Nautilus Magazine: Against Willpower

More fundamentally, the common, monolithic definition of willpower distracts us from finer-grained dimensions of self-control and runs the danger of magnifying harmful myths—like the idea that willpower is finite and exhaustible. To borrow a phrase from the philosopher Ned Block, willpower is a mongrel concept, one that connotes a wide and often inconsistent range of cognitive functions. The closer we look, the more it appears to unravel. It’s time to get rid of it altogether.  [...]

The specific conception of “willpower,” however, didn’t emerge until the Victorian Era, as described by contemporary psychology researcher Roy Baumeister in his book Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength. During the 19th century, the continued waning of religion, huge population increases, and widespread poverty led to social anxieties about whether the growing underclass would uphold proper moral standards. Self-control became a Victorian obsession, promoted by publications like the immensely popular 1859 book Self-Help, which preached the values of  “self-denial” and untiring perseverance. The Victorians took an idea directly from the Industrial Revolution and described willpower as a tangible force driving the engine of our self-control. The willpower-deficient were to be held in contempt. The earliest use of the word, in 1874 according to the Oxford English Dictionary, was in reference to moralistic worries about substance use: “The drunkard ... whose will-power and whose moral force have been conquered by degraded appetite.” [...]

A paradigmatic example of reframing is the phenomenon of “temporal discounting,” in which people tend to discount future rewards in favor of smaller immediate payoffs. When offered $5 today versus $10 in a month, many people illogically choose immediate gratification. However, when the question is reframed to make the tradeoffs explicit—“Would you prefer $5 today and $0 in a month or $0 today and $10 in a month?”—more people choose the larger, delayed reward. Research suggests that reframing the question in this way nudges people toward delayed gratification because the different versions of the question employ entirely different cognitive processes. In a neuroimaging study, when the question is edited to explicitly mention $0, not only are the brain’s reward responses reduced, brain activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (a correlate of effortful self-control) decreases as well.5 A conscientious reframing of a problem in this manner would certainly be an example of willpower, but it would not fall into the conventional understanding of the term. Rather than relying on an effortful fight against impulses, this kind of willpower has the individual completely reimagine the problem and avoid the need to fight in the first place. [...]

Doing so would rid us of some considerable moral baggage. Notions of willpower are easily stigmatizing: It becomes OK to dismantle social safety nets if poverty is a problem of financial discipline, or if health is one of personal discipline. An extreme example is the punitive approach of our endless drug war, which dismisses substance use problems as primarily the result of individual choices. Unhealthy moralizing creeps into the most quotidian corners of society, too. When the United States started to get concerned about litter in the 1950s, the American Can Company and other corporations financed a “Keep America Beautiful” campaign to divert attention from the fact that they were manufacturing enormous quantities of cheap, disposable, and profitable packaging, putting the blame instead on individuals for being litterbugs. Willpower-based moral accusations are among the easiest to sling.

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The Guardian: Mormon polygamists who believe Missouri is the 'promised land'

The Laubs live in a polygamous community of perhaps 400 people in rural Missouri between the towns of Humansville and Stockton. The residents call it “the Ranch”, though the agriculture is limited to a hay field and a few cows and chickens. People in the neighboring towns refer to the community as “the Compound”, but you won’t see any high walls or armed guards — just brown dirt roads winding through clusters of trees and homes. [...]

Today, some fundamentalist Mormon polygamists believe plural marriage is necessary to reach the highest level of heaven. Others practice polygamy simply to follow Smith’s teachings. These polygamists tend to believe in big families: women often give birth to 10 or more children. While some of the polygamist leaders have been known to have 20 or more wives, most men have two or three. [...]

A review of marriage licenses in south-west Missouri shows most residents of the polygamous community marry in their 20s, though a few brides and grooms have been as young as 17. In Mormon polygamy, the husband usually has one legal wife; subsequent marriages are ordained in a religious service, but there’s no license on file with any county clerk.

In Missouri, you can be convicted of bigamy if a married person “purports”, to quote the statute, to marry another person. The offense is a misdemeanor punishable by up to a year in jail. That’s a lesser punishment than, say, Utah, where polygamy is a felony punishable by up to five years in prison or 15 years if it’s committed in conjunction with a fraud or violent offense.

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Aeon: The English question (09 August, 2016)

In many ways England has hidden in plain sight; its identity disguised by being part of larger political entities that it dominated. England swallowed its neighbours on the British Isles and Ireland three centuries ago, then spread out across the globe as the British Empire. Out of this expansion emerged a shared British identity; it borrowed mostly from Englishness but also provided a capaciousness under which being Welsh, and even Scottish or sometimes Irish, could fit. [...]

The reemergence of English nationalism from Britishness has been a long time coming. As recently as 1997, a British Social Attitudes survey found that 55 per cent of English voters called themselves British, while just 33 per cent said they were English. But as colonies freed themselves and as Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales increasingly controlled their own futures, the English started to believe that Britain was holding them back too. By 2012, the 22-point gap in the BSA study had vanished: now 43 per cent of voters identified as English, the same number who identified as B­­­ritish.[...]

The English – especially those who voted Conservative – noticed that England, per head of population, got less money from the Treasury than the other British nations. The central British government had ministers for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland – but none for England. Scotland, where state expenditure per head is £1,600 higher than in England, has free NHS prescriptions. Scotland also has free – and excellent – university education. In England, students must pay. [...]

Sifting through the imagery driving this form of English nationalism, the vision of England that emerges is an old and familiar one. It is white, it is church-going in a ‘tea with the vicar’ kind of way and it celebrates World War Two’s victories as if they happened yesterday. It distrusts the foreign and the urban: it prefers villages and a never-changing countryside. It was best summed up by Conservative prime minister John Major in 1993 when he spoke of warm beer and cricket matches. It is a powerful vision and one not limited only to the right. The idea of England as a pastoral idyll, harking back to a pre-industrial age where everyone was content and at peace in nature, is a common one in culture, literature and politics. [...]

It is a fair point. For, if the progressive wing of English nationalism is to win out from the ruins of Brexit, then it will have to succeed at something British nationalism failed to do: knit a wide disparity of people together by persuading them of their mutual class interest in social justice. British nationalism did not succeed at this; its failure to convince a Glaswegian docker and a Birmingham factory worker that they have more in common than either has with a wealthy banker from Edinburgh or London partly explains the current fragmentation of British identity (and the British state). As the empire’s glow faded, a true class-based politics failed to emerge that could have provided a viable push for a British party of the left that fought for social justice across the whole United Kingdom. But Labour never operated in tribal Northern Ireland, it has been virtually wiped out by the SNP in Scotland, and in Wales must continually fend off the leftward jabs of Plaid Cymru.

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openDemocracy: The theory and practice of the Kurdish Women’s Movement: an interview in Diyarbakir

Placing the liberation of women at the center of his theory, Ocalan identified monotheistic religions, the nation-state, and capitalism as three roots of women’s oppression and traced the emergence of gender hierarchies as far back as the Neolithic era. Together with the focus on ecology and direct democracy, women’s empowerment is one of the pillars of democratic autonomy and confederalism – Ocalan’s vision of a non-oppressive society, pursued by the movement both in Turkish (Bakur) and Syrian (Rojava) Kurdish regions.

Putting this theory in practice, the Kurdish movement has set up 40% women’s quotas in their organizations, created women-only organizations parallel to mixed-gender ones, as well as women’s neighbourhood assemblies, academies and cooperatives, and introduced a co-leadership system with one woman and one man at the head of any administrative body, including in municipalities under the control of pro-Kurdish parties. [...]

This is the main dilemma for us as we deal with other women’s movements. When we propose to use a different paradigm, to think from a different perspective, western feminists feel as if we reject feminism and replace it with jineoloji. This is not the case. We have strong criticisms. For example, just like black feminists, we have criticized white feminism for taking only one – middle class white perspective and trying to solve all the problems around the world with the same method. But this cannot work. One theory cannot handle all the issues. For example, queer theory may work very well in Europe but it is not sufficient for us to explain what society is facing in Kurdistan.

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UnHerd: Why the Democrats need the Deplorables

Flyover country voters will be the decisive bloc because of America’s Electoral College. Presidents are not elected by getting more votes than their opponents; they win by getting more votes in the Electoral College than their opponents. Each state is allocated a number of these votes equal to the sum of its Senators and Representatives. By custom, with two tiny exceptions, all of the state’s Electoral College votes are given to the candidate who wins the most votes within that state.[...]

The recent Democratic sweep of the House of Representatives does not alter this equation. Democrats won the House vote by 8.6% in November. But most of the Democrats’ gains were in placed that won’t shift electoral college votes, places safely blue like California, New Jersey, or Illinois or safely red like Texas, Kansas, Oklahoma, South Carolina, or Georgia. In other words, under the Electoral College system, the votes they gained from Republicans are simply wasted. [...]

They are also patriotic; their dissatisfaction stems from the idea that America is failing to live up to its values by ignoring them. They are not racist or sexist; indeed they regularly vote for women or racial minorities in non-presidential elections. Just this year many Trump flyover voters supported a gay woman, Tammy Baldwin, for senate in Wisconsin. In Michigan, a majority of flyover voters backed a black Republican, John James, for senate; while significant minorities backed two Democratic women, Gretchen Whitmer and Debbie Stabenow, for governor and senator. Unsurprisingly, these voters keenly resent being labelled by urban and media progressives. [...]

Democrats do not need to win flyover country, they just need to avoid getting wiped out there. Just a few percentage points improvement over Clinton’s horrendous showing, combined with the gains in the suburbs Democrats have made under Trump, will be enough to tip the Electoral College in their favour. If the Democrats nominate someone who can treat flyover voters with understanding and respect, they will almost surely regain the White House in 2020.

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Vox: Egypt’s president tried to stop a 60 Minutes interview from airing. It’s now clear why.

In the Sunday interview with CBS correspondent Scott Pelley, Sisi uttered a series of lies and half-truths about his government’s gross human rights violations, and confirmed for the first time that Egypt’s military is working closely with Israel in the Sinai Peninsula. [...]

In the five years since he’s been in office, Sisi has presided over a security crackdown that’s left thousands dead, imprisoned tens of thousands more, and made the use of torture routine. He’s repressed free speech, undermined civil society, and ramped up a failing war ISIS-linked fighters in the Sinai. [...]

“Since Sisi took office, living standards have declined. The country is crumbling. The insurgency problem in the Sinai has only gotten worse. It’s backed by the Islamic State, entering its sixth year. And you’ve seen the mass incarceration of peaceful activists alongside hardened jihadists, which threatens to turn more Egyptians to terrorism. That seems to be a recipe for the very instability that Sisi claims he’s preventing,” Miller said.

However, this hasn’t seemed to have a significant effect on Egypt’s relationship with the US. Egypt remains the second biggest recipient of US aid after Israel, and President Donald Trump has hosted Sisi at the White House, referred to him as a “fantastic guy” — and even complimented him on his shoes for good measure.

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The Atlantic: What Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s 60 Minutes Interview Actually Reveals

But in a 60 Minutes interview that aired Sunday night, the new congresswoman downplayed her rebellious reputation. Yes, she wants Democrats to be more progressive, but it seems she plans to work within the party rather than launch public attacks from the left. [...]

The 60 Minutes spot was Ocasio-Cortez’s first high-profile interview since taking the oath of office late last week and was likely her longest serious sit-down to date. It’s unusual for a freshman representative to land such a prominent interview, but since her improbable primary win over the summer, she’s been the subject of countless stories in both the mainstream and the right-wing press, fed in part by her unusually transparent approach to public relations. The frenzy has created a feedback loop, with Ocasio-Cortez winning media attention because of all the media attention she’s already received. Still, the 60 Minutes interview did provide some substantive details about how Ocasio-Cortez plans to work in Congress.

Ocasio-Cortez positioned herself as a principled insider rather than a purist outsider. She articulated goals that fall within the mainstream of the post-2016 Democratic Party: “I want to be able to tell my grandchildren that we established a single-payer [health-care] system, tuition-free universities, and that we saved our climate for their future, because we decided to be courageous in the moment and make it happen.” [...]

With the biggest megaphone of all the House progressives, Ocasio-Cortez can help chart the course for the Bernie wing of the party in the House. It will have to decide whether it wants to be a thorn in Speaker Pelosi’s side, like the GOP’s hard-line Freedom Caucus under John Boehner and Paul Ryan, or play nice in public in the hope of influencing leadership behind closed doors. The new congresswoman’s interview suggests she’s got a plan, at least for herself: She’d rather become an influential insider than stay an outside agitator.

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Quartz: One of America’s most progressive new political leaders is a white, middle-aged man

According to the New York Times, Newsom’s first budget will include a proposal to give families six months of paid leave after the birth of a child, by far the most generous offer among US states. (There is no federal paid parental leave in the US; five other states offer it, as well as the District of Columbia, offering between four and 12 weeks.) [...]

For now, these are just proposals; the test of Newsom’s mettle will be to see what he can fund. He has other major problems to deal with, including the fact that California has the highest poverty rate in the US, massive income inequality, and a rapidly growing homelessness problem. Nor is he not the first to push for additional early childhood funding in recent years: As the LA Times points out, that has been a key demand of the Legislative Women’s Caucus. However, one lawmaker pointed out that Newsom’s early focus on families is promising: “Quite frankly, to start out with a January proposal that includes that investment in California’s children reflects a new day,” state senator Holly J. Mitchell (D-Los Angeles) told the paper.

California already offers six weeks of partially paid leave for parents, and an additional six weeks of disability for birth mothers. The leave is funded with employees’ payroll taxes. But families need more. As James Heckman, a Nobel laureate in economics, has shown, investing in kids early has a far higher rate of return when compared to trying to “fix” drop-out rates, crime, incarceration, and the physical and mental health toll of poverty and exclusion.

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Haaretz: China Refuses to Back Down Over Muslim Re-education Camps Despite Global Concern

Beijing has faced an outcry from activists, scholars, foreign governments and U.N. rights experts over what they call mass detentions and strict surveillance of the mostly Muslim Uighur minority and other Muslim groups who call Xinjiang home.

In August, a U.N. human rights panel said it had received credible reports that a million or more Uighurs and other minorities in the far western region are being held in what resembles a "massive internment camp." [...]

In one class reporters were allowed to briefly visit, a teacher explained in Mandarin that not allowing singing or dancing at a wedding or crying at a funeral are signs of extremist thought.

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