Really Winning the War Over Holocaust History?
Last year’s conflagration was primarily the fault of Poland, which passed its ill-conceived memory law on the eve of Holocaust Remembrance Day, and then compounded this with insensitive remarks from senior figures, including Morawiecki’s comments about "Jewish perpetrators" of the Holocaust.
But this time around it is the Israeli side that has set the blaze. The claim by Foreign Minister Israel Katz that Poles "imbibe anti-Semitism with their mother’s milk" was false, essentializing and offensive – not least to the many Poles who risked, and often lost, their lives helping Jews during the war, as well as the many today who devote themselves to protecting and promoting Poland’s Jewish heritage. [...]
The fallout from this could have been contained. Yet instead it was compounded by the Israeli government making no attempt to denounce or distance itself from Katz’s remarks, nor even to rein him in. The very next day he repeated the remarks in another radio interview. The situation was further exacerbated by a slew of commentary in Israeli media that was often uninformed on WWII history and presented further negative generalizations about Poles as a whole.[...]
And this is precisely the problem. These disputes over WWII history bring out the worst elements and attitudes on both sides. They trigger a vicious circle of mutually reinforcing animosity fuelled by competing, one-sided historical memories. The discourse comes to be dominated by the most extreme voices, who have a political or ideological motivation to stir things up.
Quartz: What Russia wants from the Trump-Kim summit
The US is consulting Russia ahead of the summit, “asking our advice, our views on this or that scenario,” Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov told Russian state news organizations yesterday (Feb. 25). Lavrov is reportedly recommending that the US offer “security guarantees” to the North Korean leader to encourage him to denuclearize and has even flown to Vietnam this week as well.
The notion that the US president is taking advice from Vladimir Putin’s government on North Korea is alarming, analysts said. Yet it shouldn’t come as a surprise. Trump has previously demonstrated his willingness to believe Putin over his own US intelligence agencies.[...]
Putin’s overall goals in the region: ease sanctions against North Korea, burnish his government’s image, and make America look weak. Any situation in which Trump offers economic aid or to ease sanctions to the Kim regime, without securing any concrete steps toward denuclearization, would accomplish these steps, analysts said.[...]
Last year, Trump surprised US military officials and his own advisors when he suggested the US stop participating in “war games” with South Korea, an idea he reportedly got from Putin.
The Guardian: Brutal and dogmatic, George Pell waged war on sex – even as he abused children
As an archbishop in Melbourne and a cardinal in Sydney Pell poured his energies into combating contraception, homosexuality, genetic engineering, divorce, equal marriage and abortion.
He was particularly brutal to gay people. When a wreath was laid outside St Patrick’s Cathedral in Melbourne in memory of gay students in Catholic schools driven to suicide, Pell’s disdain was absolute.
“I haven’t got good statistics on the reasons for those suicides,” he declared. “If they are connected with homosexuality, it is another reason to be discouraging people going in that direction. Homosexual activity is a much greater health hazard than smoking.”[...]
Pell did nothing to curb paedophile priests in his years as auxiliary bishop, though the predations of some of the worst of them were being reported to him. He didn’t know enough, he would claim, and he didn’t have the authority to act. Despite the pleas of parents and teachers, Pell left mad Father Searson, toting a gun and terrifying children, in charge of the primary school in Doveton.
His elevation to archbishop shocked Melbourne Catholics. But he didn’t need to be loved by them. He didn’t need their votes. His authority came from Rome, where he sat on a number of councils policing church doctrine. These were the years the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith worked up fresh hard teachings to revile homosexuals.[...]
If you wanted to build a network of Catholic universities, Pell was your man. If you wanted to save hundreds of millions of dollars that victims of abuse might win in the courts, Pell was your man. If you wanted to block official inquiries into the abuse of children by clerics for as long as humanly possible, Pell was your man.
The Guardian: Lay Catholics who stay silent are complicit in the church’s failure on abuse
But my parish in south London appears to exist in a parallel universe, and a quick straw poll among friends who (reluctantly) attended mass at their churches at the weekend revealed it was the same in theirs. There were about 70 people at the morning mass I attended. Some of them were very elderly, and maybe deserve some understanding; but others were in their 30s, 40s, 50s. What on earth are they doing, standing up and sitting down by rote, parroting prayers that, in the light of last week’s revelations in Rome, ring so hollow? There was not a word about the horrors from the priest. In his sermon he talked about how lucky we were to be hearing that day’s reading from St Luke’s gospel, since it had last been read at Sunday mass in 2007. The only mention of the churning tumult in our institution came in a prayer read out by a layperson, which called on God to grant “wisdom” to those making decisions in the Vatican about the safety of young people and vulnerable adults.[...]
But there’s one thing we know for sure, and if I’d been a priest saying mass at a Catholic parish last weekend I would have based my sermon on it. Jesus Christ, the founder of the Catholic church, didn’t often get angry. But once or twice he got absolutely furious, and it was always about the same thing: the religious elite, who in his day were the Pharisees. “Do not imitate their actions, because they don’t practise what they preach,” he warned, telling them they were “like whitewashed tombs, which look fine on the outside but are full of bones and decaying corpses on the inside” (Matthew 23 v3, and v27).
If Jesus had been at last week’s abuse summit, he’d have been furious again; and he could have used those same lines. We, the Catholics who still have even a smidgen of faith in anything at the heart of this organisation, now have to be furious, too: we have to force change, and then we have to work out whether there is anything worth preserving in the whitewashed tomb that calls itself the Catholic church.
26 February 2019
The Guardian Longreads: The battle for the future of Stonehenge
Our Stonehenge has none of this grandeur or pathos. Instead, it is at the centre of a peculiarly modern British circus – one that involves an agonisingly long planning dispute, allegations of government incompetence, two deeply entrenched opposing sides, and a preoccupation with traffic and tourism. This absurdist drama, entirely worthy of our times, is a long and bitter battle over whether to sink the highway that runs beside it into a tunnel.[...]
Tempting as it is to suggest that the dispute pits the forces of modernity against the defenders of tradition, the argument boils down to whether you think a major construction project in a world heritage site is absolute madness, or the commonsense solution to a long-term traffic problem. English Heritage, the national body that cares for Stonehenge, insists that doing nothing is not an option. It argues that the A303 will only get busier as new homes are built in the south-west – and that the tunnel, in any case, would significantly improve the “visitor experience” by returning the circle to its intended setting, without the intrusion of the sights and sounds of the A303. They also say that the plans have been carefully drawn up to avoid damage to prehistoric features, and that they are still working hard with Highways England to minimise their impact.[...]
The principle of preserving a “national heritage” in perpetuity can seem as though it has been with us for ever – perhaps because bodies such as the National Trust seem like such timeless bastions of middle England. In fact, the idea is fairly recent – and Stonehenge itself played an important role in its invention. [...]
In 2015, the Conservative government spun off English Heritage – the descendent of the government body that cared for monuments after the 1882 act – into an independent charity, earning its own keep. Its ability to do this is strongly dependent on Stonehenge, which brings in 21% of its annual income of about £112m and which, with its 1.5 million visitors a year, attracts a million more than the next-most popular site, Dover Castle. Kate Mavor, the organisation’s chief executive, told me she thought of Stonehenge as a publisher might a bestseller – a title that supports other, less lucrative, works. While entry is free for English Heritage and Trust members, it otherwise costs £17.50 to buy a ticket to Stonehenge. More than half the visitors are from overseas. A vast coach park at the site decants tourists who will often also take in Bath and Windsor on a day trip from London.
openDemocracy: The strange connections of Tashkent City’s “British investor”
Corso Solutions LP appears to be an unusual property developer. The Edinburgh-registered company has no website, no contact details and no obvious business activity. And yet it was named last autumn as a foreign investor on the Tashkent City project, a giant property redevelopment in the centre of Uzbekistan’s capital. openDemocracy has found that Corso Solutions has connections to an opaque international network that provides company formation services, including to apparent money laundering vehicles.[...]
According to the UK companies registry, Corso Solutions has not logged any activity or accounts since its formation. As reported by Scottish newspaper The Herald, the company should have disclosed its beneficial owner (“Person of Significant Control”) after new UK legislation on Scottish Limited Partnerships came into force in 2017. Concerns about this situation were raised in September last year. [...]
Corso Solutions was first mentioned in a September 2018 report by Uzbek media on investors in Tashkent City. Since then, we have been unable to find any information on the exact nature of Corso Solutions’ investment, and it is not mentioned on Tashkent City’s official website. When Radio Ozodlik contacted Tashkent City in October 2018 regarding Corso Solutions, an official responsible for foreign investment stated that information on approved foreign investors, including Corso Solutions, was a “commercial secret”. When we contacted Tashkent City project administration to confirm Corso Solutions’ role in the project in January and February 2019, we received no response.[...]
OCCRP and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists report that the GT Group has set up offshore corporate networks used by Russian organised crime, Hezbollah and the Mexican Sinaloa drug cartel to launder funds and hide ownership. Companies House records that Ian Taylor has been disqualified as acting as a company director until 2021 under section 6 of the Company Directors Disqualification Act 1986 (Duty of court to disqualify unfit directors of insolvent companies).
CityLab: A Second Life for Berlin’s Plattenbau (SEP 6, 2018)
Yesterday, Berlin’s Senate announced a project to add more units on top of already existing buildings in the city’s east, with a possible capacity of up to 50,000 new homes. The plan to add floors isn’t novel in itself, of course, even in Berlin. What’s striking is the specific type of building chosen for the experiment: East Berlin’s Plattenbau. These mass produced, partly prefabricated modernist apartment complexes (the name translates as “slab buildings” in reference to the concrete panels that form their walls) were put up in huge numbers during the Communist era. When a German thinks of a Communist-era building, a Plattenbau likely springs to mind. [...]
It’s not necessarily the case that Berlin is falling back in love with the Plattenbau’s aesthetics. The Senate’s plan, which will launch a partnership with social housing association Howoge to identify suitable Plattenbau for trial construction, is essentially pragmatic. The building type makes a great candidate for roof extensions. Plattenbau are almost always flat roofed and usually broader than they are tall, which means that additional floors could provide a lot of new apartments. Unlike the tenements in Berlin’s older districts, Plattenbau were generally set back from the sidewalk and placed among open spaces, so their height can grow without throwing the streets beneath them into permanent shade. And crucially, there are a very large number of them. Howoge estimates that it has 320,000 square meters (3,444,450 square feet) of roof space suitable for more construction, some of which could well host multiple floors.
If all this space was used it would transform the face of East Berlin, a place where it can be a struggle to find a building that doesn’t have a slab-covered façade. Plattenbau are ubiquitous across all East Germany, largely the product of a nationwide housing program launched in 1972 that saw the state build a phenomenal 1.9 million apartments across the country. Following a model that had been developed from the 1950s onwards, this housing program was able to speed up construction by preparing almost all of a building’s components offsite in a factory—even adding windows—before it was slotted together in the chosen location. Popular across the Eastern Bloc, the technique took off in such a big way partly because it fitted so well with the state’s yen for central planning.
openDemocracy: #ElectionsSpain2019: Populist radicalisation, Catalonia, and the far-right
However the Catalan issue remains plagued with negative emotions, and that inheritance was too heavy to deal with by the new Moncloa palace (siege of the president of the government) lodger. The negotiations for governance, and above all, to pass the annual budget through parliament, have left their mark on Sánchez’s short but sweet stay at the Palacio de la Moncloa, and Catalans ensured its lack of viability towards the end.[...]
Traditionally, governments have governed with either an absolute majority or with minority governments that gained the support of the Basque and Catalan nationalists, that were pragmatic in character. The nationalists often acted as bargaining chips in favour for benefits for their territories, have become kingmakers in Madrid on several occasions, and have heavily invested the gains in nation building at home.[...]
This radical shift in Catalan consevative nationalism, acquiring clear populist traits, inreasingly demanded a referendum to gain territorial independence, putting in the centre of the political agenda something which is not permitted by the Spanish constitution.[...]
An ultra-right reaction to the threat of the breakdown of the Spanis State is certainly taking advantage of the current state of affairs to create a dangerous scenario for Spain, and as a consequence the whole European Union.
CityLab: An Incredibly Detailed Map of Europe's Population Shifts (JUN 22, 2015)
Look at the Eastern section of the map and you’ll see that many cities, including Prague, Bucharest, and the Polish cities of Poznań and Wrocław, are ringed with a deep red circle that shows a particularly high rise in average annual population of 2 percent or more. As this paper from Krakow’s Jagiellonian University’s Institute of Geography notes, Eastern cities began to spread out in the new millennium because it was their first chance to do so in decades.[...]
We already know from other available data that Europe is experiencing a migration to the northwest, but the BBSR map adds complexity to this picture and reveals some interesting micro-trends. The dark blue coloring of the map’s Eastern section shows that the lean years for Eastern states are by no means over. Residents have continued to leave Albania, Bulgaria and Latvia in particular in search of jobs, while even relatively wealthy eastern Germany has been hollowed out almost everywhere except the Berlin region.
Population growth in the Northwest, meanwhile, is far from even. While large sections of Northern Scandinavia’s inland are losing people, there’s still modest growth on the Arctic coasts. And while the Scottish Highlands contain some the least peopled lands in all of Europe, Scotland’s Northeast shows remarkable population gains, a likely result of the North Sea oil industry concentrated in Aberdeen. [...]
Spain’s trends look a little different from those of Europe as a whole. It’s actually in the country’s Northwest where the population has dropped most sharply, notably in the provinces of Galicia and León, which have long been known to produce many of Spain’s migrants.
The Atlantic: Germany Is Testing the Limits of Democracy
The AfD is perhaps the biggest test yet for these boundaries. Though the party is hardly the first far-right movement to try to compete in Germany’s postwar political ecosystem, it’s by leaps and bounds the most successful one: More than five million people supported the AfD in the 2017 federal elections, earning it 12.6 percent of the vote nationally and more than 90 seats in the German Bundestag. And as of October, the party is represented in all 16 of Germany’s state legislatures.[...]
When it comes to the party’s rhetoric about refugees and migrants, AfD leaders have even at times run afoul of online hate-speech laws, with one lawmaker finding herself temporarily suspended from Twitter and Facebook last year after posting about “barbaric, gang-raping Muslim hordes.” And the Chemnitz riots, which saw AfD supporters and radical far-right groups such as Pegida marching side by side, showed the extent to which harsh rhetoric about refugees can turn into violent action.[...]
That, combined with some party members’ ties to other monitored extremist groups—the Young Alternative, AfD’s youth wing, was placed under surveillance in part because of its ties to the far-right extremist group Generation Identity, for example—gives the impression that the AfD tolerates, if not advocates for, extremist views. (Even Bernd Lucke, one of the original founders of the party who has since left, recently said that he believes the Verfassungsschutz is right to monitor some parts of the party.)
"It may be that the majority of the AfD doesn't agree with everything Mr. Höcke says. The decisive thing is that Mr. Höcke isn't marginalized and isn't isolated,” says Axel Salheiser, a researcher who focuses on extremism at the Institute for Democracy and Civil Society in Jena, in eastern Germany.[...]
The AfD “triggers the kind of debate that you want to have in a live democracy, where people have to define the terms on which debate has to be had, again and again,” he told me. “It is also ... a signal that democracy wants to defend itself, no matter how difficult.”
Politico: Ukraine’s crisis of faith
As the fighting between Ukrainian government forces and Kremlin-backed separatists in the country’s east has dragged on, it’s become increasingly difficult to separate the centuries-old ideological conflict from the ongoing political and military conflict. [...]
With his popularity plummeting ahead of Ukraine’s presidential election in March, Poroshenko likely saw the issue as an opportunity to win back public support. With an independent church, Ukrainians would finally gain “spiritual independence that can be compared to political independence” from Russia, he said in December. [...]
Speaking at a Russian Orthodox Church event alongside Kirill in Moscow last month, Putin doubled down, saying Russia “reserve[s] the right to respond and do everything possible to protect human rights, including freedom of religion.” The thinly veiled threat resonated with officials in Kiev who recalled the Russian leader’s justification for annexing Crimea in 2014 and backing pro-Moscow separatists that same year: defending Russian speakers.[...]
Religious leaders from the Russian Orthodox Church in Ukraine are quick to point out that the 300 or so churches that have changed allegiances in the past month are a relative drop in the bucket, given there are still some 12,000 to 14,000 Moscow-aligned churches in Ukraine. [...]
Some 5,000 parishes that previously adhered to the two unofficial Ukrainian churches — the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church and the Ukrainian Orthodox Church-Kiev Patriarchate — have also become part of the new independent church. Most are located in Ukraine’s predominantly pro-European west and center, while the Moscow Patriarchate’s influence in strongest in the east and south.
CityLab: There's No Such Thing as a Dangerous Neighborhood
In essence, Kelling and Wilson argued that latent danger loomed everywhere, and everywhere people’s disorderly impulses needed to be repressed, or else. Their “broken windows theory” didn’t stay theoretical: Also known as order maintenance policing, this tactic propelled an entire generation of policing practice that sought to crack down on minor “quality-of-life” infractions as a way to stem violence.[...]
While police departments often recognize that “we can’t arrest our way out of the problem,” the broken windows paradigm remains active throughout policing. Perhaps most significantly, it still colors how the public views violence and demands responses to it: both as a danger that characterizes entire poor communities of color, and as a menace that poses a constant threat.[...]
The knowledge that we’ve gained since 1982 unequivocally tells us something else: Serious violence is extremely concentrated in very particular places and, most importantly, among very particular people. Dispelling the notion of “dangerous neighborhoods,” extensive research on geographic concentration has consistently found that around half of all crime complaints or incidents of gun violence concentrated at about 5 percent of street segments or blocks in a given city. Moving past “violent communities,” sophisticated analysis of social networks have demonstrated that homicides and shootings are strongly concentrated within small social networks within cities—and that there is even further concentration of violence within these social networks. [...]
Rather, to understand violence, our research points again to the context, norms, and dynamics of street groups. Street groups involved in violence are generally composed of young men of color living in communities with long histories of structural discrimination and alienation from state institutions, particularly law enforcement. These areas have generally suffered from both over-enforcement and under-protection. Intrusive, broken-windows-style policing means mass stop-and-frisk interactions, along with tickets and arrests for minor offenses—but it doesn’t come with an equivalent investment in preventing or solving offenses like homicide. Indeed, it often makes it harder to do so, thanks to the cycle of mistrust between police and community members. The near-total impunity for homicides and shootings in distressed communities signals that the state can’t or won’t actually protect people from the most significant harm.
Politico: French poll: Yellow Jackets down, Macron up
Fifty-five percent of those polled by Odoxa, an independent research institute, now want the broad, anti-government Yellow Jackets movement to call an end to three months of often violent street protests — the first time that support for the movement has dropped below a majority, France Inter reported. That's a rise of 6 points from the previous monthly poll.
The poll also shows a rise in voters' interest in the upcoming European Parliament election in May — the first national ballot since Macron was voted president in May 2017. While interest in the European vote rose to 62 percent in the latest poll, from 54 percent in December, that is still some way below the 83 percent turnout in the presidential election.[...]
The Yellow Jacket "fatigue" is helping Macron return to pre-protest levels of popularity. After slumping 6 points in October-December, to just 27 percent, the president has recouped most of that drop, with 32 percent of respondents in the latest poll saying they think he is a "good president."
25 February 2019
The Atlantic: Survivors of Church Abuse Want Zero Tolerance. The Pope Offers Context.
In a speech at the end of a Mass in which prelates had offered a “mea maxima culpa,” Francis put the Church’s sexual abuse crisis in historical and cultural context. Studies find most sexual abuse happens in the home, he said. And pornography and sex tourism are also scourges in the world. He warned against “justicialism provoked by guilt for past errors and media pressure, and a defensiveness that fails to confront the causes and effects of these grave crimes.”
The pope was speaking to bishops as a pastor, not issuing guidelines—a few of those were announced at the conference’s conclusion. But as Francis spoke, I couldn’t help but think that his contextualizing underscored and even exacerbated one of the deepest divides in the Catholic world today: Between the expectations of victims in the United States—who want “zero tolerance” for convicted abusers—and the way the Vatican conceives of the crisis. [...]
One of the biggest unresolved flashpoints here is the concept of “zero tolerance.” Many victims’ groups in the United States, France and elsewhere are calling on the Church to issue a “one-strike” policy of defrocking priests convicted of abuse and bishops on whose watch priests abused. The term “zero tolerance” was not used much at the conference, and was not in a series of 21 “reflection points” the pope asked participants to consider. If anything, the conference seemed to back away from the idea of defrocking, tending instead to focus on the idea of removing a priest from ministry in some cases rather than removing him from the clerical state.
Jacobin Magazine: Spain’s Troubled Spring
Today, Sánchez’s government is at the end of the line. And again the issue at the center of Spanish politics is the national question. With Spanish nationalists on the rise and the Catalan and Basque independentists withdrawing support for Sánchez’s budget, fresh elections are now set for April 28. The result of the campaign is uncertain. But things are not looking promising for the forces of social transformation. With the Catalan independentists lacking a strategy for a way forward, the Left is once again buried in in-fighting. [...]
Vox’s breakthrough and the rise of Ciudadanos (with the PP also holding firm) meant that there were enough right-wing MPs to hand the presidency of the Andalucían region to the PP for the first time. This union of the three right-wing forces is key to the reconstruction of the political camp so dear to former conservative premier José María Aznar; the absolute majority he won in 2000 may indeed repeat itself in the April 28 contest. Though they act separately, these forces today make up a three-headed beast, with the conservative soul of the PP in concert with the liberal soul of Ciudadanos and the ultra-right Vox.
Such are the forces of Spanish nationalism. Yet from the outset the Catalan independentists had been decisive in getting Sánchez into office. They unconditionally backed his bid to oust Rajoy in June 2018, in the hope that a PSOE government would make gestures toward dialogue with the Catalan autonomous government and some kind of solution for the Catalan political prisoners. This contrasted with the right-wing Basque nationalists of the PNV, who played their hand best, selling support for Sánchez in exchange for greater economic powers for the Basque Autonomous Community. [...]
With this question we get to the most tangled knot in the current situation. The PSOE can hope to bind the left-wing electorate behind itself on the basis of two main developments, namely the fragmentation of Unidos Podemos (with divisions at the regional level, but especially the bad image resulting from Iñigo Errejón and Manuela Carmena’s plan to stand separately of the party in the Madrid local elections) and the danger represented by the far-right Vox, which the polls predict to be on the brink of a historic breakthrough. Calling the elections so soon will leave all of its right-wing rivals relatively unprepared, and also exploit a moment in which Unidos Podemos is internally divided and lacks a strategic perspective.
Vox: This is an emergency, damn it
The release prompted a great deal of smart, insightful writing, but also a lot of knee-jerk and predictable cant. Conservatives called it socialist. Moderates called it extreme. Pundits called it unrealistic. Wonks scolded it over this or that omission. Political gossip columnists obsessed over missteps in the rollout.
What ties the latter reactions together, from my perspective, is that they seem oblivious to the historical moment, like thespians acting out an old, familiar play even as the theater goes up in flames around them.
To put it bluntly: this is not normal. We are not in an era of normal politics. There is no precedent for the climate crisis, its dangers or its opportunities. Above all, it calls for courage and fresh thinking.[...]
But 2 degrees is not the worst-case scenario. It is among the best-case scenarios. The UN thinks we’re headed for somewhere around 4 degrees by 2100. Believing that we can limit temperature rise to 2 degrees — a level of warming scientists view as catastrophic — now counts as wild-haired optimism, requiring heroic assumptions about technology development and political transformation.[...]
The left will never win the money game. The right’s billionaires are united in advocating for their interest in lower taxes, less regulation, and less accountability. The left’s are more likely to pick vanity causes or candidates. They love social causes but are far less likely than their counterparts on the right to focus on economic issues or redistribution, in part because many of them are quasi-libertarian tech bros who believe they are smarter than governments and better able to “change the world” if left to their billions.
The Atlantic: America's Dopamine-Fueled Shopping Addiction
Consumerism in the U.S. has reached an all-time high. In 2017, we spent $240 billion on goods such as jewelry, watches, luggage, books, and phones—twice as much as in 2002, even though our population grew by only 13 percent during that time. This is not to mention the 81 pounds of clothes and textiles that each American throws away annually, or the 26 million tons of plastics we collectively dispose of each year.
In a new animated video, writer Alana Semuels describes why shopping is so addictive and emphasizes the urgency in finding an encompassing solution to the problem of wasteful consumerism.
The New Yorker: An Unflinching View of Venezuela in Crisis
Alejandro Cegarra’s photo series “State of Decay” is an unflinching portrait of Venezuela’s collapse. How this country went from being one of Latin America’s richest societies to one of its poorest is a disaster of bewildering proportions, one that defies easy explanation. Venezuela has the largest proven oil reserves in the world, but since the 2014 crash in world oil prices, on which Venezuela depended for more than ninety per cent of its export revenues, its economy has contracted continuously, unleashing an economic crisis worse than that experienced by Americans during the Great Depression. In the past five years, three million of Venezuela’s thirty-two million people have fled the country. More than half of all Venezuelans lack enough food to meet their daily needs. The country’s hospital system has all but failed; countless Venezuelans have died owing to a lack of medical attention and the scarcity of medicines for treatable illnesses. Hyperinflation is expected to reach ten million per cent this year. On top of everything else, Venezuela’s murder rate is among the world’s highest, making it one of the most dangerous countries in the world to live in.
Shot between 2013 and 2019, Cegarra’s remarkable series of black and white images takes us beyond these statistics. (This year, the project was nominated for a World Press Photo award.) A native of Caracas, Cegarra depicts life in his home town as precariously strung-out and pared-down, shorn of any softness. We see street preachers shouting, inmates weightlifting, children running in fear, bloodstains on the ground, predatory soldiers with masked faces and black helmets, men brandishing weapons, one of them a youngster standing purposefully with a sawed-off shotgun. There are listless people in supermarkets with empty shelves, funerals and mourners, women and children with fear on their faces.[...]
At his swearing-in ceremony, in February of 1999, Chávez promised to transform Venezuela—and over the next decade and a half he did just that. While a global oil-price boom brought a trillion dollars into his treasury, Chávez declared his country to be the chrysalis of a revolutionary political force that he dubbed “twenty-first-century socialism.” He aligned himself with Cuba and spoke out against the United States. Meanwhile, the oil money was spent as fast as it came in, much of it on social programs to alleviate poverty, but also on expensive Russian weaponry for the armed forces and on subsidies to Cuba and other friendly governments that signed onto Chávez’s vision of a world free of Yankee domination.
Politico: Georgian leader revives French connection
Zourabichvili met President Emmanuel Macron on Tuesday at the Elysée Palace, on her first bilateral foreign trip as head of state. The visit was also something of a return home. Although she was elected president of the land of her ancestors in December, Zourabichvili was born in France and spent three decades working in its foreign service.
While Macron repeatedly stressed the friendship between their two countries, he also stuck to standard French talking points, designed to avoid rocking the boat with Russia. He reiterated France’s continued support for Georgia’s territorial integrity and sovereignty — but did not say explicitly that Moscow occupies 20 percent of the country.[...]
For France, any decision on Georgia is part of a bigger calculation about relations with Russia. And French ministers are not going to risk a confrontation with Moscow over a country of 3.7 million people, even if its president used to be one of their employees.[...]
Paris is willing to move to a harder line with Moscow generally, argued Nicolas Tenzer, a professor at Sciences Po university in Paris, but not on its own. “There is a will to be more firm with Russia but not for a confrontation, because France is still looking for allies," he said. “Trump’s America isn’t it and the Europeans are split.”
Quartz: Test how moral (or immoral) you are with this utilitarian philosophy quiz
A utilitarian approach states that whichever action allows the greatest number of people to live would be the moral one. This perspective holds in the commonly-referenced related scenario, the “fat man” case, which asks whether you would push a fat man off a bridge to stop a trolley in its path and block it from running over five people. (This scenario involves a “fat man” to eliminate the possibility of self-sacrifice—your weight wouldn’t stop the trolley, but his would.) The utilitarian answer is that the moral decision is to sacrifice the heavyweight man, because you’d still be killing one to save five.
By contrast, many deontological moral theories, such as the moral laws proffered by 18th century philosopher Immanuel Kant, argue that killing is never acceptable—it would be immoral to pull the lever to kill one, even if that meant allowing the trolley to continue on its course to kill 100 people. Allowing harm to happen, by failing to stop the trolley continuing on its path, is not actively hurting someone and so would not be considered murder. And so, according to Kant, actively pulling the lever would be the immoral choice. [...]
Earp says the new scale should create a more nuanced psychological understanding of utilitarians. For example, he says, two key concepts within the theory—that welfare should be maximized for all, and that you should be willing to do “instrumental harm” to achieve such welfare—seem to be in psychological tension. Those who tend to be focused on the former seem to be instinctively more reluctant to enact the instrumental harm required by utilitarianism. Conversely, those who are less concerned about the instrumental harm tend to have a reduced sense of welfare for all. “The people who are not so fussed about causing instrumental harm and say, ‘yeah, I’d be willing to tolerate torture if that was necessary to stop a bomb going off’—those people tend to be relatively low on the impartial-beneficence side of the scale,” he says. “In the general population utilitarianism is not an intuitive position.”
Quartz: Psychoterratica is the trauma caused by distance from nature
From 2004 to 2012, Japanese officials spent about $4 million dollars studying the physiological and psychological effects of forest bathing, designating 48 therapy trails based on the results. In one very small (and thus limited) but interesting study, Qing Li, a professor at Nippon Medical School in Tokyo, measured the activity of human natural killer (NK) cells in 12 men’s immune systems before and after exposure to the woods. These cells provide rapid responses to viral-infected cells and tumors, and are associated with immune system health and cancer prevention. In a 2009 study, Li’s subjects showed significant increases in NK cell activity in the week after a forest visit, and positive effects lasted a month following each weekend in the woods.[...]
That said, there are plenty of ways to take your nature medicine. Blue mind science is the study of water’s curative properties, and studies have shown that both a trip to the ocean and a shower at home prove soothing. A visit to the park is also restorative, as is walking barefoot and earthing—which is basically just connecting to the ground.
Even just digging your fingers in the soil of a potted plant can improve your mood and boost your immune system. It turns out that, like trees, dirt has properties that are good for human health. Soil has a microbiome and the more we contact it, the more we let it infiltrate our systems, the better our chances of maintaining physical and mental wellness.
Deutsche Welle: Catholic Cardinal Marx says files on child abusers 'destroyed'
"Sexual abuse of children and young people can be traced back, in no small part, to the abuse of power in the area of administration," Marx said in his address with the pope in attendance.
Vatican officials were "trampling on the rights of victims" by deliberately canceling or overriding procedures for investigating child abuse, according to Marx.
"It was not the perpetrators, but the victims who were regulated and pushed into silence," said Marx, who also serves as the head of the German Bishops' Conference. [...]
On Saturday, Cardinal Marx called for transparency in order for the church to win back "trust," saying that secrecy provoked "conspiracy theories."
He urged the church to redefine its standards of confidentiality and make its judiciary more open, as well as report numbers and details linked with abuse cases.
24 February 2019
The Guardian Longreads: Super-tall, super-skinny, super-expensive: the 'pencil towers' of New York's super-rich
The results range from the sublime to the ridiculous, or even both at once. There is 432 Park Avenue, a surreal square tube of white concrete that appears to shoot twice as high as anything around it, its endless Cartesian grid of windows framing worlds of solid marble bathtubs and climate-controlled wine cellars within. It is the most elegant of the new towers, recalling the minimalist sculptures of Sol LeWitt, although its architect, Raphael Viñoly, says it was inspired by a trash can. He can clearly turn garbage into gold, given the penthouse sold for $95m (£72m). [...]
Standing right across the street, 220 Central Park South aims to be the gentleman of the bunch. A neo-art deco tower clad in silvery Alabama limestone, with set-back terraces and ornamental metalwork, it is the work of Robert AM Stern, expedient purveyor of whatever style his client wants, from Spanish revival to Qing dynasty. “Architecture is a banquet,” Stern tells me, “and most architects are starving to death.” He says that “unlike some of its neighbours now under development”, his design “will belong to the family of buildings that have framed Central Park for generations”. The dapper costume has paid off: some apartments in his tower have gone for more than $10,000 per square foot. The penthouse was recently acquired by a hedge-fund billionaire for $238m, making it the most expensive home ever sold in the US. [...]
The revamped laws also introduced the curious notion of transferable development rights (TDRs), also known as “air rights” – a mechanism that allows landowners to buy the unused air space of their neighbours and add it on to their own lot. It is the ultimate free-market planning clause: if your neighbour is not exploiting their potential to go skywards, you can buy it off them and make your building even taller. It seems fitting that in the cut-throat capital of capitalism, even the air is for sale.[...]
But these negotiations pale in comparison to what has happened over the last decade. The parade of poles that have sprouted along 57th Street (AKA Billionaires’ Row) on the southern edge of Central Park, represent some of the most fiendishly complex and aggressively litigious dealing the city has ever seen. Gary Barnett, founder of Extell Development Corporation, took 15 years to assemble the property and air rights for One 57, one of the first of the new generation of super-tall residential towers, a garish blue-speckled shaft designed by Christian de Portzamparc, completed in 2014. He took another decade negotiating nearly a dozen further acquisitions to put together the 1.2m square feet of development rights he needed to build Central Park Tower. It was probably time well spent: the project will reportedly have a total sales value of $4.4bn, making it the most expensive residential building in New York’s history. “Our strength is assembling land,” says Barnett. “On that, we’re Number One.”
The Guardian Longreads: The class pay gap: why it pays to be privileged – podcast
This idea of a “following wind”, a gust of privilege, gets to the heart of what we call the class ceiling. It neatly captures the propulsive power provided by an advantaged class background – how it acts as an energy-saving device that allows some to get further with less effort – deftly shaping career trajectories, delineating what courses of action are possible, what kind of support is available, and how one’s “merits” are perceived by others. Equally, the metaphor also describes the experience of the upwardly mobile who, very often, have the wind against them. It is not that such individuals cannot move forward, or never reach the top; just that, generally, it takes longer, happens less frequently and often represents a markedly more labour-intensive, even exhausting experience. [...]
Still, it is important that we don’t fixate on this issue of access. Most academics, policymakers, charities and businesses have tended to make this mistake in the past, implicitly suggesting that the baggage of our class origins somehow disappears once we enter the workplace. We wanted to shift the debate – from getting in to getting on. And what we found was striking. In contemporary Britain, it quite literally pays to be privileged. Even when those from working-class backgrounds are successful in entering the country’s elite occupations, they go on to earn, on average, £6,400 less than colleagues whose parents did “middle-class” professional or managerial jobs – a nearly 16% class pay gap. This is exacerbated for women, people with disabilities, and most ethnic minorities. Each face a distinct double disadvantage. Women from working-class backgrounds, for example, earn on average £19,000 a year less in elite occupations than men from privileged backgrounds, and the figure is even higher for non-white women. [...]
Exploring elite workplaces showed us that the class pay gap is less about those from working-class backgrounds getting paid less for doing the same work and more about the kind of workplace segregation implied by Dave’s comment. And he was right. Only 7% of those in commissioning – the most prestigious and high-paying department – were from working-class backgrounds. The figure in HR was 22%. And even more significantly, this segregation was also vertical: only 2.5% of the executive team were from working-class backgrounds. Here, as in most of our case studies, there was a distinct class ceiling. [...]
Of course, the performance and recognition of merit is not just affected by a person’s class background. On the contrary, we find strong quantitative evidence – the first we know of – that upwardly mobile women and members of (certain) minority ethnic groups face a double earnings disadvantage in elite occupations. Our interview data sheds some light on these intersectional inequalities, particularly the way gender and ethnicity can magnify the visibility of class difference, and increase the scrutiny placed on these individuals in their execution of dominant behavioural codes. It is telling, for example, that no female equivalent exists of the heroic tale of the working-class boy made good. Instead, stereotypes of upwardly mobile women tend to be especially stigmatising, emphasising pretentiousness and pushiness.
99 Percent Invisible: Beneath the Ballpark
But a lot of the reason why they were so independent was that they had to be. In the early 1900s, racial covenants limited where people of color could actually purchase property. From the 1910s throughout the 40s, Chavez Ravine was one of the few places in Los Angeles that non-white people could actually own a home. [...]
The city selected Chavez Ravine to be the site for 3,600 new units because the City Housing Authority had determined it was a “slum.” The CHA claimed that it was infested with rats, homes lacked electricity and toilets and argued it was actually in everyone’s best interest that the community be outfit with newer, more modern housing. Most former residents disagree with this characterization. “We had flushing toilets everywhere. We had some lights … and we had a lot of things that would not mark us as slums,” argues Carol Jacques. [...]
At the same time, though, a lot of people were opposed to the deal for reasons that had nothing to do with Chavez Ravine. Not everyone in L.A. was excited about the city subsidizing a private business, even if that business was baseball. The opposition was so intense that the city decided to put the deal up for a referendum. This meant that the contract would be placed on a ballot and the citizens would get the chance to vote on the new stadium. In the end, voters came out in the Dodgers’ favor, but just barely. The Dodger contract passed by a narrow margin of about 52% percent out of almost 700,000 votes. [...]
These images were all over the front pages of newspapers at the time. They dredged up memories not just of the failed housing project years earlier, but of an entire history of racial discrimination that Latino and Chicano Americans had been experiencing in Los Angeles for decades. Mexican American history in the United States is full of stories of conquest and land dispossession, and seeing this scene broadcast on television hit a nerve.
The Art of Manliness: Hiking With Nietzsche
My guest today has spent much of both his personal and professional life tracking down those insights. At the age of 19 and then again at age 37, he traveled to the Swiss town where Nietzsche wrote his famous work, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and learned something different on each trip from the mustachioed philosopher about living a life of meaning and significance. His name is John Kaag, and he’s a professor of philosophy and the author of Hiking With Nietzsche: On Becoming Who You Are.
In this compelling conversation, John discusses what he learned about life hiking the same mountain Nietzsche hiked, including the role that walking itself played in Nietzsche’s approach to thinking. We begin with the biggest misconceptions about the philosopher, including what he really meant when he said “God is dead.” John then walks us through Nietzsche’s idea of the will to power, how this impulse should be balanced with amor fati — the love of fate — in order to achieve Nietzsche’s ideal of becoming who you are, and the different things his philosophy can mean to a young man and to one approaching middle age.
Radical Conversations: Phenomena of Trump and Modi are completely different says Arundhati Roy (Oct 14, 2017)
"Modi is a culmination of 100 years of Hindutva", says Arundhati Roy on May 3rd, 2017 in San Francisco
The New York Review of Books: Syria’s Monumental Loss
In May 2015, the world watched in horror as ISIS rolled into Tadmur, home to Palmyra’s magnificent Greco-Roman ruins. The ensuing destruction was widely denounced but the extremist group’s first act of vandalism in Palmyra drew condemnations only in Syria. Just a mile northeast of the Temple of Bel (founded 32 AD), stood the Tadmur Prison, one of the Baathist regime’s most notorious. Thousands of political prisoners were incarcerated there, suffering torture, humiliation, starvation, and death. In 1980, up to 1,000 detainees had been summarily executed there as retaliation for an attempt on the then-President Hafez al-Assad’s life. When ISIS blew up this prison, it erased a place of historical importance, a monument to a nation’s agony.[...]
The few people who appear in these photographs seem conjured from myth: a woman with a handsome face, fair hair, and intense gaze stands in a stony enclosure in a grimy calico dress, her eyes squinting in the mid-day sun; but what gives the photograph its pique is the depth of her tan and the incongruity of her refined features and rough hands. There is the portrait of a Bedouin with searching eyes and tattooed face. There is an old man in a thobe and keffiyeh casually resting with his bicycle before a magnificent Roman colonnade.
Quartz: Happiness doesn’t change much in long marriages. But something else does (June 27, 2018)
To answer that question, sociologists Paul Amato from Pennsylvania State University and Spencer James of Brigham Young University examined data from 1,617 participants in the Marital Instability over the Life Course survey, a longitudinal study of marriage in the US conducted from 1980 to 2000. All respondents were married at the start of the survey; by the end, about half of them still were, the rest having divorced (19%), become widowed (5%), or dropped out of the study.[...]
To gauge happiness, the researchers asked respondents to rate their satisfaction with things like their spouse’s supportiveness, the affection in the marriage, and their sex life. Much like other researchers, the team found that happiness declines in the first years of marriage, as the flush of newlywed life gives way to day-to-day frustrations and realities. [...]
But what was more striking about the overall collective data of married people was that while happiness really didn’t sway that much over time, the relationships still changed markedly.
Conflict, for instance, declined dramatically and continuously over the course of a life together. After a dip in the first decades when work and family obligations consume a couple’s time, the frequency of shared activities increased. By the fourth decade of marriage, couples reported spending as much time dining, socializing, and having fun together as they did when they were newlyweds.
The Atlantic: The Spotlight Effect: This Church Scandal Was Revealed by Outsiders
But it’s also an acknowledgment of how this conference would never be happening, and the dark secret of clerical sexual abuse and cover-up might never have come to light, if not for outsiders to the hierarchy: journalists, civil authorities, films, women who listened to the victims (or who were victims themselves). They helped reveal a pattern of concealment within the Church and drove a shift in the culture.[...]
To my mind, Archbishop Scicluna is the most powerful Vatican official with a full understanding of the scope of the crisis (although what changes he wants to see and whether he has the power to make them is another question). His words—albeit tailored to an audience of journalists, rather than members of the hierarchy—mark a shift for the Vatican, a way of saying not only that something horrible happened, but that it was outsiders who raised alarm bells. There’s less talk now of how the sexual revolution caused clergy to carry out abuse, or that children had somehow led priests into temptation, as there was back in 2002. Vatican officials no longer call media coverage of abuse cases “calumnious attacks” on the Church, as some did in the 2010 flare-up of the crisis under Francis’s predecessor, Benedict XIV.[...]
Huggins is also part of another group of outsiders to Church hierarchy that has become more and more vocal: women. In November, the organization representing the world’s Catholic women’s religious orders denounced the “culture of silence and secrecy” that contributed to abuse, and urged nuns to report abuse to law enforcement. This month, Francis acknowledged another Church scandal in which nuns had been sexually abused by priests for years, and said the Church was working to address the issue.
23 February 2019
Commune: Syria from Revolution to Civil War
I grew up in Syria. In state-run schools, we were reminded daily that we received free education thanks to the Ba’ath party’s revolution in 1963. We should be grateful, our teachers told us. In the fourth grade, like millions of students across Syria, I memorized songs praising the Ba’ath Party and its leader, Hafez al-Assad: We shine like the morning, we carry the gun / Our blood will water the soil. A loyal Syrian must recite quotes by the party leader, quotes memorized from a 150-page book entitled Nationality. In exams, one could be penalized for misremembering a single word. [...]
I grew up believing that all other ethnic groups might kill us if they had the chance. And then, one day in eighth grade, it seemed that nightmare was coming true. In 2004, the Kurdish uprising in Qamishli happened. Following the requisite flag salute, the principal announced that our school trip was canceled because “there is trouble in the country.” Later, I overheard someone in the yard exclaim, “The Kurds are coming to kill us!” We were told that the Kurds were planning to target Alawite women. The teacher described an Alawite commander who the Kurds had tied to the back of a car and dragged through the streets of Qamishli until his flesh came off. [...]
Many observers and participants, myself included, argued behind closed doors and on social media platforms that the uprisings would have lost momentum had the president replaced the governor of Daraa and held the murdering police officers accountable. But Assad the Younger followed the dictum established by Assad the Older: just kill them all. This approach poured gasoline on the fire, the brutality of the police swelling the ever-larger and ever-angrier protests. Each day, there was a funeral for a protestor killed the day before. The funeral would turn into a protest, and the pallbearers would find themselves inside the casket the next day, surrounded by an even angrier crowd. People would attend funerals without knowing who had been killed—their main aim became the protest itself. [...]
You might be forgiven for thinking that, after all this horror, the entire country would be against the government and sympathetic to those calling for justice, reform, and dignity. But, in fact, the majority of the country did not join the uprising. This silent majority comprised three rough categories: the hardliners, the bourgeoisie, and the undecided. Hardliners knew exactly what was happening and supported it unequivocally. Without Assad, they believed, there was no country. The bourgeoisie, unlike the hardliners, cared only about the security of their own families and businesses. They refused to pick a side. People in this category were the first to flee the country. And the undecided, finally, could not figure out what was happening. However, many members of this group made up their minds rather quickly and joined the hardliners. Their conversion to opponents of the uprising was mainly achieved by the media narrative propagated on state television, as well as by the militarization of the conflict. [...]
This was just one take on who had killed the soldiers. Some suggested that the soldiers were killed by fellow soldiers who refused to watch innocent people massacred. It’s important to note here that weapons are abundant in cities on the border. Every house has a gun. Whatever the true story, this incident opened a new chapter in the uprising, with two important consequences. First, many Syrians saw the names of the dead soldiers as confirmation of the government narrative, which aligned undecided Syrians with the regime. Second, these events created a split within activist circles, as parts of the movement took positions for and against the use of arms.
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