Branding: Laurie Taylor explores the 'persuasion industries' and their role in creating modern consumer society. How has their use of an emotional model of brand communication, whether in political campaigning or product advertising, transformed our understanding of the rational consumer? He's joined by Steven McKevitt, Visiting Professor in Brand Communication, at Leeds Beckett University. Also, how 'branding' can desensitize far right consumers to extremist ideas. Cynthia Miller-Idriss, Associate Professor of Education and Sociology at American University, discusses her study into the ways in which extremism is going mainstream in Germany through clothing brands laced with racist and nationalist symbols.
6 April 2019
The Guardian Longreads: Dirty lies: how the car industry hid the truth about diesel emissions
And, as it turned out, Volkswagen wasn’t the only one evading the law. Less flagrantly, but to similar effect, the vast majority of diesel cars were making a mockery of emissions rules. In the wake of the revelations in the US, European governments road-tested other big brands too. In Germany, testers found all but three of 53 models exceeded NOx limits, the worst by a factor of 18. In London, the testing firm Emissions Analytics found 97% of more than 250 diesel models were in violation; a quarter produced NOx at six times the limit. “As the data kept coming in, our jaws just kept dropping. Because it is just so systematic, and so widespread,” German says. “VW isn’t even in the worst half of the manufacturers.” With a few honourable exceptions, “everybody’s doing it”.
In the US, where only around 2% of cars are diesel, the rule-breaking had an impact. But the health consequences have been far more severe in Europe, where drivers had been encouraged for years to buy diesel cars – when the scandal broke, they accounted for more than half of all sales. In 2015 alone, one study found that failure to comply with the rules caused 6,800 early deaths. To put it more plainly, tens of thousands of people had died because carmakers felt so free, for so long, to flout the law. [...]
While the US is, in so many ways, an environmental laggard compared to Europe, air quality is a glaring exception. The EPA has, over the years, built up tremendous legal and technical expertise. At least until its evisceration in the Trump years, the EPA was known for its diligence in supplementing regulations with circulars and advisories that precisely defined every term, clarifying ambiguities and laying out what was allowed and what was not. The result was a system that, if not watertight, was a lot less leaky than elsewhere. In Europe, while the rules might look similar, no one goes to the trouble of making clear exactly what they mean, so polluters provide their own interpretations. Its atrocious air offers a cautionary tale that those undermining US regulation would do well to heed. [...]
I learned to my astonishment that some in power knew about the consequences all along. I spoke by phone to Martin Schmied, an official at Germany’s federal environment agency. His department, he told me, had been taking cars on the road for 25 years to measure emissions – and publishing the results. Year after year, they found diesels producing NOx above the legal maximum; six times, in one recent test. I asked him to clarify: Germany’s government, and anyone who read its public reports, has known for decades that automakers were flouting the rules? Schmied responded that as long as emissions went down when limits were tightened, his department didn’t mind they were many times higher than allowed. “We publish this data,” he said. “In principle, this is nothing new.”
Haaretz: Sex Parties, Drugs and Gay Escorts at the Pope's Residence: Undercover in the Vatican
This is not the only affair that Martel mentions from the period of Benedict XVI. He devotes a special chapter to the pope’s visit to Cuba in 2012. The visit, which was supposed to be a historic event in one of the last bastions of communism, devastated the pope. Backed by testimonies of high-level figures in the Vatican who accompanied the pope on the journey, and offering a vivid, concrete description, the chapter captures the despair that seized the pope when he grasped the scale of the homosexual prostitution and the pedophilia within the ranks of the Church there. What was flagrantly monstrous in the Cuban case was that the Castro regime knew what was going on within the Church and turned a blind eye, in return for the full cooperation of the Havana archbishopric with the regime.[...]
Martel also devotes a long chapter to the man who, in his view, was the most abhorrent pope of all – Paul VI, one of the strictest and most conservative leaders of the Catholic Church. In the face of the sexual revolution, in the 1960s, this pope toughened the Church’s stance: against the pill, against masturbation, against homosexuality. But as in many cases in which it turned out afterward that the most ardent combatants against sexual permissiveness were also the prime suspects, Martel elaborates on the rumors and gossip that were rife in the Italian press about a romantic relationship between the pontiff and a theater and TV actor named Palo Carlini, the vigorous denials and the ultimate dismissal of suspicions by none other than Ratzinger himself, who signed the decree that led to the title “Venerable,” and later sainthood, being conferred on Paul. [...]
“In order to familiarize yourself with the world of male prostitutes around Rome’s central station, you need to be multilingual and speak Romanian, Arabic, Portuguese and Spanish. I was helped a great deal in learning about these goings-on by a young man named Mohammed, who in return for a drink or a meal gave me information about what was happening in the neighborhood. Mohammed is a Tunisian who works with two friends, Billal and Sami, as prostitutes in Rome. I had another collaborator, Gabi, a young Romanian sex worker from Bucharest. He told me that from his point of view, the busiest days for work are Fridays, when the priests leave the Vatican in civilian attire, and Sunday afternoon, when the boredom in the Vatican drives them outside. He can identify them by the crucifix around their neck when they disrobe, but also without that – by the stress they’re under. Sometimes the priest takes him in to the Vatican. If the priest is a bigwig, they tell me, he will get paid generously, sometimes 100 or 200 euros instead of the usual 50 to 60. Some of them showed me proudly the phone numbers of the priests they visit regularly. [...]
“I interviewed quite a few graduates of seminaries. In my estimation, 75 percent of those who attend the seminaries are gay. All of them told me that in our day, masturbation, which in the past was a subject not mentioned in public, has become, at the Vatican’s instructions, a central issue in the training of priests. The reason is no longer the biblical injunction against spilling your seed in vain, but the need to exercise totalitarian supervision over the young man who is cut off from his family and from his body: It’s the negation of personality in the service of the collective. The Church’s opposition to masturbation became an idée fixe, utterly insane, with the result that those who masturbate necessarily live in a kind of ‘closet’ within a closet – a kind of doubly locked homosexual identity. What a shame for the Church, which is fighting masturbation more than it is fighting pedophilia. That says it all.”
Foreign Policy: In Ukraine’s Election, Pro-Russian Candidates Can’t Win
In the other 93 percent of Ukraine, however, things have not gone in the Kremlin’s favor. For Ukrainian politicians focused on consolidating their country’s independence and national identity—and that includes Poroshenko and most of the country’s political class—the status quo is tolerable. They would prefer to get Crimea and the Donbass back, yet Russia’s ongoing occupation has its benefits too. In seizing those areas, Russia chopped off the two regions with the least-developed sense of Ukrainian identity. And with them gone, no pro-Russian candidate could win a Ukrainian election. Long gone are the days when candidates such as former President Viktor Yanukovych, who was openly sympathetic to Russia, could win a majority of votes. [...]
It is less clear what Russia is getting from the status quo. The Kremlin has proved willing to bear the costs of occupation, paying for soldiers’ salaries, tolerating the collapse in Russia-Ukraine trade, and putting up with Western sanctions that will persist until Moscow agrees to return the Donbass to Ukrainian control. Why? There are several potential explanations. [...]
Yet Russia’s neighbors do not seem to have gotten the message. Just last year, Armenia tossed out its pro-Russian government, installing a younger crowd that wants better ties with Europe. Fearing blowback, the new Armenian government has insisted that its revolution is not anti-Russia. But the country is tacking closer to the West all the same. [...]
European Union membership for Ukraine is no more likely in the short term. But here, too, the Donbass is not the most important factor. More significant is the EU’s own expansion fatigue. Ukraine, with 44 million people, would be the most populous country to join the EU since Spain joined the then-European Communities in 1986. Integrating countries such as Romania and Bulgaria caused plenty of difficulty. Ukraine is significantly bigger, and it would be significantly harder to integrate. Existing member states aren’t eager to take on that challenge now.
CityLab: What Can European Socialists Teach the American Left?
First, the Northern Europeans are focused on building strong national and local institutions that can make markets and drive societal benefits, not just change policy. Cities like Copenhagen and Hamburg, for example, have created public asset corporations that dispose of publicly owned lands and buildings in ways that spur large-scale urban transformation, particularly around historic harbors and downtowns. The revenue from such regeneration is then used to fund infrastructure, affordable housing, and other societal benefits. These regeneration efforts show a mature balance between public- and private-sector interests—a stark contrast to the tax-break scramble over landing Amazon’s HQ2, or New York City’s Hudson Yards private megaproject. [...]
Second, the Northern Europeans are devolutionists—they use the nation-state to provide a platform for local market realities, political priorities, and social needs. Denmark, for example, has a decentralized government system, enabling municipalities to operate as strong partners with the national government. According to a 2009 OECD review, local governments in Denmark account for over 60 percent of government spending, the highest level among OECD peers. Copenhagen’s ambition to be the first major global city to generate zero carbon emissions is enabled by a strong fiscal foundation, coupled with mechanisms that give local officials input in national policy that would be unprecedented in the United States.
Along with that local power and legitimacy comes more voter participation: While the U.S. suffers from voter turnout of 20 percent or less in local elections, Copenhagen has consistently experienced turnout of 70 percent. Accordingly, local capacity is likewise strong. The knowledge and decision-making capacity of the public sector is robust, with a steady supply of highly educated public servants across technical, environmental, social, and business fields. The supply stems from the free tuition public sector educational system (which also greatly benefits the private sector).
Aeon: Turkey’s hard white turn
In 1909, the US Circuit Court in Cincinnati set out to decide ‘whether a Turkish citizen shall be naturalised as a white person’. The New York Times covered the case without noting that the plaintiff who brought the case was a Turk. The Times asked: ‘Is the Turk a White Man?’ and answered both yes and no. ‘The original Turks were of the yellow or Mongolian race,’ the Times reported, and they ‘are a cruel and massacring people … But they are also Europeans, as much “white” people as the Huns, Finns, and Cossacks.’ The question of whether the world considered the Turkish people white, and the uncertain responses to it, helped to propel Turkey’s modernisation efforts, and also shaped the state’s support for particular narratives of national identity and, for decades, their dissemination in education. [...]
The Ottoman empire entered the First World War on the side of Germany. Defeat led to the collapse of the empire, and the emergence of the Turkish republic. By the 1930s, Turkish reformers began emphasising the need for deep cultural transformation. In Europe and the US, the image of the ‘terrible Turk’ carried real popular power. Chester Tobin, an American who coached the Turkish Olympic track team in 1924, wrote in his memoirs: ‘The European cliché of the “Terrible Turk” had been sharply imprinted in the minds of Americans by the close of the First World War. It was cast in human baseness.’ The ‘Terrible Turk’ imagery was a legacy of the Ottoman government’s handling of non-Muslim minority populations and their nationalist claims. It also derived from brutal ethnic conflict between Muslim Turks and non-Muslim populations during the tumultuous years of First World War. [...]
Other prominent Turkish scholars of eugenics also tried to popularise the cause. Newspapers published articles with eugenics-inspired headlines such as ‘Should the Mad, the Feeble-Minded, and the Sick Be Sterilised?’ While Turkish eugenicists were trying to establish the whiteness and Europeanness of their civilisation, Hitler was fantasising about a superior race that availed itself of what he saw as Islamic immorality and ruthlessness. In his memoirs, Albert Speer, the Nazi Minister of Armaments, noted that Hitler expressed admiration for the ruthlessness of Muslim Turks. Hitler wished Turks had conquered Europe and converted the continent to Islam. He imagined a superior race of ‘Islamised Germans’ who could circumvent the moral limits of Christianity. So race science could lead its believers to an array of conclusions about preferred or desirable political outcomes.[...]
This last claim was an interesting twist on the peculiarly racist one-drop rule in the US, whereby anyone with any black ‘blood’ is black. In the Turkish model, racial mixture did not debase the ‘superior’ race. Instead, it raised and assimilated ‘inferior’ races. Turkish people learned that the cradle of Western whiteness and civilisation was to be found in Asia. The American philosopher John Dewey (1859-1952) visited Turkey in 1924 to prepare a report on education, and quipped: ‘It is paradoxical that it should be necessary for a nation to go into Asia in order to make sure that it is to be Europeanised.’
Politico: Emissions up as car buyers switch from diesel to gasoline
Average CO2 emissions from new cars rose in 2017 for the first time since 2010 — largely due to the fuel change, according to final data released by the European Environment Agency (EEA) on Thursday.
That’s bad news for the EU’s efforts to cut emissions by at least 40 percent by 2030. Cars are responsible for around 12 percent of total EU CO2 emissions, according to the European Commission. [...]
Since 2010, emissions from new cars have fallen by 15.5 percent, or almost 22 grams of CO2 per kilometer; but emission reductions slowed between 2015 and 2016. [...]
The share of plug-in hybrid and battery-powered electric cars rose from 1 percent to 1.5 percent in 2017. Hydrogen cars made an appearance for the first time with fewer than 200 units, while other alternatives such as liquefied petroleum gas and compressed natural gas cars accounting for the remaining registrations.
Fortune: Finland's Universal Basic Income Experiment Just Gave Lawmakers a Really Good Reason to Back the Idea
In its first report, Kela said the basic income didn’t much affect the amount of work that the subjects picked up during the experiment, but it did make them feel healthier and less stressed, and more confident about their ability to find work. [...]
Here’s where it gets interesting for lawmakers. According to Kela: “Respondents who received a basic income had more trust in other people and in societal institutions—politicians, political parties, police and the courts—than members of the control group.” [...]
On a scale of 0 to 10, where higher numbers denote more trust, basic income recipients gave an average score of 6.8 for trust in other people, versus 6.3 in the control group. Trust in politicians and political parties got an average 4.5 among basic income recipients and 4.0 in the control group, and trust in courts and cops was 7.2 versus 6.9, again with the control group providing a lower score.[...]
In the U.S., a universal basic income is one of the core proposals of 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang, who maintains that it would not make people lazier. The preliminary Finnish results seem to back him up on that. Kela’s survey, conducted just before the end of the two-year experiment, also showed that those who received the basic income were just as willing to use official job-finding services as those who did not.
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