The Atlantic: Betting on Anti-feminism as a Winning Political Strategy

The smaller march that followed, however, was decidedly not courting the feminist vote. In a gravelly voice, a small woman introduced as a dissident of gender ideology—the expression is used by the global far right to designate advances in women’s and LGBTQ rights—declared that it was in fact men who were being discriminated against under the law. The crowd responded with thunderous applause. The sexes were being pitted against each other, and the only way to restore the balance, the speaker said, was by voting against feminist legislation. [...]

In many ways, its rise mirrors advances made by populist and far-right parties across Europe. A decade of slow economic growth, dislocations caused by the global financial crisis, and the vast wave of migration that has hit Europe in recent years have fueled disenchantment with traditional political groupings across the region. Spain had, for a time, been a rare exception to that shift. And in a way, that remains the case: Whereas most of the continent’s populist parties want to either gut the EU or leave it altogether, Vox’s focus is different. While blatant anti-feminist rhetoric is often employed by political parties in eastern Europe, such efforts are markedly less frequent in the west of the continent. That was, of course, until Vox announced its first legislative push in Andalusia—to demand that the region’s gender-violence law be scrapped. [...]

The party also espouses what Sílvia Claveria, a politics professor at Carlos III University in Madrid, described to me as “modern sexism”: It advocates longer maternity leave and encourages women to be proud mothers, but once women want to separate from or divorce their partners, it shifts positions to take the man’s side. According to Manuela Carmena, the mayor of Madrid and a politician known for her efforts to promote women’s rights, Vox has sought to benefit from “the frustration and confusion of many men who feel displaced by the growing role of women in society.” [...]

Such platforms are more often seen in eastern Europe than in western Europe, Ruth Wodak, a linguistics professor at Lancaster University and the University of Vienna who focuses on right-wing populist rhetoric, told me. France’s Marine Le Pen, shy of calling herself a feminist, has come out to defend “women’s rights” (though she did so largely to prop up her anti-immigration policies). The Dutch and Scandinavian far right have “more progressive gender politics,” Wodak says. These are mainly manifested in an apparent embrace of LGBTQ rights, though this too is often at the expense of immigrants: In 2015, Sweden’s far-right party staged an unofficial gay-rights parade in a predominantly Muslim neighborhood. In Italy, Matteo Salvini, the country’s interior minister and leader of the League party, has said that abortion and “equal rights between men and women” were not up for debate.

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Jacobin Magazine: Today, We Celebrate the Carnation Revolution

The MFA’s formation owed not to left-wing ideology but rather to Portugal’s colonial war between 1961 and 1974. The country spent thirteen years fighting against the anticolonial revolutions in Guinea, Mozambique, and Angola, with more than one million troops mobilized, over eight thousand dead on the Portuguese side and one hundred thousand dead on the African side. [...]

Revolution means conflict: and the MFA overthrew the dictatorship with troops and tanks in the streets. But its members were mostly from the petty bourgeoisie, and little politicized, their aims being limited to ending the war. That was their achievement on April 25, 1974, as middle-ranking officers mounted a coup d’état. This however also launched a wider revolutionary process, as the working and popular masses entered the stage. This also altered the balance of forces between the social classes. [...]

But while parallel forms of power emerged during the revolution, they did not develop and coordinate themselves nationally, as a viable alternative to the power of the central state. Indeed, if the state entered an enormous crisis, it did not collapse. This lack of alternative was one of the reasons why on November 25, 1975 the right wing was so easily able to restore “order” at the expense of these forms of dual power. [...]

The banks were nationalized and expropriated with no compensation whatsoever. And the right to free time was absolutely pivotal. Take the case of the demonstration by bakers working long hours, whose slogan was “we want to sleep with our wives.” As a slogan, it is very interesting, because nowadays we take it for granted that at eleven at night there are people selling socks in supermarkets or working on Volkswagen assembly lines. People won not just price freezes so that they could have decent meals, but the right to leisure and culture. They also won the right to housing, indeed by occupying vacant houses that were destined for speculation. Even judges sometimes backed them, as in the city of Setúbal. I’ll remind you that today in Portugal there are seven hundred thousand vacant houses, owned by real-estate funds, which do not pay taxes.

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openDemocracy: The people’s rebellion, or why a showman became president of Ukraine

This, then, is a rebellious popular vote against corrupt politics-as-usual by people who are largely non-political. In this sense, there’s a certain resonance with the Gilets Jaunes movement – and like their French counterparts, Zelensky voters do not have any political unity or ideological coherence. Their basic common denominator is negation. The demands and expectations of Zelensky voters are heterogeneous and even contradictory, ranging from putting an end to the war and oligarchy to increasing wages, lowering prices and household gas tariffs. But in the best traditions of 1968, they are demanding the “impossible” – just social conditions that are equal for all. And 73% means a clear refusal of any kind of negotiations or possible compromise with the current ruling class so that it could remain in power. [...]

While Zelensky voters may vary widely in their claims about what they voted for, they found common ground in what they voted against. First of all, they voted against the war. And this is not a blind denial of the reality of warfare and occupation – this vote was against the war as a political and economic system of relations between the state and the society that has emerged in Ukraine during the recent years. Russian military intervention and occupation has poisoned the atmosphere inside Ukraine, creating the conditions for political reaction in the form of bans on certain social media platforms, attacks on anti-corruption NGOs, the beating and killing of activists, racist pogroms and so on. [...]

Zelensky isn’t a right-winger or even a conservative, but rather a libertarian in a very broad sense, while right-wing populism is exactly what Ukraine has experienced under Poroshenko’s rule at its purest. Throughout most of his presidency, Poroshenko has addressed the Ukrainian public predominantly in a discourse of narrow-minded ethnic nationalism borrowed from Ukraine’s far-right Svoboda party. He ended up campaigning for president with the medieval slogan “Army! Language! Faith!” – in reference to laws protecting the Ukrainan language, military reforms and the creation of an independent Ukrainian Orthodox Church. In recent years, various extreme right and neo-Nazi organisations have been legitimised in the public sphere as “activists” and “freedom fighters”, receiving the informal backing of the security services and law enforcement. They have remained unpunished for their committed hate crimes.

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anarchopac: Homosexuality in Medieval Europe

UnHerd: Why do the Greens make so many see red?

Of course, it’s easy to call anything a religion (or a cult), because the words are so fuzzily defined that almost anything can fall into them. But let’s imagine that they’re right. Imagine there’s some stable psychological role that religion plays, to do with authority and community and morality, and that green activism plays the same role; or that the fear of ecological disaster, or AI apocalypse, triggers the exact same pattern of neurons to fire that fired in the brains of the Branch Davidians or the Heaven’s Gate lot. [...]

You know what? I think there is quite a lot of overlap, psychologically speaking, between some climate activism and some religious belief. There’s even a brand of theology called “ecotheology” which explicitly makes that link. A lot of the behaviours seem similar, about sin and abstinence and guilt as well as the unwavering faith and conviction. I also think that Left-wingers have found it easier to believe in climate issues because it’s easier to square it with stuff they want to do anyway, like higher taxes on industry and greater state intervention, while Right-wingers tend to see it as in opposition with the free market, so they are more likely to reject it. That’s not surprising, that’s bog-standard motivated reasoning. We all do it.

But I am also pretty sure that Greta Thunberg is, largely, right when she says that there really is a looming problem. that the world’s governments and businesses aren’t doing enough to avoid the worst effects, and that we really are going to face up to a need to balance economic growth against ecological loss. And if she’s right, it doesn’t matter if she was told it by a burning bush, we still need to do something about it.

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FiveThirtyEight: Democrats Think Biden Is Electable, But He’s Not Everyone’s First Choice

Beating President Trump in November 2020 is really important to Democrats. Sizable shares of Democrats tell pollsters that a candidate’s “electability” will be a very important factor in their primary vote — even more than the candidate’s policy positions. The problem is that we don’t know for sure what makes a candidate electable. [...]

The table below looks at the difference in each poll between the share of voters who support each candidate and the share who think he or she is the strongest general-election candidate, then averages those differences. It turns out Democrats believe former Vice President Joe Biden is the most electable Democrat — even though fewer voters pick him as their first choice in the primary. [...]

You probably noticed a pattern there. The moderate, straight, white men score best, while the women and the man seeking to become the first openly gay president lose points on electability, as do nonwhite candidates like businessman Andrew Yang and Sen. Cory Booker. Harris ranks particularly low considering her level of voter support, which may reflect the fact that she is both a person of color and a woman. And even Sen. Amy Klobuchar is seen as a relatively weak general-election candidate even though her strong past electoral performances make a good case for her being electable.

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The Guardian: Gary Jones on taking over Daily Express: ‘It was anti-immigrant. I couldn’t sleep’

In his first morning news meeting, the team presented him with a standard-issue set of Daily Express story ideas. He gave an instruction to staff on the spot: “I’m not going to be doing an anti-immigrant story. Ever. Do not put them on the schedule.” [...]

Since then Jones has removed the Express’s frontpage claim to be the ”world’s greatest newspaper”, along with its inaccurate weather forecasts. He has placed an emphasis on exclusive, original, campaigning and investigative stories about care home abuse and the NHS, while turning down coverage of Tommy Robinson and Steve Bannon – claiming that, nowadays, “the BBC gives far more airtime to rightwing propagandists” than his outlet does. [...]

Last month, the Express news team moved to Canary Wharf, where it shares an open-plan newsroom with the Mirror and the Star, with all outlets increasingly sharing content due to financial pressures. Jones, who still uses a vintage pre-smartphone era Nokia 6310, has control over the 314,000 circulation print newspaper. But he does not have day-to-day control of the the Daily Express website, which has different editorial standards, including a dedicated UFO section, and recently ran a story suggesting Angela Merkel was making secret hand signals to the Illuminati.

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Quartz: Over 13% of the homes in Japan are abandoned

Japan’s population is shrinking. Last year it fell by nearly 450,000 people. Not since records began in 1899 had so few babies been born (921,000). Before that, 2017 had also set a record. Meanwhile the number of people passing away last year set a post-war record. The figures are part of a larger pattern in which births have declined and deaths increased steadily for decades.

Less noticed is another alarming figure that’s been growing. According to the latest government statistics, the number of abandoned homes in Japan reached a record high of 8.5 million as of Oct. 1, 2018, up by 260,000 from five years earlier. As a proportion of total housing stock, abandoned homes reached 13.6%.

Some areas have been hit harder than others. Saitama, north of Tokyo, and tropical Okinawa had the lowest proportions of vacant homes. But the rate topped 20% in the Yamanashi and Wakayama prefectures.

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Quartz: Africa’s largest mosque has been completed with thanks to China

The Great Mosque of Algiers, or Djamaa El Djazair, sits on an area of 400,000 square meters and has a 265 meter (870 feet) minaret that houses observation decks. The compound’s domed sanctuary and outside courtyard overlooking the Bay of Algiers can house up to 120,000 worshippers and has an underground parking space with a capacity of 7,000 cars. [...]

With its completion, the mosque will now be the world’s third biggest by area and the largest in Africa. The two largest mosques are The Sacred Mosque of Mecca and the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina: both considered the holiest sites in Islam and accustomed by millions of Muslim worshippers and pilgrims every year. [...]

The choice of building Africa’s largest mosque is an interesting choice for a Muslim-majority nation that has for years struggled with an Islamist insurgency. After the government canceled the 1992 elections where Islamists appeared to win, that triggered a civil insurgency that led to the death of 200,000 people.

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