The Guardian Politics Weekly: A bad week for Boris Johnson

It appears that Boris Johnson has been taking tips from the Theresa May electioneering handbook, as this week he lurched from one PR disaster to another.

Last Friday police were called to the flat Johnson shares with his partner, Carrie Symonds, and since then Johnson has been on the back foot: dodging reporters, avoiding TV debates, and saying strange things about building toy buses.

Could the wheels be coming off Boris’s cardboard bus?

Rafael Behr is joined to discuss by the Observer’s Michael Savage, Katy Balls from the Spectator and Tom Kibasi from the Institute for Public Policy Research.

Also this week: the next prime minister will be decided by 160,000 Conservative party members. We ask Tim Bale, professor of politics at Queen Mary University of London, who they are and what is known about them.

Labour’s shadow cabinet met on Tuesday to resolve their second referendum conundrum once and for all. But didn’t. What’s stopping them?

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Today in Focus: Has Saudi Arabia got away with the murder of Jamal Khashoggi?

A UN report on the murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi has said there is credible evidence linking the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, to the crime. Nick Hopkins and Stephanie Kirchgaessner discuss the killing and the fallout in Saudi Arabia and among its allies. Plus: Patrick Timmons on the political reaction to the deaths of a father and daughter in the Rio Grande this week.

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The Atlantic: Kamala Harris Knew What She Was Doing

In early polls of the 2020 Democratic presidential field, Biden has held a strong lead among African American voters—an outcome that, to some, might seem surprising when two black senators, Harris and Cory Booker, are also running. While progressives on Twitter were appalled by Biden’s speech, many in the Congressional Black Caucus downplayed the former vice president’s comments or defended him outright. Nor did the dustup hurt Biden at the grassroots level, either. In a recent report from South Carolina, a key primary state where nearly two-thirds of Democratic-primary voters are black, CNN found that support for the former vice president was holding steady. [...]

The long history of discrimination against African Americans, at the polls and elsewhere, has shaped voting behavior in more distinctive ways. Black voters have been highly pragmatic: They have typically favored candidates who are known quantities over fresh faces with shorter records, and in primary campaigns, have deliberated long and hard over who’s most likely to win in the general election. [...]

Exit polls showing that more than 90 percent of black voters now support Democratic candidates in midterm and general elections fuel the myth of a monolithic black vote and conceal the diversity of opinion within the African American community. The partisan skew is easily explained. While 31 percent of African Americans identify as liberal, 42 percent identify as moderates, and 22 percent as conservative, nearly all of these voters have ascertained that the Republican Party is less interested in federal protections of civil rights than the Democratic Party. Indeed, African Americans’ enduring quest for stability and certainty on civil rights helps explain a cautious voting pattern in primary races as well. When a candidate has had a long relationship with black America, the risk of any unpleasant surprises on civil-rights issues is lower. [...]

Political solidarity is not an innate characteristic of black America; it is a survival tactic that adverse experience has reinforced time and time again. Chattel slavery and Jim Crow paid little mind to the specific talents, abilities, and aspirations of each black person. Simply being a member of the race was sufficient to be disenfranchised and oppressed. Black Americans have been made acutely aware that their individual fates are linked to the wellbeing of the whole group. As political scientists have documented, social norms in the community encourage African Americans to look out for one another and ostracize those who don’t. During presidential campaigns, politics is a major topic in what the political scientist Melissa Harris-Perry has described as “everyday talk”— the lively conversations that occur in African American common spaces such as barbershops, salons, churches, neighborhoods, and now, black Twitter. After all this deliberation, African American voters typically end up backing the same candidate—which maximizes their electoral power.

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The Atlantic: Trump Invites Kim Jong Un to Yet Another Summit

All the buildup and made-for-TV drama, however, has distracted from one salient fact: North Korea has not given up its nuclear weapons. In fact, it likely has more nuclear-weapons material now than it did a year ago, when Trump became the first American leader to meet with his North Korean counterpart. What the fevered anticipation does underscore is that progress on North Korean denuclearization rests largely on Trump and Kim’s personal relationship—even though this dependence contributed to the collapse of their second summit, in Vietnam last February.  [...]

As recently as this month, Trump-administration officials such as National Security Adviser John Bolton and Defense Intelligence Agency Director Robert Ashley Jr. have stated that North Korea hasn’t yet decided to give up its nuclear weapons. Last week, Steve Biegun, Trump’s special representative for North Korea, acknowledged that the two sides still haven’t agreed on a common definition of the “complete denuclearization of the Korean peninsula,” which Kim committed to work toward during the first summit, in Singapore. “We’ll never get to our destination if we don’t know where we’re going,” Biegun said during a conference at the Atlantic Council. “The progress has not been as much as we would have liked.” [...]

So far, however, this problematic history appears to be repeating itself. After the humiliation in Vietnam, the North Koreans shifted into “silence mode” and a “severe [internal policy] review,” one senior South Korean official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive negotiations, told me in April. North Korean officials and state media denounced Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo for sabotaging the nuclear talks with their hard-line positions, implying that they considered Trump (and perhaps Biegun, who has thus far escaped Pyongyang’s wrath) as their only viable American interlocutors. Biegun reportedly received no answer to a letter he wrote to Choe Son Hui—a savvy North Korean diplomat with extensive experience dealing with Americans—requesting a resumption of working-level talks. Rumors have swirled about Kim purging members of his negotiating team, and it’s not even clear at this point who Biegun’s counterparts are.

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Quartz: Tourists love 'live like a local' travel. Do locals?

The way we travel has changed. 

Forget travel agents and hotel concierges — the modern traveler uses smartphones with GPS, Airbnb and Instagram to plan an off-the-beaten-path trip. 

And sure enough, it’s not hard to find business owners and locals who have benefitted economically from the boom. But the economic benefits of “live like a local” travel only tells part of the story. In Lisbon, the tourism boom has had ripple effects everywhere from the housing market to getting into the local lunch spot.

ABC News: Iran may stand down on nuclear threat after Europe, China work to bypass US sanctions

It's a sign of the Trump administration's isolation on the world stage when it comes to the Iran nuclear deal, as it tries to cripple Iran financially and drive it to the negotiating table for a "more comprehensive deal" -- something Iran has said won't happen. [...]

Under the JCPOA, Iran agreed to limitations on and inspections of its nuclear program in exchange for lifting most sanctions on the country. But after President Donald Trump withdrew the U.S. from the accord in May 2018, the U.S. has reimposed sanctions, including on Iran's oil exports, and tried to enforce them vigorously. That's scared away European businesses from Iran and caused the country's economy to contract dramatically. [...]

The European Union announced Friday that INSTEX, its mechanism for financial transactions that will bypass U.S. sanctions, is finally operational, and two or three transactions are already being executed, according to Araghchi. Several European countries have already announced that they will join, and perhaps even more important to its success, China also expressed interest Friday.

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The New York Review of Books: America’s Indefensible Defense Budget

A parable, to begin: in 2016, the 136 military bands maintained by the Department of Defense, employing more than 6,500 full-time professional musicians at an annual cost of about $500 million, caught the attention of budget-cutters worried about surging federal deficits. Immediately memos flew and lobbyists descended. The Government Accountability Office, laying the groundwork for another study or three, opined, “The military services have not developed objectives and measures to assess how their bands are addressing the bands’ missions, such as inspiring patriotism.” Supporters of the 369th Infantry Regiment band noted that it had introduced jazz to Europe during World War I. How could such a history be left behind? A blues band connected effectively with Russian soldiers in Bosnia in 1996, another proponent argued, proving that bands are, “if anything, an incredibly cost-effective supplement” to the Pentagon’s then $4.5 billion public affairs budget. [...]

The sheer size of the military establishment and the habit of equating spending on it with patriotism make both sound management and serious oversight of defense expenditures rare. As a democracy, we are on an unusual and risky path. For several decades, we have maintained an extraordinarily high level of defense spending with the support of both political parties and virtually all of the public. The annual debate about the next year’s military spending, underway now on Capitol Hill, no longer probes where real cuts might be made (as opposed to cuts in previously planned growth) but only asks how big the increase should be. [...]

If the United States faced acute threats, allocating 60 percent of the government’s unrestricted funds to defense might be necessary. We do not, but we still spend more on defense than the next eight largest spenders combined—China, Saudi Arabia, India, France, Russia, Britain, Germany, and Japan—and four of those countries are treaty allies. The disproportion has held for decades. [...]

For many years, the United States has increasingly relied on military strength to achieve its foreign policy aims. In doing so, it has paid too little heed to the issues that military power cannot solve, to the need for diplomatic capabilities at least as strong as military ones and, in particular, to the necessity of multilateral problem-solving—as slow and frustrating as it often is—to address current threats. Sadly, it took a rash and unbelievably unwise decision by the president to throw away the Iran nuclear deal for members of Congress and the public to begin to appreciate what tough, patient diplomacy can achieve.

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Jacobin Magazine: The Two Faces of Kamala Harris

Over her time as DA and, later, as California attorney general, she took a number of progressive stances. She opposed the anti-gay Proposition 8, helped defend Obamacare in court, supported an undocumented immigrant’s bid for a law license, sponsored legislation that increased transparency around websites’ data collection, opposed California’s despicable “shoot the gays” ballot initiative, and filed a brief in the Supreme Court encouraging it to allow public universities to consider race in admissions. Under her direction, the state’s justice department adopted body cameras, California police were made to undergo implicit racial bias training, and her office received an award for accelerating the testing of rape kits.

Harris also had a respectable record of standing up to corporate malfeasance. She filed a friend-of-the-court brief signed by thirty-one other state attorneys general in 2011 in a Supreme Court case looking to end the practice of drug companies paying competitors to keep generic versions of their drugs off the market. In 2012, she set up a privacy enforcement protection unit in the attorney general’s office, which at one point fined a company for surreptitiously installing spyware on its customers’ computers. [...]

The limits of Harris’s approach are likewise evident in her actions on police shootings. She did back a bill that required reports on officer-involved shootings to be posted publicly online and mandated bias training and that justice department agents wear body cameras. But as district attorney, she refused to hand over the names of police officers whose testimonies had led to convictions despite the officers’ arrest records and histories of misconduct. As attorney general, she also opposed instituting police body cameras statewide and stood against a bill requiring her office to investigate fatal police shootings. [...]

Harris has shown the capacity to be moved leftwards when pressured by activism. This is no small thing. But you can’t pressure Harris — or any other politician, for that matter — without having an understanding of her record beyond the fuzzy PR that Democratic loyalists are currently trying to substitute for actual political discussion. Perhaps Harris will end up the 2020 nominee. Then it’s all the more important we understand her inadequacies.

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The Atlantic: The Architects Redefining Aesthetics

Many architects dismiss these additions, Downey said, because they don’t think they’re visually appealing, or because it doesn’t occur to them to take the extra steps for accessibility. Downey himself didn’t start pushing past the visual level of design until his sudden blindness introduced him to a broader range of sensory experiences. “With sight, I designed to sight and didn’t go beyond that,” he said. “I didn’t really think sufficiently beyond that to engage all the senses, which is really the relevancy of architecture: that whole human experience of the body in space.”

Now, Downey argues that the multisensory experience he discovered after losing his eyesight should become the new norm for design. “I want to propose to you today that the blind be taken as the prototypical city dwellers when imagining new and wonderful cities, and not the people who are thought about after the mold has already been cast,” Downey said in a 2013 TED talk. “It’s too late then.” Centering the blind, he said at the time, would lead to “predictable and generous” sidewalks, spaces that balance the needs of people and cars, and “robust, accessible, well-connected” mass-transit systems. “It would actually be a more inclusive, more equitable, and more just city for all,” he said. [...]

That idea of beginning with human experience rather than beauty, Bauman contended, has applications beyond the deaf and blind communities. It’s a design philosophy that can be applied to tackling problems of sustainability as climate change worsens, and of an aging population, and of increasing urbanization. And it can be used to improve spaces for able-bodied people, too, by newly emphasizing their comfort and the ways they want to make use of space. By focusing on real people, architects hope to create buildings that aren’t just accommodating to all on a basic level, but truly universal.

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openDemocracy: Is the UN taking a position in today’s ‘culture wars’?

Couples with children under 18 years old comprise only 33% of households worldwide. Almost as common, in developing countries, are extended families with multiple generations living together. There is also a growing number of what the report calls ‘emerging’ families, including same-sex partners, sibling-based households, and ‘blended families’ with married or cohabiting partners with children from previous unions. [...]

That event was notable not so much because ‘usual suspects’ (the Holy See, Egypt, Qatar, Belarus, Russia, Bangladesh) defended the patriarchal family, but because the US did. Even during the conservative Reagan and Bush administrations, US delegates avoided sharing a platform with states that have such overtly authoritarian and religious agendas. [...]

Speakers described this (and only this) kind of family unit as supportive of patriotism, teamwork, love, acceptance, social cohesion, and better economic outcomes – without noting that it requires women’s acquiescence to subordination and dependency to function. Any non-binary interpretation of gender, deviation from heterosexuality, or assertion of women’s autonomy, is profoundly disruptive to this project. [...]

Meanwhile, women tend to be left on their own without care as they age (twice as many women as men live alone after the age of 80, the report finds), and are more likely to lack adequate income support in old age thanks to maternity-related interruptions in capacities to earn and save.

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EURACTIV: The far-right’s influence in Europe is much greater than its new EU Parliamentary group suggests

The first was the major EU enlargement of 2004, when 10 countries joined, swiftly followed three years later by Romania and Bulgaria. The effect on the richer, western countries of the EU was enormous: within a few years, millions had moved westwards from the former eastern bloc.

Then came the financial crash of 2008, which stagnated wages and ushered in austerity measures, which hurt already disadvantaged communities. Within a few years, the migrant crisis had begun, culminating in the mass movement of hundreds of thousands of people to Europe, predominantly from African and Asian countries. [...]

Immigration poses a challenge for both center-left and center-right parties, but it is a particular challenge for liberals, for whom openness to migration is part of their political DNA. But given the real economic realities of many center-left voting areas, the political parties have adapted, seeking to adopt versions of far-right positions on immigration and so neutralize it as a topic. Rather than stealing the clothes of the far-right, they merely steal the colors. [...]

The rise of a new far-right grouping within the EU’s parliament only tells part of the story, because their influence doesn’t lie merely in the ballot box. Until centrist parties can find answers to the very real dislocations and dispossessions of millions of Europeans, far-right parties will keep making the political weather – and keep forcing parties across the political spectrum to adapt to save themselves from the storm.

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EURACTIV: Right- and left-wing violence cannot be equated, says expert

The Federal Office’s report shows that the community of Reich citizens and so-called ‘self-administrators’ is growing. How come, what kind of people are they?

This is by no means a new phenomenon, these people have long been known among researchers. Yet, the size of the group is growing and Reichsbürger is a collective term for everything. It is also easy to enter the right-wing extremist scene.[...]

Moreover, in recent years we have observed an increase in physical attacks on Jews where perpetrators are of Arab descent. The attacks are not, therefore, carried out with a classical right-wing extremist motivation, but because of hostility towards Israel.[...]

No. The extremist groups from the left are very divided in terms of ideologies and programmes. These are not rooted in tradition as is the case with right-wing extremism, which leans towards nationalist thinking. [...]

On the right, the vast majority of offences are racially motivated, often directed against migrants. On the left, we see mostly confrontational violence directed towards the right-wing scene and police officers. It is often about eliminating the basic democratic order of the state. For example, by attacking right-wing politicians or attacking the police at demonstrations.

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The Atlantic: Bernie Sanders’s Ideas Dominated the Second Debate

Several of the candidates seemed to define themselves against Sanders, reflexively comparing and contrasting their agenda with his. It was a reminder of just how popular the senator from Vermont’s ideas have become since his first campaign, in 2016: His policies have dominated discussion for much of the past three years, helping pry open the Democrats’ Overton window, inch by inch.

That’s especially true when it comes to health care. When asked about the pragmatism of progressives’ proposals, Senator Michael Bennet of Colorado said, “I agree with Bernie” on his goal of universal health care. But “where I disagree is on his solution of Medicare for All.” South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, for his part, criticized what he sees as an impractical shift to a Medicare for All system. “Every person in politics who allows that phrase to escape their lips has a responsibility to explain how you are supposed to get from here to there,” Buttigieg said. [...]

The candidates, again and again, were playing the game on Sanders’s turf. He didn’t receive the Democratic Party’s nomination in 2016, and he might not secure it in 2020. But when the issues he’s long championed are being debated before 15 million Americans, in some ways he’s already won.

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The New Yorker: Martin Duberman on What the Gay-Rights Movement Has Lost

Duberman begins by reviewing the agenda of an early post-Stonewall gay-rights organization called the Gay Liberation Front. He doesn’t claim that the G.L.F. ever represented a majority of gay people in America—revolutionaries, whatever they might say, rarely speak for the masses—but he believes that the G.L.F. offered a vision of what was possible. “They did something few of us ever attempt,” Duberman writes. “They named what a better society might look like, thus establishing a standard by which to measure the alternating currents of progress and defeat.” In this vision, a better society would be brought about through the common efforts of a range of oppressed groups. The G.L.F. was “overtly anti-religious, anti-nuclear family, anti-capitalist, and antiwar,” he writes, as well as anti-racist and anti-patriarchal. In a G.L.F. utopia, gender would be an outmoded concept, kinship would be a function of community and friendship, sex and love would be parsed out, and love would be truly loving. [...]

Duberman acknowledges that the movement wasn’t exactly hijacked: the marriage issue, he writes, “landed on the top because that’s where the majority of gay Americans want it to be.” But he warns against the idea that marriage is an express train to equality, safety, and security. He is highly skeptical of statistics that show a tectonic shift in public attitudes toward homosexuality. He sees evidence that the change is shallow and uncertain, and he notes that hundreds of anti-gay bills have been filed in state and local legislatures since the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage. He notes, inevitably, but no less ominously, that German anti-Semitism “was to no extent changed or diminished” when German Jews blended in.

By hitching the future of the movement to the vehicle of marriage, Duberman suggests, gay people paid a price that may be too high. “What has been most innovative about the erotic patterns that have evolved over time in the gay community may partly be abandoned or wholly concealed, or we will otherwise run the serious risk of being rebranded as unredeemable renegades incapable of changing our ‘bizarre’ behavior,” he writes. On top of that, by adopting a narrow agenda that is also socially centrist or even conservative, the movement has forfeited its ties to other oppressed groups. [...]

To argue effectively for marriage rights, gay lobbyists had to continuously assert two positions: that gays are not sexual outlaws and that homosexuality is immutable. Duberman details the costs of these arguments. By abandoning a radical sex-liberationist agenda in a country that is waging a war on sex, he writes, the gay community has abandoned some of its most vulnerable members, including teen-agers whose sex with one another is criminalized in many states.

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Politico: John Roberts Just Called Out the Trump Administration for Lying

But Thursday’s decision also has broader implications for the Supreme Court’s entire relationship to the Trump administration. One of the administration’s distinctive characteristics is its approach to truth and lying. All administrations sometimes hide, shade or slant the truth—and occasionally lie outright. The present administration is different in that it lies regularly, blatantly, heedlessly. In the census case, the Supreme Court, for the first time, called the administration on this behavior—ever so politely and by the slimmest of margins. But still. Now the question is whether it will have the stomach to do so in other cases—or even in this case, if it comes back to the court in the near future. [...]

One problem with that argument, though, is that the Supreme Court has previously held that where there is a strong indication of bad-faith government action, a court can look deeper. And today, a majority composed of Chief Justice Roberts and the four more liberal justices called shenanigans. Quoting the legendary judge Henry Friendly, for whom Roberts once clerked, the chief justice wrote that the Supreme Court is “not required to exhibit a naivete from which ordinary citizens are free.” In other words, if everyone can see that the administration is lying, the court isn’t required to pretend that it alone is blind. [...]

Why did the chief justice come out the other way this time? There are multiple possible explanations. Maybe it matters that one case was (at least ostensibly) about national security and the other was not. Maybe it matters that in the census case the person whom the chief justice had to call a liar (circumspectly—words like “lie” do not appear in the opinion) was a Cabinet secretary rather than the president himself. Maybe the evidence of deceit was more damning in the census case—though it was pretty clear in the entry-ban case, too. Maybe the lower court’s surpassingly thorough documentation of the problems with the administration’s position made the chief justice think he couldn’t pretend not to know without looking foolish. Whatever the case, this time Roberts refused to play the see-no-evil role.

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Curbed: The rise and fall of Laguna Beach, a gay California hotspot

What I didn’t know was that, a decade later, the city that was once known as “San Francisco South” and “the Provincetown of the West” would be no more. From the late 1990s to the 2010s, through a combination of AIDS-related deaths, ’80s-era conservatism, and skyrocketing home prices, the rainbow-hued city lost its gay shine. Today only the Main Street Bar and Cabaret, a festive but small underground bar, remains from among those original venues. [...]

It is, by all appearances, an idyllic California town, the type of place people from elsewhere conjure up when they think “Southern California.” The town also has long been overwhelmingly white—84.2 percent caucasian, according to Statistical Atlas. Diversity and acceptance outside of artistic communities, while hard fought, has never been in Laguna Beach’s DNA. [...]

During the height of its popularity among the LGBTQ crowd, the city elected one of the country’s first openly gay elected officials, Bob Gentry, a former associate dean of students at University of California at Irvine, who served as mayor and councilman from 1982 to 1996. [...]

When the new millennium approached, Laguna Beach’s latest identity began to crystallize in the form of well-to-do, lovelorn teens, as seen in Laguna Beach, an MTV reality series that put the city’s privileged youth front and center. Neither the town’s gay community nor the wide swath of death caused by AIDS two decades prior was ever mentioned. But the message was clear: youthful, healthy, rich, heterosexual, unapologetically white. LC, Lo, Talen. That was the new Laguna Beach.

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Vox: Why Colombia has taken in 1 million Venezuelans (Nov 27, 2018)

Colombia is currently dealing with a massive wave of refugees coming from Venezuela. Venezuelans are fleeing their home because of a severe economic crisis under President Nicolas Maduro. There are high inflation rates and there isn’t enough food available for people within Venezuela to even eat. Thousands of Venezuelans cross the Simon Bolivar bridge located at Cúcuta every day and Colombia doesn’t seem to be turning anyone way.

This borders episode looks at why Colombia doesn’t turn away these refugees, the shared history of the two nations and how there may be a limit to Colombia’s acceptance of incoming Venezuelans.

The Huffington Post: Trump Blew Up The Iran Nuclear Deal. Now He Wants Allies To Help Him Get An Iran Nuclear Deal.

Trump prepares to meet Thursday and Friday with leaders of the world’s largest industrial economies at the G-20 summit in Japan with the idea, according to the White House, of gaining their cooperation in lowering tensions with Iran. “This is a chance for the president to engage with a number of different international leaders, among our closest partners and allies, to obtain their support and to have discussions about how we can encourage Iran to enter into negotiations,” a senior administration official said this week on condition of anonymity. [...]

“He’s taken his usual tactic, which is aggravate everyone in advance, up the ante, be obnoxious, with the hope of then acting like the non-abusive parent in the face-to-face meeting,” said Wendy Sherman, the former State Department official who led the U.S. negotiating team for the Iran agreement that Trump scrapped. “What that gets him is not really clear at this point.” [...]

rump also turned his attacks against Vietnam for its tariffs — “Vietnam takes advantage of us even worse than China” — and Japan, also for purportedly taking advantage of the United States through its defense treaty: “If Japan is attacked, we will fight World War III. We will go in and we will protect them and we will fight with our lives and with our treasure. We will fight at all costs, right? But if we’re attacked, Japan doesn’t have to help us at all. They can watch it on a Sony television.” [...]

Adding to the difficulties, she said, is Trump’s tendency to swing from position to position, often undercutting his own administration’s work. Trump went from threatening “fire and fury” on North Korea to praising its dictator within weeks. He threatened to shut the border with Mexico, then reversed. He threatened tariffs on Mexico, then reversed on that, too.

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Slate: John Roberts Rejects the Census Citizenship Question Because Trump Officials Lied About It

The record shows that the Secretary began taking steps to reinstate a citizenship question about a week into his tenure, but it contains no hint that he was considering VRA enforcement in connection with that project. The Secretary’s Director of Policy did not know why the Secretary wished to reinstate the question, but saw it as his task to “find the best rationale.” The Director initially attempted to elicit requests for citizenship data from the Department of Homeland Security and DOJ’s Executive Office for Immigration Review, neither of which is responsible for enforcing the VRA. After those attempts failed, he asked Commerce staff to look into whether the Secretary could reinstate the question without receiving a request from another agency. The possibility that DOJ’s Civil Rights Division might be willing to request citizenship data for VRA enforcement purposes was proposed by Commerce staff along the way and eventually pursued. [...]

Theoretically, then, Ross can still find a way to insert the question into the census. But two factors work against him. First, the Trump administration has repeatedly told the courts that it must begin printing the census forms on June 30. It presented this deadline as essentially non-negotiable, apparently hoping to pressure SCOTUS into quickly upholding the question. That tactic may have now backfired, because the administration must print the forms in three days or else reveal it was lying about its timeline. (Census officials have said that the printing could be delayed until October, though that still may not leave the government enough time.) [...]

Thursday’s decision is complex and, at times, confusing. The liberal justices wrote separately to declare that the citizenship question should be blocked altogether as illegally “arbitrary and capricious.” The conservative justices wrote separately to assert that the court should afford more deference to the Commerce Department—an argument that reaches the heights of hypocrisy, especially in light of their recent assault on judicial deference to agencies. So neither bloc got exactly what it wanted. But make no mistake: Roberts’ compromise gives the liberals a qualified victory, one that should keep the citizenship question off the 2020 census. Ross’ own incompetence appears to have doomed his discriminatory scheme.

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Vox: 4 winners and 2 losers from the two nights of Democratic debates

Before the debate, there were basically three tiers of candidates in the polls. You had the top three in double digits (Biden, trailed by Biden and Warren), two runners-up around 6 percent (Harris and Buttigieg), and then a whole mess of candidates near the bottom. By the end of both nights, there were only two candidates who seemed like they may have performed well enough to move up a tier: former HUD Secretary Julián Castro and Sen. Kamala Harris. [...]

From that standpoint, he couldn’t have hoped for a better night than the one he had on Wednesday. Castro’s bold idea on immigration — to decriminalize illegal entry — was taken up by other candidates on stage, and then was endorsed by the vast majority of candidates on Thursday. He used his mastery of the issue to pounce on fellow Texan Beto O’Rourke, making O’Rourke look like an empty suit while elevating his own profile (O’Rourke had a really, really bad night in general, but Castro was the single biggest reason). [...]

Sanders’s 2016 presidential run appears to have played a major galvanizing role here, opening up space for a genuinely left-wing shift among Democratic leaders that produced a crop of progressive 2018 stars like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. In July 2018, YouGov asked self-identified Democrats whether they wanted candidates for the midterm elections to be “more or less like Bernie Sanders.” Fifty-seven percent said they wanted more Sanders-esque candidates; a scant 16 percent said less. [...]

Social justice, identity politics, wokeness — whatever terminology you want to call the modern left-wing approach to issues relating to historically disadvantaged social groups, it dominated the stage on both nights.

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Vox: Kamala Harris was the Democrat you could imagine taking on Trump

But it was in the middle of the debate that Harris changed the campaign. After Biden was confronted with a question about deportations in the Obama administration, Harris went where the other candidates had not. “This was one of the very few issues with which I disagreed with the administration,” she said, explaining that “as attorney general and the chief law officer of the state of California, I issued a directive to the sheriffs that they did not have to comply with detainers and instead should make decisions based on the best interest of public of the basis of their community. I was tracking it and saw that parents, people who had not committed a crime even by definition were being deported.” [...]

“I do not believe you are a racist,” she said. “But” — you knew there was a but — “it was hurtful to hear you talk about the reputations of two United States senators who built their reputations and career on the segregation of race in this country. And it was not only that, but you also worked with them to oppose busing. And, you know, there was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools, and she was bused to school every day. And that little girl was me.” [...]

Buttigieg is a natural debater, and he offered about as good an answer on the South Bend shooting as was plausible, but it’s always hard to run for president from a place of apology. His bigger problem, to my ear, was the absence of an overarching theory connecting his answers. His responses are strong on their own terms, and I particularly appreciate his insistence that he’d prioritize restoring American democracy in his first year, but he’s offering individual answers rather than a clear message, and that’s tough in a field this big.

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Today in Focus: What oil companies knew: the great climate cover-up

Before 1988, climate change was a subject confined to the realm of academic journals. That all changed when the scientist James Hansen told Congress that global heating was caused by the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere as a result of the burning of fossil fuels.

That moment caught the imagination of the journalist Bill McKibben, who has written and campaigned on climate breakdown ever since. And it has been reported that fossil fuel companies, such as ExxonMobil, were making links between the burning of oil and rising sea levels as early as the 1970s. But instead of making their findings public, the industry colluded to cast doubt over the science.

Also today: John Stewart on his campaign to prevent a third runway at Heathrow airport as plans are released for the first time. They show detailed proposals to lower the M25, reroute rivers, replace utilities and build parking areas for nearly 50,000 cars.

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The Guardian: The new left economics: how a network of thinkers is transforming capitalism

There is a dawning recognition that a new kind of economy is needed: fairer, more inclusive, less exploitative, less destructive of society and the planet. “We’re in a time when people are much more open to radical economic ideas,” says Michael Jacobs, a former prime ministerial adviser to Gordon Brown. “The voters have revolted against neoliberalism. The international economic institutions – the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund – are recognising its downsides.” Meanwhile, the 2008 financial crisis and the previously unthinkable government interventions that halted it have discredited two central neoliberal orthodoxies: that capitalism cannot fail, and that governments cannot step in to change how the economy works. [...]

The new leftwing economics wants to see the redistribution of economic power, so that it is held by everyone – just as political power is held by everyone in a healthy democracy. This redistribution of power could involve employees taking ownership of part of every company; or local politicians reshaping their city’s economy to favour local, ethical businesses over large corporations; or national politicians making co-operatives a capitalist norm. [...]

And yet, outside McDonnell’s circle and the transatlantic radical left, the new economics has gone largely unnoticed – or been casually derided. The black holes of Brexit and the Tory leadership contest are partly responsible, sucking attention away from everything else. But so is the radical nature of the new economics itself. Transforming or ending capitalism as we know it – the new economists differ as to which is the goal – is a difficult idea for most British politicians and journalists to take on board. After half a century accepting the economic status quo, they associate any leftwing alternatives to it either with out-of-date postwar social democracy – aka “the 70s” – or with leftwing authoritarianism, with present-day Venezuela or the Soviet Union. [...]

Contrary to his usual portrayal as a statist ogre, McDonnell believes there are limits to how far the left can increase taxes and government spending. In his view, many voters are unwilling, or simply unable, to pay much more tax – especially when living standards are squeezed, as now. He also believes that central government has lost authority: it is seen as simultaneously too weak, short of money thanks to austerity; and too strong – too intrusive and domineering towards citizens. Instead of relying on the state to create a better society, one of McDonnell’s close allies argues, leftwing governments, at both the municipal and national level, “have to get into changing how capitalism works”. [...]

Yet the problem for the left with settling for “a different capitalism”, however temporarily, is that it may simply enable capitalism to regroup, and then resume its Darwinian progress. Arguably this is exactly what happened in Britain during the last century. After the politically explosive economic slump of the 1930s – the precursor to today’s crisis of capitalism – during the postwar years many business leaders seemed to accept the need for a more egalitarian economy, and developed close relationships with Labour politicians. But once the economy and society had been stabilised, and rightwingers such as Thatcher started making a seductive case for a return to raw capitalism, the businessmen switched sides.

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The Atlantic: Republicans Don't Understand Democrats—And Democrats Don't Understand Republicans

Americans often lament the rise of “extreme partisanship,” but this is a poor description of political reality: Far from increasing, Americans’ attachment to their political parties has considerably weakened over the past years. Liberals no longer strongly identify with the Democratic Party and conservatives no longer strongly identify with the Republican Party.

What is corroding American politics is, specifically, negative partisanship: Although most liberals feel conflicted about the Democratic Party, they really hate the Republican Party. And even though most conservatives feel conflicted about the Republican Party, they really hate the Democratic Party.[...]

Unfortunately, the Perception Gap study suggests that neither the media nor the universities are likely to remedy Americans’ inability to hear each other: It found that the best educated and most politically interested Americans are more likely to vilify their political adversaries than their less educated, less tuned-in peers.

Americans who rarely or never follow the news are surprisingly good at estimating the views of people with whom they disagree. On average, they misjudge the preferences of political adversaries by less than ten percent. Those who follow the news most of the time, by contrast, are terrible at understanding their adversaries. On average, they believe that the share of their political adversaries who endorse extreme views is about 30 percent higher than it is in reality.

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Philosophy Tube: Are Rules Made to Be Broken?

Are the laws of the land made to be broken? How does philosophy, and activists like Rosa Parks, tell us what good and bad laws are?

Aeon: Why millions of children are left to raise themselves in the Chinese countryside

While industrialisation has prompted unprecedented economic growth and allowed for the rise of a new middle class in China, urbanisation has also left some 9 million children in the countryside alone or in the care of relatives as their parents work in cities far from home. Down from the Mountains chronicles the lives of three children, the oldest of whom is 14, who when not in school live often unattended on a farm in Liangshan, an autonomous region for the Yi ethnic group. With their parents working in the distant city of Huizhou, where they make headphones for $15 per day, only their grandmother, who lives a 40-minute walk away, is able to supervise them and help with farm work on occasion. The UK-born director Max Duncan’s short film brings us into the lives of this fractured family as Jiajia, the mother, considers a permanent return home.

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Los Angeles Times: How will Turkey’s authoritarian president react to opposition’s big win in Istanbul mayoral race?

Ekrem Imamoglu of the Republican People’s Party, or CHP, won 54% of the vote, soundly beating the AKP’s Binali Yildrim, who took 45%. It was a far wider margin of victory than Imamoglu achieved in the original March 31 vote.

Turnout was very high — 85% — in part reflecting public unhappiness over the recount that was ordered on technical grounds by the country’s highest electoral body, widely suspected of acting at the president’s behest.

Erdogan offered congratulations to Imamoglu, and Yildrim conceded graciously even before the votes had all been tallied. But in a sign some read as ominous, Monday-morning headlines in pro-government newspapers made no reference to the opposition victory, instead merely noting that the vote had taken place. [...]

The central government could take steps to sap Imamoglu’s administrative powers, or even invent a reason to charge him personally with a criminal offense of some kind, a fate that has befallen many of the president’s foes. [...]

Criticism of the president, once rare, burst into the open. Mustafa Yeneroglu, an AKP parliament member from Istanbul, tweeted: “We lost Istanbul because we lost moral superiority.”

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The Guardian: Erdoğan’s loss in Istanbul could transform Turkish politics

First the established opposition parties will be emboldened by his win. The opposition is now in control of cities accounting for almost 70% of Turkey’s GDP. Nine out of the 10 biggest urban areas in the country will be ruled for the next five years by a mayor linked to the opposition, the exception being the industrial province of Bursa. The opposition will have the opportunity to dismantle and then restructure the patronage networks that have helped the AKP to establish itself so successfully at the helm of Turkish politics. [...]

More importantly, Sunday’s result is likely to lead to a rethink by the AKP leadership. The shock must be momentous. It is surely the most severe interruption in Erdoğan’s electoral winning electoral streak. The future of Turkish politics will depend on how this result will be interpreted by Erdoğan himself and the lessons that this experienced and able politician will draw from this reversal of his political fortunes.

At stake may be the future of the AKP’s alliance with the Nationalist Movement party (MHP). One conclusion could be that this coalition has become too constraining for Erdoğan. For instance, the overhyped nationalism influencing the conduct of Turkish foreign policy is a byproduct of this political arrangement and so is the hardline approach to the Kurdish question both domestically and in Syria. Even more importantly, the political leadership may be compelled to question the benefit of the extreme centralisation of power ushered in by the transition to a presidential system a year ago. For a majority of the Turkish population, the presidential system does not seem to be functioning as advertised.

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The Guardian: Anti-immigrant militia member charged with impersonating US border patrol

In recent years, there have been growing reports of paramilitary groups and xenophobic activists surveilling the US border with Mexico, working to intercept undocumented people trying to cross into the United States. The groups in New Mexico have previously presented themselves as “volunteers” aiding border patrol and and supporting Donald Trump.[...]

Several livestream videos posted by Benvie to Facebook in April documented some of the actions of the Guardian Patriots in New Mexico. One video appeared to show the militia ordering around a large group of migrants, including many children, and telling them to sit on the ground. As he filmed the migrants kneeling in the dirt, Benvie narrated: “There’s no border patrol here. This is us.”[...]

Stephanie Corte, an immigrant rights campaign strategist with the ACLU in New Mexico, told the Guardian on Monday that the video evidence was clear and she was glad officials finally responded: “I feel relieved for any of the migrants who might be coming through right now … These vigilante groups are very, very dangerous. They don’t care for the constitutional rights and basic human rights of migrants.” [...]

The ACLU in New Mexico described the group as “an armed fascist militia organization” made up of “vigilantes”, saying they were working to “kidnap and detain people seeking asylum” and had directly made illegal arrests and held migrants at gunpoint.

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Esquire: The Insanity in Oregon Is a Glimpse of Our Very Dark Future

Now this is not an unusual tactic. Not long ago, Democratic lawmakers in Texas and in Wisconsin blew town for the same purpose—to throw sand in the gears of a legislative act of which they did not approve and could not stop by conventional means. In Wisconsin, it was to slow down an anti-union measure. In Texas, it was about a redistricting map that gerrymandered the Texas legislature into a farce. The legislative lamsters all had a good time, taking goofy videos in what appeared to be Holiday Inn lobbies while Republicans back home fumed. (The Texans, it should be noted, won a temporary victory.) What makes Oregon different is what the fugitive Republican senators did.

The Republican senators—with the full support of the Oregon Republican Party—made common cause with armed domestic terror groups. (Calling them a militia is a misnomer, regardless of what they may think of themselves.) When a Republican state senator named Brian Boquist heard that Brown was sending the Oregon state police after them, he told a local television station: Send bachelors and come heavily armed. I’m not going to be a political prisoner in the state of Oregon. It’s just that simple. [...]

People with guns have involved themselves in a legislative dispute while the officials of one of the political parties was rooting them on, and one session of a state legislature was cancelled because of it. Roll that around in your head for a while and see where you end up. Something is building in our politics and now I wish I hadn't watched that series about Chernobyl. We may be exceeding the tolerances of all our systems.

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Today in Focus: What has changed since the Stonewall rebellion?

On the evening of 27 June 1969, gay men and their trans and lesbian peers gathered as usual at a bar called the Stonewall Inn. What followed would change the course of LGBT rights in the US and the wider world. A police raid on the bar in the early hours of the following day descended into violence as supporters came out on to the streets and stayed there defiantly.

The Guardian’s Ed Pilkington has tracked down some of those who took part in the rebellion and joins Anushka Asthana to discuss what happened and the growing recognition of LGBT rights in the decades that followed.

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openDemocracy: Don't throw the word 'fascism' around with abandon

But today the word is being used expansively in ways that very inaccurately and unhelpfully conflate everything from neo-Nazis and white supremacists to people who voted leave in the 2016 referendum. When being interviewed about President Donald Trump’s recent visit to the U.K., Rupa Huq MP referenced the Leave vote in warning of us being on a slippery slope towards fascism.[...]

George Orwell in the early 1940’s said “the word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’”. How true. The discourse around Brexit has become so polarised, so toxic, that the word is being thrown around with abandon by senior politicians as a means of shutting down debate and extolling one’s own virtuosity.

This is dangerous. We know from the ensuing research that the most significant issue driving the 2016 referendum result was concern over immigration. Inevitably, this has come to frame much of why people voted to leave the EU. In the simplified world of social media Brexit = Racism. And yet, this has been a missed opportunity to have a proper discussion about immigration which has largely been ignored by political parties of all persuasions over the last three years. These are issues that we should feel a lot more comfortable talking about. If we do not retain them within mainstream discourse, then we surrender them to the extremes. [...]

To add insult to injury, to be a member of the forgotten tribe is also to be branded a “fascist” when the debate becomes uncomfortable. And there has been a definite shift on social media from the use of the phrase “I’m not racist but...” to “If that makes me racist, then I’m a racist”. Just look at the sense of threat in response to recently reported incidents of an army veteran and Brexit Party supporter having a milkshake thrown over him, a male being called “Nazi Scum” and again having a milkshake thrown over him at a Trump rally, and an elderly male Trump supporter being pushed over at a demonstration. What this tells people is that you’re either with us or against us. And if you’re against us then you’re fair game. We should all be concerned by the escalating levels of violence. Britain feels like a febrile environment at the moment, like a tinder-box of rage that will only take a nudge for us to see wide scale public disorder implications.

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The Atlantic: Celebrating My (Gay) Divorce

At the same time, the politics of our wedding weren’t lost on me. I didn’t want to be “gay married”; I wanted us to be “married” like any other couple, thank you very much. I wanted us to be recognized like the other married couples in our families and our town. I wanted us to be counted in the next census among all the couples who have chosen to say “I do.” [...]

I still remember our officiant’s words that day in California, especially because the language of love—which dares to shout its name—was part of what made our union feel so special. (Marriage equality had come to the Golden State by then, but two more years would pass before the Supreme Court would make it the law of the land, in Obergefell v. Hodges.) Fred noted how marriage “makes us equal—in the eyes of social institutions, friends, and family—to every other loving, committed couple.” I loved when Fred, referencing his husband, Gerard, told the wedding party, “Marriage can become a source of pride in seemingly small but poignant ways. For example, whenever I introduce Gerard or check the ‘Married’ box on various forms, I think, Yes, this is who we are … You can like it or not.” [...]

But the people around us didn’t use the established language of separation and divorce to describe what we were going through, instead talking around the issue. Friends expressed their sorrow over “our split” or the fact that we’d “broken up.” I was surprised that I found such language disrespectful, and I wrote in my journal at the time: “This isn’t a break-up. It’s a separation. A legal thing. There’s a weight and history to what’s happening.” I wanted the recognition afforded by the law to all divorcés, and respect—as measured by language—from our friends and family. (I also didn’t want to be known as the “gay divorcé,” as some of my friends began calling me.) Four years earlier I had identified with newlyweds; now that I was a divorcé, I wanted equivalent recognition of my status. [...]

It may be ugly, but divorce—just as much as marriage—is part of the rights and responsibilities that come with marriage equality. I found it easy to be proud of our freedom to marry, but the freedom to divorce took some getting used to. Along with the deep sadness about the end of my marriage, I finally came to feel pride in knowing that the hard path of divorce is one that millions of couples—no qualifier necessary—have walked before.

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The Atlantic: What If the Chaos Is Strategic?

Of the many challenges facing anyone trying to understand Donald Trump’s presidency is the fact that it is maddeningly nonlinear, lurching several times each day between policy objectives that may be dictated by a Fox News anchor, a friend from Mar-a-Lago, or the prime minister of Norway. This was especially true in the first six months of his administration, when the chief political strategist Steve Bannon was at the height of his influence, while Reince Priebus wielded the chief of staff’s potentially awesome authority with all the gravitas of a substitute teacher.[...]

The question of intentionality is impossible for anyone but Trump to answer, and he would surely answer it by claiming that he has had a plan all along. That would be a typically Trumpian boast. That aside, however, it is undeniable that the exhausting storms that mark political life in Washington obscure the ruthlessly effective work happening across the federal government.[...]

The diversionary maneuver has been so effective because Trump remains an object of intense public fascination. If nothing else, Trump is an effective distraction from Trumpism, which is to say a kind of raw modern Republicanism that has shed the last vestiges of its eastern-establishment roots. The more Trump acts like Trump, the more it seems to the rest of us that his administration is about to collapse into a heap of faux-golden shards, the more the Trump administration actually gets done.[...]

In Trump’s first several months in office, Republicans used the CRA more than a dozen times. They repealed a rule that prevented internet companies from selling individuals’ data without their explicit consent. They undid the Stream Protection Rule, which was intended to keep surface mines from polluting waterways with the potential toxic products of their activities. They killed a mandate that employers report workplace injuries. And they made it easier to hunt bears in Alaska. Now you can shoot them from helicopters again.

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Politico: Extreme right-wing violence on the rise in Germany

Figures from the annual report on the protection of Germany's democratic constitution, put together by the intelligence services to monitor anti-constitutional activities, suggest there were 24,100 right-wing extremists in the country in 2018, up slightly from 24,000 in 2017.

Of those designated by the report as right-wing extremists, around 12,700 people are classified as "violence-oriented." The report is due to be presented this coming Thursday.

Right-wing extremism also fuels anti-semitic violence, the report's authors conclude, highlighting an "increase in sedition with anti-Semitic motives."

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EURACTIV: Only eight EU countries plan to phase out coal by 2030

Denmark, Spain, the Netherlands, Portugal and Finland aim to do so by 2030, the Spanish commissioner told a press conference in Brussels. [...]

An EU official told AFP the remaining 20 countries, including heavily coal-dependent Poland, had not submitted timelines for weaning themselves off the fossil fuel. [...]

“Germany, which currently accounts for around one third of the EU’s coal capacity, is discussing exiting coal between 2035 and 2038,” the policy analyst said. [...]

Under the 2015 Paris treaty, the EU pledged to reduce its carbon emissions by 40% below 1990 levels by 2030.

During its review on Tuesday, the commission said the bloc is on track to meet that goal but was falling short on its target for renewable energy use and energy savings. [...]

22 countries, including Germany, now endorse the 2050 carbon neutrality target, according to the latest count.

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EURACTIV: EU Commission documents reveal fund that pays coal lobby staff

A little-known EU fund managed by the European Commission invests around €40 million each year into coal and steel research.

Around 150 projects are currently receiving financial support under the EU-funded programme, according to documents obtained by green activists at the European Environmental Bureau (EBB), and shared with EURACTIV. [...]

The project is carried out by Euracoal, the EU-wide lobby organisation for the coal industry. “This means that the EU Commission uses this fund to finance employees of the coal lobby,” said Anton Lazarus, who requested the documents for the EBB. [...]

For Christian Schaible, policy manager at the EEB, the coal fund is about something else: “If you read the proposal, it is clear that this project is just a vehicle to spend EU money on promoting coal”. Clean coal, as promoted by the RFCS, does not exist, Schaible claims.

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IFLScience: Astronomers Looked For Alien Civilization In Our Closest 1,300 Stars. Here's What They Found

“We scoured thousands of hours of observations of nearby stars, across billions of frequency channels. We found no evidence of artificial signals from beyond Earth, but this doesn't mean there isn't intelligent life out there: we may just not have looked in the right place yet, or peered deep enough to detect faint signals,” Dr Danny C Price, a radio astronomer who leads the Breakthrough Listen project, said in a statement. [...]

Founded in 2015, the Breakthrough Listen project was funded by Yuri Milner, Russia's answer to Peter Thiel, who founded the colossal Russian internet company "Mail.ru Group" and an investor in Facebook, Twitter, Airbnb, Whatsapp, and numerous other big names in tech. Stayed tuned because there's plenty more on its way.

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IFLScience: 23 Facts You Learned About Healthy Eating As A Kid That Are No Longer True

This is because people who skimp on fat (something our bodies need to function properly) are more likely to fill up on sugar and refined carbohydrates instead, and that can lead to measurable weight gain over time. Studies of people around the globe show this to be true time and again. [...]

"People who are more health-conscious overall tend to eat breakfast because they are following health guidelines," Lowery pointed out, "whereas people who skip breakfast are usually unhealthier overall because they are ignoring guidelines" [...]

Intermittent fasting can help people ward off diseases like diabetes, high cholesterol, and obesity. The practice can also boost the production of a protein that strengthens connections in the brain and can serve as an antidepressant. Scientists even think fasting can lengthen our lifespans by keeping cells healthy and youthful longer. [...]

A long-term study of over 131,300 people in the US found that the more animal protein people ate, the more likely they were to die of a heart attack, suggesting that it may be best to favor plant proteins like those from nuts and beans, rather than relying on meat.

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Big Think: Here's how to prove that you are a simulation and nothing is real

In fact, if we don't believe we are simulations, concludes Bostrom, then "we are not entitled to believe that we will have descendants who will run lots of such simulations of their forebears." If you accept one premise (that you'll have powerful super-computing descendants), you have to accept the other (you are simulation). [...]

Simulating the whole universe, including all the details "down to the quantum level" requires more computing oomph, to the point that it may be "unfeasible," thinks Bostrom. But that may not really be necessary as all the future humans or post-humans would need to do is to simulate the human experience of the universe. They'd just need to make sure the simulated minds don't pick up on anything that doesn't look consistent or "irregularities". You wouldn't have to recreate things the human mind wouldn't ordinarily notice, like things happening at the microscopic level. [...]

A fascinating outcome of all this speculation is that we have no way of knowing what the true reality of existence really is. Our minds are likely accessing just a small fraction of the "totality of physical existence." What we think we are may be run on virtual machines that are run on other virtual machines - it's like a nesting doll of simulations, making it nearly impossible for us to see beyond to the true nature of things. Even the posthumans simulating us could be themselves simulated. As such, there could be many levels of reality, concludes Bostrom. The future us might likely never know if they are at the "fundamental" or "basement" level. [...]

What are other implications of these lines of reasoning? Ok, let's assume we are living in a simulation – now what? Bostrom doesn't think our behavior should be affected much, even with such heavy knowledge, especially as we don't know the true motivations of future humans behind creating the simulated minds. They might have entirely different value systems.

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Slate: The Price of Equality

Yeah, I love that [Duggan quote]. I am responding to that line of thinking, absolutely. But I would add that I’m also approaching this as a sociologist, and there’s this whole body of sociological research that shows how marriage is a “greedy institution.” Once people get married, because contemporary marriage requires focus and you’re supposed to just be totally focused on your partner, it sucks all your time and energy away from your broader community. Research on heterosexual marriage shows that married people, they volunteer less. They spend less time with friends. They talk to their neighbors less. So as a sociologist, I’m just curious if we are going to see marriage being quite so greedy for queer folk as well or not. [...]

I think there are a few. One of the things that I found most interesting was the extent to which a kind of social etiquette seemed to make these once very critical people, or even people who still felt very critical of marriage as an institution, feel like they couldn’t express that as freely anymore. Because suddenly you’re getting wedding invitations in the mail. And it’s not this abstract debate that you’re having. Your good friends that you’ve known for years are getting married. And it might be seen as insulting to decline. Or, even more than to decline, to challenge them. Do you say, wait a minute, what about all those debates we used to have? I think there was this kind of self-policing going on. People realized that it just wasn’t seen as appropriate anymore to critique marriage as an institution because they were worried that if they did, it would come across as a personal attack. [...]

Sure. It wasn’t just that the people were keeping [their criticisms] in or felt like they couldn’t express them anymore. Over time, reluctantly or not, they acknowledged to me that their views had softened. People would tell me, well suddenly we were going to these weddings and you know, I couldn’t believe how overcome with emotion I was. I couldn’t believe how happy I felt for these people getting married. And so, the emotional power of marriage was really striking. You could have these intellectual critiques of marriage as an institution, but then all of a sudden it was happening and people got very, very swept up in the emotion of it. Like, people saying: How could you not be moved by watching an elderly couple on the news that had been together for 50 years suddenly being able to tie the knot? It was always sort of unhuman not to be moved by them. [...]

I suppose what I would say about the legacy is that there’s a loss. There’s a price to social inclusion. I heard this from my respondents in all kinds of ways. I have another piece that I wrote, which is about the loss of organized community. There is this sense the more included you are, the less need people felt for any kind of organized LGBT community. And so [after marriage] all these once vibrant groups and organizations started shutting their doors. So that’s one thing.

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CityLab: Berlin Will Freeze Rents for Five Years

The Berlin senate on Tuesday voted in favor of what could be the most radical rental laws anywhere in Europe. The decision, which awaits final ratification by the same assembly members in October, is the most drastic step yet in a city that has already gone further than most in its attempts to keep rents affordable. [...]

Once fully ratified in October, the law would be retroactive to June 18. Rent increases on Berlin homes would be banned for five years, with the exception of already subsidized public housing and newly constructed apartments. In practice, this means rental rates will remain in place on 1.5 million of the city’s 1.9 million homes.

To enforce the rule, tenants who sign new contracts could have them checked by the city to verify that rents have not been raised illegally. Meanwhile, existing tenants who pay a rate that the city deems too high could apply to have their rent lowered. (It hasn’t been decided yet what rates are considered too high.) [...]

This is already fairly strict, but its effect is to steadily pace rent increases, rather than halt them altogether. This has thus far prevented rents from galloping up year by year, which could cause real social chaos in a city where 85 percent of homes are rented. [...]

In a city where even relatively wealthy, well-connected people rent, this has led to a growing popular movement for greater collective control of the housing market. Berlin is already being swept by a campaign to renationalize former public housing blocks and ban mega landlords, one that may well be the subject of a city-wide referendum in 2020. Meanwhile the state has become more heavily involved in new housing provisions, though here it is currently falling behind its ambitious targets.

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TLDR News: Tactical Voting in the Leadership Election

Throughout the Conservative leadership contest theirs been speculation that candidates have encouraged their supporters to vote tactically. With the final two candidates selected we look back over the process and examine if there really been tactical voting going on.

Smithsonian: Scientists Identify Exotic Birds Depicted in Peru’s Mysterious Nazca Lines Read

But a new study published in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports introduces a complicating factor to these theories: As a trio of Japanese researchers—Masaki Eda of the Hokkaido University Museum, Takeshi Yamasaki of Yamashina Institute for Ornithology, and Masato Sakai of Yamagata University—writes in the paper, an ornithological analysis of the Nazca Lines’ avian glyphs reveals that many of the birds in question were previously misidentified. [...]

Ultimately, the researchers reclassified three of the 16 glyphs studied. According to Live Science’s Stephanie Pappas, an etching once identified as a hummingbird actually portrays a hermit, a subgroup of hummingbird known to live in the forested regions of northern and eastern Peru rather than the southern desert where the lines are situated. Per Ars Technica’s Kiona N. Smith, the hermit was recognized on the basis of its three pointed toes; long, thin beak; and elongated tail feathers. Comparatively, most hummingbirds have forked or fan-shaped tails. [...]

Smith writes that the researchers were unable to identify all 16 of the birds, as some had morphological traits anathema to both their previous classifications (for example, condors and flamingoes) and that of any living species native to Peru. It’s possible, therefore, that some of the drawings represent extinct lineages or are simply inaccurate.[...]

Moving forward, the researchers plan on comparing the glyphs to birds “drawn on pottery, modeled as vessels, and used in religious activities.” By identifying additional members of the avian group, or perhaps gaining a clearer understanding of why the featured species were so important to the Nazca, the team hopes to further unravel the secrets of the still-mysterious Nazca Lines.

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Reuters: Kushner's economic plan for Mideast peace faces broad Arab rejection

The lack of a political solution, which Washington has said would be unveiled later, prompted rejection not only from Palestinians but also in Arab countries with which Israel would seek normal relations.

From Sudan to Kuwait, commentators and ordinary citizens denounced Kushner’s proposals in strikingly similar terms: “colossal waste of time,” “non-starter,” “dead on arrival.”

Egyptian liberal and leftist parties slammed the workshop as an attempt to “consecrate and legitimize” occupation of Arab land and said in a joint statement that any Arab participation would be “beyond the limits of normalization” with Israel. [...]

Thousands of people marched through the Moroccan capital Rabat on Sunday to express their solidarity with the Palestinians and their opposition to the Kushner plan. [...]

Arab analysts believe Kushner’s economic plan is an attempt to buy off opposition to Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land with a multi-billion dollar bribe to pay off the neighboring hosts of millions of Palestinian refugees to integrate them.

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CityLab: Paris Wants to Grow ‘Urban Forests’ at Famous Landmarks

Under a plan announced last week by Mayor Anne Hidalgo, thickets of trees will soon appear in what today are pockets of concrete next to landmark locations, including the Hôtel de Ville, Paris’s city hall; the Opera Garnier, Paris’s main opera house; the Gare de Lyon; and along the Seine quayside.

The new plantings are part of a plan to create “islands of freshness”—green spaces that moderate the city’s heat island effect. It also falls into an overall drive to convert Paris’s surface “from mineral to vegetal,” introducing soil into architectural set-piece locations that have been kept bare historically. As a result, the plan will not just increase greenery, but may also provoke some modest rethinking of the way Paris frames its architectural heritage.

While “forest” might be far too big a term for plots this modest in size, the plans as a type are necessary if Paris is to meet its ambitious greening goals. By 2030, city hall wants to have 50 percent of the city covered by fully porous, planted areas, a category that can include anything from new parkland to green roofs. This means that, when it comes to planting, pretty much any urban space needs to be up for grabs. [...]

As the mayor notes in this interview with newspaper Le Parisien, traffic on Paris’s roads has been reducing at a rate of 5 percent every year during her term, a reduction that is not always apparent on the roads because car lane space has also been reduced. With the number of cars steadily falling, Hidalgo has suggested steadily removing parking spaces and replacing each one with mini-gardens, a process that is due to start already this year on Avenue Daumesnil, an axial thoroughfare bisecting the city’s southeast.

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The Observer view on Boris Johnson’s Brexit fantasies

When politicians can spread untruths with little accountability and few electoral consequences, an irreversible rot starts to set into the political system. There’s no greater indicator that this is happening in Britain today than the fact that a man within spitting distance of Downing Street is getting away with deploying utterly misleading information about what might happen in the aftermath of a no-deal Brexit, in order to strengthen his leadership bid. [...]

Johnson’s claims contradict the views of trade experts. The House of Commons library summarises it thus: “Trade law experts have repeatedly and authoritatively dismissed the view that the relevant rule offers an easy solution to UK trade with the EU in the case of ‘no deal’.” So Mark Carney, the governor of the Bank of England, was entirely correct to reject Johnson’s assertion. If there is no withdrawal agreement when Brexit happens, Britain and the EU will have to trade under WTO tariffs, unless they choose to lift tariffs for other countries. [...]

A no-deal Brexit will have destructive economic and political consequences for the country. The government’s forecast is that it would depress GDP between 7.7% and 9.3% over a 15-year period and it is the least affluent areas of the nation that will be hit worst in terms of jobs and growth. Moreover, a no-deal Brexit risks the breakup of the UK; it would increase the pressure for a vote on Irish unity and fuel the campaign for Scottish independence. This does not seem to worry the Conservative members who will select our next prime minister. One poll last week suggests they are so ideological about Brexit that they are happy to countenance significant economic damage, the breakup of the union and the destruction of their own party in order to see it happen. Johnson is currently expected to secure a comfortable victory among them, despite the fact that 40% believe he cannot be trusted to tell the truth.

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