Aeon: Vice dressed as virtue

On the face of it, cruelty and morality are opposites. Just as morality stands as a check or constraint on our cruel impulses, so these impulses propel us away from morality. On closer examination, however, the relationship between them is more complex and much messier. One way of appreciating this is to consider our retributive propensities and dispositions, which certainly encourage causing pain and suffering to those we find objectionable or threatening. It would, nevertheless, be a mistake to consider the relationship between morality and cruelty entirely in terms of our largescale social and legal institutions and practices, such as prisons, and the forms of punishment associated with them. For one thing, these institutions and practices might or might not be cruel in terms of the definition provided. Beyond this, we shouldn’t overlook or ignore the way in which morality is frequently misused at a much more personal or everyday level, one that need not involve our legal institutions and practices at all. The particular form of cruelty that I am concerned with is a mode of moralism. [...]

The particular motivations behind vain moralism largely account for the cluster of vices associated with it. This includes hypocrisy, sanctimoniousness, pomposity, pretension and conformism. These vices are all evidence that vain moralism is at work. Cruel moralism involves a very different set of motivations and a different cluster of vices. Although vain moralisers might adopt cruel attitudes and practices if they serve their (vain and shallow) ends, there is no satisfaction or pleasure taken in the suffering and humiliation of others for its own sake. With cruel moralism, things are different. What gives cruel moralisers satisfaction is not enhancing their moral standing in the eyes of others but rather the suffering and humiliation of others as a means to achieve power and domination over them. Achieving this confirms the moralisers’ sense of superiority over others and provides further validation for their ideals and values. It is self-validation – not validation to others – that cruel moralisers care about and seek to confirm. Imposing suffering and humiliation on the guilty and morally flawed provides this validation, and this becomes a deep source of motivation in their own ethical conduct and responses. In the hands of the cruel moraliser, morality lends itself to misrepresentation and misuse, and is liable to become cruel and sadistic. [...]

One reason for not relying entirely on examples of this kind is that it’s a mistake to think that cruel moralism operates only at the level of largescale or world-historical events. On the contrary, cruel moralism typically manifests itself in countless minor everyday interpersonal exchanges that pass largely unnoticed by all but those directly involved. They are, nevertheless, cruel and morally damaging. Another, more important reason for avoiding examples of the sort mentioned above is that they confuse and conflate a number of distinct issues. In the cases cited, the principles, values and ideology of the moralisers (ie, the Church, the Party, the state, etc) are all highly questionable. Beyond that, the process and procedure by which ‘guilt’ is determined is no less suspect and flawed. We are, in almost all these cases, left with the thought that the accused is entirely innocent from any relevant ethical point of view (they might, indeed, be ethical, admirable and brave figures who are simply subject to groundless persecution). In these circumstances, the victims of moral cruelty know that neither those who condemn them, nor what they are being condemned for, have the slightest moral standing or credibility – however cruel they might still be. [...]

This disposition to moral idealism and utopian goals is itself closely allied with a Manichean world view that divides the moral community into the good and the evil, the innocent and the guilty, victims and oppressors, exploited and exploiters, friends and enemies, saints and sinners, and so on. This becomes another dynamic for cruel moralism. Moral practitioners who live in a world that is ethically polarised in this way are especially vulnerable to the satisfactions of cruel moralism. A world governed by such simple and crude moral divisions and polarities is one where it becomes easy to lose all sympathetic feeling and affinity for those who fall on the wrong side of the divide. Whatever restraints and moderation might be encouraged by kinder motivations will be lost, and the pleasures of watching the wicked suffer will be amplified. In many religions, this becomes part of an ‘inspiring’ picture of our moral future – a form of moral sickness that has worked its way deeply into those political ideologies that developed out of them (including ideologies that claim to have repudiated their own religious sources and origins).

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Unherd: How populism went mainstream in Denmark

Throughout the 1990s and 2000s the DPP were consistent in their attitudes: they never advocated for the use of violence as a political tool, and argued for the extension of equal rights to all citizens. So long as people lived up to the provisions of the citizenship laws of the country, they did not advocate for discrimination along racial or confessional lines. But they were early in raising the central question that was going to keep returning to Danish (as in all European) politics during the 2000s: how much immigration is enough? [...]

And in the wake of that incident, Denmark got a dose of international attention of a kind it was unused to. As a result, the country’s politicians — and the country itself — were startled into a discussion centred not just on questions of free speech but of integration. Polls showed almost full opposition among the country’s Muslim population to the portrayal of Mohammed. In wider Danish society there was a split but it was fairly even, one Gallup poll showed 48% against the publication and 43% in favour. [...]

So in January 2016, the Danes passed legislation stating that any arrivals who had travelled through multiple safe European countries in order to reach Denmark should expect to help pay for themselves in the country, and not simply expect to rely on the Danish taxpayer. The law was passed with the support of all the main parties, including the Social Democrats. [...]

Throughout this period, the Danish People’s Party did increasingly well in the polls. Their success peaked at the 2015 election in which they became the second largest party in the Folketing, the Danish Parliament, winning 37 of 179 seats. Unlike in neighbouring Sweden, the party had never been excommunicated from politics, in the way that the Sweden Democrats have been. Indeed, within three elections of the party’s founding, it was providing support to the government. [...]

Earlier this month the Danish government released an 800-page report from the Ministry of Justice which concluded that while the Danish public are strongly committed to freedom of speech, immigrant communities have far less of an attachment to the principle. The report found that among immigrants and descendants of immigrants from Muslim-majority countries such as Turkey, Lebanon and Pakistan, 76% thought that it should be illegal to criticise Islam. Just 18% of the Danish population as a whole thought the same thing — and in response to these findings, Tesfaye announced that immigrants who didn’t respect Danish values should leave the country.

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OCCRP: What Lockdown? World’s Cocaine Traffickers Sniff at Movement Restrictions

But OCCRP reporters have found that the world’s cocaine industry — which produces close to 2,000 metric tons a year and makes tens of billions of dollars — has adapted better than many other legitimate businesses. The industry has benefited from huge stores of drugs warehoused before the pandemic and its wide variety of smuggling methods. Street prices around Europe have risen by up to 30 percent, but it is not clear how much of this is due to distribution problems, and how much to drug gangs taking advantage of homebound customers. [...]

As many countries begin partially reopening their economies, traffickers may now be in a position to become more powerful than ever. With economies in distress and many businesses facing ruin, cash-rich narcos may be able to cheaply buy their way into an even bigger share of the legitimate economy. [...]

Exports to the world’s other biggest cocaine market, Europe, have suffered even less disruption. Unlike exports to the United States, cocaine bound for Europe is typically moved in legal air and sea cargoes, especially fast-moving fresh goods such as flowers and fruit. The latter, as food, has continued to move unimpeded during the pandemic, helping feed Europe’s 9.1 billion euro-a-year cocaine habit. [...]

Perhaps as a response to increased seizures, the street price of cocaine has risen by 20 to 30 percent during the lockdown period from mid-February until the end of April compared to the same period last year, according to Sciuto of the DCSA. Six months, criminal groups in Europe paid 25,000 to 27,000 euros for a kilogram of cocaine; they now fork out 35,000 to 37,000 euros, he said, adding that Spanish police have noticed the same trend.

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Aeon: The fruits of anger

The philosopher Amia Srinivasan at the University of Oxford is an advocate of anger’s merits. Her work makes the case for anger by drawing extensively on fields ranging from political science and sociology to feminist epistemology. Among the many arguments in her seminal article, ‘The Aptness of Anger’ (2018), she notes that anger can be productive epistemically – that is, in the production, shaping and organising of our knowledge and understanding. It better enables victims to make sense of their oppression by heightening their emotions and allowing them to focus on specific features of their victimisation. Victims of injustice or circumstance are often told by their oppressors to blame themselves; consider, for instance, the black single mother blamed for ‘choosing’ to become a ‘welfare queen’, or those languishing in caged homes in Hong Kong, who are told that their socioeconomic circumstances are their own fault. Gaslighting and dismissal of their lived experiences are part and parcel of everyday life for the voiceless. Anger supplies those who are wronged or slighted with the resilience to say: ‘No! It is not my fault.’ It clarifies the injustice that befalls them, enabling individuals to make sense of their situations by access to their authentic feelings. [...]

The philosopher Maxime Lepoutre at Nuffield College in Oxford argues that anger – as expressed through speech or nonverbal cues – can direct attention to the most morally pressing features of particular situations. For instance, victims of domestic abuse, through spontaneous anger, articulate publicly the extent of violation and pain they experience at the hands of their abusers. Thunberg’s angry speech reminds us of the extent to which we are actively, presently complicit in the persistence of climate change. Communicative anger helps us understand what is at stake, and what is most important to those with whom we are speaking.

Anger can motivate people, too. Malcolm X’s anger found voice in his call for violent self-defence and active resistance towards both the institutionally racist police force and the tacitly racist American middle class. His advocacy epitomised a willingness to subvert established legal structures and social norms in advancement of African American interest. Anger mixed with symbolic or psychological violence – as opposed to the non-violent, non-confrontational methodology for which Martin Luther King became known – was the driving force behind those who found King’s methods too conciliatory and inefficacious. Regardless of how one assesses the moral legitimacy of Malcolm X’s methods, his radical activism reshaped public discourse, rendering King’s advocacy not only more palatable, but even honourable in the eyes of the fundamentally shaken American public. As Srinivasan notes: ‘It is historically naive, after all, to think that white America would have been willing to embrace King’s vision of a unified, post-racial nation, if not for the threat of Malcolm X’s angry defiance.’ [...]

Anger is an overriding emotion – it is, by its vindictive and impulsive nature, uncontrollable and blinding. It wages war against cool and steady consideration of all reasons in decisionmaking, by amplifying disproportionately our thirst for what we take to be justice. At its worst, anger is what propels terrorist ideology and mass violence, committed by psychopathic individuals to exact revenge and attain justice under their ideological conceptions. More mundanely, anger causes us to shut out dissent and take pleasure in inflicting pain upon others – it transforms others’ suffering into something we take to be right and warranted. We can be easily skewed by our biases and pre-existing views to project our anger on to the wrong individuals, thereby undermining our ability to act upon our considered judgments.

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Politico: German conservatives’ eurobond awakening

Countries would not be allowed to use the money in the fund to repay existing obligations, which in Italy’s case totals about €2.5 trillion. The bonds sold to seed the fund would be issued in the name of the EU. That means individual members would only be responsible for repaying their own share (to be determined by the European Commission) and not liable for others’ portions.

At least in theory. It’s hard to imagine that Germany (even if it’s not legally bound) would allow the EU to default on the bonds if Italy or Spain couldn’t pay what they owed. The fallout would be too damaging. Such concerns are just one reason German conservatives rejected similar plans in the past. [...]

Unlike the euro crisis, which triggered dramatic turbulence in financial markets but left German industry unscathed, the corona pandemic threatens Germany’s own economic stability. The nations in the eye of the euro crisis storm, such as Portugal and Greece, were not key German trading partners. The countries in focus now — especially Italy — are a different story. [...]

The far-right Alternative for Germany might have had more luck mounting a counterattack if it weren’t consumed by a civil war over some leaders' ties to neo-Nazi elements.

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The Washington Post: Where would U.S. democracy head in a second Trump term? Hungary and Poland show the answer.

Former Obama administration deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes clearly had this sentiment in mind last week when he tweeted, “If you want to know where Trump wants to take America in a second term, look at Russia, Hungary and Poland.” While comparing the United States’ potential future to Russia’s mafia-state was a stretch, Rhodes’s references to Hungary and Poland were not. [...]

Freedom House removed Hungary from its list of democracies last week, calling the country’s decline “the most precipitous ever tracked” by one of its flagship reports. Freedom House now labels the government led by Prime Minister Viktor Orban a “hybrid regime,” meaning that it marries some elements of democracy with those of an autocracy.

Under Orban, Hungary maintains some democratic traits; for example, it holds elections, albeit ones in which Orban’s government provides his party significant advantages. Yet Orban and his ruling coterie have neutered a once-vibrant media, politicized the administration of justice and promoted the interests of regime insiders such as the prime minister’s son-in-law, all while scapegoating migrants and asylum seekers. Orban recently dropped any semblance of adherence to democratic rule and used the fight against covid-19 to have Hungary’s parliament grant him indefinite rule by decree. [...]

There’s a reason all this may sound familiar. As multiple political scientists, intelligence officials and historians have documented, governments that turn away from democracy and the rule of law increasingly follow a consistent pattern. Summarized as a slow roll of subversion, elected autocrats chip away at democracy’s foundations in the courts, media and civil service with the grudging (or sometimes energetic) support of their political allies. As Harvard political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt put it, “Democracy’s erosion is, for many, almost imperceptible.” Yet that erosion is real, and the United States is experiencing it, too.

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The Prospect Interview #126: The Nazi leader who vanished, with Philippe Sands

Human rights lawyer and award-winning author Philippe Sands joins the Prospect Interview to talk about his new book, The Ratline: Love, Lies, and Justice on the Trail of a Nazi Fugitive. The author of East West Street‘s new project traces the real-life disappearance of a Nazi leader. He talks to deputy editor Steve Bloomfield about what drew him to this curious family history, what 20th-century atrocities can teach us today, and why, as a human rights lawyer, he’s concerned about life under lockdown.

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Like Stories of Old: Your Life is Not a Hero's Journey

Why are stories so purposefully structured whereas our reality is so often messy and chaotic? Why do characters have clear transformative arcs when our identities and personal journeys are so much more complex than that? It's questions like these, and their implications that will be explored in this new series on stories vs. reality. In this second episode, I’ll be examining the history of the heroic adventure, and the implications of projecting the hero’s journey on our own lives.

City Beautiful: Train stations are making a comeback. But why?

In Denver and cities across the United States, historic train stations are getting a new lease on life. Many are anchoring downtown redevelopment projects as well.

PolyMatter: Where is Kim Jong-Un?

UnHerd: Parents don’t want tips from the childless

In truth, the myth of parental satisfaction is at least half over-compensation. Being a parent is hard. You sacrifice your social life, your sleep, your disposable income, your once-reliable lack of contact with humans waste. Such great cost is more bearable if you can fool yourself that it’s purchased access to knowledge and goodness. But claims of individual illumination hide the fact that bringing up children is a collective enterprise. Lockdown has cut us all off from the collective. And so, the cracks begin to show. [...]

Much of this has a tone of you-made-your-bed to it. You wanted children? Well now you’ve got them all the time, and if you really loved them you’d be fine with it. You chose your choice. Part of its cruelty is that it denies parents the space for ambivalence: say you’re happy, or you may say nothing at all. And we should be able to be honest about the fact that parenthood is ambivalent. Its pains and its rewards are tightly poised, particularly for women, which helps to explain why it is that wherever women’s prospects improve, a lower birthrate follows. [...]

Without at least some babies to grow up into new adults, after all, the whole state begins to topple over. Parents who believe that having children makes them automatically wise are wrong. Non-parents who believe that not having children makes them free are wrong too: we are all tangled up in this together, and there is room for more kindness all round.

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Social Europe: A federal budget for European citzens

In 1973, in the midst of an economic crisis, the EU founding father Jean Monnet proposed a ‘provisional European government’ to the French government—converting the European summits into a council, with regular quarterly meetings. He also proposed that that council adopt further reforms: direct election of the parliament, to give European citizens a voice, and abolition of the right of member-state veto, to enable the council to function democratically.

Developments since have shown that the council has become ‘permanent’ to all intents and purposes. Indeed, during the 2008 financial crisis, it acted improperly as the ‘non-democratic government of the union’. [...]

The second side-effect would concern the European tax system. The need to implement a serious system of own resources would be an opportunity to resolve the current scandal of unfair tax competition. By definition, there is tax competition between states if one gains what another loses. In a resolution in March 2019, the European Parliament asked the Council de facto to include the Netherlands, Ireland, Luxembourg, Malta and Cyprus in the list of countries classified as tax havens. The council naturally ignored this request.

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Al Jazeera: Polish archbishop refers child abuse negligence case to Vatican

The referral, unprecedented in the deeply religious country, will test procedures introduced by the Vatican last year to hold to account bishops accused of turning a blind eye to child sex abuse. The Vatican is now expected to assign an investigator to the case. [...]

The case came to prominence after a film by brothers Tomasz and Marek Sekielski, released on Saturday, showed how Bishop Edward Janiak, based in the city of Kalisz, failed to take action against priests who were known to have abused children. [...]

"For the last year, the Catholic Episcopate has known that there are bishops who covered up paedophilia cases, and yet none of them have been dismissed."

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FRANCE 24 English: Sweden’s Covid-19 strategy has caused an ‘amplification of the epidemic’

There have been some exceptions. Secondary schools and museums have been closed, sport fixtures cancelled and gatherings of more than 50 people banned. Swedes have been asked to stay at home if they are over 70 or are feeling unwell. Social distancing has been requested in public places. And on Thursday, the government urged Swedes to avoid unnecessary international travel and to limit car journeys within the country to two hours. [...]

Reported coronavirus deaths per million in Sweden stand at 358, according to Statista – even higher than the hard-hit US, at 267. The Swedish figure is dramatically worse than those of Denmark (93), Finland (53) and Norway (44). In Sweden, “we’re seeing an amplification of the epidemic, because there’s simply more social contact”, said Lynn Goldman, dean of the Milken Institute School of Public Health at George Washington University in the US. [...]

Many Swedish experts have lambasted the government’s response to the pandemic. Twenty-two doctors and scientists demanded a change of tack in an editorial piece in the newspaper Dagens Nyheter, published on April 14. “The approach must be changed radically and quickly,” they implored. “As the virus spreads, we need to increase social distance […] Politicians must intervene, there is no alternative.”

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The Red Line: The Geopolitics of North Korea

There are few geopolitical flashpoints in the world more dangerous than North Korea, and with instability at the top of the regime we can add another layer of complexity to an already shaky situation; one that few people truly understand.

USA, China, Seoul and Pyongyang all have competing goals and needs to keep their own domestic politics in check, but some of those goals infringe upon others, and with a few minor missteps the Korean peninsula could easily break out in full war again. The difference this time is that there are 60+ nuclear weapons to factor into the equation.

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Freakonomics: Reasons to Be Cheerful

Humans have a built-in “negativity bias,” which means we give bad news much more power than good. Would the Covid-19 crisis be an opportune time to reverse this tendency?

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Freakonomics: How Do You Reopen a Country?

We speak with a governor, a former C.D.C. director, a pandemic forecaster, a hard-charging pharmacist, and a pair of economists — who say it’s all about the incentives. (Pandemillions, anyone?)

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The Memory Palace: Freds

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Associated Press: States accused of fudging or bungling COVID-19 testing data

In Florida, the data scientist who developed the state’s coronavirus dashboard, Rebekah Jones, said this week that she was fired for refusing to manipulate data “to drum up support for the plan to reopen.” Calls to health officials for comment were not immediately returned Tuesday.

In Georgia, one of the earliest states to ease up on lockdowns and assure the public it was safe to go out again, the Department of Public Health published a graph around May 11 that showed new COVID-19 cases declining over time in the most severely affected counties. The daily entries, however, were not arranged in chronological order but in descending order. [...]

Guidelines from the Trump administration say that before states begin reopening, they should see a 14-day downward trend in infections. However, some states have reopened when infections were still climbing or had plateaued. States have also been instructed to expand testing and contact tracing.[...]

Jennifer Nuzzo, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, said a lot of these cases are not necessarily the result of any attempt to fool the public. For example, she said, states may not have updated information systems that allow them to tell the difference between an antibody test and a viral test.

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WorldAffairs: Hong Kong on the Brink (18 February 2020)

Are we witnessing the end of Hong Kong as we know it - or is this the biggest challenge yet to China’s authoritarian rule? This week on the podcast, we’re looking at what’s driving the protests in Hong Kong and why the demonstrations have persisted for so long. We walk through the history of Hong Kong, right up to today with: Jeffrey Wasserstrom, professor of history at UC Irvine and author of Vigil: Hong Kong on the Brink, and former East Asia Correspondent for NPR and PRI’s The World, Mary Kay Magistad.

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UnHerd: Why are minorities so hard hit by Covid-19?

Around the world, people are dying from Covid-19 in staggering numbers. As of today, there have been more than 250,000 confirmed deaths from the disease, and the emerging data suggests that the suffering disproportionately falls not only on the elderly, but also on ethnic minorities, the poor and marginalised. These groups suffer and die from the coronavirus much more than we would expect given their share of the population.

In Brazil, in India and in the Arabian Gulf, migrants or the native poor have been devastated by the coronavirus. In Sweden, suburbs containing large immigrant populations are believed to be the hardest hit. In New York city, black and Hispanic residents make up a disproportionate number of deaths, and in Singapore, migrant workers living in dorms make up the majority of the country’s cases. [...]

For example, some ethnic groups are much more likely to work in occupations that the Government has deemed essential during the lockdown: 32% of black African and 26% of black Caribbean people of working age are employed in these essential services, compared to 21% of white British individuals. That they come into contact with more people than they would if they were forced to stay at home means they have a higher chance of contracting the infection. [...]

In the US, prisons (which are disproportionately black) have seen an explosion in coronavirus cases. The New York Times estimates that the largest local outbreaks have occurred in jails in several counties and states, and that almost every state prison system has at least one infection among inmates or staff, where social distancing is difficult if not impossible.

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Vox: Dr. Anthony Fauci, explained

Dr. Anthony Fauci has become one of the most recognizable faces of the United States’ coronavirus response, as a member of the Coronavirus Task Force and director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. But it was an earlier crisis that shaped his career — and that’s crucial to understand his position today.

As the above video shows, Dr. Fauci’s involvement in the AIDS crisis, from the virus’s discovery to the present day, has affected the course of his career and the way the disease is treated around the world. That history, in turn, informs how we learn about and treat the coronavirus today.

In addition to scientific progress, AIDS also necessitated bureaucratic changes in the government response to the disease. By negotiating these challenges, Dr. Fauci secured his place in the public health system and changed how AIDS was treated.

Wisecrack Edition: How FAKE SCIENCE Can Fool You

If you internet, you may have heard the rumor that coronavirus is caused by 5G technology, and you may have laughed at the people dumb enough to believe it. But here's the thing: we're all more susceptible to pseudoscience than we like to think. And there's a perfectly good reason why. Let's find out in this Wisecrack Edition: How Fake Science Can Fool You.

VICE: Inside the Newly Reopened, Socially Distanced Strip Clubs of America

Groups of ethnically diverse patrons aren’t standing in line but rather in clumps, strategically placed six feet away from other groups. And while venues such as Trails used to have strict dress codes regarding hats and facial coverings, everyone in line has their face covered. Some wear medical grade N95 masks. Some wear makeshift Western-style bandanas. A large majority wear high-end ski balaclavas, a subtle nod to a ski season that was abruptly cut short due to the pandemic.

A bouncer in an N95 mask pulls double duty, checking IDs before taking temperatures. (Those with temperatures above 99 are denied entry.) Once all members of a group pass the temperature scan, the group is escorted to a table as the bouncer recites the rules of the new world [...]

Inside Trails, the LED lights surrounding the stage shine extra bright due to the absence of patrons sitting around the “tip rail” (the counter immediately next to the stage). At the end of each performance, a masked employee dutifully uses a Swiffer to remove the dollar bills from the stage (where they will then be counted and handled by a separate gloved employee) while another sterilizes the performing area in preparation for the next masked dancer. [...]

Morgan, the bartender, estimates that the club is about 60 percent fuller than usual, a similar approximation provided by staff at Trails.

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Today in Focus: Reopening Mississippi: America's poorest state begins lifting lockdown

The US southern state of Mississippi is the country’s poorest. It went into the coronavirus crisis with high levels of poverty and poor health outcomes. But following the period of lockdown and orders for residents to stay at home, the state’s governor Tate Reeves has eased restrictions - despite evidence that the rate of infections has not yet hit its peak.

The Guardian’s Oliver Laughland travelled to the Mississippi coastal resort of Biloxi where he tells Mythili Rao he found the lockdown has hit hardest those working in low paid jobs in the tourism industry. One restaurant worker describes how the loss of work meant he has had to rely on the charity of his neighbours and local food banks. But despite growing numbers of cases, people are flocking back to the beach and increasingly breaching recommendations of minimum social distancing. The state is reopening, but at what cost?

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Ministry Of Ideas: Climate of Denial

Human-caused climate change is real and growing in impact. Yet many Americans see climate change as a belief that they can opt out of. Two belief structures are to blame: American Protestantism and postmodernism.

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UnHerd: How we mythologise the Second World War

But this is not the whole story. The Finest Hour speech appealed to a fundamentally patriotic understanding of the war, noting with regard to the Battle of Britain that “upon it depends our own British life, and the long continuity of our institutions and our Empire”. The “Fight Them On The Beaches” speech explicitly situated the danger from Hitler in the context of a long series of threats to British independence from Continental tyrants, and declared the Anglo-French intention to “defend to the death their native soil”.

And Britain had entered the war for old-fashioned strategic reasons; not to defeat a country with a wicked government that was oppressing its population, but to stand up to a continental power that threatened to dominate Europe and so undermine the British national interest. [...]

Something similar has been happening to the Second World War over the last few decades. Not only are the events of the war itself being repurposed to tell a simplistic tale about an idealistic war, but additionally the war is treated as an origin story for all that is considered good in the post-war world, from the NHS and the welfare state to our ability to rise above primitive notions like patriotism and national interest to the sunlit uplands of universal benevolence. [...]

There is another reason for this pivot to extreme deference to Second World War veterans, and it was neatly summed up by an astute Twitter correspondent of mine, who noted that the wartime generation have become less culturally threatening as they have aged. Discussing the recently-discovered footage of Captain Tom Moore on the TV show Blankety Blank in 1983, he suggested that at that time he was the right age (63) to be a resented authority figure, liable to tell you to get a haircut and turn that bloody racket down, rather than in the category of enormously ancient and hence admirable sage from times long past.

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City Beautiful: How to design a great street

This video is based primarily on the fantastic book "Great Streets" by Allan Jacobs. I highly recommend picking up a copy.

Social Europe: German court decision ends treaty pretences

In one relatively brief decision, the court struck a double blow. It asserted the power of itself, a national institution, to overrule the European Court of Justice on an EU-level issue, and it denied the political independence of the European Central Bank. [...]

The first was the conviction that there existed a coalition with the centre-right European Peoples’ Party for greater EU integration within a progressive framework. That conviction was closely related to a second—that concessions by the centre-left on fiscal rules would gain proportionate concessions from the centre-right on social protection. [....]

While the German constitutional court operates independently of the federal government, the recent decision by the former sets limits to the decisions the latter can make. These bind all the more because the decision affirms the longstanding opposition of the Bundesbank to ECB monetary-expansion programmes—the appropriateness of which the ruling explicitly mandates the Bundesbank to assess. [...]

Methods to confront this dilemma fall into three categories, increasingly radical in nature: 1) devise schemes to bypass treaty rules, 2) take measures which openly challenge the treaties or 3) break with the EU. I exclude the last, since it would create for any such government unmanageable short-term problems exactly when a solution is needed.

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Associated Press: Pandemic shows contrasts between US, European safety nets

That is a pattern seen in earlier economic downturns, particularly the global financial crisis and the Great Recession. Europe depends on existing programs kicking in that pump money into people’s pockets. The U.S., on the other hand, relies on Congress taking action by passing emergency stimulus programs, as it did in 2009 under President Barack Obama, and the recent rescue package under President Donald Trump. [...]

In downturns, U.S. employees can lose their health insurance if they lose their job and there’s also a greater risk of losing one’s home through foreclosure. On the other hand, Europeans typically pay higher taxes, meaning they earn less in the good times. [...]

The U.S. tends to rank below average on measures of social support among the 37 countries of the Organization for Economic Development and Cooperation, whose members are mostly developed democracies. The U.S. came last in people living in relative poverty, meaning living on half the median income or less, with 17.8%. Countries like Iceland, Denmark, the Czech Republic and Finland have less than 6%.

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99 Percent Invisible: The Natural Experiment

Usually, Fournet relies on quiet periods in an individual day to try and understand how ship noise changes whale behavior. If she’s lucky she’ll get 6-7 hours of silence, but now the ocean was about to experience months of quiet. Fournet is all set to record an entire summer of whale sounds in strangely quiet seas, “This is the first time in human history that we’ve been able to listen to truly quiet behavior,” she says. “We will finally get a baseline for what the ocean sounds like in the absence of human activity.” [...]

The shutdowns have also been incredible to researchers who study air pollution, researchers like Sarath Guttikunda. Guttikunda says that in their work they are always looking to understand the baseline air quality, like what a clean air scenario looks like. Usually, they use rainy days to do this, but the problem with rain is that it doesn’t last. “When it rains, it’s clean for one day and then the build-up starts again. But what we are seeing here is a sustained period of low numbers.” And so this shutdown feels like the entire country is running an experiment for him… a forced experiment that shows what happens if you turn many of the major sources of pollution down basically to zero.

Having this extended period of clean air is also allowing them to do more fine-tuned research experiments. Some of those experiments are chemistry experiments looking at particular pollutants like ozone. But they’re also trying to do a forensic accounting of where all this pollution is coming from because there’s actually a lot of confusion about that. And a big question people have is: is the pollution being generated inside the city, by things like cars, trash burning, and dirty cookstoves? Or is it floating in from outside sources, things like power plants and heavy industry outside the city, or farmers in the countryside who burn their fields before they replant? All of those sources are contributing to the problem but the uncertainty has allowed cities to throw up their hands and say this isn’t a problem we can solve. It allows people in power to pass the buck of responsibility. [...]

Westgate says that in the last two decades there has been a growing consensus that boredom is, in fact, a real emotion, like anger or sadness. And just like other emotions, it’s not intrinsically good or bad. Instead, it’s a signal telling you something is amiss with your situation that needs to be changed somehow. But when it comes to the question of “Why do we get bored?” — that’s where the scientific consensus ends. “When you get down to the nitty-gritty of what exactly is causing boredom, you’re going to start finding a lot of disagreement.”

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New Statesman: Capitalism after coronavirus

We should remind ourselves that only a year ago we faced the daily nightmare of Jeremy Corbyn versus Theresa May: the two worst party leaders since 1940. The transformation for the better in British politics is extraordinary. In the Labour Party, the hard left could not avoid responsibility for Labour’s crushing electoral defeat, and its ringmasters have been swept away. Not only is the party expecting change, but with his decisive leadership victory, Keir Starmer has the power to deliver it. Similarly, the Conservatives first ejected Theresa May, followed by Boris Johnson’s high-risk strategy of ousting the established order of Philip Hammond and Jeremy Hunt, which was rewarded with a decisive election victory. Both parties had been bitterly divided, and in both, the internal opposition has won an election. [...]

To guard against the strong tendency to interpret the crisis through a lens of understanding that inevitably reinforces existing beliefs, a good discipline is to start by asking: “In what ways have events not been consistent with what I would have predicted given my prior beliefs?” Applying this discipline, I think one awkward fact really does bear political attention and, as it happens, it is deeply rooted in both left and right. While it can doubtless be spun away into the deep grass, it is sufficiently surprising to mainstream thought that it should shift ideas: Britain is heavily over-invested in its belief in the efficacy of centralised state direction. Underpinning this belief are two fallacies. One is that the top knows what to do. It knows best, because it is staffed by those of the highest calibre and they draw on the finest expertise. The other is that central control is necessary for coordination. These sound – at least to the people to whom they are congenial – obvious. Indeed, anyone hearing them would judge them to be common sense. How could either possibly be wrong? [...]

When Britain’s health outcomes are properly measured beyond the privileged zone of London and its region, its health system is not even ranked within the Western European pack – according to medical journal the Lancet, British outcomes look more like those of eastern Europe. The rest of western Europe has “the best health systems in the world”. Why don’t we learn from them? And no, it isn’t just a matter of money. Coronavirus fitted this pattern: we could have learnt from the responses in east Asia, but instead, public policy – though set by scientists – was based on a British model with assumptions about critical unknowns. [...]

We need compromise, mutuality, long-term perspectives and mediators: exactly the properties that bonus-hungry bankers and aggression-fuelled lawyers are trained not to possess. Returning to the unrepresentative nature of our political parties: depressingly the Tories are overloaded with bankers, and Labour with lawyers. We need to devolve the power of decision from Whitehall, but to where and what? To communities. The right political community, at which many decisions should be exercised, is the region. Whitehall, staffed by people whose daily life is the weirdly atypical experience of professional London, is both too remote and too exceptional to be the locus of many decisions. London is less “the capital” than “the outlier”. But the term “region” begs the question of appropriate boundaries, especially after what coronavirus will do to our economy.

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UnHerd: Who controls the Covid-19 narrative?

Unfortunately, on this occasion, the would-be gatekeepers have not developed the requisite muscles either. The ISD briefing says that a far-Right online community has “mobilised” to “advance a range of… conspiracy theories relating to COVID-19”. As well as anti-Semitic tropes, the ISD lists as other ‘conspiracy theories’: the idea that this is a deep-state plot; the idea that it is a cover for celebrity arrests; and that the virus was developed in a Chinese laboratory. It should not be hard to spot which of these conspiracies listed is the odd-one out. Of the last, ‘bioweapon’ conspiracy the ISD say [...]

People who have been told that something is a ‘conspiracy theory’ only to learn that major western governments are looking into the exact same thing, might be forgiven for being more sceptical in future about the way in which ‘conspiracy theory’ is used as a gatekeeping term. In future, they may be far more sceptical of the term whenever it is used. At the far end of this some people may even decide that other ‘conspiracy theories’ are in fact true or at least plausible.

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Wisecrack Edition: HER - Why You Suck at Dating

Spike Jonze's 2013 film "Her" is ostensibly a movie about a man who falls in love with his computer. But if you look a little closer, it's actually more like an advice manual about how we can get better at human to human relationships. Allow us to explain in this Wisecrack Edition on Her: Why You Suck at Dating.

statista: The Most Culturally Chauvinistic Europeans (Oct 30, 2018)

A Pew Research Center survey set out to answer that question by surveying 56,000 adults across Europe. Respondents were asked whether they agree with the statement "our people are not perfect but our culture is superior to others". The following map shows the share of people in different countries considering their own culture to be superior to others and there are certainly some interesting results. Take Portugal where 47 percent of people agree with the above statement compared to just 20 percent in neighbouring Spain.

The most chauvinistic attitudes towards culture were recorded across Eastern Europe with Romania (66 percent), Bulgaria (69 percent) and Russia (also 69 percent) on top. The highest score of any country across Europe was actually recorded in Greece where 89 percent of people agreed with the statement.

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UnHerd: What if Trump loses the election?

But rather than focus on addressing their failure of 2016, and the risk of repeating it, some in the party are going full Apocalypse Now: they’re claiming the President is going to delay the election or not accept the result. Joe Biden himself, at a fundraising event last month that was meant to be about his programme for office, managed to darken the mood. “Mark my words,” he said. “I think [Trump] is gonna try to kick back the election somehow, come up with some rationale why it can’t be held.” [...]

So let us assume that the election will go ahead on 3 November. It is constitutionally mandated (and, as I have noted before, the lower the turnout the better for the Donald so there is really no reason at all that he would delay it even if he could). But what if he loses? Here is where some Democrats are getting really excited, and not in a good way. They think, or pretend to think, that he will refuse to leave. [...]

I am not suggesting that Donald Trump will be a happy man on 4 November if he loses. Or that he will go quietly and gently. I doubt he would attend Biden’s inauguration. But there is simply no evidence that he is planning a revolution. He is mandated by law — a new law passed by Congress during Obama’s time in office — to prepare a transition team even while trying to win re-election. He is, it seems, doing it. Only days ago, according to the Associated Press, Russell Vought, acting director of the Office of Management and Budget, sent a directive asking federal agencies to select transition coordinators by the end of the week. It is in hand. Joe: relax.

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Social Europe: Basic income: Finland’s final verdict

Most importantly, the long-term sustainability of a generous unconditional basic income hinges far less on the immediate impact on labour supply than on the structural effect on health, skills and motivation that can be expected from a smoother lifelong back-and-forth between employment, education and voluntary activities.

By showing a significant positive impact on employment, the experiment did not prove the economic sustainability of a basic income of €560, conditionally supplemented in the various ways mentioned above. Nor was it supposed to do so. But it did yield interesting results which will stimulate further thinking about how best to phase in a basic income and what accompanying measures would facilitate the transition. [...]

Also significant is that the positive effect was less in Helsinki (1.8 more days of employment) than in rural municipalities (7.8 more days), where means-tested housing benefits are less frequent and lower and therefore the remaining unemployment trap is less deep. By contrast, despite the availability of means-tested child benefits, the positive effect of the basic-income regime was higher in households with children (13.7 more days) and for single parents (9.5 days) than in childless households (1.6 more days).

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UnHerd: Not every death is a traged

Of course we know in theory that death comes for us all eventually. But for the most part, our culture treats death as abnormal, even outrageous — not the inevitable fact it still is. While volunteering as a bereavement counsellor, I learned that some GPs will prescribe antidepressants barely days after a loss, as though normal grief at the death of a loved one is a medical condition. And one of the most contentious areas of debate among doctors is how to manage relatives’ pleas for life-prolonging interventions for a patient, even in cases where there is no hope and such measures will only cause pain and distress to a dying person. [...]

This quandary in turn helps explain why the government’s initial response to the pandemic (which arguably it is still following, albeit more circumspectly) was so politically unpalatable. This initial response followed roughly the lines set out in the government’s pandemic flu planning documents. The assumption was that transmission would be impossible to contain, so the aim was to slow the spread, ensure healthcare systems are not overwhelmed, and over time to reach a state where enough people are immune that replication would fade away: ‘herd immunity’.

But from the outrage that erupted when Boris tried to explain this, you’d think it was a calculated plan to kill off the old and frail. Surely we could do more. ‘More’ turned out to be total lockdown — an approach that still commands widespread support with the British public. A recent Opinium survey suggested that even the barest hint that the government might be considering relaxing lockdown has caused public approval of Johnson’s handling of the crisis to dip. Most of us, it seems, want rules that will prevent any further tragic deaths.

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Wendover Productions: Air Cargo's Coronavirus Problem

Vox: Why we're seeing mass layoffs in the US but not the UK

Millions of Americans have lost their jobs in the coronavirus lockdowns. But it didn't have to be that way -- and it's not too late for the US to change course. 

Few Americans alive today have ever seen jobless numbers as bad as they are right now. At the end of April 2020, economists estimated that between 13 and 18 percent of US workers were unemployed. It's the highest rate since the Great Depression. That figure can seem somewhat inevitable; the unfortunate but unavoidable cost of economic lockdown. It’s why, in response, Congress has prioritized shoring up unemployment insurance benefits.

But a handful of European countries have shown that mass unemployment isn’t a given in a situation like this.

It’s a policy choice. In this video, we explain how and why the UK, Denmark, and the Netherlands chose a different path. With the help of economist Heidi Shierholz of the Economic Policy Institute, we explore whether the US can still avoid millions more job losses.

The Guardian: Berlin's battle scars remain 75 years after end of WWII – in pictures

8 May marks the 75th anniversary of the end of the second world war in Europe. Parts of the destruction that resulted from the fight for Berlin are still visible decades later.

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The New Yorker: Seattle’s Leaders Let Scientists Take the Lead. New York’s Did Not

Epidemiology is a science of possibilities and persuasion, not of certainties or hard proof. “Being approximately right most of the time is better than being precisely right occasionally,” the Scottish epidemiologist John Cowden wrote, in 2010. “You can only be sure when to act in retrospect.” Epidemiologists must persuade people to upend their lives—to forgo travel and socializing, to submit themselves to blood draws and immunization shots—even when there’s scant evidence that they’re directly at risk. [...]

The lead spokesperson should be a scientist. Dr. Richard Besser, a former acting C.D.C. director and an E.I.S. alumnus, explained to me, “If you have a politician on the stage, there’s a very real risk that half the nation is going to do the opposite of what they say.” During the H1N1 outbreak of 2009—which caused some twelve thousand American deaths, infections in every state, and seven hundred school closings—Besser and his successor at the C.D.C., Dr. Tom Frieden, gave more than a hundred press briefings. President Barack Obama spoke publicly about the outbreak only a few times, and generally limited himself to telling people to heed scientific experts and promising not to let politics distort the government’s response. “The Bush Administration did a good job of creating the infrastructure so that we can respond,” Obama said at the start of the pandemic, and then echoed the sohco by urging families, “Wash your hands when you shake hands. Cover your mouth when you cough. I know it sounds trivial, but it makes a huge difference.”At no time did Obama recommend particular medical treatments, nor did he forecast specifics about when the pandemic would end. [...]

Public-health officials say that American culture poses special challenges. Our freedoms to assemble, to speak our minds, to ignore good advice, and to second-guess authority can facilitate the spread of a virus. “We’re not China—we can’t order people to stay inside,” Besser said. “Democracy is a great thing, but it means, for something like covid-19, we have to persuade people to coöperate if we want to save their lives.” [...]

Today, New York City has the same social-distancing policies and business-closure rules as Seattle. But because New York’s recommendations came later than Seattle’s—and because communication was less consistent—it took longer to influence how people behaved. According to data collected by Google from cell phones, nearly a quarter of Seattleites were avoiding their workplaces by March 6th. In New York City, another week passed until an equivalent percentage did the same. Tom Frieden, the former C.D.C. director, has estimated that, if New York had started implementing stay-at-home orders ten days earlier than it did, it might have reduced covid-19 deaths by fifty to eighty per cent. Another former New York City health commissioner told me that “de Blasio was just horrible,” adding, “Maybe it was unintentional, maybe it was his arrogance. But, if you tell people to stay home and then you go to the gym, you can’t really be surprised when people keep going outside.”

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AJ+: Why There Will Never Be Another Sesame Street

Big Bird, Bert and Ernie, Cookie Monster and the Count. These iconic muppets from our childhood were the product of a unique, hard-fought initiative that started more than 50 years ago. Armed with federal dollars and the reach of public broadcasting stations located around the United States, Sesame Street set out to harness the potency of television to better prepare American schoolchildren across the socioeconomic spectrum for academic success. Yet today, the show’s most popular product is a certain ticklish electronic doll and new episodes of the show air on a premium cable network before hitting the public airwaves. Sesame Street is finding it increasingly difficult to secure public funding and increasingly relying on the merchandising game, creating a world in which it is hard to imagine another show with the same educational principles finding the same reach or impact. In this episode of Pop Americana, Sana Saeed takes a critical look at America’s most iconic kid’s show and asks, could there ever be another Sesame Street?

Farnam Street: Why We Focus on Trivial Things: The Bikeshed Effect

The Law of Triviality states that the amount of time spent discussing an issue in an organization is inversely correlated to its actual importance in the scheme of things. Major, complex issues get the least discussion while simple, minor ones get the most discussion. [...]

The main thing you can do to avoid bike-shedding is for your meeting to have a clear purpose. In The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters, Priya Parker, who has decades of experience designing high-stakes gatherings, says that any successful gathering (including a business meeting) needs to have a focused and particular purpose. “Specificity,” she says, “is a crucial ingredient.” [...]

It also helps to have a designated individual in charge of making the final judgment. When we make decisions by committee with no one in charge, reaching a consensus can be almost impossible. The discussion drags on and on. The individual can decide in advance how much importance to accord to the issue (for instance, by estimating how much its success or failure could help or harm the company’s bottom line). They can set a time limit for the discussion to create urgency. And they can end the meeting by verifying that it has indeed achieved its purpose.

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The Guardian: French hospital discovers Covid-19 case from December

A French hospital that retested old samples from pneumonia patients has discovered that it treated a man with the coronavirus as early as 27 December, nearly a month before the French government confirmed its first cases. [...]

Knowing who was the first is critical to understanding how the virus spread but Cohen said it was too early to know whether the patient was France’s “patient zero”. [...]

“We’re wondering whether she was asymptomatic,” he said. “He may be the ‘patient zero’, but perhaps there are others in other regions. All the negative PCRs for pneumonia must be tested again. The virus was probably circulating.”

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Aeon: We are nature

For decades, Lovelock has warned of the global heating that will permanently alter human and nonhuman ways of life. His recent publications reveal an understanding, shared with Spinoza, that these natural transformations are profoundly amoral. Gaia strives to preserve itself, to preserve life as such: Gaia, God or nature doesn’t have any interest in preserving this or that species, or any particular configuration of the Earth. Lovelock also shares with Spinoza the understanding that human transformations of the Earth are part of nature, however much we might think of certain actions as harming or destroying nature. By seeking our own advantage and transforming our environment, human beings don’t destroy nature: we are nature, transforming itself. The effects of these activities are, from nature’s point of view, neither good nor bad. [...]

And this is to say nothing of our inability to rejoice in the loss or diminishment of species of insects, plants, animals and places that sustain our lives and give us joy. The Anthropocene produces in us feelings of sadness, longing, guilt, anger and resentment. These feelings are all the more strongly felt because we understand the climate crisis to be anthropogenic: we believe that we caused it through a series of choices, and that we might have chosen otherwise. As Spinoza says, we feel most keenly those emotions that are caused by beings we believe to be free. [...]

All sad passions, for Spinoza, are experienced as diminished power. When we fear our own power, we might feel this disempowerment to be what our power consists in. Disempowerment becomes our basis for striving, acting and thinking, generating what Friedrich Nietzsche in 1887 called ressentiment. Spinoza calls this humility, which is not virtuous self-effacement but an ‘evil and useless’ passion closely aligned to self-regard and envy. Because we naturally rejoice in our own power to act, we perversely celebrate our own weakness. Our fears and resentments become the basis of misplaced pride and arrogance. As we know, those feelings can be put to political uses: our climate fears have loomed behind campaigns for Brexit, Donald Trump and populist and neo-fascist leaders, all making strategic use of fear and resentment, and taking pride in lack of knowledge. When we fear our own power and its effects on the ground we stand on, we are easily swayed by those who promise the imagined stabilities of the land and borders of the past. [...]

We should strive to support the flourishing of other animals and natural things not out of pity or guilt or fondness, but because their flourishing is essential for our flourishing. Recall that for Spinoza, ‘good’ is what we certainly know to be useful to us: we certainly know the utility of the ice caps remaining frozen, of the Amazon remaining intact, and of bees and butterflies continuing to thrive. According to Spinoza, this certain knowledge should determine us to strive for those ends. Given that we know that the flourishing of other beings on Earth is instrumental to our own, what prevents us from striving for it? Spinoza argues that passions and inadequate ideas can derail us from affirming and acting on what we know to be good. In these cases, we need laws to make us act well: laws that are determined by a state that agrees on shared goals. Laws tell us how to act when we don’t know, or can’t remember, what is good for us.

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Five Books: The Best Books on the Politics of Information

Political science, because it is interested in politics, has to be concerned with what is happening in the broader world. However, I’m afraid to say that, by and large, it tends to be a lagging rather than a leading indicator. It aspires towards being a science—in the sense of having some predictive capacities—but in practice, we political scientists tend to be much better at explaining what has happened than at predicting what is likely to happen in the future. Hence we are always trying to catch up with what is happening in the world at the moment. [...]

On the one hand, we have people in Communist China, like Jack Ma, suggesting that we may not need markets anymore; we may be at the point where planning is actually going to work because we’ve got machine learning. Machine learning is going to provide us with the sophisticated means to achieve what the planners were trying to achieve and where they failed. On the other hand, we’ve got the Silicon Valley model, which is trying to figure out ways to use machine learning techniques to turn raw information into patterned data that can then be turned towards a variety of commercial purposes, with the same kind of enthusiasm that the people like Kantorovich had. This sudden, ‘Oh my God, we have the mathematics to turn all of these complicated miseries of human life into a set of engineering problems that can be optimised, isn’t that wonderful?’ sounds very familiar if you’ve read Spufford’s book. [...]

What commentators like Harari don’t get is the ways in which these systems are not only incapable of grasping the messiness of actual human social systems, but also able to actually exacerbate the flaws of central planning. For authoritarian countries, China in particular, you have these feedback loops between the categories that people are using to try and understand the world in the central committees, and the actual world they are trying to explain. We know how politics work in these systems. Very often, if you’re not implementing the thought of the beloved chairman, your superiors will decide that there’s something wrong with you and you’re obviously a problematic political element who needs to be eliminated. So the categories you use are likely to reflect the ideas of your superiors, even if you know that they’re wrong. [...]

If you look at economics textbooks, they typically assume that we have complete information, understand everything about the environment that we are in, that we can map out ad infinitum what strategies other actors are going to play against us, and that we do not have any bandwidth limits on our ability to process information. Simon says this is nonsense. We know human beings simply can’t do that. We are flawed. Our individual capacity to understand the world is limited and so what we tend to do in ordinary life, he says, is go for good seeming solutions that are obvious to us rather than for optimal ones. This means that a lot of the actual processes of cognition, or computation that we do, have to be offloaded onto other social systems rather than our individual brains. If we want to think about markets, in Simon’s sense, we should think about how they work and don’t work as massive systems of distributed computation.

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Aeon: It didn’t have to be this way

The document provoked an uproar. The media feasted on it, spreading the panic. The situation in Italy was certainly exceptional due to the sheer number of cases presenting themselves each day. It’s likely the first time that many of these doctors, especially the younger ones, were being faced with such harrowing choices. Yet, from an ethical point of view, the document was neither unprecedented nor revolutionary. In another context of scarce resources – organ donation – patients are routinely ranked on waiting lists using an algorithm. Standard criteria match donor organs to recipients using a calculation of the chances of the transplant’s success and the patient’s survival. More controversial criteria can apply too. For example, if someone has cirrhosis of the liver caused by drinking, their personal responsibility in causing the condition will, in some circumstances, be a factor that weighs against their receiving a transplant. [...]

There’s no such thing as a value-free model. Self-isolation and quarantine are much heavier physical and mental burdens for those who live alone. John Ioannidis, the professor of medicine at Stanford University who exposed the ‘replication crisis’ in social psychology and beyond, has argued since the beginning of the pandemic that the economic, social and mental health implications of lockdowns must be accounted for in cost-benefit public health calculations – including the deaths caused by disruption to the social fabric. We might end up looking back on coronavirus, Ioannidis said, as a ‘a once-in-a-century evidence fiasco’. There’s currently little evidence that the most aggressive measures work, and if they continue, they could end up causing more harm in the long term than riding an acute epidemic wave. However, discounting the future is a typically human bias – as health economists know well from studies of how people think about the consequences of smoking, drinking or failing to exercise. [...]

Younger generations have been asked to make huge sacrifices for older generations, with the expectation of only very limited benefits for their own health – and some big repercussions for their own physical and mental wellbeing, including the closure of universities and loss of opportunities to work. This is also the generation that will have to pay off the bulk of debts we’re now accruing to pay for government assistance packages. Beyond family ties, the moral basis for this request isn’t obvious. On the one hand, we’ve asked a lot from younger people, without really making the case for those policies. On the other hand, when younger generations make demands of older generations – for example, about climate change and the future health of the planet – older people in power seem to have a hard time accepting them. After asking younger people to do so much for the elderly during this crisis, perhaps we ought to give them something in return.

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Aeon: Imagine alien signals are detected. Here’s what happens next

Planets aren’t rare. Life is surprisingly durable. The more we’ve learned about the Universe, the more the search for extraterrestrial life has shifted from science fiction to serious scientific undertaking. So it’s worth considering how humanity would react if we learned, through some distant but unmistakable signal, that lifeforms elsewhere in the Universe were communicating with us. In this interview, Seth Shostak, senior astronomer at the Center for SETI Research in California, discusses how first contact is more likely to be perspective-shifting than Earth-shattering.

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PolyMatter: How Singapore Solved Housing

Salon: Evangelical fundamentalists who openly defied social distancing guidelines are dying of COVID-19

Countless non-fundamentalist churches in the United States, from Catholic to Lutheran and Episcopalian, have embraced social distancing during the coronavirus pandemic and temporarily moved their activities online. But many Christian fundamentalists and evangelicals have been irresponsibly downplaying the dangers of COVID-19 and doing so with deadly results: journalist Alex Woodward, in the U.K.-based Independent, reports that the pandemic has claimed the lives of more than 30 pastors in the Bible Belt.

"Dozens of pastors across the Bible Belt have succumbed to coronavirus after churches and televangelists played down the pandemic and actively encouraged churchgoers to flout self-distancing guidelines," Woodward reports. "As many as 30 church leaders from the nation's largest African-American Pentecostal denomination have now been confirmed to have died in the outbreak, as members defied public health warnings to avoid large gatherings to prevent transmitting the virus." [...]

"The virus has had a wildly disproportionate impact among black congregations, many of which have relied on group worship," Woodward explains. "Yet despite the climbing death toll, many US church leaders throughout the Bible Belt have not only continued to hold services, but have urged worshippers to continue paying tithes — including recent stimulus checks — to support their mission."

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WorldAffairs: North Korea, Russia and the Nuclear Threat

As we’ve learned from this pandemic, human beings can act quickly in the face of immediate danger. However, we’re not so good at taking action against slow-moving threats. The threat posed by nuclear weapons is now as high as it’s been since the Cold War. This week on WorldAffairs, we talk about North Korea with veteran aid worker Katharina Zellweger, Pulitzer-nominated journalist Jean Lee and North Korean defector Joseph Kim. We also discuss Russia and nuclear proliferation with Dr. Ernest Moniz, who served as Secretary of Energy in the Obama Administration.

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The Atlantic: It’s Slowly Dawning on Trump That He’s Losin

There’s ample polling to back that up. RealClearPolitics’s average has the presumptive Democratic nominee, Joe Biden, up 6.3 percent on Trump. Polling averages in each of the potentially decisive states show Biden up, too, save North Carolina—and even there, the most recent polls show Biden ahead by 5 percent. A survey of Texans released yesterday even has Biden up by a point in the Lone Star State. [...]

Privately, however, Trump is not so sanguine. Late yesterday, a trio of stories arrived reporting on turmoil inside the president’s reelection campaign. It’s a throwback to the news-dump Fridays of the early Trump administration—or to the fractious leaks that characterized Trump’s 2016 campaign. CNN reported that Trump screamed at his campaign manager, Brad Parscale, last Friday over his sliding poll numbers, even threatening to sue him. (How serious the threat was, CNN notes, is unclear, and Trump issues empty lawsuit threats as reflexively as many people check their phone.)[...]

That upset may help to explain Trump’s fury now. The president is still fighting the last war, trying to rerun the 2016 campaign in a new environment. Trump clearly has never really moved on from the previous race, tweeting about it as recently as this morning. No campaign rally is complete without a lengthy soliloquy on the 2016 race, and Trump never stopped holding campaign rallies, even in the first months of his term in office. As recently as this January, a (misleading) map of the 2016 election results has been spotted on the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office. He also continues to claim that the election was a landslide, rather than a loss in the popular vote—which he sometimes explains away with bogus claims of fraud. [...]

Trump may yet win the election. There’s a lot of time between now and November, and the pandemic and volatile economy make it hard to even envision the territory on which the battle will be fought. But at the moment, Trump is losing and he doesn’t understand why. Because the president continues to fixate on the previous election, and interpret it in questionable fashion, he is desperate to keep talking, oblivious to the self-inflicted damage his press conferences create. He has killed the daily briefings, for now, and in name, but continues to speak with reporters and the public in other forums. It scratches his itch for public attention a little, but it can’t replace the big rallies that he seems to believe are the salvation for his campaign. In 2016, Trump’s inability to keep his mouth shut turned out to be just crazy enough to work. He hasn’t grasped that in 2020, it’s the problem, rather than the solution.

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Time: The coronavirus is causing Trump's supporters to abandon him

One of the defining questions of the 2020 election is how many Trump voters feel in November like Heidi and Dennis Hodges do now. Over the past four years, Trump has developed a Teflon mystique: no matter what he says or does, nothing seems to stick to him. Predicting that the latest outrage will finally sever his bond with supporters has been a mug’s game. And even as the coronavirus crisis escalated in March and April, there have been few signs that this is changing: 93% of self-described Republicans said during the first half of April that they approved of Trump’s performance, according to Gallup—up two points from a month prior.

Yet there is also little question that the pandemic has transformed the election. Two months ago, Trump was an incumbent president riding a strong economy and a massive cash advantage; today, he looks like an underdog in November. The RealClearPolitics polling average has former Vice President Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee, leading Trump 48.3% to 42% nationally. Trump’s prospects aren’t any brighter right now when broken down by states that were key to his 2016 victory. According to Real Clear Politics polling averages, Biden leads Trump by 6.7 points in Pennsylvania, 5.5 in Michigan, and 2.7 points in Wisconsin. Biden is also leading Trump narrowly in Florida and Arizona. [...]

Republican strategists note the pendulum could easily swing back in Trump’s direction before the election. “Three months ago we were all certain that this election was going to be about impeachment, and three months before that it was all going to be about the border wall,” says Brad Todd, a Republican strategist and co-author of The Great Revolt. But he sees signs of trouble in the polling of voters who dislike both candidates. In 2016, those voters picked Trump; in 2020, they favor Biden. “It is a warning sign” for Trump, Todd says.

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Social Europe: The four worlds of the social-ecological state

From this point of view, a speech by the French president, Emmanuel Macron, on March 12th, amid the shock of the Covid-19 health crisis, appeared as an epiphany as radical as it was late: ‘What this pandemic is already revealing is that free health care, without condition of income, course or profession, our welfare state, are not costs or burdens, but precious goods, essential assets when fate strikes … There are goods and services which must be placed outside the laws of the market.’ [...]

The decade that is opening is indeed that of the ecological challenge: faced with climate change, the destruction of biodiversity and the degradation of ecosystems—visible and tangible everywhere on the planet—human communities must initiate a profound transformation of attitudes and behaviours to prevent the 21st century being one of self-destruction of human wellbeing. The first months of the first year of this decisive decade leave little doubt about the urgency of this collective effort.

First, Australia was ravaged by a succession of giant fires, which only rain eventually extinguished. Then the Covid-19 pandemic rendered inactive almost half of humanity and, with that, the global economy. Yet the worldwide health crisis is, at its origin, ecological: this virus—as before it SARS, MERS, Ebola and to some extent HIV-AIDS—is a pathology of the human-animal frontier. It is because humans have gone too far in the destruction of ecosystems, the conquest of biodiversity and the commodification of life that they are today affected, panicked and paralysed—in other words conquered in turn.

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