Are we living in a ‘golden age’ of political conspiracy theories? James Tilley asks what belief in them tells us about voters and politicians.
15 February 2019
The Guardian: How a Slovakian neo-Nazi got elected
In many of the smaller settlements there were simply not enough jobs, and the most talented people got out as soon as they could. There was a vague resentment at being seen as second-class citizens inside the European Union, and a more acute feeling that the Slovak political class was isolated from the masses and only interested in lining its pockets. Soon enough, the same issues would fuel the rise of rightwing populism across the region. Within a few years, after migration and nationalism had taken over the political agenda, much of Europe would also be grappling with the far-right’s success at the ballot box. But back in 2013, nobody was expecting a neo-Nazi to win an election. How was it possible that 55% of voters had backed someone this extreme? [...]
Kotleba rebuffed my attempts to talk with him, saying he did not trust western journalists, so, instead, I met Milan Uhrík, who was Kotleba’s deputy in Banská Bystrica and is now an MP from his party. We drank coffee in a shopping mall outside his home town of Nitra, an hour’s drive away from Banská Bystrica. Regarded as the polished face of Kotleba’s party, Uhrík had a couple of days’ worth of light stubble and wore a checked shirt. He spoke to me softly in fluent English, and although he was friendly enough, within seven minutes of us sitting down, he was on the defensive, insisting unprompted that he had no problems with “the Jews”. He repeatedly denied Kotleba or the party was racist or fascist, batting away criticism with wide-eyed mock-surprise and the predictable retort that the real victims of discrimination were white Slovaks.
Uhrík ran over what he saw as the achievements of Kotleba’s time in office, which he lamented were fairly miserly only because the central government had blocked them from doing more. I asked him what he was most proud of, and he buried himself in his phone, looking for the right English translation. “Ah, pickaxes, that’s the word,” he said with a boyish grin. “Pickaxes and shovels – that was our programme.” The policy in question hit on two of Kotleba’s favourite themes in one: Roma and roads. It involved long-term unemployed people being put to manual labour on the roads, using the simplest of tools. It employed around 90 people, many of them Roma. “They couldn’t work with computers, or do some business, they were simplest people on the labour market, but they have to do something because when they sit at home and do nothing they just start drinking, stealing and doing some criminal stuff,” he said. Kotleba’s programme was widely criticised for being both demeaning and pointlessly inefficient. It was soon shut down by the regional parliament – in Uhrík’s mind, because they were alarmed by its success. [...]
After being crushed at the polls, the party was liquidated by the courts in 2006 for its overtly anti-democratic nature. Kotleba took a brief break from politics, opening a shop in Banská Bystrica called “KKK – English fashion”. The three Ks were meant to represent the three Kotlebas, but the Ku Klux Klan reference was fairly obvious, especially given the clothing on sale – T-shirts and hoodies with far-right emblems and insignia. Kotleba and his followers regularly dressed in Hlinka Guard uniforms (making minor alterations, as the actual uniforms were illegal). “We are Slovaks, not Jews, and that is why we are not interested in the Jewish issue,” he said in 2009, when asked about the wartime deportations of the Jews from Slovakia by the very unit in whose uniform he was dressed. [...]
Kotleba did not have control of the regional parliament, which tried to frustrate his initiatives at every turn, but he set about making his influence felt wherever he could. He was particularly put out by programmes promoting human rights and tolerance in schools, and issued guidelines suggesting that instead of doing that, it would be better if the schools held beauty pageants. These were aimed at “girls learning to present themselves as ladies, and for them to see that there is still a world that values women’s dignity and spiritual beauty”. Some schools ignored the recommendations and still held the anti-extremism sessions; others did indeed hold beauty contests. Kotleba’s Kulturkampf continued in other areas, as he cancelled a contemporary dance festival he deemed to contain “pornography”, as well as an EU-funded project to resettle people with mental disabilities from a decaying communist-era facility into smaller supported housing units, and reintegrate them into society.
The Guardian: From Columbine to Parkland: how we got the story wrong on mass shootings
The school shooter era. Even 10 years after Columbine, I still couldn’t perceive what we were living through in that way. No one could. It had been going on far too long, but it was hard to predict its endurance or trajectory. While I despise the media scorekeeping – awarding the killers titles like prizefighters, giving them exactly what they crave – one stat is worth noting: what was then the most notorious mass murder in recent American history no longer ranks in the top 10. Four of the five deadliest attacks in the US have occurred since then, three of them in the past three years. In a five-day period near the end of last month, the US suffered four mass murders in four different states: Louisiana, Georgia, Pennsylvania and Florida. This is not going away, it’s getting worse. [...]
Since 20 April 1999, I have studied most of the major mass shootings and some of the smaller ones. I have written about them individually and collectively. I have joined the Academy of Critical Incident Analysis (ACIA) team in studying several incidents, including on-site studies at Virginia Tech after the 2007 shooting and in Las Vegas in 2017, and an off-site analysis of Norway’s 2011 Workers’ Youth League attack in Utøya. A troubling trend emerged: many of the mass murderers emulated Columbine killers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. The FBI released more than 1,500 pages of documents about the horror at Sandy Hook elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut in 2012, when Adam Lanza killed 20 first-grade students and six members of staff, as well as his own mother. It details just how obsessively Lanza was following Harris and Klebold. He amassed a hoard of Columbine information on his hard drive, frequented a chat room dedicated to the attack, and role-played the killers in an online game. If only this were an isolated incident.[...]
We had good reason. In the wake of Columbine, America was united in one idea – that something had to change in three obvious areas: police, schools and guns. The police surrounding Columbine High had failed to consider the possibility that the gunmen had no demands. They just wanted to kill people. After considerable analysis, police forces across America upended their response to these attacks with the active shooter protocol. They now neutralise most major attacks within minutes, saving countless lives. Schools responded too, with threat assessment teams, lockdown drills and advance coordination with law enforcement, who now have blueprints to their buildings and alarm codes. The changes were swift, and dramatic, but they were primarily aimed at reducing the death count once bullets were already in the air.
On prevention? On minimising the ability of perpetrators to arm themselves to the hilt, US politicians responded with ... nothing. Worse than nothing, they have regressed. Columbine brought great hope for gun control, but almost no meaningful legislation. Politicians of all stripes were afraid of the power of the National Rifle Association (NRA). In 2000, vice-president Al Gore stuck his neck out. He defied the conventional wisdom that gun control was politically toxic, ran on it and lost the electoral college, by a whisker, in two southern states he should have carried easily. Either one would have led to him defeating George W Bush. Guns were blamed, and the Democrats went from squeamish on gun control to terrified. [...]
In fact, the two were uninterested in their particular victims, just the body count. Mark Juergensmeyer, one of the great thinkers on terrorism, captured the essence of that phenomenon in one phrase: performance violence. A defining characteristic of terrorism is some sort of political agenda. But the Columbine killers realised they could employ those same tactics for their own petty self-aggrandisement. A whole generation of murderers have followed in their wake.
VICE: The South Korean Love Industry
With one of the lowest birth rates in the world, South Koreans are predicted to become extinct by 2750.
Because of the rapidly ageing population this situation has created, elderly prostitutes known as "Bacchus ladies" have cornered a number of public parks as their working areas. Meanwhile, as the marriage rate falls and the country's younger generation continues to live at home well into their twenties, young people have been forced to book themselves into purpose-built sex motels to avoid the prying eyes of parents.
We sent Matt Shea to investigate this generational crisis, which led him to Seoul's Red Light District, a pre-wedding photo-shoot on the set of a Korean soap opera, and an erotic sculpture park on South Korea's "honeymoon island".
The New York Times: Sexual Abuse of Nuns: Longstanding Church Scandal Emerges From Shadows
The pope’s remarks on Tuesday, in response to a question posed on the papal plane about Ms. Scaraffia’s article, came after decades of persistent allegations of such abuses, and seeming Vatican inaction, which has now collided with the heightened awareness of the #MeToo era. They also came just ahead of an extraordinary conference of bishops on sexual abuse scheduled this month at the Vatican.[...]
Advocates for abused nuns were relieved the pope had at last put the issue on the church’s radar. But they also noted that it was a long time coming and that the pope’s other remarks Tuesday did not inspire confidence in a speedy solution. [...]
“I was wondering when he said they were dealing with the problem for a long time, because we just don’t know what those actions are,” said Zuzanna Flisowska, the general manager of Voices of Faith, a group advocating for more participation by women in lay leadership positions inside the church. [...]
In 1994, Sister Maura O’Donohue sent the Vatican the results of a multiyear, 23-nation survey about such abuse, which was especially rampant in Africa where nuns were considered safe sexual partners for priests who feared infection by H.I.V.
Vox: The important questions about universal basic income haven’t been answered yet
Their takeaway? We’re studying the wrong things. We’ve pinned so many hopes to UBI — some of them contradictory — that it’s not clear anymore what concrete empirical results from our pilot programs would help us conclude it’s a good idea. At the same time, proponents typically haven’t characterized their plans in enough detail that we can figure out how to pay for them and how they’ll affect the poor.
That doesn’t necessarily mean UBI is a utopian pipe dream. But it does suggest that, right now, UBI is proposed as a solution to many different social ills, and the details of UBI proposals are often underspecified — so it’s not clear who’d get money, how much, or how we’d pay for it. If we want to fix our welfare system, that has to change. [...]
But other arguments for UBI assume it will decrease the labor supply. The technological unemployment argument, for example, seems to rest on the assumption that UBI will decrease the labor supply — and that this is a good thing. Under this model, UBI is part of how we transition from a society where people need to work to a society where they don’t. Complaining that they won’t get jobs is beside the point.
As the paper spells out, this makes it tricky to evaluate whether UBI programs are living up to expectations. We haven’t decided what problem we want to solve, much less what experimental results we’d see if we’d successfully solved it. [...]
And that’s not the only problem. Eliminating all existing transfer programs in favor of a UBI would leave some big holes. For example, under the UBI they propose, a single parent of three children would be eligible for $12,000 a year in total assistance. Under the current system, that parent would likely be eligible for a lot more: health care through Medicaid, food stamps, rent and housing assistance, and potentially transfer payments through Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. “Replacing existing anti-poverty programs with a UBI would be highly regressive,” the paper argues. That’s not what anyone’s going for.
Politico: Winners and losers of Europe’s copyright reform
The European Commission, Parliament and EU countries agreed Wednesday on the controversial copyright reform, after two and a half years of painful negotiations and unprecedented lobbying campaigns from all sides of the argument.[...]
The legislation agreed this week creates a new EU-wide right for press publishers, allowing them to seek compensation from Google for having their content displayed on Google News. It also makes it mandatory for platforms such as Google’s YouTube to strike licensing deals with the cultural industry, film producers, record companies, collecting societies and other rights holders seeking such deals as a condition for their content to be shared on platforms. Platforms will also become legally responsible for copyright-protected, licensed content that has been unlawfully uploaded. [...]
Authors and performers: Songwriters, film and movie directors, actors, musicians, screenwriters — they all won a lot more from the reform than what was originally expected. They managed to add to the text a “principle of appropriate and proportionate remuneration.” This means they’ll be able to seek compensation for the exploitation of their work, proportionate to the revenues generated by their material, rather than based on a flat rate.[...]
Small and medium-sized enterprises: Small and medium-sized enterprises almost derailed the reform, when Germany and France couldn’t agree in the Council of the EU on whether they should be included within the legislation. Germany wanted a broad carve-out for platforms with an annual turnover under €20 million. France preferred only a targeted exception on very specific measures. Paris ultimately had the last word, and the targeted exception only applies to enterprises with an annual turnover under €10 million, a monthly audience under 5 million unique visitors and which are less than three years old.
Vox: A year after Parkland, support for stricter gun laws wanes
A new NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll found that 51 percent of Americans support stricter gun laws in the United States. While that’s still a slim majority, it’s a significant drop from when the same poll was conducted last year, soon after the Parkland shooting, when 71 percent of Americans said gun laws should be tightened. [...]
It’s a familiar pattern: In the immediate aftermath of mass shootings, there is a bump in support for gun restrictions, and calls for gun control increase. But over time, public attention on the issue fades, and Congress fails to act. It’s what happened after the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012, at Pulse nightclub in 2016, and at a Las Vegas concert in 2017. [...]
According to the Giffords Law Center, legislators on both sides of the aisle in 26 states and Washington, DC, enacted 67 new gun safety laws last year. And gun control advocates saw some important victories in the 2018 midterms — Washington state voted to raise the legal age to buy semiautomatic refiles from 18 to 21, and Democrats won governorships in states such as Wisconsin and Nevada and took back the House of Representatives, potentially setting the stage for more action at both the federal and state level. The House Judiciary Committee just this week approved two bills that would expand background checks for gun purchases. [...]
Those attitudes show up in the NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll. Fifty-eight percent of Americans say it’s more important to control gun violence, but 37 percent prioritize protecting gun rights. And 58 percent of Americans believe the right to own and carry a gun is just as important as other constitutional rights, such as freedom of speech, religion, and the press. Americans seem divided on what guns mean for crime: 28 percent think more people owning guns leads to more crime, 26 percent think less, and 42 percent don’t think it will make a difference.
The Guardian: Four in five Vatican priests are gay, book claims
The 570-page book, which the French journalist and author Frédéric Martel spent four years researching, is a “startling account of corruption and hypocrisy at the heart of the Vatican”, according to its British publisher Bloomsbury.
It is being published in eight languages across 20 countries next Wednesday, coinciding with the opening day of a conference at the Vatican on sexual abuse, to which bishops from all over the world have been summoned.
Martel, a former adviser to the French government, conducted 1,500 interviews while researching the book, including with 41 cardinals, 52 bishops and monsignors, 45 papal ambassadors or diplomatic officials, 11 Swiss guards and more than 200 priests and seminarians, according to a report on the Catholic website the Tablet.
Many spoke of an unspoken code of the “closet”, with one rule of thumb being that the more homophobic a cleric was, the more likely he was to be gay. [...]
Although the book does not conflate homosexuality with the sexual abuse of children, Martel describes a secretive culture among priests that creates conditions in which abuse is not confronted, say people familiar with the book’s contents.
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