Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss one of the jewels of medieval English poetry. It was written c1400 by an unknown poet and then was left hidden in private collections until the C19th when it emerged. It tells the story of a giant green knight who disrupts Christmas at Camelot, daring Gawain to cut off his head with an axe if he can do the same to Gawain the following year. Much to the surprise of Arthur's court, who were kicking the green head around, the decapitated body reaches for his head and rides off, leaving Gawain to face his promise and his apparently inevitable death the following Christmas.
27 August 2019
Failed Architecture: The Deceptive Platform Utopianism of Google’s Sidewalk Labs
Sidewalk’s plans for Toronto are emblematic of the ways Big Tech companies are taking over responsibilities traditionally provided by governments, and further encroaching into physical urban space. This approach applies the logic of platform capitalism — a model wherein a handful of companies have consolidated economic power by owning and controlling the majority of digital infrastructures — to urban planning, reflected in both the design and funding of Sidewalk’s plans for the Toronto waterfront in general, and its “proving ground” of Quayside in particular. Indeed, Sidewalk Labs have continually stated that they look at urban landscapes as they would a consumer digital product such as a phone. Rit Aggarwala, Head of Urban Systems at Sidewalk has said if “you think of the city as a platform, and design in the ability for people to change it as quickly as you and I can customize our iPhones, you make it authentic because it doesn’t just reflect a central plan.” [...]
This approach to urban design is underpinned by digital and physical infrastructures which are, of course, proprietary to Sidewalk Labs. In their proposal, an entirely separate subterranean city is created where automated robots “transport mail and garbage via underground tunnels,” while surface-level infrastructure to support driverless cars is merged with embedded sensors to continually monitor not just transportation patterns, but public activity as well. Data collected through these processes is intended to be used in a digital replica of Quayside — a real time representation of the area used by planners to quickly simulate urban changes “without bothering residents.” Sidewalk’s digital infrastructure is further claimed to provide “ubiquitous connectivity for all,” encouraging “creation and collaboration” to vaguely “address local challenges.” To do this, Sidewalk’s data can be trawled by other companies to “make their own products and services for Quayside” including social and community amenities intending to “improve” city services. Through this API-like model, platform capitalism is further morphing into an increasingly spatial form, referencing the language of programming with mundane (and inaccurate) analogies of ‘software’ and ‘hardware’. The standardization of both the infrastructure and modular construction for Quayside is seen by Sidewalk Toronto as a process that, once built, can be scaled up and applied to cities across the globe — not unlike a universal operating system. [...]
And while community participation is now routinely used by developers at the start of projects to whitewash top-down urban development processes, through Sidewalk’s clever approach to public relations, capitalist urban development appears to explicitly absorb the spatial critique of itself, incorporating user-input, flexibility, temporality and participation. This becomes particularly clear in the development of ‘307’, Sidewalk Labs “experimental” space in Toronto which opens its doors to the public once a week so that they can “contribute to the co-creation of Sidewalk Toronto.” Here, a “Plan Your Neighborhood” prototype has been developed via generative design methods — simulation algorithms developed to quickly test design options based on a series of parameters — with which the public can make design choices and see how they perform.
Rare Earth: The Witchhunt that Founded Liechtenstein
We happened to be driving past Liechtenstein on our way to filming and came across this story. I couldn't find it online in English, so I decided to make the pit stop.
SideNote: Why US Produced Eggs Are Banned Across Europe (& vice versa)
Because of the difference in USDA regulations and EU regulations on how eggs should be processed before the sale, the eggs produced in the UK become so different from US ones that, it would be illegal to sell British eggs in the US and vice verse. For the same reasons, eggs are refrigerated in the US and not refrigerated in the UK and rest of Europe - Why do some countries refrigerate their eggs and others don't?
The Calvert Journal: Inside Warsaw's fixation on the Palace of Culture and Science
The Palace’s origin story is part of the problem. It was framed as a direct gift from Stalin (although he died two years before construction was completed in 1955), designed by the Soviet architect Lev Rudnev, and largely built with Soviet machinery and labourers. It clearly resembles the “Seven Sisters” skyscrapers in Moscow — the largest of which, Moscow State University, was also a Rudnev design. Despite the incorporation of Polish national elements into the structure — the result of an architectural tour of the country that Rudnev undertook with Warsaw chief architect Józef Sigalin — the Palace is an indelible reminder of a post-war settlement that some Poles consider shameful. In Murawski’s words, “people were more negatively disposed towards it in the communist era because it was a direct expression not only of communism, but more so of Russian domination.” [...]
To simply equate the towering Palace with the oppressions of state socialism, however, is far too reductive. It was in no way universally disliked under communism, for one. This Stalinist edifice was the place where regular Poles were most likely to encounter Western culture: The Rolling Stones, Leonard Cohen, and Miles Davis played there; the bookshop of the Polish Academy of Sciences was the best place to buy foreign journals. As Murawski puts it, the Palace “always had this weird, double function.” His research suggests that, counter to popular opinion, it is precisely those Warsaw residents who have strong recollections of communism who are more likely to appreciate the Palace than “young people who have the bizarre, jaded idea that communism was all about Stalinist jackboots.” [...]
This is what Murawski hails as the “still-socialist” nature of the Palace, arguably its defining characteristic. He points out that the idea of “post-socialist” Eastern Europe ignores the fact that “a lot of powerful residues of the socialist period which completely transformed those countries continue to exist. The Palace is a socialist ghost or zombie which continues to haunt the reality of the capitalist city. Warsaw is a wild capitalist place: everything’s being privatised, there are huge billboards everywhere, children are being turfed out of their kindergartens so that aristocrats can move back into their stately homes. The Palace is an island exuding a kind of still-socialist publicness over the debris of the discombobulated city.” [...]
The Palace’s future as a beacon of public-mindedness in a hostile urban and political environment is far from guaranteed, though it has proven remarkably resilient thus far. Whatever the results of this autumn’s parliamentary elections — where left parties are predicted to gain up to 15 per cent of the vote — it will continue to serve as a lightning rod for Poles’ conflicting emotions about communism and capitalism alike. A more nuanced understanding of the nation’s past is sorely needed; the Palace proves that it is also more honest.
CNN: Putin tried to smash the opposition. Instead protests have spiraled
Navalny was released from jail on Friday, but while he was inside another activist has emerged as a leading opposition voice: Lyubov Sobol, a lawyer and activist with Navalny's Anti-Corruption Fund. Sobol recently ended a month-long hunger-strike after election officials refused to allow her onto the ballot in upcoming municipal elections; she was also detained and subsequently released ahead of an August 3 protest. [...]
But the protests have now taken on a different rationale: They have become a response to the wide-ranging crackdown on opposition activism. The slogan for the upcoming protest is "against political repression." [...]
And local authorities have carrots, as well as sticks, to deter protests. The Moscow city government organized two last-minute street carnivals that appeared timed to lure Muscovites away from protests (including one barbecue-and-music festival on August 10, dubiously titled "Meat and Beat").
Politico: Boris Johnson loses Brexit bite in Biarritz
The Sunday Times reported that U.K. government lawyers put the financial obligation in the event of no deal at between £7 billion and £10 billion, but following the Tusk meeting, Downing Street declined to put a figure on it. [...]
There was also a sense of anti-climax about Johnson’s challenge to Donald Trump on trade. The prime minister had positioned himself before the summit as a defender of the principles of free trade and open economies. But in comments to the press ahead of his one-hour meeting with the U.S. president, amid bellicose rhetoric from Trump on China, Johnson mustered only what he admitted was a “faint, sheep-like note of our view on the trade war.” [...]
In a reminder of the battle waiting for him at home, former Chancellor Philip Hammond sent a strongly worded letter on Sunday demanding Downing Street withdraw anonymous briefings that last week suggested a former minister was responsible for leaking documents that painted a bleak picture of the potential impact of a no-deal Brexit. Hammond has fallen under suspicion for the leak, something his team has denied.
The Daily Wire: Will Trump Win? The Latest On Trump’s National And State-By-State Approval Ratings
Historically, presidents have fared well in re-election campaigns when they maintain approval ratings above 50%. This president, to be sure, has never had such an approval rating at any point throughout his presidency. But President Trump oversees a soaring economy, with record-low unemployment rates, and has a hardened base of core supporters. One must also never forget the sheer power of incumbency: Since FDR, only Presidents Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush were elected and then subsequently not re-elected four years later. [...]
The Daily Wire will be tracking Trump's state-by-state approval rating as the general election nears. Here is the latest Trump approval rating information from across all the various swing states.
26 August 2019
WorldAffairs: Gun Violence: A Global Perspective
Recent tragic events in Gilroy, El Paso and Dayton have forced a painful reckoning amongst Americans across the country as kitchen table conversations turn to the issue of gun violence. While mass shootings have also happened in characteristically peaceful societies like Canada, Norway and New Zealand, those governments, unlike in the US, have been swift and decisive in enacting meaningful gun control. The question is: how do we do that here? New York Times columnist Max Fisher and Chelsea Parsons, vice president of gun violence prevention at the Center for American Progress, share their global perspectives on gun violence with Co-host Ray Suarez.
Today in Focus: The crisis in Kashmir
Azhar Farooq and Vidhi Doshi report on the crisis over Kashmir, triggered by the Indian government’s decision to impose direct rule from Delhi. Plus Jason Burke on life in post-Mugabe Zimbabwe.
A communications blackout means accurate, up-to-date information from Kashmir is extremely difficult to get. The reporter Azhar Farooq had to fly from its summer capital, Srinagar, to Delhi to file his dispatch as phone lines and internet connections are all down. He describes an eerie quiet on the streets as residents prepare for what they fear could be long period of lockdown.
On Friday, the BBC released a video appearing to show huge crowds marching through the streets of Srinagar. The footage shows people running for cover as police appear to open fire and use teargas.
The Guardian’s Vidhi Doshi tells Anushka Asthana that the history of Kashmir since it was given special status after Indian independence in 1947 has been that of a contested territory and the centre of tensions between India and Pakistan.
Mirza Waheed, a Kashmiri journalist and author, describes how his idyllic childhood in the 80s changed abruptly as his home town became a frontline for militants after elections widely seen to have been rigged by India sparked an insurgency.
Also today: Jason Burke reflects on life in post-Mugabe Zimbabwe where living conditions for millions have rapidly deteriorated.
The Guardian Longreads: Speed kills: are police chases out of control?
In the 1980s, Alpert was invited by the UK government to consult on the subject. He found “enormous similarities between Britain and America,” he recalled, recently. “Crazy police driving, serious injuries, deaths – and very little interest around the departments in exploring this further. It was seen as the natural thing, same as in the States. Bad guy runs, cop chases.” A sharp spike in fatalities at the end of the 1990s did lead to the IOPC (then under a different name; it has transitioned through several rebrands) bringing in a criminologist, David Best, to investigate accidents resulting from chases. Best came to the conclusion that standards varied wildly from district to district and that, in the main, officers were given a lot of leeway once the sirens were on and the suspects in flight. There seemed to be a received locker-room understanding: most chases turned out fine. “We’ve done a lot of work on this in America,” Alpert said, “where an amazing number of officers don’t wear a seatbelt. It’s called ‘phantom ninja’ [syndrome]. You’re inside the car with lights and sirens blaring and you think you’re immune and nothing bad can happen. But it can. It does.” [...]
Chase lots, or chase little. What mattered most, said Martin Cooper’s solicitor, Michael Oswald, was that police drivers were not only taught but incentivised to keep their heads. The report into the deaths of Rozanne and Makayah, sitting on the conference-room table in front of us, included findings by the IOPC “that two officers may have committed criminal offences both during and following the pursuit”. Martin and his family had been confused, then, to receive a letter from the CPS, agreeing that, yes, there were evidentiary grounds to bring charges against the officers; but there would be no such charges – “not in the public interest”. The phrase jarred with Diana. For the first time, sitting in the conference room, she spoke up, asking softly: “What are we?” [...]
Around this time, I met an off-duty coroner who, discussing the new ramming tactic, raised an eyebrow and asked: why not swear the police in as judge and jury too? “It’s wild west stuff.” Because what if a suspect was thrown off their bike (injured, killed) and later found to be innocent? This happened at least once, to another client of the Cooper family’s solicitor Michael Oswald. The client was under 18. The city did not tend to look fondly on young men on scooters just then. But he was guilty of no criminal offence when, riding around on a London A-road, he was rammed off his bike by a police officer. A barrister called Michael Etienne, a colleague of Oswald’s and a fellow member of an organisation called the Police Action Lawyers Group, told me he is profoundly uneasy about the changing flavour of policing. Etienne acknowledged that running thieves off their scooters probably was effective as a crime suppressor. “But so would be cutting off their hands.”
BBC News: Dukes, aristocrats and tycoons: Who owns Scotland?
Scotland is said to have some of the most concentrated land ownership in the developed world. It’s estimated that fewer than 500 people own half the country’s privately-owned rural land.
But how does land ownership affect our lives and is it important who the land belongs to?
SciShow: Why You Should Never Put Tomatoes in the Fridge!
Without refrigerators, we'd have spoiled milk, moldy cheese, and warm sodas. However, there are some foods that don't fare so well in a chilly fridge, including tomatoes.
24 August 2019
Plough Quarterly: What Lies Beyond Capitalism?
For this reason, capitalism might be said to have achieved its most perfect expression in the rise of the commercial corporation with limited liability, an institution that allows the game to be played in abstraction even from whether the businesses invested in ultimately succeed or fail. (One can profit just as much from the destruction of livelihoods as from their creation.) Such a corporation is a truly insidious entity: Before the law, it enjoys the status of a legal person – a legal privilege formerly granted only to “corporate” associations recognized as providing public goods, such as universities or monasteries – but under the law it is required to behave as the most despicable person imaginable. Almost everywhere in the capitalist world (in America, for instance, since the 1919 decision in Dodge v. Ford), a corporation of this sort is required to seek no end other than maximum gains for its shareholders; it is forbidden to allow any other consideration – say, a calculation of what constitutes decent or indecent profits, the welfare of laborers, charitable causes that might divert profits, or what have you – to hinder it in this pursuit. [...]
For all these reasons, it seems wise to me that we have elected to ask ourselves not what comes after capitalism, but rather what lies beyond it. As far as I can see, what comes after capitalism – that is, what follows from it in the natural course of things – is nothing. This is not because I believe that the triumph of the bourgeois corporatist market state constitutes the “end of history,” the final rational result of some inexorable material dialectic. Much less do I imagine that the logic of capitalism has won the future and that its reign is destined to be perpetual. In fact, I suspect that it is, in the long run, an unsustainable system. [...]
Simply said, the earliest Christians were communists (as Acts tells us of the church in Jerusalem, and as Paul’s epistles occasionally reveal), not as an accident of history but as an imperative of the faith. In fact, in preparing my own recent translation of the New Testament, there were many times when I found it difficult not to render the word koinonia (and related terms) as something like communism. I was prevented from doing so not out of any doubt regarding the aptness of that word, but partly because I did not want accidentally to associate the practices of the early Christians with the centralized state “communisms” of the twentieth century, and partly because the word is not adequate to capture all the dimensions – moral, spiritual, material – of the Greek term as the Christians of the first century evidently employed it. There can simply be no question that absolutely central to the gospel they preached was the insistence that private wealth and even private property were alien to a life lived in the Body of Christ.
Rare Earth: Yasukuni: Enshrining War Criminals
Yasukuni shrine is one of the most touristed spots in Tokyo. Next to the Emperor's Palace in the centre of town, it is an easy addition to an otherwise normal walk around. But it is also a major point of contention. It enshrines war criminals, and is owned by a far right nationalist organization who deny fundamental atrocities committed in WW2.
SciShow Psych: Spelunking in the Uncanny Valley
With all the CGI cat-humans going around on the internet these days, it’s hard to deny the sense of yikes known as the uncanny valley. But what exactly is this phenomenon, and why do we feel it when we do?
The Guardian: A new poll shows what really interests 'pro-lifers': controlling women
Do men make better political leaders than women? More than half of anti-abortion voters agreed. Do you want there to be equal numbers of men and women in positions of power in America? Fewer than half of abortion opponents said yes – compared with 80% of pro-choicers, who said they want women to share in power equally.
Anti-abortion voters don’t like the #MeToo movement. They don’t think the lack of women in positions of power impacts women’s equality. They don’t think access to birth control impacts women’s equality. They don’t think the way women are treated in society is an important issue in the 2020 election. [...]
But evangelicals didn’t seem to think much about abortion until an earlier pet issue, racial segregation, began to fall out of favor. Around the same time, women’s social roles were rapidly changing. The birth control pill brought with it an avalanche of opportunities and freedoms, and women, finally fully able to have sex for fun and prevent pregnancy, took full advantage. The ability to delay a pregnancy – and later, the ability to legally end one – meant that women didn’t have to choose between romance and ambition (and it meant women could be choosier about romance, making a more considered decision about who and whether to marry). [...]
Women, according to more than three-quarters of anti-abortion survey respondents, “are too easily offended”. More than 70% of “pro-lifers” in the survey agree that women interpret innocent remarks or acts as being sexist – women, in other words, are a touch hysterical and perhaps not to be trusted. While 82% of pro-choice respondents said that the country would be better off with more women in political office, just 34% of abortion opponents agreed.
The Guardian: 'People have had enough': Mexican town that lynched alleged kidnappers
The lynchings, which took place in the Mexican state of Puebla on 7 August, were the latest expression of a regional malady blighting countries from Bolivia to Brazil, whose far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, recently declared criminals should “die in the streets like cockroaches”.
Most weeks Latin American newspapers feature chilling tales of mob justice, often committed by otherwise law-abiding citizens and increasingly coordinated on social media and filmed on smartphones. In one recent case in the Brazilian Amazon, vigilantes smashed their way into a police station with sledgehammers in search of a suspected killer, before hacking him to death with machetes and scythes.
But Mexico, which last year registered a record 35,964 murders and where only a tiny fraction of crimes are solved, has been particularly affected.
The number of lynchings almost tripled here last year, jumping from 60 incidents in 2017 to 174 – 58 of which resulted in deaths. In the first half of this year that trend has continued with security expert Eduardo Guerrero counting at least 42 killings.
Bloomberg: What If Everyone’s Wrong About China?
Past mistakes about China are too numerous to mention. When it joined the World Trade Organization in 2001, many thought China would liberalize. Since Japan, Taiwan and South Korea had all gone on to become full-fledged democracies after periods of autocracy, the pattern was clear: Once they were fairly wealthy, the growing middle classes demanded a say in their government. At the time, it hardly seemed crazy to believe China might go down a similar path. [...]
Or consider Hong Kong. Not long ago it was practically a cliché that Hong Kong was a territory of apathetic, spoiled wealthy people, not very committed to self-rule or democracy. That too has been shown to be false, as 1.7 million people took the risk of participating last weekend in a peaceful anti-government march. [...]
For myself, I don’t have a coherent story about how the Chinese might move to greater liberty in the next 10 to 15 years. But I do think the actions of the current regime can be read as signs of vulnerability rather than entrenchment. Taiwan and Hong Kong, despite its current crisis, remain strong examples of the benefits of liberalization. Meanwhile, the notion of the internet — even with censorship — as a liberalizing force has been too quickly dismissed, especially in an America that has fallen out of love with Big Tech.
Vox: The New York Times 1619 Project is reshaping the conversation on slavery. Conservatives hate it.
At the heart of both men’s criticism is that the New York Times’ focus on race is part of what they and other conservatives see as a broader decline at the newspaper. It’s the type of criticism the institution often hears from President Donald Trump, who has referred to the newspaper as the “failing New York Times.”[...]
The 1619 Project, as it appears online, is sprawling and interactive. Matthew Desmond writes about how slavery shaped modern capitalism and workplace management norms. Jamelle Bouie connects the early 19th century political efforts to preserve slavery to current conservative political movements like the Tea Party and its efforts to nullify federal authority. Kevin Kruse explains how the country’s history of racism contributes to Atlanta traffic. [...]
This represents a shift in race coverage as the country heads toward the 2020 election. The media faced blowback — including from reporters of color — for not talking enough about race in the 2016 election, and outlets are now framing more of the political debates in this country around the topic of race.
20 August 2019
The Atlantic: The Dutch War on Tourists
In the era of cheap flights and Airbnb, their numbers are staggering. Some 19 million tourists visited the Netherlands last year, more people than live there. For a country half the size of South Carolina, with one of the world’s highest population densities, that’s a lot. And according to the Netherlands Board of Tourism & Conventions, the number of annual visitors is projected to increase by 50 percent over the next decade, to 29 million. Urban planners and city officials have a word for what the Netherlands and quite a few other European countries are experiencing: overtourism. With such an influx of humanity comes a decline in quality of life. Residents’ complaints range from inconvenience (crowds spilling from sidewalks to streets) to vandalism to alcohol-induced defilement (vomiting in flower boxes, urinating in mailboxes). [...]
Overtourism may have pierced a part of the Dutch psyche that once seemed inviolable: its gedoogcultuur, or culture of permissiveness. Ko Koens, who studies sustainable tourism at Breda University of Applied Sciences, finds the anti-tourist sentiment expressed by his fellow citizens both curious and troubling: “There’s a certain irony that many left-wing people who condemn xenophobia nonetheless talk about ‘the Chinese’ and ‘the English’—if they’re tourists, that’s seen as okay,” Koens says.
Tony Perrottet, the author of Pagan Holiday: On the Trail of Ancient Roman Tourists, says anti-tourist sentiment can be traced at least as far back as the first and second centuries a.d., when wealthy Romans visited Greece (where they complained about the food), Naples (where they complained about the guides), and Egypt (where they defaced the pyramids and the Sphinx with graffiti). “The structure of tourism historically is that you have resentful locals, and rich, obnoxious, clueless intruders: the Greeks and the Romans, the Brits and the Americans, the Dutch and Germans,” says Perrottet, who lives in Manhattan. “But I sympathize with the Dutch. God, there’s nothing more annoying than getting stuck on Fifth Avenue between a bunch of tourists.”
UnHerd: Will Boris lose his seat?
The constituency of Uxbridge and South Ruislip, created in 2010 out of the old Uxbridge seat, was once deemed safe, if not rock-solid, Conservative territory. Between its two incarnations, it has returned a Tory at every general election since 1970. But things are suddenly less comfortable for the Tories here. In 2017, the seat saw a 13.6% swing to Labour and Johnson’s majority halved to just over 5,000 – the smallest for any prime minister since 1924. Labour needs only a 5.4% swing to win next time out, and is going all out to achieve it. [...]
The number of benefits claimants is significantly lower than the average across the UK, and the high street seems, unlike many across Britain today, to bustle with activity and trade. Resistance to HS2 and a third runway at Heathrow – both of which will impact on the constituency fundamentally – is widespread, with many residents mildly irritated that their MP’s own opposition has been less than unequivocal. In fact, chatting to people here, it is obvious that the new prime minister cuts as divisive a figure locally as he does across the country. [...]
The Tories are determined to ensure that Johnson does not become their first party leader since Arthur Balfour in 1906 to lose his seat. They will no doubt throw everything into protecting their star player. For its part, Labour has been co-ordinating a series of “Unseat Boris Johnson” days, and the grassroots organisation Momentum has promised to flood the place with activists.
UnHerd: How the Right lost faith in capitalism
The Uber algorithms, perfectly embodying the spirit of market forces, make all value beholden to fluctuations of supply and demand. Here, nothing is fixed. Everything is relative. It’s a metaphysics, of sorts. Or perhaps – because it’s so wholeheartedly materialist – an anti-metaphysics. Capitalism represents the triumph of the immanent – that there is nothing to human value except the ebb and flow of human behaviour. Value is not rooted in anything transcendent, beyond the continual drift of human desire. [...]
I mention this little story only because it sits neatly alongside a movement that seems to be gathering force, especially in the US, in which conservatives – and often religious conservatives – are ousting socialists as some of the most thoughtful critics of capitalism. Last year Peter Kolozi, an academic at the City University of New York, published a timely historical survey of the long tradition of anti-capitalism within US conservatism. To those who have become used to conservatives being capitalism’s most high-profile cheerleaders, this notion may seem odd. But there is no necessary connection between conservatism and capitalism: indeed, there is a strong case that they are antithetical. And that case is re-emerging. [...]
As Kolizi explains, this tradition came to be obscured by the Cold War. Given the threat posed by communism, anti-capitalist conservatives threw in their lot with free-market conservatives, united against a common enemy. But the end of the Cold War, the 2008 financial crash, worries about globalisation, and the collapse of faith in the market’s ability to sustain community life – often code for church and family – has exposed old divisions within the conservative family. Thus people like Fox news presenter and Trump supporter Tucker Carlson are beginning to say things like this: “Market capitalism is not a religion. Any economic system that weakens and destroys families isn’t worth having.”
SciShow Psych: The Dark Side of Needing Closure
Seeking closure is normally a good thing, but it also has a dark side. And if you’re not careful, chasing after it could set you up for some pretty bad decisions.
Los Angeles Times: Coffee is still a no-go for Mormons even if you call it caffe or mochaccino
The rules prohibit alcohol, tobacco, illegal drugs and coffee and tea. They are based on what church members believe was a revelation from God to founder Joseph Smith in 1833. The faith’s rejection of coffee has long generated curiosity and more than a few jokes, including a scene in the biting satirical Broadway musical “The Book of Mormon,” in which dancing cups of coffee appear in a missionary’s nightmare. [...]
“The word coffee isn’t always in the name of coffee drinks. So, before you try what you think is just some new milkshake flavor, here are a couple of rules of thumb: One, if you’re in a coffee shop (or any other shop that’s well-known for its coffee), the drink you’re ordering probably has coffee in it, so either never buy drinks at coffee shops or always ask if there’s coffee in it,” the article said. “Two, drinks with names that include cafe or caffe, mocha, latte, espresso, or anything ending in -ccino usually have coffee in them and are against the Word of Wisdom.” [...]
Jana Riess, a church member and author, said she was shocked to find that four in 10 active church members under age 51 had drunk coffee during the previous six months in a 2016 survey she conducted for her book “The Next Mormons: How Millennials Are Changing the LDS Church.”
The Guardian: The end of capitalism has begun
Postcapitalism is possible because of three major changes information technology has brought about in the past 25 years. First, it has reduced the need for work, blurred the edges between work and free time and loosened the relationship between work and wages. The coming wave of automation, currently stalled because our social infrastructure cannot bear the consequences, will hugely diminish the amount of work needed – not just to subsist but to provide a decent life for all.
Second, information is corroding the market’s ability to form prices correctly. That is because markets are based on scarcity while information is abundant. The system’s defence mechanism is to form monopolies – the giant tech companies – on a scale not seen in the past 200 years, yet they cannot last. By building business models and share valuations based on the capture and privatisation of all socially produced information, such firms are constructing a fragile corporate edifice at odds with the most basic need of humanity, which is to use ideas freely.
Third, we’re seeing the spontaneous rise of collaborative production: goods, services and organisations are appearing that no longer respond to the dictates of the market and the managerial hierarchy. The biggest information product in the world – Wikipedia – is made by volunteers for free, abolishing the encyclopedia business and depriving the advertising industry of an estimated $3bn a year in revenue.[...]
Meanwhile in the absence of any alternative model, the conditions for another crisis are being assembled. Real wages have fallen or remained stagnant in Japan, the southern Eurozone, the US and UK. The shadow banking system has been reassembled, and is now bigger than it was in 2008. New rules demanding banks hold more reserves have been watered down or delayed. Meanwhile, flushed with free money, the 1% has got richer. [...]
So how do we visualise the transition ahead? The only coherent parallel we have is the replacement of feudalism by capitalism – and thanks to the work of epidemiologists, geneticists and data analysts, we know a lot more about that transition than we did 50 years ago when it was “owned” by social science. The first thing we have to recognise is: different modes of production are structured around different things. Feudalism was an economic system structured by customs and laws about “obligation”. Capitalism was structured by something purely economic: the market. We can predict, from this, that postcapitalism – whose precondition is abundance – will not simply be a modified form of a complex market society. But we can only begin to grasp at a positive vision of what it will be like.
The Guardian: No 10 furious at leak of paper predicting shortages after no-deal Brexit
The leaked document, detailing preparations under Operation Yellowhammer, argues that the most likely scenario is severe extended delays to medicine supplies and shortages of some fresh foods, combined with price rises, if there is a no-deal Brexit on 31 October.
It said there would be a return to a hard border on the island of Ireland before long and a “three-month meltdown” at ports unable to cope with extra checks. Protests could break out across the UK, requiring significant police intervention, and two oil refineries could close, with thousands of job losses, according to the documents. [...]
Despite the document, leaked to the Sunday Times, being dated to earlier this month when Johnson was already in post, the senior No 10 source said: “This document is from when ministers were blocking what needed to be done to get ready to leave and the funds were not available. It has been deliberately leaked by a former minister in an attempt to influence discussions with EU leaders.
19 August 2019
WorldAffairs: Ratcheting up the Pressure: Assessing the Risks of Trump's Iran Policy
In May 2018, President Trump withdrew the United States from the Iran nuclear deal, and re-imposed crippling economic sanctions against Tehran. Iran responded by restarting elements of its nuclear program and sponsoring militant attacks against US interests and allies in the Middle East. Trump claims he will keep the pressure on until Iran agrees to a better nuclear deal, while Iranian leaders insist they will not negotiate under duress. Colin Kahl, Steven C. Házy senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies' Center for International Security and Cooperation and former national security advisor to the vice president of the United States, speaks with WorldAffairs CEO Jane Wales about Trump's Iran strategy and how it risks igniting war with the country.
Today in Focus: Meghan: why all the hate against the Duchess of Sussex?
The outpouring of bile against the Duchess of Sussex has been impossible to miss in recent weeks, whether it is stories of her contributing to human rights abuses through eating avocados, or opinion pieces criticising her for guest editing Vogue or being ‘snobbish’. But many commentators have noted another tone to some of the criticism, one of misogyny and racism.
Victoria Murphy has been covering the young royals for years and joins Anushka Asthana to discuss how Meghan has adapted to life in Britain and the royal family. She points to a rich history of intense tabloid criticism that most members of the monarchy have been through in recent years.
Also today: Malachi O’Doherty, the author of Fifty Years On, argues that despite the turmoil of the past half a century, Northern Ireland should not be defined by the Troubles.
Rare Earth: Zog: King of the Bloodfeud
Be you a Hatfield, a Black Donnelly, Alexander Hamilton or Zog, vendettas are an unfortunately common part of human existence. And while as an individual, our needs for vengeance are personal and deep, they're often at odds with society. Justice is not a universal concept.
Blood feuds end in blood. It's right there in the name.
FiveThirtyEight: The Movement To Skip The Electoral College May Take Its First Step Back
As we’ve written previously, states that join the National Popular Vote compact agree to cast their electoral votes for the presidential candidate who wins the most votes nationwide — not necessarily the candidate who carries the state. And the compact only goes into effect once states worth 270 electoral votes (a majority in the Electoral College) have joined, thus ensuring that its signatories have enough electoral votes to guarantee that the national popular vote winner becomes president. Currently, 15 states plus the District of Columbia, together worth 196 electoral votes, have ratified the compact.
Four of those states, including Colorado, joined the National Popular Vote movement just this year, but it remains a controversial issue — for example, it recently failed to pass in Maine and was vetoed in Nevada. And opponents in Colorado were upset enough about its passage that they are now actively trying to repeal the law. Earlier this month, the organization Coloradans Vote said it submitted more than 227,198 signatures to the Colorado secretary of state in an effort to subject the law to voter referendum in the 2020 election. With that number of signatures, chances are very good it will make the ballot, making it the first time voters in any state will vote directly on the National Popular Vote compact. [...]
So the real question becomes whether voters will reject the legislature’s law and make Colorado the first state to exit the National Popular Vote compact. And polls suggest it would be a competitive election! Nationally, 53 percent of Americans said the popular vote should determine the president, and 43 percent said the Electoral College should, according to an April/May NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll. Unsurprisingly, given that almost every state government to pass the National Popular Vote compact was completely controlled by Democrats, there is a wide partisan gap on the question: 79 percent of Democrats preferred the popular vote, while 74 percent of Republicans favored the Electoral College.
Politico: ‘Using the Lord’s name in vain’: Evangelicals chafe at Trump’s blasphemy
To most of America, the comments went unnoticed. Instead, the nation was gripped by the moment a “send her back” chant broke out as Trump went after Somali-born Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar, an American citizen. But some Trump supporters were more fixated on his casual use of the word “g--damn” — an off-limits term for many Christians — not to mention the numerous other profanities laced throughout the rest of his speech. [...]
Using coarse language is far from the president’s only behavior that might turn off the religious right. He’s been divorced twice and has faced constant allegations of extramarital affairs. He previously supported abortion rights, and he has stumbled when trying to discuss the specifics of his religious beliefs, once referring to a book in the Bible as “Two Corinthians” instead of Second Corinthians. Yet to this point, Trump has maintained broad support from evangelicals, including the unwavering backing of some prominent conservative Christian leaders. [...]
For evangelicals, however, Trump’s indelicate language has frustrated religious fans who have otherwise been staunch supporters of his agenda. They agree with his social policies, praise his appointment of conservative judges and extol his commitment to Israel — often tolerating Trump’s character flaws for the continued advancement of all three. But when it comes to “using the Lord’s name in vain,” as Hardesty put it, “the president’s evangelical base might be far less forgiving.”
Politico: The One Thing Elizabeth Warren Needs to Do to Win
There are significant challenges to this strategy, not the least of which is winning over a reasonable share of the African American vote, where Biden dominates. In fact, the South Carolina primary in 2020 could be Iowa 2008, but in reverse. Back then, Barack Obama convinced African-Americans that he was more than a symbolic candidate when he won the caucuses in an overwhelmingly white state. This time around, if Warren were to win a respectable slice of the black vote in South Carolina, she would prove to white liberals skeptical of her electability that she has support among a constituency without which no Democrat can win a nomination, or the presidency. [...]
And African American Democrats are, as Tom Edsall pointed out in a much-discussed column in the New York Times, on average, more centrist than white Democrats. The party’s “more moderate wing, which is pressing bread-and-butter concerns like jobs, taxes and a less totalizing vision of health care reform, is majority nonwhite, with almost half of its support coming from African-American and Hispanic voters,” he wrote. [...]
So far, there is little sign that Warren has any interest in following the example of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump. She is a candidate whose surge is in good part predicated on her deeply detailed policy proposals and her campaign skills, but evidence of the potential for broader reach to middle-of-the-road voters is difficult to find.
The Atlantic: Scientifically Proven Sources of Sex Appeal
Scads of studies suggest that those of us looking for Mr. or Ms. Right may actually be looking for Mr. Facial Symmetry or Ms. Ideal Waist-to-Hip Ratio (about 0.7 for women). [1, 2] But other research suggests that whether a trait is attractive depends on the type of connection you’re looking for. For example, women in one study found men with facial scars more appealing than other men for short-term relationships, but not for long-term ones. [3] In another study, men with beards had an edge among women seeking long-term relationships—a finding that might give clean-shaven guys with scars an idea about how to turn a one-night stand into something lasting. [4] (If all of this sounds heteronormative, it is: Almost all research on attraction involves straight people.)
Should two people seek lasting happiness, they may want to define the relationship, especially if they’re already friends. As any Harry or Sally can tell you, while women often mistake males’ indications of sexual interest for expressions of friendliness, men consistently mistake females’ expressions of friendliness for sexual interest. [5–7] This might help explain why men are more likely to report attraction toward opposite-sex friends than are women. [7] Further complicating matters, University of Virginia and Harvard researchers found that women were most attracted to men whose level of interest in them was ambiguous. [8] [...]
If two people can get it together to go out, they are likely to wear red or black, especially common choices on a first date. [12] No wonder: Red makes everyone seem more attractive, both to themselves and to others. [13] What they order matters, too. Researchers have found that a woman is more likely to find a man attractive if she’s eating something that’s spicy rather than sweet. [14] A drink may also help—but only one. In an experiment, people who had the equivalent of a glass of wine were rated more attractive than people who drank either no alcohol or more than a glass, perhaps because they seemed more relaxed, or maybe because they were attractively flushed. [15]
Global Citizen: 2 in 3 Afghan Men Think Women Have Too Many Rights: Report
The male generational gap may be explained by younger men seeking rigid gender roles as they struggle to find work and stability in a country ravaged by war and poverty, said gender equality group Promundo.
Religious teachings against women's rights under the Taliban regime had also played a role in hardening views among younger men, said Gary Barker, founder of Promundo-US, which works with men and boys to promote gender equality. [...]
And while nearly three-quarters of women said a married woman should have equal rights with their partner to work outside the home, only 15 percent of men agreed.
12 August 2019
Nautilus Magazine: Is Physical Law an Alien Intelligence?
For example, if machines continue to grow exponentially in speed and sophistication, they will one day be able to decode the staggering complexity of the living world, from its atoms and molecules all the way up to entire planetary biomes. Presumably life doesn’t have to be made of atoms and molecules, but could be assembled from any set of building blocks with the requisite complexity. If so, a civilization could then transcribe itself and its entire physical realm into new forms. Indeed, perhaps our universe is one of the new forms into which some other civilization transcribed its world.[...]
For example, only about 5 percent of the mass-energy of the universe consists of ordinary matter: the protons, neutrons, and electrons that we’re composed of. A much larger 27 percent is thought to be unseen, still mysterious stuff. Astronomical evidence for this dark, gravitating matter is convincing, albeit still not without question. Vast halos of dark matter seem to lurk around galaxies, providing mass that helps hold things together via gravity. On even larger scales, the web-like topography traced by luminous gas and stars also hints at unseen mass. [...]
The universe does other funky and unexpected stuff. Notably, it began to expand at an accelerated rate about 5 billion years ago. This acceleration is conventionally chalked up to dark energy. But cosmologists don’t know why the cosmic acceleration began when it did. In fact, one explanation with a modicum of traction is that the timing has to do with life—an anthropic argument. The dark energy didn’t become significant until enough time had gone by for life to take hold on Earth. For many cosmologists, that means our universe must be part of a vast multiverse where the strength of dark energy varies from place to place. We live in one of the places suitable for life like us. Elsewhere, dark energy is stronger and blows the universe apart too quickly for cosmic structures to form and life to take root.
But perhaps there is another reason for the timing coincidence: that dark energy is related to the activities of living things. After all, any very early life in the universe would have already experienced 8 billion years of evolutionary time by the time expansion began to accelerate. It’s a stretch, but maybe there’s something about life itself that affects the cosmos, or maybe those well-evolved denizens decided to tinker with the expansion.
CityLab: Berlin Tiptoes Into Europe’s Car-Free Streets Movement
This summer, the German capital has announced plans to pedestrianize some vital central streets starting in October. One experiment will ban cars from the main section of Friedrichstrasse, a long, store-filled thoroughfare that, before World War II, was considered the city’s main shopping street. Another will test daily closures on Tauentzienstrasse, another key retail street, with a view toward going permanently car-free in 2020.
These plans are notably muted compared to, say, the blanket car ban in central Madrid, or London’s new Ultra Low Emissions Zone. But they are nonetheless ground-breaking for Berlin, and could do much to slash the presence of cars in some of its busiest areas. [...]
There are budding efforts to go further in Berlin, as well. There’s talk among the city’s Greens—still too hazy to count as proposals—of banning cars in inner Berlin by 2030, after an interim congestion charge. And this Saturday, a group of activists who favor a city-wide car ban are planning a demonstration intended to temporarily shut down Western Berlin’s Sonnenallee, a long avenue bisecting the fast-gentrifying working-class district of Neukölln. Lined with affordable cafés and restaurants, Sonnenallee also has traffic that can sometimes be deafeningly loud, making what might otherwise be a promenade for strolling into something that sounds and smells like a race track. Piloted by an organization called Autofrei Berlin (“Car-free Berlin”), the demonstration hopes to amp up pressure to free the space from private cars.
Vox: Study: many of the “oldest” people in the world may not be as old as we think
Across the United States, the state recording of vital information — that is, reliable, accurate state record-keeping surrounding new births — was introduced in different states at different times. A century ago, many states didn’t have very good record-keeping in place. But that changed gradually over time in different places. [...]
In other words, as soon as a state starts keeping good records of when people are born, there’s a 69 to 82 percent fall in the number of people who live to the age of 110. That suggests that of every 10 supposed supercentenarians, seven or eight of them are actually younger than that, but we just don’t know it because of poor record-keeping.
This doesn’t mean that any of these false supercentenarians are lying. It could be that they lost track of their age a long time ago, accidentally double-counted some years, or were told the wrong birth year. But it does mean that the majority of people claiming to be supercentenarians, born in areas that didn’t keep reliable, accurate birth records, are probably not quite as old as they say they are. [...]
The paper puts forward a controversial proposal. It seems unlikely that living in high-crime, low-life-expectancy areas is the thing that makes it likeliest to reach age 110. It seems likelier, the paper concludes, that many — perhaps even most — of the people claiming to reach age 110 are engaged in fraud or at least exaggeration. The paper gives a couple of examples of how this might come about; some of it might be reporting error, and some of the supercentenarians might be produced by pension fraud (someone might be claiming a dead person is still alive for pension benefits, or claiming the identity of a parent or older sibling).
The Observer view on India’s aggression over Kashmir
Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister, and the ruling nationalist BJP stand accused of acting without proper legal authority by unilaterally revoking article 370 of the constitution, which guarantees Kashmir’s special status. Delhi’s arbitrary bifurcation of the state into two union territories (Jammu and Kashmir, and Ladakh) is also legally contentious. Opponents say Modi has opted for “raw power” over legitimacy.
Modi also ignored UN resolutions on the internationally recognised dispute with Pakistan over sovereign control of the Kashmir region and, notably, the 1972 Simla agreement, which stipulates that its final status must be settled by peaceful means. That point was made last week by the UN secretary-general while appealing for “maximum restraint”. To cap it all, Modi failed to consult Kashmir’s political leaders, whether pro-independence or pro-India, or the Kashmiri people. Quite the opposite, in fact. Political leaders were placed under house arrest. The population was placed under curfew. Means of association and communication were cut. And massive army deployments have been used to enforce Delhi’s diktat. [...]
Khan has limited options. His country is severely indebted. Modi has been clever in strengthening ties with Muslim countries such as Saudi Arabia that traditionally bankrolled Pakistan. None of them spoke up on Islamabad’s behalf last week. Meanwhile, relations with the US have become strained, not least over Afghanistan.
The Guardian: Swinson’s Lib Dems target Raab’s seat as Tory moderates flee no-deal Brexit
Research by the Lib Dems conducted over the summer has convinced officials to rip up the party’s existing plans and adopt a more ambitious targeting strategy after concluding that it was on course to win more than 70 seats – a result that would represent its best ever return. [...]
An internal memo from June, written by the party’s campaigns director Shaun Roberts, said 76 seats were considered winnable, and a further five percentage point swing brought more than 200 seats into play. However, the party has slipped among some pollsters since the memo was written.
“Of the first 100 seats we can target, most of these seats will come from the Conservatives,” it stated. It called for an immediate “expansion of our target seat list” and emergency selection procedures to ensure candidates were in place by the autumn. It told party staff to “revise [the] general election campaign plan” and ordered new research to be conducted earlier than planned at the start of September. [...]
Peter Kellner, past president of YouGov and a People’s Vote supporter, said: “This polling shows that, in the battleground seats, Boris Johnson’s hard line on Brexit is far from a deal sealer in any early election. Even before a campaign has begun the Lib Dems could expect to benefit from enhanced coverage, and their tactical voting message will almost certainly gain traction. Jo Swinson’s party is well placed to make significant gains at the Tories’ expense.”
9 August 2019
The New York Review of Books: Absent Opposition, Modi Makes India His Hindu Nation
Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s triumph on May 23 was conclusive. His Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won more than 300 of the 543 seats in the lower house of Parliament. But Modi had spent the last five years letting India down. Very little he had said on the 2014 campaign trail turned out to be true and virtually nothing he promised was delivered. [...]
These elections, reported the Centre for Media Studies, a non-partisan think tank in New Delhi, had been the most expensive “ever, anywhere.” In an election that was fought between six national parties, and many smaller ones, the BJP’s electoral juggernaut received an estimated 45–55 percent of the estimated 55,000 crore rupees (nearly $8 billion) that was spent on this election. Their main rival, the Indian National Congress (INC), accounted for an estimated 15 percent of the total spent. More than half of Modi’s war chest came from anonymous donors. Who these people are can only be guessed at, but since 2016 the BJP has received almost 93 percent of corporate donations, leaving the remaining 7 percent for the other national and state parties to fight over. [...]
The mainstream media, particularly cable news, amplified the BJP’s message and drowned out the opposition. They editorialized the news, started rumors, and spread lies. Truth was an illusion, and everything was propaganda. The INC’s leader, Rahul Gandhi, was denounced as a fool and even a foreigner, while Modi, in a tradition that will ring familiar to people in Russia and China, was glorified as the great leader. [...]
And while Gandhi was the obviously better choice, he wasn’t, necessarily, a convincing one. For years, Gandhi dithered about whether he would join politics, enjoying the unheard of privilege, in India, of deciding if he wanted to apply for a job. When he finally accepted, standing for election in 2004, he positioned himself as a foot soldier. He failed to do anything significant to change the country’s oldest party, his family’s party. The Congress was rotting from the roots upward, its representatives seen as incompetent, corrupt, and out of touch, yet Gandhi appeared to shrug and roll his eyes as though to say, Can you believe these people? He officially took over the party’s leadership in 2017, but it wasn’t until March 2019, less than a fortnight before voting was to commence, that he announced the main plank of his manifesto.
The Atlantic: The Fight Against White Nationalism Is Different
Against ISIS, America deployed drones, proxy armies, and hundreds upon hundreds of air strikes. The extremist protostate that once controlled millions of people is dead. The ideology that inspired ISIS, however, remains alive. U.S.-led efforts known as “countering violent extremism,” mainly aimed at ISIS and al-Qaeda sympathizers online, were of debatable utility. U.S. air strikes took out ISIS propagandists, just as an Obama-administration-authorized drone strike years earlier in Yemen killed one of al-Qaeda’s most effective messengers, the U.S. citizen Anwar al-Awlaki. Yet his videos remained on YouTube until 2017, and the same basic ideas have continued to fuel terrorist attacks throughout America’s two-decade War on Terror. I remember the earnest passion one al-Qaeda member displayed, at his home in southern Turkey, as he played me a speech from someone he reverentially called “The Sheikh.” Osama bin Laden had been dead for almost three years, but the man was sure that if I just heard the logic of his words, it would open my eyes. [...]
Experts who have focused on both types of extremism—Islamist and white nationalist—tell me that a fundamental change in the way America views the latter would indeed help combat it, freeing up law-enforcement resources to address the growing problem. FBI Director Christopher Wray told Congress last month that the bureau made about 100 domestic-terrorism arrests in the past nine months, putting it on pace to surpass the total from the previous year, and that the majority of the suspects were motivated by white supremacism. Since 9/11, far-right extremists have killed more people on American soil than Islamist terrorists have. [...]
The El Paso attack shows the ways in which white-nationalist terror has become an international movement—while also remaining a distinctly American one. Just minutes beforehand, a manifesto that authorities believe was authored by the suspected shooter was posted online. The 2,300-word racist and anti-immigrant diatribe expressed the fear that white Americans are being replaced by foreigners. As my colleague Adam Serwer has documented, the idea of white replacement, like the tenets of white nationalism more generally, has American roots. And these ideas are central to white-nationalist extremists in other countries. The manifesto cited inspiration from the March massacre at a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, in which a white supremacist shot and killed 51 people after posting his own rambling warnings about white replacement. Many attacks by white supremacists target the groups demonized in this propaganda: the black worshippers at a church in Charleston, South Carolina; the Jewish worshippers at a synagogue in Pittsburgh. “If we can get rid of enough people, then our way of life can be more sustainable,” the manifesto read. [...]
At the moment, there is a significant disparity in the amount of funds, personnel, and law-enforcement tools that America devotes to combatting Islamist versus white-nationalist terrorism. Finding a way to add white nationalists to the list of U.S.-designated foreign terrorist organizations could help address that, Seamus Hughes, the deputy director of the Program on Extremism at George Washington University, told me. It would lower the bar for law enforcement to be able to charge a person for providing material support to white-nationalist terrorists. It would allow investigators to get warrants to monitor their international communications. The Treasury Department could look into their finances and perhaps issue sanctions. U.S. investigators would have more leeway to explore whether individual attacks and plots were part of a larger network. (Alternatively, as the former FBI agent Ali Soufan has proposed, laws surrounding domestic terrorism could be changed to provide authorities with similar powers.)
read the article
At the moment, there is a significant disparity in the amount of funds, personnel, and law-enforcement tools that America devotes to combatting Islamist versus white-nationalist terrorism. Finding a way to add white nationalists to the list of U.S.-designated foreign terrorist organizations could help address that, Seamus Hughes, the deputy director of the Program on Extremism at George Washington University, told me. It would lower the bar for law enforcement to be able to charge a person for providing material support to white-nationalist terrorists. It would allow investigators to get warrants to monitor their international communications. The Treasury Department could look into their finances and perhaps issue sanctions. U.S. investigators would have more leeway to explore whether individual attacks and plots were part of a larger network. (Alternatively, as the former FBI agent Ali Soufan has proposed, laws surrounding domestic terrorism could be changed to provide authorities with similar powers.)
read the article
Jacobin Magazine: After We Sacked the Ministers
Yet there was also a big difference with the movement of three decades hence: the social forces involved. If by the early 1990s the Communist regime was economically and politically on its knees, practically awaiting the final push that would send it tumbling, the current political establishment is strongly supported by economic magnates who would not wish to see them replaced. In the 2019 movement protesters kept politicians of all sides at bay, blocking their usual attempts to blend with the crowd so as to gain political capital. This was crucial in confronting the prime minister with the creative discontent of the country’s educated youth. [...]
Indeed, it’s no surprise that the judicial system is at the center of the current conflict. The three major political parties, PS (Socialist Party, now in government), PD (Democratic Party), and LSI (Socialist Movement for Integration) have all been involved in major corruption scandals and abuses of power in recent years. These parties do refer to different electorates — PS is rooted in the old Hoxhaist party and its intelligentsia, whereas PD is built on the families persecuted by that regime as well as among the largely poor working class from northern Albania; meanwhile, LSI maintains its electorate primarily through rewarding its activists with public sector jobs. But what unites all three is their common entrenchment in right-wing, pro-privatization policies.
Beyond the theatrics of the mutual allegations these parties exchange, they have together contrived to maintain a dysfunctional judicial system that holds no one accountable for even flagrant wrongdoing. In Albania, the legal process is a mere auction for the highest bidder. The power of money in influencing justice is apparent in the spread of property speculation, as public assets are passed into the hands of private “developers.” The status of properties supposedly protected by the state — such as natural reserves, cultural heritage sites, or public buildings like the National Theatre — is illegally changed in order to allow for the construction of private resorts or urban skyscrapers. Moreover, the ambiguous legal status of property owners since the change of regime — for decades, intentionally left unclear and open to speculation — has allowed the current government to undertake megaprojects, for instance the construction of a ring-road in Tirana which would destroy the homes of dozens of families. [...]
The Albanian president — former LSI leader Ilir Meta — joined this strategy by decreeing a new date for the local elections, October 13. Meta labeled the justice reform an initiative by shadowy forces sponsored by Hungarian-Jewish billionaire George Soros, while comparing his own opposition to the stances adopted by various national heroes. The president’s decree, however, was ignored both by PS and Western functionaries, who have shown unprecedented support for Edi Rama’s government in their pursuit of the rapid implementation of the reform.
Political Critique: Poland’s Future: A view from the countryside
The principal driver of re-ruralisation is the rediscovery of the countryside as an attractive place to live. According to CBOS survey from 2015, just 18 per cent of Poles want to live in a large city, while 40 per cent think of living in the countryside as their ideal.[2] Contrary to the global trend of urbanisation, Poles started the 21st century by going back to the countryside. Material changes such as the ever-increasing ease of working remotely from home facilitated this shift. It is borne out in the numbers: since 2002 the proportion of urban dwellers has declined, while that of rural residents continues to grow. Currently 40 per cent of Poles live in villages and, if such a trend continues, by 2049 this figure will rise to 45 per cent of a population of 34 million (compared to 38 million today).[...]
The countryside itself is the theatre of a third trend: de-agrarisation. Despite EU money, rural areas are losing their agricultural character. Villages have less and less to do with farming land and are becoming a sort of rusticate Arcadia with peace, quiet, and nature at its core. While farming (at present) is still limited to the countryside, only 10 per cent of Poland’s employment is made up of agriculture – by 2049 this figure may shrink to single digits. At the same time for growing category of people, a small plot of land next to their house is an element of their lifestyle.
Finally the trend of internal migration means that wealthier, more highly educated people are starting to come to live in the countryside, while people with low cultural and economic capital go to the cities. Villages near dynamic cities become bedrooms, while places near attractive tourist destinations are enclaves for people searching for a summer relax or a calm life as middle-class pensioners from the city. Such colonisation results in rising class conflict. Especially if we consider that another growing group in the Polish countryside is that of the ‘NEETs’ (people not in education, employment or training) – people that are inactive in cultural, social and political terms and whose views, research shows, may end up on the extreme margins of the authoritarian political spectrum.[3] [...]
All those changes contribute to the unstable political and class relations that determine the balance of power between urban and rural in Poland. They create the structural context for populist mobilisation against various ‘Others’ (middle-class colonists in the countryside, rural migrants in large cities, economic immigrants and refugees in both environments), fuelling radical right-wing sentiment and activism. The best example in Poland is rising nationalism, which, stoked by anti-immigrant campaigns from the ruling Law and Justice party, heightens the risk of ethnic violence. Its combination of Polish nationalism, religious conservatism, anti-elitism, and attacks on those supposedly seeking to dictate to Poland about values and migrant quotas made Law and Justice the largest party in Parliament after 2015 election and is very likely to help it maintain its dominance in the forthcoming 2019 elections.
The Atlantic: Trump the Bulldozer
But over the past year and change, there’s been a shift: Trump, having shed himself of the aides most likely to try to divert him or change his mind, has followed through on several of the biggest unfulfilled threats I highlighted back then. The catch is that while Trump is getting his way, many of these policies are not turning out as well as the president hoped—as illustrated by severe market jitters on Monday over the escalating trade war between the U.S. and China. [...]
This is the template for what has happened in several of the cases where Trump had appeared to fold but has since followed through. Aides who felt he was acting either against the national interest or against his own interest have been shipped out: Cohn, Defense Secretary James Mattis, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster, Chief of Staff John Kelly. They’ve been replaced by advisers who either encourage Trump, like Navarro, or are determined to enable rather than encumber him, such as acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney and the television pundit Larry Kudlow, who succeeded Cohn.
In retrospect, the May 2018 announcement that Trump would withdraw from the nuclear-nonproliferation deal with Iran looks like a turning point. Trump had lambasted the deal as a candidate, but once entering office, he repeatedly recertified Iranian compliance with the agreement, bowing to the will of his aides. He seemed more ready to fire aides than to keep but overrule them. But starting with his withdrawal from the deal, Trump has begun following his instincts more fully.[...]
Negotiations with North Korea have gotten nowhere after two summits—though to his credit Trump did walk away from the second meeting, in Vietnam, when he felt no progress was being made. And Trump is now pursuing diplomatic negotiations with Iran on what appears to be, as with NAFTA and USMCA, just a rewrite of the deal that was previously in place, though whether anything will come of the push is unclear.
The Conversation: Mass shootings aren’t growing more common – and evidence contradicts common stereotypes about the killers
Long-term studies of youth consistently find that violent games are not a risk factor for youth violence anywhere from one to eight years later. And no less than the U.S. Supreme Court declared in 2011 that scientific studies had failed to link violent games to serious aggression in kids.
A 2017 public policy statement by the American Psychological Association’s media psychology and technology division specifically recommended politicians should stop linking violent games to mass shootings. It’s time to lay this myth to rest. [...]
Most mass homicide perpetrators don’t proclaim any allegiance to a particular ideology at all. [...]
It’s also important to point out that the vast majority of people with mental illness do not commit violent crimes. For instance, in one study, about 15% of people with schizophrenia had committed violent crimes, as compared to 4% of a group of people without schizophrenia. Although this clearly identifies the increase in risk, it also highlights that the majority of people with schizophrenia had not committed violent crimes. It’s important not to stigmatize the mentally ill, which may reduce their incentive to seek treatment. [...]
To be sure, the U.S. has experienced many mass homicides. Even stability might be depressing given that rates of other violent crimes have declined precipitously in the U.S. over the past 25 years. Why mass homicides have stayed stagnant while other homicides have plummeted in frequency is a question worth asking.
statista: The Hong Kong Protest by the Numbers
On Sunday, violent protest broke out in Hong Kong again, with an estimated 150,000 people hitting the streets of the Chinese special administrative region to voice their opposition to a proposed bill that would make extradiction of individuals from Hong Kong to China possible.
The mass protest have been going on since June and while crowd estimates vary widely, probably reached their peak on July 1. 265,000 people alledegly came out to protest on that day, a number calculated with the help of crown-counting AI.
Hong Kong police has said that they have arrested more than 500 people so far since June and that 1,800 canisters of tear gas, 300 rubber bullets and 170 sponge grenades have been used on the protesters, according to Bloomberg.
Politico: Pass the Duchy: Luxembourg’s grand plan to legalize cannabis
Luxembourg, however, wants to go further and become the first country in the European Union to make cannabis completely legal. Its health ministry is slated to unveil a proposal to start the legislative process this fall, and the goal is for it to become law within two years. [...]
One of the main advocates is Health Minister Etienne Schneider, who cites health reasons as the most important driver. He said young people are already getting weed on the black market, coming into contact with drug dealers who provide cannabis of unknown quality, and getting access to more potentially dangerous drugs. [...]
A possible playbook for Luxembourg is the U.S. state of Colorado, the first in the country to legalize recreational cannabis. Legalization advocates say that they chose to frame the issue so that voters view pot the same the way they view alcohol — a substance that is widely available and socially acceptable. [...]
"In Germany, there is a consensus that there is a reason why medical cannabis is allowed and that there are patients who benefit from it," Goetz said. "So there's no reason for prohibiting that. But there is definitely not a consensus yet on legalizing it for recreational use."
8 August 2019
Curbed: The ‘free love’ utopia behind your forks and knives
In the 1940s, it wasn’t sex that sold—it was love. When Oneida, a silverware manufacturer, took out ads, instead of focusing on forks and knives and serving spoons, they showed a passionate embrace between a woman and man returning from war.
“Dare to dream...dare to cut yourself a slice of heaven. Some day you’ll have it...the storybook house, the crackling fire...and on your table your treasured Community,” stated one ad for Oneida’s Community Plate flatware. The “Back Home for Keeps” ads were so popular that they became the subject of a 1945 LIFE magazine article that called them “a new kind of pin-up craze.”
The irony is these ads were selling monogamous, possessive love—the exact opposite of what the founders of Oneida stood for. Long before making flatware, Oneida was a religious commune founded on polyamory.
Oneida was founded in 1848 by John Humphrey Noyes, a former theological student who believed that paradise could be found on Earth through nontraditional sexual and familial structures. This included communal child raising; “complex marriage,” a term Noyes invented to describe how all Oneidans were married to one another; and sexual rituals, like male continence. Noyes built an enormous mansion in upstate New York for his “family” and amassed hundreds of followers. For years, the community succeeded. But after Noyes died, the community pivoted—into a thriving business.
In this episode, host Avery Trufelman speaks with Paul Gebhardt, creative director and senior vice president of design at the Oneida Group; Ellen Wayland-Smith, author of Oneida: From Free Love Utopia to the Well-Set Table and descendent of the Oneida Community; and Kate Wayland-Smith, resident of the Oneida Community Mansion House.
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