The Guardian: Fear of the far right and the collapse of Podemos gave Spain’s socialists victory

Sánchez’s victory is the result of two main trends. First and foremost is the rise of Vox, a new, openly misogynistic and xenophobic party that toys with nostalgia for Franco’s dictatorship. Backed by the likes of Steve Bannon, Marine Le Pen and Matteo Salvini, and indirectly financed (via the Madrid-based CitizenGo organisation) by a US super PAC with ties to Donald Trump, Russian oligarch Aleksei Komov and the Italian MP Luca Volontè, who is accused of bribery, Vox rode a wave of anti-Catalan sentiment into the government of Andalucía in December. Sunday’s massive turnout (75.8%) was most likely driven by widespread fear of a rightwing coalition government that would include it.

The second trend that explains Sánchez’s staggering victory is the decline of Unidas Podemos, the radical-left party that emerged in the wake of the anti-austerity indignados movement. Though the party initially promised to implement a progressively participatory new style of politics, over time its leadership has adopted a more traditional top-down approach that has been overly reliant on individual personalities. It lacked proper channels for democratic deliberation, so internal dissent most often took the form of high-profile desertions, such as that of former party leader Íñigo Errejón. It was also recently revealed that a group of police officers have been accused of conducting a smear campaign against the party, with help from government officials. Much was made, too, about the purchase of a pricey chalet by party leaders Pablo Iglesias and Irene Montero, which was depicted in the media as a betrayal of the couple’s leftist ideals. [...]

Towards this end, Podemos could take some cues from the leftwing councils currently governing most of Spain’s major cities, including Madrid and Barcelona. Though not without significant shortcomings, these councils have made citizen participation a crucial part of their brand by organising citizen consultations and participatory budgets. On the other hand, a more radical approach to participation would involve opening the party up to more meaningful forms of deliberation and participation. Over recent years, Podemos’s failure to do so has come off as a disavowal of its initial promise. This is most disheartening because it leaves the impression that a new approach to politics simply isn’t possible. And when the new seems impossible, people are tempted to go back to the old ways or, worse, to embrace the destructive, authoritarian political nihilism of the far right.

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Politico: What Putin could lose in Ukraine

Unlike Poroshenko, who embraced Ukrainian nationalism and spoke only in Ukrainian, Zelenskiy is capable of speaking to Russians in their own language, and of reaching them through his Instagram and other social media channels. For Putin, having a Russian-speaking president in democratic Ukraine is like eating a live octopus — exhilarating, yes, but also terrifying. [...]

Putin, it seems, has a different take. The Russian president has not called the Russian-speaking comedian to congratulate him on his victory. There has been near silence from the Kremlin except a terse statement “recognizing” the election, while criticizing Ukraine for not allowing the 3.5 million Ukrainians living in Russia to vote.

Sure, Putin most likely prefers Zelenskiy to Poroshenko, who was more interested in going mano o mano with Putin than the nitty-gritty of governance. The comedian has promised to lift the ban on Russian artists and Russian social networks, and will most likely encourage a cultural thaw between the two countries. Direct flights might even be reinstated at some point. [...]

The real danger for Putin is what happens next. Zelenskiy fired the first salvo on election night by calling out to all post-Soviet states with the cheer: “Look at us – everything is possible.” His landslide victory in a free election has puzzled Russians who are used to elections being decided in advance. It makes them wonder whether Putin could also be so easily swept aside in a free election. The theater of democracy in Ukraine has already been infectious: Some politicians have called for debates in football stadiums for Russian elections.

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UnHerd: Who voted for Vox?

One of the key causes of current disruption, though, was glaringly absent from the highly-staged, high-stakes debates. Vox, a radical Right-wing group founded a mere six years ago, was not eligible to participate because it didn’t have any elected representatives in Madrid. Not any longer. Vox has since claimed 24 seats in Spain’s parliament – the first far-right grouping to win any seats since the death of Franco, in 1975. [...]

Vox offers an affirmation of traditional, unapologetic, masculine Spanishness. “The Left will never succeed in making us feel ashamed for that which only merits pride,” said Abascal at a rally last autumn. This is Spanish politics, cowboy-style: Vox’s campaign video shows its leader crossing a plane as a lone ranger on horseback.

Abascal proudly invokes Spain’s unity and Catholicism while calling for drastic measures against immigrants, particularly of a Muslim background. He defends family values and stands up for men against the oppression of “feminazis”. He champions hunters and bullfighting, opposes gay marriage (which has been legal since 2005), and wants to outlaw abortion, even in cases of rape. [...]

The Catalan crisis is definitely a factor in Vox’s rise in a country that was long considered immune to the anti-immigrant, right-wing populism that has emerged in many other countries. But more important is the feeling that the progressive urban political elites have neglected their needs and disparaged their traditions and culture. This disconnect is something we are seeing throughout Europe. And is felt particularly strongly in rural populations. But the Vox message has also found purchase in wealthier, culturally conservative voters; this could be down to the fact that the party twins its conservative nationalist message with more liberal economic proposals (it seeks, for example, to reduce corporate tax rates, and abolish inheritance tax and estate tax altogether).

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PolyMatter: Is Amazon Too Big?

Politico: Salvini ally tipped to resign over corruption case

The League politician — who serves as a transport undersecretary but is a key economic adviser to the party’s leader, Matteo Salvini, and a close ally of Steve Bannon — is being investigated over whether he accepted a €30,000 bribe from a businessman in return for pushing specific renewable energy policies. [...]

The populist 5Stars have repeatedly called for Siri’s resignation. “When there’s the mafia involved, we can’t wait for the trial before deciding. [Siri] must go,” Luigi Di Maio, the 5Stars leader, said Thursday. According to prosecutors in Rome, Paolo Arata, the man who allegedly bribed Siri, was in business with Vito Nicastri, a Sicilian businessman facing a possible 12-year jail sentence for his alleged ties to the mafia. [...]

Agriculture Minister Gian Marco Centinaio, also from the League, told a radio show that Conte has no powers to remove Siri from office, and said “if he were to issue a decree to oust him against our will, we’d withdraw our confidence in the prime minister.”

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The Guardian: Why we need to pause before claiming cultural appropriation

The artist Kenneth Coutts-Smith wrote one of the first essays on the subject in 1976, entitled Some General Observations on the Concept of Cultural Colonialism. He never actually used the term cultural appropriation, but he was the first to bring together the Marxist idea of “class appropriation” (in which notions of “high culture” are appropriated and defined by the dominant social and economic class) and “cultural colonialism”, which describes the way western cultures take ownership of art forms that originate from racially oppressed or colonised peoples.

This is important to bear in mind. Our modern understanding of cultural appropriation is highly individualised. It’s all about what Halloween costume you wear, or who’s cooking biryani. But the way in which the idea was first used was to describe a relationship of dominance and exploitation between a global ruling class and a globally subjugated one. The idea that cultural appropriation is primarily a form of erasure – a kind of emotional violence in which people are rendered invisible – came along later. And this is the sticky point. Is it right to level the same criticism at an act of cultural borrowing that doesn’t have a clear angle of economic or political exploitation as for one that does?[...]

When you’re a second- or third-generation migrant, your ties to your heritage can feel a little precarious. You’re a foreigner here, you’re a tourist back in your ancestral land, and home is the magpie nest you construct of the bits of culture you’re able to hold close. The appropriation debate peddles a comforting lie that there’s such thing as a stable and authentic connection to culture that can remain intact after the seismic interruptions of colonialism and migration.

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The Atlantic: Betting on Anti-feminism as a Winning Political Strategy

The smaller march that followed, however, was decidedly not courting the feminist vote. In a gravelly voice, a small woman introduced as a dissident of gender ideology—the expression is used by the global far right to designate advances in women’s and LGBTQ rights—declared that it was in fact men who were being discriminated against under the law. The crowd responded with thunderous applause. The sexes were being pitted against each other, and the only way to restore the balance, the speaker said, was by voting against feminist legislation. [...]

In many ways, its rise mirrors advances made by populist and far-right parties across Europe. A decade of slow economic growth, dislocations caused by the global financial crisis, and the vast wave of migration that has hit Europe in recent years have fueled disenchantment with traditional political groupings across the region. Spain had, for a time, been a rare exception to that shift. And in a way, that remains the case: Whereas most of the continent’s populist parties want to either gut the EU or leave it altogether, Vox’s focus is different. While blatant anti-feminist rhetoric is often employed by political parties in eastern Europe, such efforts are markedly less frequent in the west of the continent. That was, of course, until Vox announced its first legislative push in Andalusia—to demand that the region’s gender-violence law be scrapped. [...]

The party also espouses what Sílvia Claveria, a politics professor at Carlos III University in Madrid, described to me as “modern sexism”: It advocates longer maternity leave and encourages women to be proud mothers, but once women want to separate from or divorce their partners, it shifts positions to take the man’s side. According to Manuela Carmena, the mayor of Madrid and a politician known for her efforts to promote women’s rights, Vox has sought to benefit from “the frustration and confusion of many men who feel displaced by the growing role of women in society.” [...]

Such platforms are more often seen in eastern Europe than in western Europe, Ruth Wodak, a linguistics professor at Lancaster University and the University of Vienna who focuses on right-wing populist rhetoric, told me. France’s Marine Le Pen, shy of calling herself a feminist, has come out to defend “women’s rights” (though she did so largely to prop up her anti-immigration policies). The Dutch and Scandinavian far right have “more progressive gender politics,” Wodak says. These are mainly manifested in an apparent embrace of LGBTQ rights, though this too is often at the expense of immigrants: In 2015, Sweden’s far-right party staged an unofficial gay-rights parade in a predominantly Muslim neighborhood. In Italy, Matteo Salvini, the country’s interior minister and leader of the League party, has said that abortion and “equal rights between men and women” were not up for debate.

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Jacobin Magazine: Today, We Celebrate the Carnation Revolution

The MFA’s formation owed not to left-wing ideology but rather to Portugal’s colonial war between 1961 and 1974. The country spent thirteen years fighting against the anticolonial revolutions in Guinea, Mozambique, and Angola, with more than one million troops mobilized, over eight thousand dead on the Portuguese side and one hundred thousand dead on the African side. [...]

Revolution means conflict: and the MFA overthrew the dictatorship with troops and tanks in the streets. But its members were mostly from the petty bourgeoisie, and little politicized, their aims being limited to ending the war. That was their achievement on April 25, 1974, as middle-ranking officers mounted a coup d’état. This however also launched a wider revolutionary process, as the working and popular masses entered the stage. This also altered the balance of forces between the social classes. [...]

But while parallel forms of power emerged during the revolution, they did not develop and coordinate themselves nationally, as a viable alternative to the power of the central state. Indeed, if the state entered an enormous crisis, it did not collapse. This lack of alternative was one of the reasons why on November 25, 1975 the right wing was so easily able to restore “order” at the expense of these forms of dual power. [...]

The banks were nationalized and expropriated with no compensation whatsoever. And the right to free time was absolutely pivotal. Take the case of the demonstration by bakers working long hours, whose slogan was “we want to sleep with our wives.” As a slogan, it is very interesting, because nowadays we take it for granted that at eleven at night there are people selling socks in supermarkets or working on Volkswagen assembly lines. People won not just price freezes so that they could have decent meals, but the right to leisure and culture. They also won the right to housing, indeed by occupying vacant houses that were destined for speculation. Even judges sometimes backed them, as in the city of Setúbal. I’ll remind you that today in Portugal there are seven hundred thousand vacant houses, owned by real-estate funds, which do not pay taxes.

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openDemocracy: The people’s rebellion, or why a showman became president of Ukraine

This, then, is a rebellious popular vote against corrupt politics-as-usual by people who are largely non-political. In this sense, there’s a certain resonance with the Gilets Jaunes movement – and like their French counterparts, Zelensky voters do not have any political unity or ideological coherence. Their basic common denominator is negation. The demands and expectations of Zelensky voters are heterogeneous and even contradictory, ranging from putting an end to the war and oligarchy to increasing wages, lowering prices and household gas tariffs. But in the best traditions of 1968, they are demanding the “impossible” – just social conditions that are equal for all. And 73% means a clear refusal of any kind of negotiations or possible compromise with the current ruling class so that it could remain in power. [...]

While Zelensky voters may vary widely in their claims about what they voted for, they found common ground in what they voted against. First of all, they voted against the war. And this is not a blind denial of the reality of warfare and occupation – this vote was against the war as a political and economic system of relations between the state and the society that has emerged in Ukraine during the recent years. Russian military intervention and occupation has poisoned the atmosphere inside Ukraine, creating the conditions for political reaction in the form of bans on certain social media platforms, attacks on anti-corruption NGOs, the beating and killing of activists, racist pogroms and so on. [...]

Zelensky isn’t a right-winger or even a conservative, but rather a libertarian in a very broad sense, while right-wing populism is exactly what Ukraine has experienced under Poroshenko’s rule at its purest. Throughout most of his presidency, Poroshenko has addressed the Ukrainian public predominantly in a discourse of narrow-minded ethnic nationalism borrowed from Ukraine’s far-right Svoboda party. He ended up campaigning for president with the medieval slogan “Army! Language! Faith!” – in reference to laws protecting the Ukrainan language, military reforms and the creation of an independent Ukrainian Orthodox Church. In recent years, various extreme right and neo-Nazi organisations have been legitimised in the public sphere as “activists” and “freedom fighters”, receiving the informal backing of the security services and law enforcement. They have remained unpunished for their committed hate crimes.

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anarchopac: Homosexuality in Medieval Europe

UnHerd: Why do the Greens make so many see red?

Of course, it’s easy to call anything a religion (or a cult), because the words are so fuzzily defined that almost anything can fall into them. But let’s imagine that they’re right. Imagine there’s some stable psychological role that religion plays, to do with authority and community and morality, and that green activism plays the same role; or that the fear of ecological disaster, or AI apocalypse, triggers the exact same pattern of neurons to fire that fired in the brains of the Branch Davidians or the Heaven’s Gate lot. [...]

You know what? I think there is quite a lot of overlap, psychologically speaking, between some climate activism and some religious belief. There’s even a brand of theology called “ecotheology” which explicitly makes that link. A lot of the behaviours seem similar, about sin and abstinence and guilt as well as the unwavering faith and conviction. I also think that Left-wingers have found it easier to believe in climate issues because it’s easier to square it with stuff they want to do anyway, like higher taxes on industry and greater state intervention, while Right-wingers tend to see it as in opposition with the free market, so they are more likely to reject it. That’s not surprising, that’s bog-standard motivated reasoning. We all do it.

But I am also pretty sure that Greta Thunberg is, largely, right when she says that there really is a looming problem. that the world’s governments and businesses aren’t doing enough to avoid the worst effects, and that we really are going to face up to a need to balance economic growth against ecological loss. And if she’s right, it doesn’t matter if she was told it by a burning bush, we still need to do something about it.

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FiveThirtyEight: Democrats Think Biden Is Electable, But He’s Not Everyone’s First Choice

Beating President Trump in November 2020 is really important to Democrats. Sizable shares of Democrats tell pollsters that a candidate’s “electability” will be a very important factor in their primary vote — even more than the candidate’s policy positions. The problem is that we don’t know for sure what makes a candidate electable. [...]

The table below looks at the difference in each poll between the share of voters who support each candidate and the share who think he or she is the strongest general-election candidate, then averages those differences. It turns out Democrats believe former Vice President Joe Biden is the most electable Democrat — even though fewer voters pick him as their first choice in the primary. [...]

You probably noticed a pattern there. The moderate, straight, white men score best, while the women and the man seeking to become the first openly gay president lose points on electability, as do nonwhite candidates like businessman Andrew Yang and Sen. Cory Booker. Harris ranks particularly low considering her level of voter support, which may reflect the fact that she is both a person of color and a woman. And even Sen. Amy Klobuchar is seen as a relatively weak general-election candidate even though her strong past electoral performances make a good case for her being electable.

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The Guardian: Gary Jones on taking over Daily Express: ‘It was anti-immigrant. I couldn’t sleep’

In his first morning news meeting, the team presented him with a standard-issue set of Daily Express story ideas. He gave an instruction to staff on the spot: “I’m not going to be doing an anti-immigrant story. Ever. Do not put them on the schedule.” [...]

Since then Jones has removed the Express’s frontpage claim to be the ”world’s greatest newspaper”, along with its inaccurate weather forecasts. He has placed an emphasis on exclusive, original, campaigning and investigative stories about care home abuse and the NHS, while turning down coverage of Tommy Robinson and Steve Bannon – claiming that, nowadays, “the BBC gives far more airtime to rightwing propagandists” than his outlet does. [...]

Last month, the Express news team moved to Canary Wharf, where it shares an open-plan newsroom with the Mirror and the Star, with all outlets increasingly sharing content due to financial pressures. Jones, who still uses a vintage pre-smartphone era Nokia 6310, has control over the 314,000 circulation print newspaper. But he does not have day-to-day control of the the Daily Express website, which has different editorial standards, including a dedicated UFO section, and recently ran a story suggesting Angela Merkel was making secret hand signals to the Illuminati.

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Quartz: Over 13% of the homes in Japan are abandoned

Japan’s population is shrinking. Last year it fell by nearly 450,000 people. Not since records began in 1899 had so few babies been born (921,000). Before that, 2017 had also set a record. Meanwhile the number of people passing away last year set a post-war record. The figures are part of a larger pattern in which births have declined and deaths increased steadily for decades.

Less noticed is another alarming figure that’s been growing. According to the latest government statistics, the number of abandoned homes in Japan reached a record high of 8.5 million as of Oct. 1, 2018, up by 260,000 from five years earlier. As a proportion of total housing stock, abandoned homes reached 13.6%.

Some areas have been hit harder than others. Saitama, north of Tokyo, and tropical Okinawa had the lowest proportions of vacant homes. But the rate topped 20% in the Yamanashi and Wakayama prefectures.

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Quartz: Africa’s largest mosque has been completed with thanks to China

The Great Mosque of Algiers, or Djamaa El Djazair, sits on an area of 400,000 square meters and has a 265 meter (870 feet) minaret that houses observation decks. The compound’s domed sanctuary and outside courtyard overlooking the Bay of Algiers can house up to 120,000 worshippers and has an underground parking space with a capacity of 7,000 cars. [...]

With its completion, the mosque will now be the world’s third biggest by area and the largest in Africa. The two largest mosques are The Sacred Mosque of Mecca and the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina: both considered the holiest sites in Islam and accustomed by millions of Muslim worshippers and pilgrims every year. [...]

The choice of building Africa’s largest mosque is an interesting choice for a Muslim-majority nation that has for years struggled with an Islamist insurgency. After the government canceled the 1992 elections where Islamists appeared to win, that triggered a civil insurgency that led to the death of 200,000 people.

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The New Yorker: The Airbnb Invasion of Barcelon

Park Güell’s shift from a shared public space into a cultural zone occupied almost exclusively by tourists is understood by some worried residents of Barcelona as a story about the prospective fate of the city itself. Albert Arias, a geographer with the local government, told me that he had publicly criticized the selling of tickets as “a very bad solution,” adding, “It is acknowledging a problem by fencing off public space.” [...]

Nearly half the Airbnb properties in Barcelona are entire houses or apartments. The conceit of friendly locals renting out spare rooms has been supplanted by a more mercenary model, in which centuries-old apartment buildings are hollowed out with ersatz hotel rooms. Many properties have been bought specifically as short-term-rental investments, managed by agencies that have dozens of such properties. Especially in coveted areas, Airbnb can drive up rents, as longtime residents sell their apartments to people eager to use them as profit engines. In some places, the transformation has been extreme: in the Gothic Quarter, the resident population has declined by forty-five per cent in the past dozen years. [...]

Properties used almost exclusively for Airbnb rentals are offered on the company’s Web site with photographs that might have come from a shelter magazine: carefully staged table settings, closeups of fruit bowls. The same neutral, vaguely Scandinavian design can be seen in listings from Bangor to Bangkok. (The critic Kyle Chayka has aptly characterized this aesthetic as “AirSpace.”) The Barcelona Airbnb I stayed in, in the Eixample, an elegant fin-de-siècle district, was typical: stylishly but minimally equipped, with ikea furnishings and a Nespresso machine in the kitchen. There were no signs of regular habitation, which wasn’t a surprise. According to Inside Airbnb, a watchdog site founded by Murray Cox, a Brooklyn-based housing activist, the Eixample apartment, which goes for about two hundred dollars a night, is available to rent three hundred and forty-three days a year. Its owner has five other properties in the city listed on Airbnb. [...]

By 2017, tourism had risen to the top of a list of Barcelona’s most pressing concerns. According to an annual survey taken by the city, sixty per cent of residents felt that Barcelona had reached or exceeded its capacity to host tourists. Three years earlier, only thirty-five per cent had felt this way. That summer, anti-tourism protesters lined the waterfront, standing knee-deep in the Mediterranean bearing banners reading “this is not a beach resort,” in English, in the face of bikini-clad visitors who were somnolently tanning themselves. Thousands of protesters marched along La Rambla and loudly informed tourists that they were not welcome. Pardo and other activists staged protests against illegal Airbnb apartments by renting them on the site, checking in while using a hidden camera, and then refusing to leave, with the media there as witnesses. They staged an action to expose a landlord who was illegally renting out thirteen apartments in the Ribera neighborhood. After obtaining access to one of the apartments, the activists were about to film themselves reading a manifesto when the manager suddenly came back—and they had to flee. “We forgot to lock the door!” Pardo said, with chagrin. It was the kind of rookie mistake a tourist would make.

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The New Yorker: The Man Who Built the Bauhaus

The Bauhaus aesthetic always drew sophisticated detractors. In 1981, Tom Wolfe, whose own taste in interiors ran to damask and lacquer, published “From Bauhaus to Our House,” a polemical defense of “coziness & color” and an indictment of the “whiteness & lightness & leanness & cleanness & bareness & spareness” of austere modern design. What bothered Wolfe most was the style’s erasure of affect, pleasure, and chance, subtractions that made a house into something resembling “an insecticide refinery.” It had been this way since the early twenties at the Bauhaus—the school, in the city of Weimar, Germany, where the aesthetic originated. From the start, Wolfe writes, Gropius, “the Epicurus” of the place, had insisted on “a clean and pure future.” Wolfe identified with Alma Gropius, the architect’s first wife. When Alma, a voluptuous and refined woman, visited the Bauhaus from her native Vienna, she was especially repelled by its high-minded diet of “a mush of fresh vegetables.” Years later, she remarked that the Bauhaus was best defined not by clean lines and pure materials but by “garlic on the breath.” [...]

Gropius’s personal awakening was abetted by a global one. “On or about December 1910,” Virginia Woolf famously wrote, “human nature changed.” Individual artists were suddenly granted the freedom to design the arc of their own lives. Collectively, this freedom inspired the consistent period aesthetic that we call modernism. In 1911, Gropius returned to his architectural practice and, with a partner, designed an astonishing building: the Fagus orthopedic shoe-last factory, in Lower Saxony, one of the greatest buildings of early modernism. Its shimmering glass curtain wall, a feature that later became essential to Bauhaus design, brought together everything Gropius loved. It made a factory feel as dignified as a cathedral, expressing the near-holiness of modern work. Like the radically inventive poems and paintings of the era, it synthesized new materials and methods in ways that somehow felt classical, as though art had leapfrogged over the nineteenth century, the sentimental world of Gropius’s childhood. [...]

The rational domestic interiors we associate with the Bauhaus—white walls, a few perfect objects, chairs and tables distilled to their essence—make the very idea of personal conflict seem almost gauche. There is no way to reconcile Gropius’s emotional life in the early twenties with the idealized spaces he created. His marriage to Alma dissolved, and her visits to Weimar were fraught, though Gropius loved to spend time with their daughter. In MacCarthy’s book, the storms of his private life tend to be tallied on one side of the ledger, unconnected to the goings on in his professional world. Later in his life, bantering with Frank Lloyd Wright about the importance of collaboration, Gropius was asked by Wright, ever the solo operator, whether he would enlist a neighbor’s help in making a baby. Gropius, channelling both sides of his nature, answered that he might, if his neighbor was a woman. [...]

The evolution of a single design gives a sense of how the Bauhaus grew. For his Model B3 chair—also called the Wassily chair, in honor of Kandinsky, who expressed admiration for its prototype—Breuer took inspiration from the elegant handlebars of a milkman’s bicycle, made of seamless tubular steel, a new material. He created an industrial-age club chair that, reduced to its metal frame, seemed to levitate in space. You could see through it to other, equally beautiful Bauhaus objects in the background. Like all the furniture Breuer designed for the school, it was also a collaboration: the school’s textile workshop contributed the seats, woven from Eisengarn, a strong cotton thread. And, as with many great Bauhaus designs, it is an example of materialized reasoning. It solves the formal problem of creating a substantial piece of furniture that is both there and not there. It is interesting from every angle, and especially beautiful from the back.

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The New York Review of Books: Indonesia’s Fragile Festival of Democracy

Jakarta, Indonesia—Democracy in Indonesia always seems to come at a high price. At least a hundred people died while keeping the polls open on Election Day last week, from causes such as heat-stroke and exhaustion. The Indonesian islands straddle the Equator and most of them are hot, at least eighty degrees, every day of the year. They are home to 264 million people and are the stage for world’s largest single-day election, which is deeply impressive in its logistics. Seven million citizens volunteered to keep the polls running last Wednesday across more than 800,000 polling stations. Ballots were distributed to the periphery via planes, canoes, and elephants. The voting booth volunteers who died have been dubbed locally as “martyrs of democracy.” [...]

Indonesia is the world’s largest Muslim-majority country and about 90 percent of its citizens are Sunni Muslims. It is not a secular state but has defined itself since its postcolonial independence in 1945 as pluralist and multi-faith. It was ruled for three decades, from 1965 to 1998, by the military strongman Suharto, whose dictatorship still casts a long, dark shadow on its contemporary politics. In the post-Suharto era, Indonesian democracy has developed hand in hand with a religious revival, particularly among Muslim groups that were suppressed during the dictatorship.

Although it is not new for politicians to bolster their credibility and standing by parading their Islamic faith and values, religion was unusually foregrounded in this last race. This was because the general elections took place in the wake of a vitriolic local contest in Jakarta in 2017, when Islamist zealots mobilized mass protests to agitate for the trial and prosecution of a popular ethnic-Chinese Christian governor of Jakarta for allegedly blaspheming against Islam—attacks that led to his defeat at the polls. The eruption of a populist, hardline Islam in 2016 and 2017 seemed to catch Jokowi by surprise, and he quickly caved to the demand to put the governor—his own former deputy and close ally—on trial. In an earlier show of conciliation, he even prayed alongside his Islamist critics during their second mass rally in December 2016. (Ma’ruf and the Ulama Council actively supported these rallies, too.) [...]

“I can see why many progressives were disappointed by Jokowi’s pick of Ma’ruf, given his human rights record,” said Ulil Abshar-Abdalla, a scholar of Islam who used to run the Liberal Islam Network. “In my opinion, it has been the most polarizing election ever—like the Jakarta election but national.” On the other hand, he said, it is not inherently negative that religion continues to play a large part in the country’s politics. “Democracy will develop in a different way here than it did in the West,” he said, noting also that many conservative movements, such as Salafism and the Islamist Prosperous Justice Party, have moderated over time as they’ve taken their places under the figurative big tent of Indonesian Islam. [...]

Sri Vira’s conception of family values includes actively campaigning to criminalize homosexuality, which has been painted by its opponents as a foreign imposition. Her politics do not fit into easy categories: she is Islamist but also nationalist, a family-focused activist but not a feminist. She ran for office partly because she didn’t see enough women like her represented; at the same time, she is skeptical of the quota system whereby all political parties must have at least 30 percent female candidates. “According to me, it depends on the women,” she said. “Sometimes it’s hard to find women [candidates] who are credible, they may not have the background or experience.”

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The Atlantic: A Tremor on Mars Confirms a Lasting Suspicion

Scientists know this because they sent a seismometer to our planetary neighbor. The instrument arrived last year, on board a NASA lander called InSight. The seismometer, small and dome-shaped, has sat on the brick-colored surface since, waiting for hints of movement below the surface. On April 6, it caught something, a “quiet but distinct” signal, scientists said. A rumble from the depths. [...]

Scientists have suspected for decades that they’d find this phenomenon if they had the right tools to look. Unlike Earth, Mars lacks tectonic plates that glide over its mantle, jostling the ground when they touch. But like Earth, Mars has three distinct layers—a rocky crust, a mantle, and a metal core—and it’s still cooling from its fiery formation out of a primordial cloud of cosmic dust. Even now, billions of years later, heat radiates from its center and can be strong enough to crack the surface and escape. The fracturing sends seismic waves streaming in all directions. [...]

While scientists are thrilled about the detection, they wish the rumble were stronger. The quake measured about 2.5 on the Richter scale, too weak to draw a path within the depths. If a tremor like that happened on Earth, you wouldn’t feel it. If you were standing next to the InSight lander at the moment of detection, you wouldn’t know either. “We are waiting for the big, big one,” says David Mimoun, a scientist at France’s Higher Institute of Aeronautics and Space and a member of the seismometer team. Researchers expect to detect dozens more, some as powerful as 5.5 magnitude.

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The Atlantic: World War I in Photos: Soldiers and Civilians (APR 27, 2014)

When looking through thousands of images of World War I, some of the more striking photos are not of technological wonders or battle-scarred landscapes, but of the human beings caught up in the chaos. The soldiers were men, young and old, and the opportunity to look into their faces and see the emotion, their humanity, instead of a uniform or nationality, is a gift—a real window into the world a century ago. While soldiers bore the brunt of the war, civilians were involved on a massive scale as well. From the millions of refugees forced from their homes, to the volunteer ambulance drivers, cooks, and nurses, to the civilian support groups used by all major armies, ordinary people found themselves at war. This entry is a glimpse into the lives of these people, in battle, at play, at rest, and at work, during the war. I've gathered photographs of the Great War from dozens of collections, some digitized for the first time, to try to tell the story of the conflict, those caught up in it, and how much it affected the world. This entry is part 6 of a 10-part series on World War I.

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Politico: Putin’s garbage challenge

Massive open-air landfills and the pollution they bring are stirring tensions across Russia, provoking some of the most sustained protests since Putin came to power almost two decades ago. Thousands of people have defied police bans to march against planned landfill openings, blaming the mounting piles of garbage for health problems and foul-smelling air. [...]

Just 4 percent of Russia’s waste products are recycled or reused, according to Greenpeace. (That’s compared to over 50 percent in European countries such as Germany and Switzerland.) Almost all of the country’s remaining refuse — around 70 million tons a year — is simply dumped in huge landfills that are frequently located dangerously close to residential areas. These landfills cover a total area of land that is four times larger than Cyprus. In 10 years, ecologists say, that area will double in size, unless urgent steps are taken. [...]

So far, Putin, whose approval ratings have taken a fall thanks to a wildly unpopular increase in the national pension age and falling living standards, doesn’t appear to be in a rush to change things. When pressed in December on the country’s poor record on recycling and waste reduction, he brushed off concerns, saying that implementing effective policies to minimize the amount of toxic garbage building up in Russian landfills would “require a huge investment and time.” [...]

Similar demonstrations have also been held in Siberia and Russia’s far north. Earlier this month, in Arkhangelsk, a city in northern Russia, up to 5,000 people took part in one of the region’s biggest ever unsanctioned protests to oppose the construction of a landfill intended for garbage from Moscow. Protesters carried signs that read “The North Is Not A Dump!” and marched on the city governor's office. Police detained around 20 people on charges of taking part in an illegal protest.

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Politico: Belgium’s democratic experiment

Nowhere else in the world will everyday citizens be so consistently involved in shaping the future of their community. In times of massive, widespread distrust of party politics, German-speaking Belgians will be empowered to put the issues they care about on the agenda, to discuss potential solutions, and to monitor the follow-up of their recommendations as they pass through parliament and government. Politicians, in turn, will be able to tap independent citizens’ panels to deliberate over thorny political issues. [...]

As manifested by Brexit, the Yellow Jacket protests in France and climate activists across Europe, citizens no longer feel trusted or taken seriously. Ticking a box on a ballot paper every five years no longer feels like enough. And some topics are simply too toxic to be solved by party politics alone — or too complex to put to a Yes or No referendum. The Belgian experiment is an opportunity to take seriously the idea of involving citizens in our institutions before political discontent tears down our democratic processes. [...]

Its Bürgerrat (Citizens’ Council), which will consist of 24 members who each serve 18 months, will set the agenda. Its members will define the questions, but not give the answers. They will instead organize regular Bürgerversammlungen (citizens’ assemblies) made up of at most 50 people who will meet for three weekends over three months. These panels will be allowed to invite experts to help them learn about the topic and draft independent policy proposals. Parliament will be bound to organizing two hearings with the assembly’s participants and then to respond to their recommendations.

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Politico: Macron responds to Yellow Jackets with tax cuts and reform plans

In his speech, which was originally supposed to be held on the day of the fire that devastated Notre Dame cathedral, Macron said he wants to see better public services outside major cities, and suggested reforming how long the French work for, but there was little detail as to how that would be carried out, with the prime minister and government tasked with putting flesh on the bones of his plans. [...]

He also expanded on his previous suggestion of "overhauling" Schengen, suggesting that countries that either refuse to take in refugees or that don't enforce border controls shouldn't be part of the border-free zone.

"On the European level, we decided to have common borders ... it's not working anymore," he said. "Responsibility comes with solidarity, this is the basis upon which Schengen should be overhauled, even if it means having fewer states within Schengen."

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Vox: Denver may become the first US city to decriminalize psychedelic mushrooms

The initiative would not legalize magic mushrooms; they’d remain illegal under state and federal law. And it wouldn’t decriminalize or deprioritize the distribution and sales of psilocybin mushrooms — all of that could still be pursued by police. [...]

Advocates for the measure argue that decriminalization would shift law enforcement resources away from pursuing nonviolent offenses. They claim that psilocybin is safe, nonaddictive or close to nonaddictive, and that a growing body of evidence suggests the drug has therapeutic benefits for illnesses ranging from depression to end-of-life anxiety to addiction. [...]

Still, decriminalization alone may have its benefits. A 2009 report from the libertarian Cato Institute, written by Glenn Greenwald, concluded that decriminalization freed people from the “fear of arrest” when they sought help for their addiction and “freed up resources that could be channeled into treatment and other harm reduction programs.”

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The New York Times: The Surprising Place Mueller Found Resistance to Trump

The strongest pushback against President Trump came instead from a source never contemplated by the founders: his own branch of the government. The F.B.I. and the intelligence agencies opened their investigations of Russian interference in the 2016 election even before Mr. Trump took the oath of office. The president thought that he could quash this inquiry by dismissing James Comey, the F.B.I. director, but as the president’s strategist Steve Bannon reportedly cautioned, “you can’t fire the F.B.I.” Mr. Trump’s appointee as deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein, initiated the special counsel inquiry and appointed Mr. Mueller to lead it, while Attorney General Jeff Sessions — an early Trump backer — refused to “unrecuse” himself from the Russia investigation.

Even more surprising, resistance arose from key White House personnel. In June 2017, when Mr. Trump tried to remove Mr. Mueller, the White House counsel Donald McGahn refused to carry out the directive. The next month, when Trump tried to get Mr. Sessions to limit the special counsel’s jurisdiction, the White House deputy chief of staff, Rick Dearborn, declined to relay the order to the attorney general. Later in July 2017, when Mr. Trump told White House chief of staff Reince Priebus to demand Mr. Sessions’s resignation, Mr. Priebus refused. Mr. McGahn also disobeyed the president’s early 2018 directive to create a false paper trail obscuring an earlier effort by Mr. Trump to have the special counsel fired.

The resistance to the president from within the executive branch is not a new phenomenon. Clashes between the president and cabinet officials date back to George Washington’s conflicts with his first secretary of state, Thomas Jefferson. President Richard Nixon’s national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, routinely disobeyed his boss’s instructions on matters ranging from press contacts to arms control talks. What makes the pushback to President Trump unique is that it has trumpeted its existence in the open.

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openDemocracy: Ukrainians voted for change, but is it enough?

Still, sociologist Iryna Bekeshkina believes that Zelensky voters share a wide range of views. For example, Bekeshkina cited statistics on Zelensky supporters’ attitudes towards NATO membership - 37% support the idea, 33% support a neutral status for Ukraine, and six percent support a military union with Russia. In Bekeshkina’s opinion, Ukrainian citizens didn’t vote so much for Zelensky, but against Poroshenko.

It’s hard to figure out what Zelensky really offered Ukrainian voters, or how he sees internal and foreign politics. Indeed, Zelensky gave practically no interviews to journalists throughout the election campaign. For the most part, he limited himself to short phrases or jokes. In the end, he gave an interview to RBC-Ukraine several days before the election. But questions remained - and for both journalists and voters it was important to find out more about Zelensky. More, at least, than what they knew about him as the actor who plays a president in a popular television series. [...]

After the exit polls were released, Poroshenko conceded with a farewell speech in which he thanked Ukrainian citizens for their votes: “I’m leaving the office of president, but I’m not leaving politics.” Among Poroshenko’s achievements we can pick out the following: visa-free regime with the EU, an independent Ukrainian Orthodox church, a new and effective Ukrainian army, as well as the decentralisation reform. Poroshenko’s presidency coincided with the first years of the Russia-Ukraine war and the annexation of Crimea. And during Poroshenko’s rule, the Ukrainian government has built an international pro-Ukrainian coalition, which is important in terms of supporting sanctions against Russian officials responsible for crimes in Donbas and repressions in Crimea.

But at the same time, recent corruption scandals at defence manufacturer Ukroboronprom and in Ukraine’s energy sector suggested that Poroshenko was all-too loyal when it came to his “team”. The incumbent also drew on the support of regional politicians with “complex” backgrounds. The mayor of Odesa Gennady Trukhanov, who holds Russian citizenship, is connected to corruption schemes in the city, according to the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project. Indeed, recent years have seen a wave of attacks on civil society activists in the southern port city.

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openDemocracy: Why the church’s teachings on same-sex relationships are profoundly flawed

Today, we know for sure that LGBTQI youth who are connected to Christian institutions that do not support their orientation are at a much higher risk of suicide. In addition, they are also at a very high risk of mental health challenges including substance abuse, and social troubles such as homelessness. Why? Because, if you face racism, the one place you might still be safe is your family; but if you are LGBTQI and Christian your family might actually reject you and you might experience religious bullying. [...]

Most Christians claim to know this tradition, but their knowledge is quite superficial. First of all, the Bible does not condemn homosexuality. Yes, this is a technical point, but a very important one. Modern translations of the Bible that use the word ‘homosexual’ are simply wrong. The Bible describes sexual behaviours that are unacceptable, but none of these clearly match or perfectly fit the modern concept ‘homosexual. [...]

The beginnings of the idea of sodomy were deeply influenced by Roman cultural conceptions of what a ‘true man’ should be like. For much of Christian history, the term described various sexual ‘deviances,’ most of which were heterosexual. Medieval theologians were obsessed with the ‘correct’ use of human genitals, and believed that sex without the potential to create children was wrong.

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SciShow Psych: When Everything Feels Like a Dream | Depersonalization-Derealization Disorder

It's not rare to feel like we're dreaming, even right after we wake up, but when it sticks around for longer than it should, it can merit its own diagnosis: depersonalization-derealization disorder (DDD). Hank unpacks what this disorder is and how scientists and doctors are working to understand and treat it.

CityLab: How Historic Ellicott City Plans to Survive the Next Flood

An initial plan proposed by former Howard County Executive Allan Kittleman called for demolishing 10 buildings in the town’s low-lying historic core, but that plan met with resistance from preservationists and community members, and Kittleman, a Republican, was unseated by Democrat Calvin Ball in the 2018 election. Ball halted his predecessor’s plans and promised to search for less-destructive alternatives. [...]

The five options would cost between $63.5 million to $175 million, and take between four and seven years to complete; they’re expected to reduce the floodwater down to between 2 to 3.6 feet on Main Street. The two most costly variations call for boring underground tunnels to divert water away from Main Street—a scheme once deemed too expensive by officials. [...]

Among preservationists, the new proposals are being met with cautious optimism. “It’s always tough to see four buildings come down, and I’ll need to better understand—as the public does—the decision-making process,” said Nicholas Redding, executive director of the nonprofit Preservation Maryland. “Then the [next] part of the conversation is what happens to the buildings? Can they be moved and disassembled? How are they treated, and then, what follows?”

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Social Europe: Reframing the European welfare state

On September 13th 2017, the president of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, proposed ‘a positive agenda’ to help create –‘a Europe that protects, a Europe that empowers, a Europe that defends’. But while two months later the European Pillar of Social Rights set out 20 ‘principles and rights’, Juncker failed to translate this optimistic ethos of a social Europe into concrete measures which could redress the lack of political confidence felt by many citizens. [...]

The advent of individualisation has, indeed, placed the responsibility upon each citizen to manage his or her own risks when he or she proves to be a ‘deserving’ recipient of welfare benefits. This against a wider background of privatisation and contracting, which have reduced the risk assumed by public authorities.

Yet recent studies and policy analyses show that European citizens are in favour of institutionalised solidarity. The formalisation of solidarity is only possible if institutions that represent the values of social justice, dignity and social protection—such as social-security systems—continue to be the main pillars of Social Europe. In May 2018, Eurobarometer revealed that the dimensions of the union on which citizens wanted a stronger commitment were those aiming to combat social vulnerability: health and social security, migration, the promotion of democracy and peace in the world and the fight against unemployment. [...]

The ideal of a Europe welfare state does not disdain national challenges and demands. There isn’t a unique welfare state: the European policy agenda must consider and respect the inner diversity of national regimes. But Europe must learn from past errors—otherwise the voices of resilience and indignity may turn into voices of protest, promoting mere conflict and disruption.

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CityLab: Photographing the Trumpian Urbanism of Atlantic City

Atlantic City got a promising start as a rail-accessible getaway for nearby New Yorkers and Philadelphians in the late 1800s, a resort town rife with architecturally decorative hotels along a bustling boardwalk. It doubled down on its hedonistic appeal in the Prohibition era, turning a blind eye to bootleggers and becoming a hub for illegal drinking and gambling.

The emergence of commercial air travel after World War II, however, sent the region’s vacationers to Florida and the Caribbean instead of AC for their long weekends. By the 1970s, the town that experienced its glory days under the watch of mobster and political boss Nucky Johnson was desperate for a savior. It thought it found one in Trump. [...]

But in Rose’s new book Atlantic City (Circa Press), the photographer sees Trump’s trail of architectural and financial ruin in the troubled resort town as a warning for the rest of the United States now that he leads its executive branch. Rose’s stark photographs show urban scenes devoid of life, overrun by soul-sucking architecture commissioned with bad money, poor taste, and little regard for the people who live in its shadows. The images are accompanied by relevant news blurbs, song lyrics, movie quotes, and Trump tweets that, combined, offer a picture of a deeply troubled city with little to show for the risks it took. [...]

Trump was the biggest player in Atlantic City for years, whether he owned casinos or licensed his name; his presence was dominant. The remarkable thing is that [his companies] went bankrupt several times. None of his properties ever made money in the conventional sense, yet he managed to keep things afloat for years. Where did the money come from? The Trump Taj Mahal, by the way, was fined $10 million by the Treasury Department for money laundering.

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Vox: Mueller report: the controversy about a Sarah Sanders lie, explained

Even at the time, Sanders’s claim about Comey not having the support of the FBI agents was implausible. It was almost immediately contradicted during congressional testimony by Comey’s successor, Andrew McCabe, and as the exchange in the below video indicates, reporters made it clear during a press briefing that they didn’t buy what she was trying to sell them.

When the time came for Sanders to be interviewed under oath by investigators working for the special counsel, her story suddenly changed. She told the special counsel’s team that her comment about FBI agents contacting her to express concerns about Comey was actually a “slip of the tongue” that was not based on anything. So she acknowledged pushing a falsehood to Mueller’s team, but said it was just an accident.

During a string of media appearances last week, Sanders stuck to her “slip of the tongue” talking point. She was grilled about its implausibleness by ABC’s George Stephanopoulos during an interview on Friday, but bizarrely tried to pin blame for her lie on Democrats, saying ,“I’m sorry I wasn’t a robot like the Democratic Party that went out for two-and-a-half years and stated time and time again that there was definitely Russian collusion between the president and his campaign, that they had evidence to show it, and that the president and his team deserved to be in jail.”

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The Guardian: The kings of capitalism are finally worried about the growing gap between rich and poor

This month Dalio, founder of Bridgewater, the world’s biggest hedge fund, an investor in low-wage employers including Walmart and KFC, and a man worth about $18bn according to Forbes, became the latest in a bank of billionaires to go public about his fears of widening income inequality. [...]

So dire has the situation become that Schwarzman called for a Marshall plan – referencing the US initiative that aided the rebuilding of western Europe after the second world war – to help rebuild the middle class. Admittedly he couldn’t quite use the word “inequality” (that might suggest something was unfair), preferring to argue the real problem was that those not in his wealth bracket were suffering from “income insufficiency”. [...]

Now, he worries generations of children are being left behind. “Today, the wealth of the top 1% of the population is more than that of the bottom 90% of the population combined, which is the same sort of wealth gap that existed during the 1935-40 period (a period that brought in an era of great internal and external conflicts for most countries),” he wrote before going on to dissect how this gap hits poor people’s health, education and opportunities.

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99 Percent Invisible: Froebel’s Gifts

In the late 1700s, a young man named Freidrich Froebel was on track to become an architect when a friend convinced him to pursue a path toward education instead. And in changing course, Froebel arguably ended up having more influence on the world of architecture and design than any single architect — all because Friedrich Froebel created kindergarten. If you’ve ever looked at a piece of abstract art or Modernist architecture and thought “my kindergartener could have made that,” well, that may be more true than you realize. [...]

Among other things, Froebel realized he wanted kids to go beyond just drawing lines on pages — he wanted them to learn through the physical manipulation of objects. “Pestalozzi was especially busy with breaking down the two dimensional world,” explains Tamar Zinguer, author of Architecture in Play, “but what Froebel did is break down the three dimensional world.” Specifically, Froebel wanted children to play with educational toys, which was a fairly unusual notion in the early 1800s. Yet it was Froebel’s experiences outside of childhood education that would ultimately lead him to determine the shape and function of these toys. [...]

Froebel’s Gifts were meant to be given in a particular order, growing more complex over time and teaching different lessons about shape, structure and perception along the way. A soft knitted ball could be given to a child just six weeks old, followed by a wooden ball and then a cube, illustrating similarities and differences in shapes and materials. Then kids would get a cylinder (which combines elements of both the ball and the cube) and it would blow their little minds. Some objects were pierced by strings or rods so kids could spin them and see how one shapes morphs into another when set into motion. Later came cubes made up of smaller cubes and other hybrids, showing children how parts relate to a whole through deconstruction and reassembly.

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The Guardian - Politics Weekly: New politics and the far right

With the traditional two-party system in deadlock over Brexit, new political forces are emerging to challenge the status quo.

The first battleground looks likely to be the European elections next month, where the Independent Group and Nigel Farage’s Brexit party will be slugging it out alongside the usual suspects.

How will the newcomers fare?

Joining Rowena Mason to discuss these issues are Ellie Mae O’Hagan from the Guardian, Katy Balls from the Spectator, and Matthew Goodwin, co-author of National Populism: The Revolt Against Liberal Democracy.

Also this week: with David Lammy comparing the European Research Group to the Nazis, we take a look at how politics shifted to the right.

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Aeon: Why mothers of tweens – not babies – are the most depressed

We studied more than 2,200 mostly well-educated mothers with children ranging from infants to adults, and examined multiple aspects of mothers’ personal wellbeing, parenting and perceptions of their children. Our findings show an inverted-V shape in feelings of stress and depression, with mothers of middle-school children (‘tweens’ aged 11 or 12) consistently faring the most poorly, and mothers of infants and adult children doing the best. [...]

Mothers are essentially the ‘first responders’ to children’s distress, and now they must figure out how best to offer comfort and reassurance, as the old ways – hugs, loving words and bedtime stories – no longer work. They also have to walk a very fine line in setting limits. Decisions about what to allow and where to draw the line bring confusion and even fearfulness. We want our children to talk to us about everything and to be supportive, but worry about how to do that without seeming to condone bad or dangerous stuff. Even for confident mothers, it’s a time of second-guessing ourselves, worrying about whether we made the right judgment calls, and feeling guilty about the firm stands that we do take. [...]

A central take-home message from our findings is that the big ‘separation’ from offspring, the one that really hurts, comes not when children leave the nest literally, but when they do this psychologically – in their complex strivings to become grown-ups, in their tweens.

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What's So Great About That?: Kondo-Culture: The Fall of the House of 'Stuff'

The recent decline of objects goes beyond decluttering, so why are we suddenly so keen on getting rid of things? And what role do objects play in our increasingly digital world? This essay follows the rise and fall of 'stuff', through art, philosophy and Marie Kondo.

Financial Times: What's wrong with Great Britain?

The FT's chief economics commentator Martin Wolf says the UK is facing six interlocking crises, from stagnant living standards to a lack of political leadership.

Associated Press: United Methodists edge toward breakup over LGBT policies

The differences have simmered for years, and came to a head in February at a conference in St. Louis where delegates voted 438-384 for a proposal called the Traditional Plan, which strengthens bans on LGBT-inclusive practices. A majority of U.S.-based delegates opposed that plan and favored LGBT-friendly options, but they were outvoted by U.S. conservatives teamed with most of the delegates from Methodist strongholds in Africa and the Philippines. [...]

Some churches have raised rainbow flags in a show of LGBT solidarity. Some pastors have vowed to defy the strict rules and continue to allow gay weddings in Methodist churches. Churches are withholding dues payments to the main office in protest, and the UMC’s receipts were down 20 percent in March, according to financial reports posted online. [...]

The UMC’s largest church — the 22,000-member Church of the Resurrection with four locations in the Kansas City area — is among those applying financial pressure. Its lead pastor, Adam Hamilton, says his church is temporarily withholding half of the $2.5 million that it normally would have paid to the UMC’s head office at this stage of the year. [...]

Traditional Plan supporter Mark Tooley, who heads a conservative Christian think tank, predicts that the UMC will split into three denominations — one for centrists, another oriented toward liberal activists and a third representing the global alliance of U.S. conservatives and their allies overseas.

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Vox: Democrats’ impeachment dilemma, explained

Pursuing articles of impeachment against Trump would be politically explosive. Democrats know the Republican-led Senate under Mitch McConnell won’t take the next step after impeachment — a trial in the Senate — and they doubt the public would support them. In March, just 36 percent of voters polled by CNN supported impeachment. That number dropped to 34 percent after the Mueller report’s release, according to a Morning Consult poll released Monday. [...]

On one side, there’s a handful of Democrats, including Reps. Rashida Tlaib (MI), Ilhan Omar (MN), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (NY), Al Green (TX), and Steve Cohen (TN), who have been vocal about their belief that Trump is unfit for office. Many of them have signed on to articles of impeachment. On the other side, a number of moderate Democrats believe impeachment is a distraction from issues like infrastructure and health care — the very things that got them to a Democratic majority in the first place. And then there’s a bunch of people in the middle who aren’t ruling out impeachment but want more information before they make a decision. [...]

Even Democrats skeptical of impeachment took notice of the 10 specific episodes in which Mueller investigated Trump for obstruction of justice. Part of Mueller’s reason for not charging Trump himself was clearly the Justice Department’s longstanding practice not to indict a sitting president. Instead, Mueller wrote that Congress gets to decide what happens next. [...]

Even though Trump’s 40 percent public approval rating is extremely low, Pelosi and the majority of her caucus only want to move toward impeachment if there’s something so bad that Republicans can also get on board. They remember when Republicans who impeached President Bill Clinton in the 1990s reaped the political consequences in the 1998 midterms, when they lost seats in the House and made few gains in the Senate. Historians later concluded that backlash against Republicans for Clinton’s impeachment resulted in the GOP’s weak showing in the midterms.

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Politico: 6 takeaways from Ukraine’s presidential vote

It’s not a clean break — these kinds of divisions don't tend to be. But previous candidates have successfully exploited this split: Yanukovych owed his surprise victory in the 2006 parliamentary election to a large degree by playing on the resentment felt by those in the Russian-speaking south and east toward western and central Ukrainians. [...]

But this time, the strategy failed: The electoral map shows green representing support for Zelenskiy — a Russian speaker — stretching across regional and linguistic boundaries. [...]

And Ukraine’s ultra-nationalists are typically an anemic presence at the polls. Ruslan Koshulynsky, a joint candidate from far-right parties, won only 2.2 percent in the first round of this election. [...]

It would be wrong to say the idea of aligning Ukraine with Russia couldn't be revived in the future, or that there are no Moscow-friendly politicians. But the pro-Russian camp at the moment remains weak, divided and without a strong leader.

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IFLScience: You Could Soon Turn Yourself Into Compost In The USA

Washington is looking to become the first state in the US to allow “natural organic reduction”, an alternative burial method that can turn a human body into compost in a matter of weeks. [...]

Recompose, a Seattle-based public-benefit corporation, has been working with lawmakers and scientists in the hopes of providing the service, should the bill make its way into law. Their method of natural organic reduction essentially gives the natural process of decomposition a gentle boost. Bodies are put in a temperature-controlled rotating vessel along with some woodchips, straw, and gases. After the process is completed, a cubic yard of soil per person is left, which loved ones can then take home to grow a tree or a plant from if they so wish. [...]

Recompose, a Seattle-based public-benefit corporation, has been working with lawmakers and scientists in the hopes of providing the service, should the bill make its way into law. Their method of natural organic reduction essentially gives the natural process of decomposition a gentle boost. Bodies are put in a temperature-controlled rotating vessel along with some woodchips, straw, and gases. After the process is completed, a cubic yard of soil per person is left, which loved ones can then take home to grow a tree or a plant from if they so wish.

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UnHerd: Crony capitalism is empowering the Left

And yet it might explain a seemingly paradoxical feature of our contemporary politics. This is an era of widening inequality – of real anger towards the rich and powerful. And yet as The Economist notes, there’s been no groundswell in support for redistribution through the tax and benefit system.

It’s telling that the radical parties of the Left talk about more spending through borrowing or by resort to exotic measures such as Modern Monetary Theory. If higher taxation is mentioned at all, it is very clearly targeted at the super-wealthy and corporations. As for spending priorities, the emphasis is on free stuff for everyone – e.g. the abolition of student fees, socialised healthcare, universal basic income etc – as opposed to support targeted at the poor.

As I’ve argued before, you don’t get Scandinavian-style welfare states without Scandinavian levels of taxation on middle-class incomes – but that appears to be an unsaleable proposition in politics these days. [...]

I wonder if trends like the expansion of higher education, competition for affordable housing in expensive cities and the erosion of some mid-level occupations is having the effect of pushing the classes closer together – both physically and in terms of socio-economic status. One might have thought this would encourage solidarity, but it could be having the opposite effect – undermining popular support for focusing government assistance on the poorest people.

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Inverse: Same-Sex Marriage Legalization Actually Changed Americans' Level of Bias

A team of researchers reported Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that the legalization of same-sex marriage on a state-by-state basis decreased anti-gay bias at a rapid rate. This result held true across the 35 states and Washington, D.C., which legalized same-sex marriage in some form before the US Supreme Court ruled that marriage was a fundamental right for all in 2015.

However, a sharp contrast emerged across the 15 states that did not pass same-sex marriage locally before the Supreme Court ruling. In these states, there was a reactive “backlash” effect, in which the federal legalization was associated with increased anti-gay bias — despite the fact that there was decreasing levels of bias in these states before the ruling. [...]

This study incorporated two large surveys designed to measure implicit and explicit anti-gay bias. The first set of data included the responses of 949,664 people who completed Project Implicit surveys between 2005 and 2016. Hehman and his team also examined the American National Election Studies (ANES) dataset, which included 10,870 respondents from 2008, 2012, and 2016. Both of these surveys asked participants the extent to which they felt “warmth” toward gay and lesbian people. [...]

The researchers write that these results indicate that “government legislation can inform attitudes even on religiously and politically entrenched positions.” Previous studies show that people modify their views and actions to align with the perceived norms of their environment. This study shows, in some cases, the government has the power to establish a sense of what’s normal, which in turn becomes what’s accepted.

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SciShow: Can Gargling Salt Water Cure a Sore Throat?

Gargling with warm saltwater for a sore throat is a remedy commonly known and loved by doctors, and there is some evidence to back it up, but it’s not a cure.

The Guardian view on the Mueller report: now we see it. What next?

It details the “sweeping and systematic” Russian interference. It lays out the multiple links between the campaign and those with ties to the Russian state, reminds us that it “expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts”, and was at times receptive to Russian offers of help, even if conspiracy or coordination could not be established. It lists 11 possible instances of obstruction. It states that there was evidence which precluded the investigators from conclusively determining that the president did not commit a crime. Attempts to influence the investigation were mostly unsuccessful “largely because persons surrounding the president declined to carry out orders or accede to his requests”. [...]

The document released on Thursday, however, is not the complete story. It is copiously redacted, often in striking places. There are valid legal reasons to excise material from such a text. But no confidence can be placed in the man overseeing the process, Mr Trump’s hand-picked attorney-general, particularly after his almost comical attempts to misrepresent the document. In William Barr’s world, the president’s refusal to be interviewed amounted to the White House’s “full cooperation”. The entire tenor of his remarks implied that the matter was now done and dusted: “GAME OVER”, as his boss posted on Twitter.

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Associated Press: Church membership in US plummets over past 20 years

The percentage of U.S. adults who belong to a church or other religious institution has plunged by 20 percentage points over the past two decades, hitting a low of 50% last year, according to a new Gallup poll. Among major demographic groups, the biggest drops were recorded among Democrats and Hispanics.

Gallup said church membership was 70% in 1999 — and close to or higher than that figure for most of the 20th century. Since 1999, the figure has fallen steadily, while the percentage of U.S. adults with no religious affiliation has jumped from 8% to 19%. [...]

David Campbell, a University of Notre Dame political science professor who studies religion’s role in U.S. civic life, attributed the partisan divide to “the allergic reaction many Americans have to the mixture of religion and conservative politics.” [...]

Mark Chaves, a professor of sociology, religion and divinity at Duke University, said that as recently as the 1970s, it was difficult to predict someone’s political party by the regularity with which they went to church.

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Vox: The Mueller report’s collusion section is much worse than you think

We learned that, after Trump publicly called on Russia to find Hillary Clinton’s emails, he privately ordered future National Security Adviser Michael Flynn to find them. Flynn reached out to a man named Peter Smith who (apparently falsely) told a number of people that he was in contact with Russian agents. [...]

As the report takes pains to point out, “collusion” has no legal definition and is not a federal crime. So while the report did not establish conspiracy or coordination, it does not make a determination on “collusion” — and in fact, it strongly suggests that there was at least an attempt to collude by Trump’s campaign and agents of the Russian government. [...]

Although Attorney General William Barr said that there was “no collusion” in his press conference before the report’s release, Mueller is actually quite explicit that he did not address the question of “collusion.” This is because, to his mind, the term is not precise enough, nor does it fall within the ambit of what was essentially a criminal investigation. [...]

I want to be clear: I am not disputing Mueller’s conclusions on whether a crime was committed. Criminal conspiracy has a very particular legal definition, and Mueller is persuasive on why none of the activities detailed in the report constituted illegal “coordination” in a way that would run afoul of the statute. [...]

What the report finds is not clear-cut evidence of a quid-pro-quo. Instead, what we see is a series of bungled and abortive attempts to create ties between the two sides, a situation in which the Trump team and Russia worked to reach out to each other (and vice versa) without ever developing a formal arrangement to coordinate.

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The Guardian Today in Focus: Going viral: Fox News, Davos and radical economics

Rutger Bregman became a social media sensation after his onstage tirade at the gathered elite in Davos this year. His call for higher taxes, open borders and a shorter working week captured the imaginations of millions who viewed the speech online. But can his utopian ideas be translated into realistic policy changes? Plus: J Oliver Conroy on David Buckel, a year on from the climate protester’s death in New York

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Ministry Of Ideas: Progressive Souls

Religious people have played an important role in progressive politics in the us for its entire history. Contemporary leftists should look to build bridges and include religious voices in the pursuit of a more just and sustainable society.

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Foreign Affairs: Have Turkey’s Elections Produced a Challenger to Erdogan?

Imamoglu and his rival, former Prime Minister Binali Yildirim, have both declared themselves Istanbul’s mayor-elect. Less than 0.2 percent of the more than eight million votes cast separates them. A recount has entered its second week, and anxiety is mounting within the opposition over whether the AKP will relinquish its quarter-century hold on Istanbul should the final tally confirm Imamoglu’s victory. [...]

Before the election, Imamoglu was a largely unknown district mayor of a far-flung Istanbul suburb. His campaign addressed everyday grievances, such as traffic congestion and job creation. Since the vote, he has shown a tougher side, holding impromptu press conferences to accuse the AKP of “acting like they’ve had their toys taken away,” although he has also tried to project a sense of normalcy to reassure a nervous public. [...]

Despite Erdogan’s theatrics, many voters went ahead and punished the AKP for policies that have unleashed soaring inflation and unemployment. Although Imamoglu refrained from attacking Erdogan, who remains Turkey’s most popular politician, he hammered a ruling elite ensconced in “their palaces” while “Istanbul is in a spiral of hunger, poverty, and unemployment.” Largely ignored by the media, Imamoglu took to Facebook to livestream visits to street markets, where he hugged fans and politely engaged AKP supporters who refused to shake his hand.

Pious voters have long shunned the centrist CHP, repelled by its rigidly secularist ideology and stodgy, elitist image. But nominating Imamoglu, a practicing Muslim who scheduled time on the campaign trail to attend Friday prayers, allowed the CHP, humbled by so many years in the political wilderness, to broaden its appeal. It last ran Ankara and Istanbul in the 1970s, and has been in the opposition in parliament since then as well.

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