The Guardian: Death on demand: has euthanasia gone too far? – podcast

Over the past few decades the Bible has been increasingly sidelined, and the law has vindicated the young doctor who put Antonius to sleep. As people got used to the new law, the number of Dutch people being euthanised began to rise sharply, from under 2,000 in 2007 to almost 6,600 in 2017. (Around the same number are estimated to have had their euthanasia request turned down as not conforming with the legal requirements.) Also in 2017, some 1,900 Dutch people killed themselves, while the number of people who died under palliative sedation – in theory, succumbing to their illness while cocooned from physical discomfort, but in practice often dying of dehydration while unconscious – hit an astonishing 32,000. Altogether, well over a quarter of all deaths in 2017 in the Netherlands were induced. [...]

Many Dutch people write advance directives that stipulate that if their mental state later deteriorates beyond a certain point – if, say, they are unable to recognise family members – they are to be euthanised regardless of whether they dissent from their original wishes. But Last January a medical ethicist called Berna Van Baarsen caused a stir when she resigned from one of the review boards in protest at the growing frequency with which dementia sufferers are being euthanised on the basis of a written directive that they are unable to confirm after losing their faculties. “It is fundamentally impossible,” she told the newspaper Trouw, “to establish that the patient is suffering unbearably, because he can no longer explain it.” [...]

The underlying problem with the advance directives is that they imply the subordination of an irrational human being to their rational former self, essentially splitting a single person into two mutually opposed ones. Many doctors, having watched patients adapt to circumstances they had once expected to find intolerable, doubt whether anyone can accurately predict what they will want after their condition worsens. [...]

Privately, even surreptitiously undertaken, suicide leaves behind shattered lives. Even when it goes according to plan, someone finds a body. That openly discussed euthanasia can cushion or even obviate much of this hurt is something I hadn’t really considered before meeting the de Gooijers. Nor had I fully savoured the irony that suicide, with its high risk of failure and collateral damage, was illegal across Europe until a few decades ago, while euthanasia, with its apparently more benign – at least, more manageable – consequences, remains illegal in most countries

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The New York Review of Books: Fool Britannia

Britain is a country under self-inflicted stress, gripped by fear of the unknown. Remainers and Leavers—two tribes that have taken on the mythic stature of Roundheads and Cavaliers in a second civil war—are clinging together like drowning swimmers, each side convinced that the other is provoking an epochal disaster, neither side understanding why the other won’t submit to its version of reason and allow itself to be guided back to the surface. As the deadline approaches and the clock runs down toward the “No Deal” outcome that was supposed to be unthinkable, the divided nation faces what is, by any standards, a major political crisis. However, as British people like to remind one another, we are supposedly at our best in a crisis. [...]

The battle over Europe has been fought not over the technicalities of the “Irish backstop” (maintaining the open border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland), NHS funding, or traffic flow through Dover, let alone harmonized airline regulations or the trading benefits of a Canada-plus model (along the lines of the one Canada signed with the EU in 2016, following seven years of negotiation), but through Spitfires, Cornish pasties, singing “Jerusalem” on the last night of the Proms, and what the Irish historian and journalist Fintan O’Toole calls “the strange sense of imaginary oppression that underlies Brexit.” O’Toole’s Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain is an acid and entertaining examination of what he calls, after the scholar Raymond Williams, the “structure of feeling” that has made the project of leaving the European Union politically possible. [...]

Crucially, the equation of a “European superstate” with a project of German domination is part of what O’Toole calls the “mental cartography” of English conservatism. In 1989 Margaret Thatcher showed François Mitterand a map (taken out of her famous handbag) outlining German expansion under the Nazis, in order to demonstrate her misgivings about German reunification. On January 7 of this year, the pro-Remain Conservative MP Anna Soubry was forced to pause a live TV interview outside Parliament as protesters sang, “Soubry is a Nazi, Soubry is a Nazi la-la-la-la.” The European Union is, to these people, just a stealthy way for the Germans to complete Hitler’s unfinished business.[...]

Though widely derided, this opinion is, in certain circles, something of a commonplace. In his yearning for a cleansing fire to burn away the disloyal and revive a lost organic community, Middleton displays a disturbing protofascist mindset. The idea that the suffering of No Deal Brexit would be fairly shared is, of course, transparently absurd. A primary driver of Brexit, both among ordinary voters and among the political and business elite, is the desire to circumvent “regulation” in the form of European legislation on workers’ rights and safety, and to prevent appeals to the European Court of Human Rights. Brexit would cement the changes that took place after the 2008 crash, which was the pretext for a reduction of the social safety net under the guise of so-called austerity. The aim is to remake Britain as a “buccaneering” (for which read “predatory”) low-tax, high-risk place, a sort of reset to the pre-1945 world, before the inauguration of the welfare state and postwar social democracy. Nothing about the political complexion of its proponents suggests an ambition to build community of any kind.

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Places Journal: Confucius and Mao at the Mall

State-sponsored public art has long been woven into the urban fabric of the People’s Republic of China, but such works have proliferated in recent decades as the country has embarked on the greatest city-building binge in human history. For residents of cities like Chongqing and Shanghai, propagandistic political imagery like that in Zhang Xiang’s An Bing series has become as ubiquitous as capitalist advertisements — in fact, the two often alternate in the ads that flash across flat-screen TVs in every subway car and city bus. One minute a smiling animated sheep is beckoning viewers to dine at a local hotpot chain; the next, a computer-graphics montage shows shiny molten metal pouring into a mold and emerging as a mighty hammer and sickle that rises triumphantly over the city. At first glance, the figure on the billboard looks like a happy little boy rendered in trendy kawaii style. Look again, and he is revealed to be rosy-cheeked Lei Feng, the model soldier of Maoist propaganda, wearing his trademark winter hat with ear-flaps and toting an automatic weapon.

Mao regarded his revolution as an historic rupture. But the Party now presents its regime as a restoration, returning China to its traditional place as the world’s largest economy and most powerful state. In the last fifteen years or so, official edicts have elevated numerous philosophers and statesmen from the ages of the emperors — including Confucius and An Bing — to secular sainthood, part of a growing pre-Communist pantheon that emphasizes parallels between the wealthy and powerful Middle Kingdom that endured for millennia before Western imperialism, and the nation eclipsing the West today. The government has an ambitious ideological agenda to push and full coffers from the state-capitalist boom. For China’s artists, there’s never been more money to be made in Communist art. [...]

China’s state-backed real-estate boom and concomitant public-art boom have attained a magnitude that is difficult to fathom: Consider that between 2011 and 2013, mainland China poured more concrete than the U.S. poured in the entire 20th century. 2 And even such stunning factoids fail to capture what it’s like on the ground, firsthand. Local and regional governments are spending lavishly to establish a new kind of public space in China, marked by a disorienting hybridization of Communist, nationalist, and capitalist symbols and functions that is, by turns, futuristic and nostalgic. Even the most pedestrian-hostile, neo-Corbusian developments include some officially-zoned walkable area, typically a shopping plaza, and here developers pay de facto in-kind kickbacks to officials in the form of sycophantic public monuments. Public spaces like parks are dotted with nationalistic art sponsored by flush municipal bureaus. The aim is to unify an ever-wealthier yet increasingly unequal society, as well as to exert the soft power of unelected authorities both Communist and capitalist.[...]

So much publicly-funded art has been produced since the turn of the last century that the nation is scrambling for places to put it all; a significant portion of all that freshly-poured concrete has gone to build new palaces of culture. In 2002, China’s State Administration of Cultural Heritage announced that, by 2015, it would build one thousand museums. In classic Stakhanovite fashion, this audacious central-planning goal was met — and exceeded — ahead of schedule, and by 2013, China had founded nearly fifteen hundred new galleries. At the peak of the campaign, a new museum, invariably stuffed with Socialist Realist oil paintings, was opening every single day. 5 Among the most acclaimed is the China Art Museum in Shanghai, housed in the Chinese national pavilion from Expo 2010, a massive showplace along the Huangpu river.

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Aeon: Sex talks

What kind of speech act is an invitation? What does it do? Invitations create a hospitable space for the invitee to enter. When you invite someone to something, they are not obligated to accept the invitation. But also, you are not merely opening a neutral possibility; you are making clear that they would be welcome. If I say to you: ‘I’m cooking dinner at my place on Wednesday and I want you to please come, and if you don’t I’ll be hurt,’ then I am requesting your presence, not inviting you. Conversely, if I say to you: ‘I’m cooking dinner at my place on Wednesday and you can show up or not, it’s totally up to you, I don’t care either way,’ then this is not really an invitation but perhaps more like an offer; at best it’s a highly unwelcoming, inept invitation. Invitations leave the invitee free to accept or reject them. If you turn down my invitation, I get to be disappointed, but not aggrieved (although I can feel aggrieved if it is turned down rudely or insultingly). An interesting quirk of invitations is that, if they are accepted, gratitude is called for both from the inviter and the invitee. I thank you for coming to my dinner, and you thank me for having you. [...]

A sexual invitation opens up the possibility of sex, and makes clear that sex would be welcome. Invitations are welcoming without being demanding. Although we are usually pleased when people accept our sexual invitations, we generally don’t want people to agree to sex with us as a favour to us, as it would be if it were the granting of a request. And the invitation needs to be felicitous and appropriate. I cannot invite you to have sex with someone else other than me (which would be both infelicitous and unethical). I cannot invite you to have sex with me if doing so would be an abuse of power, or if for other reasons it would be difficult for you to say no to the invitation (which would be both inappropriate and unethical), or at the end of a two-minute chat about the weather in the grocery line (which would be inappropriate and probably uncomfortable). The mere fact that an invitation can be freely turned down does not give people licence to issue infelicitous or inappropriate invitations – which is something that street harassers, for instance, often don’t seem to understand. [...]

An invitation need not presume that the recipient wants to accept it. But a gift offer is designed to be an act of generosity that pleases the recipient (whether or not it succeeds in doing so), and it calls for reciprocation. This is part of why, unlike sexual invitations, sexual gift offers are typically presumptuous and inappropriate in the early stages of getting to know someone, when you don’t yet know what would please them and you aren’t yet in a position to impose an obligation to reciprocate on them. But generous offers of sexual gifts, designed first and foremost to please one’s partner rather than to directly satisfy one’s own sexual desires, are a normal part of an ongoing healthy relationship. Such gifts do create an obligation to reciprocate, though not immediately, or exactly in kind, or on any particular schedule. If you routinely indulge my sexual desires out of generosity, it is disrespectful and undermining of our relationship if I never reciprocate. [...]

Part of what is interesting about safe words is that they let someone exit an activity at any time without having to explain themselves, or accuse anyone of transgression or any other kind of wrongdoing (although they can also be used when there has been a transgression). Calling ‘red’ does not imply that anyone has messed up or violated consent; it simply ends things. It calls for no apology and requires no apology after its use. It is significant that safe words are typically semantically irrelevant words that are not going to otherwise come up in a normal sexual encounter – they are designed to intrude minimally and unambiguously, without calling for interpretation, discussion or conversational response. Without a safe-word system, if I want to abruptly end a scene or activity, I need to say something like: ‘Stop this immediately.’ It’s very difficult for such a speech act not to come off as a rebuke; it almost inevitably creates a rift in our interaction that now needs repairing.

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The Guardian: Rewriting the past: do historical movies have to be accurate?

Nearly 30 years ago, many historians were concerned about the fabrications in Oliver Stone’s JFK (1991), which made up a conspiracy behind the murder of John F Kennedy. Between 1963 and 2001, pollsters Gallup tracked the percentage of Americans who believed Lee Harvey Oswald acted as part of a conspiracy, rather than as a lone killer. The statistics show the film had little impact. In 1983, 74% believed in a conspiracy; after the film’s release in 1992, that crept up to 77%; by 1993 it had fallen back to 75%. There was a far bigger jump between 1966, when only 50% believed in a conspiracy, and 1976, when 81% did. That was probably the result of the controversial House Select Committee on Assassinations, which, in 1976, took the view that there had been a conspiracy, though it wasn’t sure which one. Most serious historians think Oswald acted alone. They may well be concerned that a majority of Americans disagree, but those Americans seem to have been substantially more influenced by politicians than by film-makers.

Stone’s film did have an effect. In 1992, Congress responded by ordering that all remaining documents pertaining to the assassination would be released by 2017. Ninety-nine per cent are now available, and nothing in them has provided evidence for any conspiracy. As of 2017, the figure for Americans who believe in a conspiracy was down to 61%. Again, this change seems more attributable to politicians and historians than film-makers. [...]

If we can’t make clear rules about what constitutes acceptable historical fictionalisation, and we don’t want our governments to set up bureaucracies to enforce them, we are left with our present situation. Film-makers will make whatever historical films they can get funded. Some care deeply about history, and do feel a responsibility towards it, but they are paid by studios and investors to do a job that is not that of a historian. If we want film-makers to prioritise responsibilities to history or art rather than commerce, they need more public funding. As it is, films are generally commercial products. It’s up to us to choose what we watch and how we respond.

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Political Critique: A Tale of Two Europes

Examples of the unimaginative elite are easy to find. The financial crisis hitting Europe in late 2007, which rapidly turned into a crisis of the euro, was above all a crisis of the banks which could have been decisively addressed early on and could have been used to complete the fiscal union necessary for the sustainability of the eurozone. Instead, the structural weaknesses of the eurozone and the lack of proper balanced governance of the single market persist, and the crisis has instead been used to reinforce a neoliberal economic model based on austerity and precarity which works to the benefit of a few elites principally in core European countries. [...]

Likewise, the increased migration flows in 2015 were not only predictable but predicted and the European Union not only failed to make adequate preparations for these but failed to use the policy mechanisms already at their disposal, instead allowing itself to get into a ‘beggar-thy-neighbour’ situation where each member state blames the other. Few take responsibility and the fortress around the European Union is reinforced. Again, this situation is not sustainable. People will continue to come to Europe, and either efforts to stop them will become so restrictive that the rights of Europeans to move will become caught up in the fortress, or a real coordinated European asylum and migration policy will be developed. [...]

Now let us turn to the history ‘from below’ of the European Union, which is perhaps the real novelty in the past decade: the first time that a European citizenry has really expressed itself as such. The last decade has not only seen crisis, but also citizens mobilising to address them. We have had solidarity actions with and inside Greece and refugee-welcome initiatives, ‘blockupy’ mobilisations against the policies of the European central bank, the launching of NGO boats to rescue migrants in the Mediterranean (most recently the boat Mediterranea in Italy, the first such boat to sail with an Italian flag and therefore in principle the right to dock), Amazon and Deliveroo strikes in the gig-economy, mobilisations to protect or advance women’s rights to abortion in Poland and Ireland, or the rights of LGBT couples in Romania, protests for freedom of the press and against corruption in Romania, Slovakia, Malta and elsewhere. Such civic initiatives have found electoral expression and success, notably at city level. Cities like Barcelona under the administration of Ada Colau have become inspiring paradigms for others. [...]

How the Brexit process evolves will be crucially important for the future direction of Europe. The European Union elites are attempting to use the process to generate legitimacy for themselves negatively: by showing how bad it is to leave the European Union, they aim to build legitimacy amongst their own populations. This shows the staggering lack of positive ideas for the future of the Union amongst the elites. On the other side, the far-right nationalists build their betrayal narrative not only in the UK but across Europe – ‘look at the mendacious European Union which once again frustrates national sovereignty’ – and hope for an even more dysfunctional European political economy they can exploit further.

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IFLScience: The UK Is "Banning" Porn. What Does That Actually Mean For You?

It is not exactly clear how the government are going to execute this, but it is unlikely to be just an “I am over 18” tickbox. Some have suggested that it could be a similar deal to online gambling age-verification, whereby users are expected to plug in their credit card details or ID to prove their age. Alternatively, there is also talk of convenience stores selling so-called “porn passes” that would allow access to adult websites with a 16-digit passcode, provided they show the shopkeeper their ID.[...]

Equally, this bank would be a gold mine for anyone hoping to gather up dodgy data for sinister purposes. Remember the data breaches at Ashley Madison in 2015? Hackers stole over 60 gigabytes worth of users’ data from Ashley Madison, an online dating agency marketed to people who wanted to have an affair. The data, which quickly made its way onto the dark web, contained thousands of people’s names, emails, addresses, sexual fantasies, and credit card information.[...]

It will be relatively easy to override all of this using some relatively basic tech wizardry. The UK will be the only jurisdiction where this law applies, but it’s possible to fake your geo-location using a VPN (virtual private network). Equally, it seems a bit optimistic just to assume that prohibition will simply eradicate teenager’s curiosity to experience pornography. Where there’s a will, there’s a way.[...]

In 2014, the same UK government banned “female ejaculation” and “face-sitting” from making an appearance in disturbed porn films (although this was overturned on January 31, 2019). This sparked a fair amount of opposition from people arguing that this was sexist, as male ejaculation and aggressive male-orientated oral sex acts were not included.

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Quartz: Photos: African-led churches are taking charge of the gospel in England

As indigenous church populations have dwindled in the United Kingdom, numbers at churches founded by African immigrants have swelled. Last year, a survey showed “an unrelenting decline in Church of England and Church of Scotland” numbers. Only 14% of Britons identified as members of the Church of England—a record low. Similarly, Church of Scotland numbers dropped to 18% from 31% in 2002. In total, 52% of people said they had no religion. [...]

As Quartz Africa has previously reported, African “reverse missionaries” in the UK are increasingly leading Christian evangelism, catering to local African immigrant audiences while also looking to revitalize Christianity among indigenous populations. It’s a visible reverse from nearly five centuries of when Christian missionaries first brought the religion to to African communities. The Redeemed Christian Church of God (RCCG) is a prominent example of the outward expansion of African-founded churches. First founded in Nigeria in 1952, RCCG now has churches in 198 countries globally.

As the cultural center of Christianity has shifted, Africa has become the world’s largest Christian continent. While in 1950 an estimated 80% of the world’s Christians were in Western countries, by 2025, at least 50% of the world’s Christians will be in Africa, Latin America, and parts of Asia. But some of the spread of Christianity in the developing world has also been linked to economics with studies showing people are more likely to attend church in the world’s most unequal countries than they are in the most equal ones.

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Deutsche Welle: German town votes 'No' to street names

The residents of Hilgermissen, a small town that lies between Bremen and Hanover, have rebuffed a plan by local officials to introduce street names.

Sixty percent of the 1,282 voters who took part in Sunday's referendum disagreed with the proposal. Turnout was 69 percent. [...]

Public broadcaster NDR said some residents had noted an "irritable atmosphere" between supporters and opponents of the street name proposal in the lead-up to Sunday's vote.

The result of the referendum is binding on the council for the next two years.

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