The Guardian: How the murders of two elderly Jewish women shook France

But one reason the case became so notorious is that it fit into what has become a common narrative. France is the only country in Europe where Jews are periodically murdered for being Jewish. No fewer than 12 Jews have been killed in France in six separate incidents since 2003: Sébastien Selam, Ilan Halimi, Jonathan Sandler, Gabriel Sandler, Aryeh Sandler, Myriam Monsonégo, Yohan Cohen, Philippe Braham, François-Michel Saada, Yoav Hattab, Lucie Attal and Mireille Knoll. [...]

For Rachid Benzine, a scholar of Islam and a well-known French public commentator, these killings are best understood in the context of what he calls postcolonial antisemitism. “For me, this is a holdover from the colonisation of Algeria, linked to the treatment of Algerian Jews compared with Muslim natives,” he said. In 1870, for instance, the so-called Crémieux decree secured full French citizenship for all Jewish subjects residing in Algeria, whereas Arab Muslims remained under the infamous code de l’indigénat, which stipulated an inferior legal status, essentially until 1962. The legal disparity continued even after Algeria won independence, when hundreds of thousands of former colonial subjects from North Africa continued to arrive in metropolitan France. Jews like the Attal family, originally from the Algerian city of Constantine, arrived in France as citizens. Muslims, however, had to apply to the government for the privilege of citizenship.

Benzine also noted “the unfortunate reality that the Palestinian tragedy fuels the perception among many Muslims that we somehow have the Jews of France to blame”. Another factor, he said, is the so-called concurrence des mémoires. “We have this competition of who’s suffering most,” Benzine said. Many French citizens of west African origin, for instance, argue that while the French state has invested fully in preserving the memory of the Holocaust, it has made little effort to preserve the memory of slavery. “The disparity is a fact, and it’s true that many black people say, ‘look what they do for Jewish people, and there’s nothing for us,’” Louis-Georges Tin, an activist and the former director of the Representative Council of France’s Black Associations (CRAN), told me recently. Paris is home to one of the world’s premier Holocaust museums and research centres, and a black plaque adorns the façade of nearly every building in the city from which a Jewish child was deported during the second world war. All that commemorates slavery in Paris, the capital of a former slave-trading nation, are two small nondescript statues. The only museum that documents this history is in the overseas department of Guadeloupe, nearly 7,000km from mainland France. [...]

Even the phrase “the new antisemitism” is contested. If the old antisemitism was associated with France’s Catholic far right, which has hardly disappeared, the “new antisemitism” is today used almost exclusively to describe Muslim hatred of Jews. In that sense, many on the left believe that “naming the problem” actually makes it worse, enshrining difference in a society that officially recognises none, and repeating the kind of racial stereotypes that only exacerbate social divisions. But others, both on the right and in the Jewish community, ask whether Attal and the other French Jews who have been killed since 2003 are collateral damage in an egalitarian social project that was always doomed to fail. They often decry what they call “ostrich politics”, what they see as the wilful blindness of the left with regard to Islam.

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The New York Review of Books: The Many Lives of Liberalism

Strikingly, while the authors go about their tasks in very different ways, they each look above all to the same place for inspiration: revolutionary France. Past histories of liberal free-market democracy have tended to find its origins and fullest expression in the Anglo-American political tradition, with particular attention to the seventeenth-century English political writer John Locke. His arguments that men had a natural right to life, liberty, and property, and to resist tyranny, are easily cast as an origin point of the modern liberal ideal. These histories treated continental Europe as a place of great liberal hopes but even greater, indeed catastrophic failures: the French Revolutionary Terror, fascism, and many other varieties of political extremism. Miller, Rosenblatt, and Edelstein by contrast all urge us to look away from what Edelstein arrestingly calls the “strange and atypical” Anglo-American story. Miller barely mentions Locke, and Rosenblatt and Edelstein both try to knock him off the perch on which earlier histories placed him. Rosenblatt states categorically: “Liberalism owes its origins to the French Revolution.”

Taken together, the three books suggest that the Western liberal tradition may indeed have the strength and the resources necessary to withstand the political storms now gathering. But we should not conflate this tradition with the narrower set of mostly Anglo-American ideas that has been conventionally identified as its core, and labeled (mistakenly, according to Rosenblatt) “classical liberalism.” All three authors clearly believe that this narrower tradition has concerned itself too heavily with individual rights—above all, economic rights—as opposed to the common good. It has not paid enough attention to moral values and moral education, and it has not done enough to encourage broad democratic participation. Such arguments are not entirely new, but these books offer impressive new evidence and analyses. And at a moment when liberal democracy has shown itself rather more resilient in France and Germany (even with their current travails) than in Brexit Britain and Trumpist America, the case for looking to Continental sources for inspiration is particularly timely. [...]

Nor did Athens launch a durable democratic tradition. After its fall, democracy as a concept fell into long centuries of discredit and eclipse, with most leading Western commentators, up to and including the American Founding Fathers, seeing it as barely superior to mob rule. America, Miller reminds us, was not founded as a democracy but as a republic in which wise elites would restrain unruly expressions of the popular will. Only with the French Revolution did an ideal of egalitarian, participatory government again gain prominence. Miller here singles out the urban sans-culotte movement, which briefly turned the local electoral districts of some French cities into democratic assemblies, open to all male residents and meeting in permanent session. And he has particular praise for the Marquis de Condorcet’s draft constitution of 1793, which would have given local assemblies unprecedented power to challenge and curb the actions of a national legislature (the draft was never approved, still less implemented). [...]

To the extent that a self-conscious “liberal” movement existed, according to Rosenblatt, it was not to be found in Britain and America but on the European continent, starting in the French Revolution. While respectful of individual rights, this liberalism was moralizing, elitist, and concerned with the classic philosophical question of how to construct a stable, enduring, moderate regime. In France, the writers Benjamin Constant and Germaine de Staël, who came to prominence in the Revolution’s last stages, developed a political program that remained much closer to the earlier meanings of “liberty,” with an emphasis on a paternalistic “government of the best.” In the nineteenth century, German thinkers led the way in developing a “liberal” Protestant theology as well as economic ideas that anticipated the policies of modern welfare states. These self-proclaimed liberals, Rosenblatt notes, were emphatically not democrats. They mistrusted the common people and advocated limited suffrage. Nor were they libertarians. They generally did not consider property a core right, and while they warned against government becoming tyrannical, they did not seek to minimize its powers. Constant defended laissez-faire in the economic realm; many others did not.

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Social Europe: Why Alexis Tsipras is still not a social democrat

Recently, Alexis Tsipras, Greece’s prime minister and leader of the populist left-wing SYRIZA, which forms a coalition with the right-wing populist ANEL (Independent Greeks) party, has been trying to approach European social democratic leaders in a strategy of opening up to centre-left forces. Indeed, the transformation of Tsipras, from a political leader who criticized the European Union, the “old” parties, including the social democrats, and the Troika (IMF, ECB, EC), to a prime minister who agreed and implemented the third memorandum of understanding in Greece with absolute prudence and agreement with the lenders, constitutes an interesting case study. But this shift should come as no surprise. The reason is specific and related to the very notion of populism; it also tells us whether Tsipras is a social democrat or not. [...]

Apart from cynicism, the radical left-right coalition government is also distinguished by another populist feature: “liberal authoritarian” leadership that undermines democratic institutions such as the rule of law. On the one hand, the government has criticized the independent judiciary for judging certain executive acts as unconstitutional, such as the proposed law on national channels – whose main aim was to reduce pluralism – that limited the licenses to four while the digital broadcasting system could emit more than ten. The restriction of pluralism was precisely the goal of a government that was finally reined back by judicial forces. The attack on the institutions of justice and the media continues even today and undermines the rule of law and democracy itself. [...]

EU social democratic decision-makers may consider that the imminent rescue of a minimum number of MEPs via the participation of SYRIZA members could be a solution to the prolonged crisis in social democratic political identity. But this means the legitimization of social democracy as such only through numbers and not the elaboration of values-based policies. It is more a process of echoing Tsipras’s populist discourse rather than undergoing a radical injection of progressive social values. Social democracy can only overcome its crisis through working towards humanizing socio-economic reality rather than accepting a populist discourse tied to the personal aspirations of one “politician”. Thus, this leader and his party still do not have any real relation with social democracy and its values, and consequently, a possible affiliation can only be dangerous for the latter.

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FiveThirtyEight: The Era Of Easy Recycling May Be Coming To An End

Americans love convenient recycling, but convenient recycling increasingly does not love us. Waste experts call the system of dumping all the recyclables into one bin “single-stream recycling.” It’s popular. But the cost-benefit math of it has changed. The benefit — more participation and thus more material put forward for recycling — may have been overtaken by the cost — unrecyclable recyclables. On average, about 25 percent of the stuff we try to recycle is too contaminated to go anywhere but the landfill, according to the National Waste and Recycling Association, a trade group. Just a decade ago, the contamination rate was closer to 7 percent, according to the association. And that problem has only compounded in the last year, as China stopped importing “dirty” recyclable material that, in many cases, has found no other buyer.

Most recycling programs in the United States are now single stream. Between 2005 and 2014, these programs went from covering 29 percent of American communities to 80 percent, according to a survey conducted by the American Forest and Paper Association. The popularity makes sense given that single-stream is convenient and a full 66 percent of people surveyed by Harris Poll last October said that they wouldn’t recycle at all if it wasn’t easy to do. [...]

There’s some evidence that this contamination can be high enough that it ends up counteracting any increase in the volume of material you got from the ease of single-sort. A 2002 study, for example, compared five different methods of recycling collection in the city of St. Paul, Minnesota, with the city’s then-current multi-sort system. Single-stream recycling produced the highest rate of loss at the processing stage — essentially, the most stuff put in recycling bins that couldn’t actually be recycled. Compared with the existing system, gross tons of recycling collected at the curb increased by 20 percent, but there was a net decrease of 12 percent in tons of material that left the sorting facility ready for recycling.

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The Atlantic: Trump the Toddler

Twenty days into a partial government shutdown, the impact on government workers, their families, and basic services is coming into view. Food is not being inspected. Transportation Security Administration workers are calling in sick rather than working without pay. Millions could be evicted from their home, hundreds of thousands of workers are about to miss their paycheck, and tens of millions could lose food assistance. All because the president isn’t getting his way. [...]

What makes this shutdown distinctly Trumpian is not only that the president has taken credit for it, but that it was provoked by his most reliable trigger, being humiliated by a woman. Democrats and Republicans had already negotiated a deal to fund the government and border security without the wall. But after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told Trump that he lacked the votes to pass a bill with money for a wall and Ann Coulter mocked him, Trump erupted and demanded that the lame-duck Republican House pass funding for a wall, scuttling the deal. When Trump met with Democrats on Wednesday and they repeated that they will not fund his wall, the president said “Bye-bye” and walked out. Making maximalist demands, offering nothing in return, and then withdrawing in anger the second those demands are not met is a child’s strategy for getting what he wants.

Others have already pointed out that the empirical case for the wall is thin. Despite what the administration has argued, most drugs come to the United States through ports of entry; terrorists fly to the U.S. rather than engaging in dangerous, grueling overland treks over thousands of miles to enter from the southern border; and the wall won’t halt the smuggling or illegal entries it is designed to stop. It would, however, be a massive, official symbol of American hostility toward immigrants of Latin American descent, which is why it matters so much to both Trump and his fiercest supporters.

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Politico: Matteo Salvini pledges ‘Italo-Polish axis’ after Warsaw talks

Both sides have an interest in cooperating in the European Parliament. PiS is a founding member of the European Conservatives and Reformists — the European Parliament's third-largest grouping. However, the looming departure of the U.K. Conservatives thanks to Brexit will dramatically shrink the party, so it needs fresh blood. [...]

A new Salvini-led grouping incorporating nationalists and populists from across Europe could give PiS much more heft in the European Parliament, and buttress its defenses in its ongoing dust-up with Brussels over charges that it is violating the EU's legal and democratic principles. [...]

Salvini insists that Northern European countries should accept migrants arriving in Italy, while Kaczyński has built his electoral support on refusing any reallocation of asylum seekers. Salvini is also against extensive EU cohesion funds being granted to Central Europe in the next multiannual EU budget, while PiS is advocating for continued generous financial flows.

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IFLScience: This Is What Ancient Egyptian Homework Looked Like

A wax tablet mounted in a wooden frame dating back to second-century-CE Egpyt, at that time under Roman Empire control, reveals the ancient lessons taught to elementary-school-age children 1,800 years ago. Though there is no name on the tablet, so the identity of the pupil is unknown, back then formal education was almost exclusively the realm of males from wealthy families.

The tablet reveals a lesson in ancient Greek, including a reading and writing exercise and multiplication table. Lines written presumably by a teacher have been copied out by a rather endearingly wobbly hand, though according to Peter Toth, curator of the exhibition to feature the tablet at London’s British Library, the sentences weren’t just for practicing the alphabet but also to impart moral lessons. [...]

That the tablet – about the size of a paperback book, or, again prophetically, your electronic tablet of choice – survived nearly 2,000 years is impressive. Wax typically breaks down in moisture so the dry clime of ancient Egypt would have helped preserve it.

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