The Atlantic: Survivors of Church Abuse Want Zero Tolerance. The Pope Offers Context.

In a speech at the end of a Mass in which prelates had offered a “mea maxima culpa,” Francis put the Church’s sexual abuse crisis in historical and cultural context. Studies find most sexual abuse happens in the home, he said. And pornography and sex tourism are also scourges in the world. He warned against “justicialism provoked by guilt for past errors and media pressure, and a defensiveness that fails to confront the causes and effects of these grave crimes.”

The pope was speaking to bishops as a pastor, not issuing guidelines—a few of those were announced at the conference’s conclusion. But as Francis spoke, I couldn’t help but think that his contextualizing underscored and even exacerbated one of the deepest divides in the Catholic world today: Between the expectations of victims in the United States—who want “zero tolerance” for convicted abusers—and the way the Vatican conceives of the crisis. [...]

One of the biggest unresolved flashpoints here is the concept of “zero tolerance.” Many victims’ groups in the United States, France and elsewhere are calling on the Church to issue a “one-strike” policy of defrocking priests convicted of abuse and bishops on whose watch priests abused. The term “zero tolerance” was not used much at the conference, and was not in a series of 21 “reflection points” the pope asked participants to consider. If anything, the conference seemed to back away from the idea of defrocking, tending instead to focus on the idea of removing a priest from ministry in some cases rather than removing him from the clerical state.

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Jacobin Magazine: Spain’s Troubled Spring

Today, Sánchez’s government is at the end of the line. And again the issue at the center of Spanish politics is the national question. With Spanish nationalists on the rise and the Catalan and Basque independentists withdrawing support for Sánchez’s budget, fresh elections are now set for April 28. The result of the campaign is uncertain. But things are not looking promising for the forces of social transformation. With the Catalan independentists lacking a strategy for a way forward, the Left is once again buried in in-fighting. [...]

Vox’s breakthrough and the rise of Ciudadanos (with the PP also holding firm) meant that there were enough right-wing MPs to hand the presidency of the Andalucían region to the PP for the first time. This union of the three right-wing forces is key to the reconstruction of the political camp so dear to former conservative premier José María Aznar; the absolute majority he won in 2000 may indeed repeat itself in the April 28 contest. Though they act separately, these forces today make up a three-headed beast, with the conservative soul of the PP in concert with the liberal soul of Ciudadanos and the ultra-right Vox.

Such are the forces of Spanish nationalism. Yet from the outset the Catalan independentists had been decisive in getting Sánchez into office. They unconditionally backed his bid to oust Rajoy in June 2018, in the hope that a PSOE government would make gestures toward dialogue with the Catalan autonomous government and some kind of solution for the Catalan political prisoners. This contrasted with the right-wing Basque nationalists of the PNV, who played their hand best, selling support for Sánchez in exchange for greater economic powers for the Basque Autonomous Community. [...]

With this question we get to the most tangled knot in the current situation. The PSOE can hope to bind the left-wing electorate behind itself on the basis of two main developments, namely the fragmentation of Unidos Podemos (with divisions at the regional level, but especially the bad image resulting from Iñigo Errejón and Manuela Carmena’s plan to stand separately of the party in the Madrid local elections) and the danger represented by the far-right Vox, which the polls predict to be on the brink of a historic breakthrough. Calling the elections so soon will leave all of its right-wing rivals relatively unprepared, and also exploit a moment in which Unidos Podemos is internally divided and lacks a strategic perspective.

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Vox: This is an emergency, damn it

The release prompted a great deal of smart, insightful writing, but also a lot of knee-jerk and predictable cant. Conservatives called it socialist. Moderates called it extreme. Pundits called it unrealistic. Wonks scolded it over this or that omission. Political gossip columnists obsessed over missteps in the rollout.

What ties the latter reactions together, from my perspective, is that they seem oblivious to the historical moment, like thespians acting out an old, familiar play even as the theater goes up in flames around them.

To put it bluntly: this is not normal. We are not in an era of normal politics. There is no precedent for the climate crisis, its dangers or its opportunities. Above all, it calls for courage and fresh thinking.[...]

But 2 degrees is not the worst-case scenario. It is among the best-case scenarios. The UN thinks we’re headed for somewhere around 4 degrees by 2100. Believing that we can limit temperature rise to 2 degrees — a level of warming scientists view as catastrophic — now counts as wild-haired optimism, requiring heroic assumptions about technology development and political transformation.[...]

The left will never win the money game. The right’s billionaires are united in advocating for their interest in lower taxes, less regulation, and less accountability. The left’s are more likely to pick vanity causes or candidates. They love social causes but are far less likely than their counterparts on the right to focus on economic issues or redistribution, in part because many of them are quasi-libertarian tech bros who believe they are smarter than governments and better able to “change the world” if left to their billions.

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The Atlantic: America's Dopamine-Fueled Shopping Addiction

Consumerism in the U.S. has reached an all-time high. In 2017, we spent $240 billion on goods such as jewelry, watches, luggage, books, and phones—twice as much as in 2002, even though our population grew by only 13 percent during that time. This is not to mention the 81 pounds of clothes and textiles that each American throws away annually, or the 26 million tons of plastics we collectively dispose of each year.

In a new animated video, writer Alana Semuels describes why shopping is so addictive and emphasizes the urgency in finding an encompassing solution to the problem of wasteful consumerism.

The New Yorker: An Unflinching View of Venezuela in Crisis

Alejandro Cegarra’s photo series “State of Decay” is an unflinching portrait of Venezuela’s collapse. How this country went from being one of Latin America’s richest societies to one of its poorest is a disaster of bewildering proportions, one that defies easy explanation. Venezuela has the largest proven oil reserves in the world, but since the 2014 crash in world oil prices, on which Venezuela depended for more than ninety per cent of its export revenues, its economy has contracted continuously, unleashing an economic crisis worse than that experienced by Americans during the Great Depression. In the past five years, three million of Venezuela’s thirty-two million people have fled the country. More than half of all Venezuelans lack enough food to meet their daily needs. The country’s hospital system has all but failed; countless Venezuelans have died owing to a lack of medical attention and the scarcity of medicines for treatable illnesses. Hyperinflation is expected to reach ten million per cent this year. On top of everything else, Venezuela’s murder rate is among the world’s highest, making it one of the most dangerous countries in the world to live in.

Shot between 2013 and 2019, Cegarra’s remarkable series of black and white images takes us beyond these statistics. (This year, the project was nominated for a World Press Photo award.) A native of Caracas, Cegarra depicts life in his home town as precariously strung-out and pared-down, shorn of any softness. We see street preachers shouting, inmates weightlifting, children running in fear, bloodstains on the ground, predatory soldiers with masked faces and black helmets, men brandishing weapons, one of them a youngster standing purposefully with a sawed-off shotgun. There are listless people in supermarkets with empty shelves, funerals and mourners, women and children with fear on their faces.[...]

At his swearing-in ceremony, in February of 1999, Chávez promised to transform Venezuela—and over the next decade and a half he did just that. While a global oil-price boom brought a trillion dollars into his treasury, Chávez declared his country to be the chrysalis of a revolutionary political force that he dubbed “twenty-first-century socialism.” He aligned himself with Cuba and spoke out against the United States. Meanwhile, the oil money was spent as fast as it came in, much of it on social programs to alleviate poverty, but also on expensive Russian weaponry for the armed forces and on subsidies to Cuba and other friendly governments that signed onto Chávez’s vision of a world free of Yankee domination.

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Politico: Georgian leader revives French connection

Zourabichvili met President Emmanuel Macron on Tuesday at the Elysée Palace, on her first bilateral foreign trip as head of state. The visit was also something of a return home. Although she was elected president of the land of her ancestors in December, Zourabichvili was born in France and spent three decades working in its foreign service.

While Macron repeatedly stressed the friendship between their two countries, he also stuck to standard French talking points, designed to avoid rocking the boat with Russia. He reiterated France’s continued support for Georgia’s territorial integrity and sovereignty — but did not say explicitly that Moscow occupies 20 percent of the country.[...]

For France, any decision on Georgia is part of a bigger calculation about relations with Russia. And French ministers are not going to risk a confrontation with Moscow over a country of 3.7 million people, even if its president used to be one of their employees.[...]

Paris is willing to move to a harder line with Moscow generally, argued Nicolas Tenzer, a professor at Sciences Po university in Paris, but not on its own. “There is a will to be more firm with Russia but not for a confrontation, because France is still looking for allies," he said. “Trump’s America isn’t it and the Europeans are split.”

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Quartz: Test how moral (or immoral) you are with this utilitarian philosophy quiz

A utilitarian approach states that whichever action allows the greatest number of people to live would be the moral one. This perspective holds in the commonly-referenced related scenario, the “fat man” case, which asks whether you would push a fat man off a bridge to stop a trolley in its path and block it from running over five people. (This scenario involves a “fat man” to eliminate the possibility of self-sacrifice—your weight wouldn’t stop the trolley, but his would.) The utilitarian answer is that the moral decision is to sacrifice the heavyweight man, because you’d still be killing one to save five.

By contrast, many deontological moral theories, such as the moral laws proffered by 18th century philosopher Immanuel Kant, argue that killing is never acceptable—it would be immoral to pull the lever to kill one, even if that meant allowing the trolley to continue on its course to kill 100 people. Allowing harm to happen, by failing to stop the trolley continuing on its path, is not actively hurting someone and so would not be considered murder. And so, according to Kant, actively pulling the lever would be the immoral choice. [...]

Earp says the new scale should create a more nuanced psychological understanding of utilitarians. For example, he says, two key concepts within the theory—that welfare should be maximized for all, and that you should be willing to do “instrumental harm” to achieve such welfare—seem to be in psychological tension. Those who tend to be focused on the former seem to be instinctively more reluctant to enact the instrumental harm required by utilitarianism. Conversely, those who are less concerned about the instrumental harm tend to have a reduced sense of welfare for all. “The people who are not so fussed about causing instrumental harm and say, ‘yeah, I’d be willing to tolerate torture if that was necessary to stop a bomb going off’—those people tend to be relatively low on the impartial-beneficence side of the scale,” he says. “In the general population utilitarianism is not an intuitive position.”

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Quartz: Psychoterratica is the trauma caused by distance from nature

From 2004 to 2012, Japanese officials spent about $4 million dollars studying the physiological and psychological effects of forest bathing, designating 48 therapy trails based on the results. In one very small (and thus limited) but interesting study, Qing Li, a professor at Nippon Medical School in Tokyo, measured the activity of human natural killer (NK) cells in 12 men’s immune systems before and after exposure to the woods. These cells provide rapid responses to viral-infected cells and tumors, and are associated with immune system health and cancer prevention. In a 2009 study, Li’s subjects showed significant increases in NK cell activity in the week after a forest visit, and positive effects lasted a month following each weekend in the woods.[...]

That said, there are plenty of ways to take your nature medicine. Blue mind science is the study of water’s curative properties, and studies have shown that both a trip to the ocean and a shower at home prove soothing. A visit to the park is also restorative, as is walking barefoot and earthing—which is basically just connecting to the ground.

Even just digging your fingers in the soil of a potted plant can improve your mood and boost your immune system. It turns out that, like trees, dirt has properties that are good for human health. Soil has a microbiome and the more we contact it, the more we let it infiltrate our systems, the better our chances of maintaining physical and mental wellness.

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Deutsche Welle: Catholic Cardinal Marx says files on child abusers 'destroyed'

"Sexual abuse of children and young people can be traced back, in no small part, to the abuse of power in the area of administration," Marx said in his address with the pope in attendance.

Vatican officials were "trampling on the rights of victims" by deliberately canceling or overriding procedures for investigating child abuse, according to Marx.

"It was not the perpetrators, but the victims who were regulated and pushed into silence," said Marx, who also serves as the head of the German Bishops' Conference. [...]

On Saturday, Cardinal Marx called for transparency in order for the church to win back "trust," saying that secrecy provoked "conspiracy theories."

He urged the church to redefine its standards of confidentiality and make its judiciary more open, as well as report numbers and details linked with abuse cases.

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