The Guardian: 'A chain of stupidity': the Skripal case and the decline of Russia's spy agencies

Paradoxically, this low-level corruption made Russia one of the most open societies in the world. Corruption was the friend of investigative journalism, and the enemy of government–military secrets.[...]

The attacks ignored a more interesting truth: that spying was no longer the monopoly of nation states. “Now it belongs to anyone who has the brains, the spunk and the technological ability,” Jonathan Eyal of the Royal United Services Institute, a security and defence thinktank, told the New York Times, adding, “We are witnessing a blurring of distinctions.” [...]

Suvorov likened his old organisation’s failings to a nasty, cancer-like illness. It was eating up Russia’s entire body politic. This disease had affected spying, technology and rocket production, he told me. It explained the abysmal roads, the dying villages. The country was literally disintegrating. Suvorov used the word “raspad”: collapse or breakdown. The situation was akin to the Titanic, he said with the rich looking to flee in a lifeboat.

read the article or listen to the podcast

BBC4 Analysis: Behavioural Science and the Pandemic

There were two narratives that emerged in the week before we locked down on 23rd March that could go some way to explaining why the UK was relatively slow to lockdown. One was the idea of “herd immunity” - that the virus was always going to spread throughout the population to some extent, and that should be allowed to happen to build up immunity.

That theory may have been based on a misunderstanding of how this particular virus behaved.

The second narrative was based on the idea of “behavioural fatigue”. This centred around the notion that the public will only tolerate a lockdown for so long so it was crucial to wait for the right moment to initiate it. Go too soon, and you might find that people would not comply later on.

It turns out that this theory was also wrong. And based on a fundamental misunderstanding of human behaviour.

Despite photos of packed parks, crammed beaches and VE day conga lines, on the whole the British public complied beyond most people’s expectations.

So what informed the government’s decision making?In this programme we ask, what is “behavioural fatigue”, where did it come from, how much influence did it have on the UK’s late lockdown, and where does Nudge theory fit into the narrative?

listen to the podcast

99 Percent Invisible: Return of the Yokai

In the US, mascots are used to pump up crowds at sporting events, or for traumatizing generations of children at Chuck E. Cheese, but in Japan it’s different. There are mascots for towns, aquariums, dentists’ offices, even prisons. There are mascots in cities that tell people not to litter or remind them to be quiet on the train. Everything has a mascot and anything can be a mascot. As Chris Carlier adjusted to his new life in Tokyo, he started snapping photos of all these mascots he was coming across, and Carlier’s hobby has since morphed into a wildly popular twitter account called Mondo Mascots.

Usually, these costumed mascots are out interacting with the world, waving to tourists or opening supermarkets — but like the rest of us, they’ve recently had to spend a lot of time indoors. One mascot was making quarantine workout videos for people stuck at home; another posted photo after photo of himself just staring blankly into space. Around mid-March, there was something kind of odd and very meta happening on the Mondo Mascots twitter feed. Some of the more well-known mascots were adding all these new flourishes on top of the regular mascot costumes. They were all wearing long, flowing blue wigs, colorful fish scales, and a beak. It was like all these different mascots were channeling the same mythical character. It was a mythical character called Amabié: a 174-year-old creature that has recently become the unexpected hero of the COVID era in Japan. [...]

The first yokai stories were told in the 8th century, but you can see the traces of yokai that stem thousands of years back to Japan’s native religion of Shintoism. Shinto is so tightly woven into the fabric of Japanese society that it’s difficult to separate where the religion ends and Japanese culture begins. “Modern-day Japanese people [don’t] realize Shinto is our culture’s basis,” explains Izumi Hasegawa, head priest at Shinto Shrine of Shusse Inari in America. For Hasegawa, it is in fact “not a religion” but rather “more like a way of living — culture, tradition, custom,” a belief system that venerates millions of deities called kami that live all around us and impact daily life. Kami reside within everything … the trees and the wind, even your iPhone. “You have this belief system in which nearly anything can be a receptacle for a deity or a soul. And many of those kami are actually personifications,” says Matt Alt, “That world view … that belief system of polytheism and animism is the soil from which yokai emerged.”

read the article or listen to the podcast

Psyche: How to interpret historical analogies

Historical analogies can also be invaluable and enlightening, as long as we remain wary of those using them, and of their reasons. If we are conscientious about the past, we want to learn from it, pay respect to our predecessors, and derive proper lessons from how they might have dealt with their own challenges and hard times. One of the intuitive ways we react to a confusing, frightening present is to reach back into the history we know to find ways to render the current moment legible. All this is normal and natural. [...]

Historical analogies are not the same as historical comparisons. A comparison might be more direct or straightforward, between two events that are inherently similar. Natural disasters such as earthquakes can happen at varying moments in history and aren’t necessarily dependent on human activity. But they will interact differently with society given changing social circumstances, political leadership and economic development. In that sense, a hurricane ravaging a medieval landscape will be different from the exact same-sized and same-speed hurricane hitting a modern city. We will be comparing between the effects of, and response to, an otherwise similar pair of events. (Of course, we can also compare between the frequency and strength of hurricanes today and those of hurricanes in the past, establishing a link between natural disasters and anthropogenic global warming.) Likewise, when the COVID-19 pandemic spread around the world, the influenza pandemic of 1918 emerged as a tool to help us think through the challenge. The diseases are different, but the human body is pretty much the same, and pandemics, by their nature, have repetitive features. A comparison between the two health crises will focus on the changes in the world – and perhaps specifically in public health policy – that have taken place over the past century. [....]

So historical analogies, done in good faith, can make crucial points about the present and help to clarify where we stand on moral and political issues. The problem begins when we begin to substitute historical analogies for historical analysis – or, even more problematically, when we come to believe that history ‘repeats itself’. This sort of cliché has become a bane of our public discourse, especially regarding the sorry state of the US. [...]

We need to recognise the limitation of all analogising from the past. History does not repeat itself; and this means that everything that happens is new in some fundamental way. Analogies are good in so far as they are useful in helping us begin to think historically, rather than trying to formally define whether, for instance, Trump, or Bolsonaro, or Modi, or Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel, are fascists. If we came to the conclusion that these current-day wannabe autocrats are not fascists, would that mean that the imperative to seek out better leadership would become less urgent? If we conclude that they are fascists, would that make a real difference in terms of how people experience this era or what we can do? In all likelihood, the necessary political action remains the same, either way. Thinking historically is not about finding discrete past events that might resemble things happening today, but rather trying to understand how the world came to be what it is – and how it could be different.

read the article

UnHerd: How the Dutch invented our world

In recent years, however, bourgeois revolution has gone out of fashion and subjected to revisionist critique wishing to consign it to the dustbin of history. Part of what underlines this dismissiveness is a rather childish unwillingness to credit capitalism, and by extension, the bourgeoisie and liberalism, with any positive contribution to human development. The assumption is that because the bourgeoisie has been reactionary for so long, therefore it has never played a historically revolutionary role; because capitalism is now senile and decadent therefore it has never been historically progressive; because liberalism is now servile therefore it has never been emancipatory. None of which is true.[...]

For the likes of Goethe it was the struggle for liberty that made the Dutch revolt a subject of fascination, and his play in turn inspired Beethoven to compose Egmont. Friedrich Schiller, in his history of the Dutch revolt, extolled the “spirit of independence” of the Dutch people in their liberation struggle against the Habsburg Empire. [...]

The revolt was about religion but it was also about money, and the right of the bourgeois to make it. As Pepijn Brandon has argued, the revolt unconsciously, yet effectively, facilitated capitalist development, with Church lands confiscated and turned into large-scale commercial exploitation, and the political influence of the nobility and Catholic clergyman diminished. On top of this, the merchant class had way more control over state power where commercial interests usurped dynastic warfare.[...]

Because of this he was a firm defender of confessional toleration, the idea that state had no business concerning itself with the private beliefs of citizens no matter how heretical, unorthodox, crazy or immoral they seemed. Unlike his English contemporary John Locke (they were born just three months apart), Spinoza made no “special exceptions” for who did not deserve tolerance: Catholics, Protestants, Jews and atheists were all to be tolerated alike.

read the article

Freakonomics: The Pros and Cons of Reparations

Most Americans agree that racial discrimination has been, and remains, a big problem. But that is where the agreement ends.

listen to the podcast

Aeon: Nostalgia reimagined

With these clarifications in mind, let’s re-evaluate the tripartite view of nostalgia, beginning with its cognitive component. According to this view, nostalgia involves autobiographical memories of one’s homeland, suggesting that the object of one’s nostalgic states must be a place. However, research shows that by ‘homeland’ people often mean something else: childhood experiences, long-gone friends, foods, costumes, etc. Indeed, the multifarious nature of nostalgia’s objects was first systematically studied in 1995 by the American psychologist Krystine Batcho. She documented 648 participants’ nostalgic events, and found that, while they often reported feeling nostalgic about places, they also felt so about nonspatial items: loved ones, the feeling of ‘not having to worry’, holidays, or simply ‘the way people were’. Similarly, in 2006, the psychologist Tim Wildschut and his colleagues at the University of Southampton coded the content of 42 autobiographical narratives from Nostalgia magazine, as well as dozens of narratives from undergraduates, and found that a large proportion were about things other than locations. This variability holds across cultures too, as evidenced by the work of Erica Hepper and her international team who in 2014 studied 1,704 students from 18 countries and found that they frequently experienced nostalgia about things other than past events or places, including social relationships, memorabilia or childhood. These results suggest that mental states associated with nostalgia needn’t be memories of specific locations nor of specific autobiographical events. [...]

Although memory and imagination are usually thought of as different, a number of critical findings in the past three decades have challenged this view. In 1985, the psychologist Endel Tulving in Toronto observed that his amnesic patient ‘N N’ not only had difficulty remembering his past: he also had trouble imagining possible future events. This led Tulving to suggest that remembering the past and imagining the future were two processes of a single system for mental time-travel. Further support for this hypothesis came in the early 2000s, as a number of scientific studies confirmed that both remembering the past and imagining the future engage the brain’s so-called ‘default network’. But in the past decade, it has become clear that the brain’s default network supports mental simulations of other hypothetical events too, such as episodes that could have occurred in one’s past but didn’t, atemporal routine activities (eg, brushing teeth), mind-wandering, spatial navigation, imagining other people’s thoughts (mentalising) and narrative comprehension, among others. As a result, researchers now think that what unifies this common neural network isn’t just mental time-travel, but rather a more general kind of psychological process characterised by being self-relevant, socially significant and episodically, dynamically imaginative. My suggestion is that the kinds of nonautobiographical cognitive contents associated with nostalgic states are instances of this broader category of imaginations. [...]

But what about all these negatively valenced symptoms – the sadness, the depression – associated with nostalgia? Aren’t they also effects of nostalgia? My sense is that physicians of old got the order of causation backwards: nostalgia doesn’t cause negative affect but, rather, is caused by negative affect. Evidence for this claim comes from a number of recent studies showing that people are more likely to feel nostalgia when they are experiencing negative affect. Specifically, it has been documented that certain negative experiences tend to trigger nostalgia, including loneliness, loss of social connections, sense of meaninglessness, boredom, even cold temperatures. This doesn’t mean that nostalgia is triggered only by negative experiences, but it does suggest that the negative affect can often be a cause, rather than an effect, of nostalgia. [...]

A more tractable version of this second reading was championed by Charles Zwingmann’s medical analysis of nostalgia in 1960, according to which what the subject wants is for gratifying features from past experiences to be reinstated in the present, presumably because the current situation lacks them. Although a person might feel nostalgia about a childhood friendship, her longing would actually be satisfied not by travelling back in time but by improving her current relationships. There are two advantages to this approach. First, it helps to understand nostalgia’s particular instantiation of Gorgias’ paradox: the nostalgic individual wrongly attributes the desirable features of the object to an unrecoverable event, when in reality those features can be dissociated from it and reattached to a current condition. Second, this approach can help to understand recent findings suggesting that nostalgia can be motivational, and can increase optimism, creativity and pro-social behaviours.

read the article

New Statesman: Nicola Sturgeon: Britain’s most powerful woman

By most accounts Sturgeon has had a good crisis. Five and a half years into her reign as leader of the Scottish National ­Party and First Minister, she is the most ­powerful woman in Britain. Her avowed aim, of course, is Scottish independence and step by stealthy step she is creeping closer to achieving it. A recent Panelbase poll put her personal rating at plus 60, while that of ­Boris Johnson – who is even less ­popular north of Hadrian’s Wall than Margaret Thatcher was – is at minus 39. [...]

Sturgeon’s admirers are barely able to conceal their glee. One senior SNP member of Scottish parliament who has known her for decades says, “we’ve been incredibly lucky to have her,” adding, “No one expected her to be quite so exceptional.” What has impressed him has been the forthright, uncompromising manner in which she has informed the public about what is ­expected of them. There has been no obfuscation, no false optimism, no dithering, no knee-jerk pandering to those clamouring for an early return to “normality”. People may not like what she has to say but in general they ­accept it as a prescription that must be followed. Yet, despite Sturgeon’s ­direct ­approach, Scotland has recorded 2,491 deaths from Covid-19 since March. [...]

A poll for the Wings Over Scotland website, a haven for the fundamentalist cohort, found that 26 per cent of voters would either “definitely or probably” give their list vote to the so-called “Alliance for Independence” party if it was fronted by Salmond. It is not a prospect that those in the upper echelons of the SNP relish. “The idea of ­splitting pro-independence votes is manna from heaven for the unionists,” says one former confidante. “He is feasting with panthers.” [...]

Where Salmond was “collegiate and would take advice from everyone”, observes Campbell Gunn, who has worked for both the former and current first ministers, Sturgeon relies on a small group for advice. The close circle includes Liz Lloyd, her chief of staff, and her husband. But other names are conspicuous by their absence. Gunn recalls that when he was working for Salmond and monitoring press coverage over the weekend they would be in constant communication. In contrast, Sturgeon is happy to delegate. “Call me if there’s ­something urgent,” she’d say. “Otherwise leave me alone.” Having said that, Gunn says of her: “If she achieves ­independence, she has her place in ­Scottish history. I thought Alex had done a ­remarkable job in transforming the SNP but Nicola has done even better.” 

read the article

Vox: The fight for America's 51st state, explained

On June 26, 2020, the US House of Representatives voted to make America’s capital city, Washington, DC, the country’s 51st state. It was a historic vote, and the closest the country has come to adding a new state in over 60 years. But it was also, for the time being, completely symbolic. Because at least in 2020, DC has no chance of actually becoming a state.

That June 26 vote was almost entirely along party lines; Democrats mostly voted in favor of DC statehood, and Republicans against it. That’s because making DC a state would give the Democrats additional seats in Congress, potentially affecting the balance of power between the parties. It’s why President Trump and the Republican-controlled Senate have both promised to strike down any bid for DC statehood. And in fact, statehood in the US has always been a political issue. In the past, the US has often added states in pairs to preserve the political balance. Admitting a new state on its own has happened, but it’s unusual.

But the case for DC statehood is strong: The city has a similar population to several states, its hundreds of thousands of residents lack any say in national lawmaking, and its local government is uniquely vulnerable to being strong-armed by Congress and the federal government. Simply put, the laws that created the district did not anticipate that it would one day be a major city. And while in 1993, the last time Congress voted on DC statehood, the Democratic-controlled House failed to pass it, today’s Democratic Party is increasingly on board with it. If 2020’s election puts the Democrats in full control of the federal government, America might actually get its 51st state.

Slate: Conservatives Slam “Swamp-Infected” John Roberts After Nevada Church Ruling: “National Disgrace”

Cruz was reacting to the decision involving Calvary Chapel Dayton Valley in Dayton, Nev., which argued that the cap imposed during the coronavirus pandemic was unconstitutional. The Supreme Court disagreed in a 5-4 decision that rejected the Christian church’s request that it should be subject to the same rules that allow casinos and restaurants, among other businesses, to operate at 50-percent capacity. Roberts sided with the liberal majority and denied the request without an explanation, which is standard practice for emergency motions. In contrast, the four more conservative members of the court filed three strongly worded dissents saying they would have granted the church’s request while the court considered the case more carefully. “The Constitution guarantees the free exercise of religion,” Justice Samuel Alito wrote. “It says nothing about the freedom to play craps or blackjack, to feed tokens into a slot machine, or to engage in any other game of chance. But the Governor of Nevada apparently has different priorities.” [...]

The anger at Roberts expressed on social media Saturday morning marks the latest chapter of how conservatives have been attacking the chief justice in light of his recent decisions, including striking down a restrictive abortion law in Louisiana. Trump’s campaign is trying to fuel that anger to motivate conservative voters who may be disenchanted with the president to support his reelection campaign. Some have doubts about whether that can amount to a winning strategy.

read the article

BBC4 Thinking Allowed: Ignorance

Strategic ignorance and knowledge resistance: Laurie Taylor talks to Mikael Klintman, Professor of Sociology at the University of Lund, Sweden about our capacity for resisting insights from others. At all levels of society, he argues, our world is becoming increasingly dominated by an inability, even refusal, to engage with others' ideas. It does not bode well either for democracy or for science. They're joined by Linsey McGoey, Professor of Sociology at the University at Essex, whose new study explores the use of deliberate and wilful ignorance by elites in pursuit of the retention of power - from News International's hacking scandal to the fire at Grenfell Tower.

listen to the podcast

Social Europe: An economic, as well as a monetary, union?

The significance of the five-day European Council is not simply the sheer size of the €1.2 trillion stimulus to be given the EU economy but the unprecedented scale of the collective borrowing the union will undertake on world financial markets, to finance that recovery strategy. Of the €750 billion to be invested in post-pandemic economic recovery, an unprecedented €390 billion will be in grants, not repayable loans. [...]

To pay for the collective-borrowing programme, the summit also agreed—in principle—to new common taxes. These include levies on plastics and polluting imports and a digital tax. Although details remain to be agreed, this is a radical step towards an EU fiscal policy. [...]

The logic of what was agreed may, though, demand still further and more radical changes in future. The union will also have to decide whether the wind of change must sweep through the forthcoming Convention on the Future of Europe—and lead to major reforms of the EU constitution itself.

read the article

Social Europe: Poles apart—the presidential election in Poland

Anxiety about this election proved a great mobiliser: turnout reached 68 per cent, unseen in Poland since the mid-1990s. The result revealed the extent of the polarisation of Polish society, most manifest in the distribution of support for the two candidates who met in the second round. Both received more than 10 million votes and the outcome was determined by a mere 420,000 ballots.

The most important factors distinguishing these two groups of voters were age, education and place of residence. In a nutshell, younger and better-educated voters, living in the metropoles and other cities, chose Trzaskowski. Older citizens from rural areas, pensioners and farmers, as also the unemployed, chose Duda. [...]

Poles abroad also played a significant role in this election. Not only did their voter turnout vary around 80 per cent but Trzaskowski won a vast majority of their votes (74 per cent). There was however a big difference in voter preferences between the Polish communities in the EU and in north America and post-Soviet countries, where Duda was an unquestionable leader, most probably thanks to a new course in the foreign policy of the national-conservative government.

read the article

TLDR News: Anti Trump Republicans & The Lincoln Project: Why Some Don't Want Trump

In recent weeks, a group of anti-Trump Republicans seems to be increasing its campaign against the president. Groups like the Lincoln project and GOP leaders (including Romney and Bush Jr) have come out against Trump, saying they won't vote for him in 2020. So in this video, we explain this movement, the issue they have with their leader and what it means for Trump's 2020 campaign.

The New York Times: When China Met Iran

Leaked news this month that China and Iran had come to the verge of signing a 25-year trade and military partnership agreement struck like a geopolitical storm in Washington — a rising rival of America and a longtime foe joining forces to threaten the United States’s predominant position in the Middle East. [...]

Yet in Iran and China themselves, the reaction was hardly ebullient. Critics of Iran’s beleaguered president, Hassan Rouhani, called the deal a new Treaty of Turkmenchay, after the notorious 1828 accord under which a weakened Persia ceded much of the South Caucasus to the Russian Empire. In Beijing, a government spokesman who was asked about the deal dodged rather than criticize Washington, insisting blandly that Iran is merely one of many countries with which China is “developing normal friendly relations,” and claiming not to have further information about the reported deal. [...]

In recent years, as the United States has been bogged down in unrewarding conflicts in the Middle East, China has been quietly expanding its economic, diplomatic and even military activities in the region. Beijing’s motives are straightforward but varied: It seeks to advance its interests, such as a pressing need for energy imports and for destinations for surplus capital and labor. In practice, it tries to advance President Xi Jinping’s signature Belt and Road Initiative, which is aimed at reshaping regional economic topographies in China’s favor and counters what Beijing sees as an American effort to contain it. In short, China seeks to establish itself in the eyes of the world — and its own people — as a great power capable of contending with the United States.

read the article

EU south hails step towards federalism, north sees handout

Almost half of this, 32 billion euros ($36bn), comes from NextGenerationEU, with some 19 billion euros ($21bn) in the form of grants and more than 12 billion euros ($13bn) in the form of loans. Over a five-year period, the grants alone amount to a boost of about 2 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per year. [...]

The pandemic is set to claim 8.3 percent of the EU economy, but other countries in the European south stand to lose even more than Greece. Spain, Italy and France are expected to see recessions to the tune of 11 percent. [...]

NextGenerationEU marks the first time all 27 EU members are selling debt together, and it is the first time the Commission is to be given powers to levy taxes and raise resources of its own to service that debt. [...]

"Conte is probably the last thing separating Italy from sliding to a new wave of anti-Europeanism that could be fatal, not just for Italy's participation in the euro, but for the entire European integration project and the single market," he said.

read the article

The Guardian: The end of tourism?

What goes for cruises goes for most of the travel industry. For decades, a small number of environmentally minded reformists in the sector have tried to develop sustainable tourism that creates enduring employment while minimising the damage it does. But most hotel groups, tour operators and national tourism authorities – whatever their stated commitment to sustainable tourism – continue to prioritise the economies of scale that inevitably lead to more tourists paying less money and heaping more pressure on those same assets. Before the pandemic, industry experts were forecasting that international arrivals would rise by between 3% and 4% in 2020. Chinese travellers, the largest and fastest-growing cohort in world tourism, were expected to make 160m trips abroad, a 27% increase on the 2015 figure. [...]

Coronavirus has also revealed the danger of overreliance on tourism, demonstrating in brutal fashion what happens when the industry supporting an entire community, at the expense of any other more sustainable activity, collapses. On 7 May, the UN World Tourism Organisation estimated that earnings from international tourism might be down 80% this year against last year’s figure of $1.7tn, and that 120m jobs could be lost. Since tourism relies on the same human mobility that spreads disease, and will be subject to the most stringent and lasting restrictions, it is likely to suffer more than almost any other economic activity. [...]

According to the unapologetic elitism that informs the thinking of Van der Borg and other industry strategists, “high-impact, low-value” excursionists should be made less welcome than the affluent independent travellers who stay in a hotel, eat at neighbourhood restaurants and perhaps round off a day in the city’s lesser-known churches with a bellini at Harry’s Bar – like Truman Capote before them. At every step, runs this line of reasoning, “quality” tourists contribute to the city’s wellbeing through taxes, tips and human interaction. [...]

There is, of course, a financial cost to limiting tourism. As Fermín Villar, the president of the Friends of La Rambla, which represents the street’s residential and commercial interests, told the Guardian two years ago, “La Rambla is above all a business … every year more than 100 million people walk along this street. Imagine,” he enthused, “if each person spends only €1.” But mass tourism displaces other businesses, while the exodus of many creative and productive residents, as well as the stress placed on local infrastructure by visitors in such numbers, carry a cost of their own. Da Mosto told me that, in purely economic terms, Venice is a net loser from an industry that has set up shop on its premises and remits much of its revenues elsewhere. [...]

While in many places getting rid of tourists may be the only way to restore a healthy natural world, in countries where the tourist industry focuses on the environment, the opposite may be true. When I suggested to Karim Wissanji, Elewana’s CEO, that the best way to conserve Africa’s wildlife might be for human beings to migrate to the cities and leave them in peace, he retorted: “The future of our wildlife and their habitats are intrinsically linked to the future of the safari adventure industry.”

read the article or listen to the podcast

Cautionary Tales: That Turn To Pascagoula

For years, people had warned that New Orleans was vulnerable - but when a hurricane came close to destroying the city, the reaction was muted. Some people took the near miss as a warning - others, as confirmation that there was nothing to worry about.

So why do we struggle to prepare for disasters? And why don't we draw the obvious lessons from clear warnings?

Sources for this episode include Amanda Ripley's The Unthinkable, The Ostrich Paradox by Howard Kunreuther and Robert Meyer, Margaret Heffernan's Willful Blindness, and Predictable Surprises by Max Bazerman and Michael Watkins. For a full list of sources see http://timharford.com/

listen to the podcast

Daily Dot: Public sex is at the center of a queer culture war

Public sex has lost some of its popularity over the years thanks to the internet and modern cybersex, but its taboo nature—and, ironically, increased privacy away from home—still renders it popular. Still, there’s an ongoing culture war within the queer community between those who advocate for public sex and those who believe it’s abhorrent. As radical queers go toe-to-toe with burgeoning purity culture, issues of class, race, gentrification, sexual consent, and the long-term legacy of the AIDS crisis merge together to create one of the most complex issues the LGBTQ community deals with. [...]

During the 20th century, public sex was a cornerstone of LGBTQ sexual expression. By having sex in public, queer men, women, and nonbinary folks reclaimed public spaces from heteronormative society and turned them into hubs for queer eroticism and desire. Queer cruising for public sex is born out of necessity, author Alex Espinoza argues in his book Cruising. [...]

Instead, moral panic over gay public sex has grown. While cisgender heterosexual couples are much less likely to be seen as boundary violators for hooking up in a bathroom stall or the backseat of a car, queer sex is inherently transgressive, so queer public sex quickly becomes a target for homophobia from within and without the queer community. This past June, one queer Twitter user argued public sex at Pride is akin to being “flashed and traumatized by someone who decides its [sic] okay to pull their dick out.” The year prior, another queer user criticized “dumbasses who [have] public sex at pride” because the event is “family-friendly.” The user, who has acronyms for Black Lives Matter and the abolition slogan “All Cops Are Bad” in their profile, promised to “call the police” on these attendees and vowed to “bring a bat to pride and shut shit down.”

read the article

PolyMatter: Where Billionaires Hide From Coronavirus

Salon: In an upset to Big Pharma, the most promising coronavirus vaccine comes from the public sector

The early-stage human trial data on the new vaccine, known as AZD1222, is expected to be published in the medical journal The Lancet on Monday, according to a Wednesday report from Reuters. The vaccine candidate is already in large-scale Phase III trials, meaning mass inoculations of thousands in multiple countries, although researchers have yet to disclose whether the Phase I trials demonstrated that it will be both safe and trigger an immune response. (Many coronavirus vaccine candidates use parallel processing, meaning multiple phases of trials happen simultaneously to speed research.) [...]

Recently, American news outlets have been fixated on the vaccine efforts of Moderna, a pharmaceutical company with a promising candidate. Yet as a for-profit company, much of the news around Moderna's vaccine is hard to separate from hype; the company's stock value shot up in May after it revealed promising early results from its vaccine candidate. And the Trump administration has a suspect connection to the company: Moncef Slaoui, President Trump's coronavirus "czar," held more than 150,000 stock options in Moderna before selling them off in May and was a former member of the company's board of directors. [...]

"Whether an innovation will be a success is uncertain, and it can take longer than traditional banks or venture capitalists are willing to wait," economist Mariana Mazzucato wrote in New Scientist in 2013. "In countries such as the US, China, Singapore and Denmark the state has provided the kind of patient and long-term finance new technologies need to get off the ground. Investments of this kind have often been driven by big missions, from putting a human on the moon, to solving climate change. This has required not only funding basic research – the typical 'public good' that most economists admit needs state help – but applied research and seed funding too."

read the article

Electrek: EGEB: Portugal kills coal two years ahead of schedule

Portugal has ended its coal-burning two years ahead of schedule. It’s the third EU country to close its coal plants early in 2020, after Austria and Sweden. Belgium was the first EU country to end coal, in 2016.

Portuguese energy utility EDP announced the closure of its Sines coal power plant, which emitted 13.5% of all carbon dioxide in Portugal. Sines (pictured) is south of Lisbon, on the coast. EDP will close one more plant and convert another unit in Spain. The utility is now evaluating the development of a green hydrogen production project in Sines, according to its website. [...]

The German city of Wuppertal partnered with Cologne in 2018 to order 40 hydrogen-powered buses made by Belgian manufacturer Van Hool NV. Cologne is running 30 of them, and the remaining 10 will soon be on the road in Wuppertal. It’s thought to be the largest order for hydrogen buses in Europe.

read the article

Cautionary Tales: How To End A Pandemic

The eradication of smallpox is one of humanity's great achievements - but the battle against the virus was fought by the most unlikely of alliances. How did the breakthrough happen - and can we guarantee that the world is still safe from smallpox?

This episode owes a debt to Stephen Coss’s book The Fever of 1721, Ibram X. Kendi’s book Stamped From the Beginning, and to an article about Dark Winter written by Tara O’Toole, Michael Mair and Tomas Inglesby.

For a full list of our sources please see the shownotes at http://timharford.com/

listen to the podcast

Politico: Pandemic has left Europeans thirsty for change, poll finds

According to the poll, a majority of respondents across all six countries said the COVID-19 pandemic has made them "more aware of the living conditions of other people" in their country, ranging from 56 percent in Poland and France to 73 percent in Italy. Beyond national borders, the crisis has triggered similar reactions, with about three-quarters of all respondents agreeing that "no matter where we are from, as humans we are fundamentally the same." [...]

The desire for a fresh start was particularly manifest with regard to questions about the environment. A Green New Deal "that makes large-scale government investments to make our economy more environmentally friendly," for example, resonated positively with 59 percent of German respondents, 71 percent in Poland, and 77 percent in Italy. [...]

Solidarity is not confined to national borders, however, with 48 percent of Dutch respondents supporting the idea of a European Reconstruction Fund and common debt, even though the government of the Netherlands is one of the so-called frugal four countries.

read the article

Notes from Poland: Polish courts annul “LGBT ideology-free zones”, finding they violate constitution

Polish courts have annulled two of the “zones free from LGBT ideology” that have been declared by many local authorities around Poland. Judges found that they violate the constitution, which bans discrimination and requires equal treatment. [...]

The court noted that the anti-LGBT resolution violated Article 32 of Poland’s constitution, which stipulates that “all persons shall be equal before the law” and “have the right to equal treatment by public authorities”, and that “no one shall be discriminated against in political, social or economic life for any reason whatsoever”. [...]

Last month, the European Commission wrote to the heads of five Polish provinces requesting an explanation regarding such resolutions. In the letter, the Commission reminded local authorities that the activities of beneficiaries of European funds must be in accordance with European values and may not violate any European laws.

read the article

TLDR News: France's New Porn Ban Explained: Child Protection or Online Censorship?

Recently the French Parliament signed off on an age verification bill, which attempts to prevent under-18s from viewing adult content. The problem is that like the UK's attempts to do similar things in 2019, there are a whole bunch of issues with the plan. In this video, we explain what the French are trying to achieve and if their plans can overcome the security, censorship and privacy concerns.

The Guardian: Canada police investigate vandalism of monument to Nazi troops as hate crime

The investigation comes as countries around the world grapple with difficult questions over monuments to people or groups with controversial or racist legacies. Two years ago, the city of Halifax removed a statue of Edward Cornwallis, a British general who offered a bounty for the scalps of the region’s indigenous Mi’kmaq people.

And in Victoria, the city council voted to remove a statue of John A MacDonald, the first prime minister of Canada and architect of the country’s notorious residential school system.

There are at least two other statues in Canada commemorating Ukrainians who fought alongside German forces. In Edmonton, a statue – partially funded by taxpayers – of Roman Shukhevych, a Nazi collaborator, has received scrutiny after the Russian embassy in Ottawa tweeted about “Nazi monuments” in Canada. There is also a second statue dedicated to the 14th SS Division in an Edmonton cemetery.

read the article

Social Europe: The Green Deal may not be green enough

The Green Deal covers areas such as energy, construction, agriculture and transport, and further develops the concept of the ‘circular economy’ as well as the EU’s biodiversity strategy. The details of how existing policies will have to be adapted and new ones introduced will be worked out over 2020 and 2021.

However, the plan as currently constituted is not enough. The Green Deal remains ‘a new growth strategy’, based on the same ideology that led us into the climate crisis. Although the aim is to reduce the carbon-intensity of our lifestyle, it is continuing the path of further growth. It allows continuous extraction and consumption of unsustainable and non-renewable resources, with natural gas—specifically the less carbon-intensive liquefied natural gas—as an important part of the energy strategy for an (indefinite) transition period, including carbon-capture and storage (which is a long-term strategy by default). [...]

The speed and intensity with which we act is decisive: the more moderately we act, the more effort will be needed to try to contain global warming to an average 1.5C—if that’s still possible. Climate NGOs further stress that the EU should choose strategies that avoid a temporary overshoot of the 1.5-degree objective and which consequently also rely least on unproven removal technologies (including carbon capture and storage) to bring the temperature rise back below 1.5C in case of overshoot. They are not the only experts judging that the development and deployment of sustainable negative emission technologies at a global scale is unreliable today. [...]

What we need instead is a revolution in our lifestyles. We need a radically different way of thinking. We need to tap into existing movements and forms of organisation that have a ‘healthy eco-system-first’ strategy and apply indicators that do not reflect quantitative production capacity (gross domestic product) but the improvement of our (qualitative) wellbeing. Without this change, we cannot reach net-zero emissions and we cannot contain global warming to 1.5 degrees.

read the article

Social Europe: A ‘Hamiltonian moment’ for Europe

Part of the ‘Compromise of 1790’, Hamilton’s proposal as Treasury secretary, to nationalise state-level debts, is inseparable from US white-supremacist history. When Hamilton’s first attempts to achieve his purpose met no success, he negotiated a compromise with Jefferson, then secretary of state, and James Madison, member of the House of Representatives—both from the Virginia plantation elite. The compromise involved two apparently unrelated political steps.

The southern plantation elite in Congress agreed to take on the debt of the northern, non-slave states by supporting the Assumption Act of 1790. In return, the southern elite achieved its goal of locating the national capital in slave territory, with the creation of the District of Columbia via the Residence Act of the same year. [...]

This arrangement fits neatly into the propaganda of the ‘frugal four’: Merkel, Macron and the commission want the long-suffering northern-European taxpayer to take on the debts of feckless southern governments. Yet Europeanising debt aims to avoid sovereign-debt speculation, not shift the cost of debt service. As a result, it would reduce the likelihood of a northern ‘taxpayer bailout’ of southern-European governments.

read the article

Politico: What Poland tells us about the fight against populism

Trzaskowski's defeat is a reminder that running a slick, progressive campaign is not enough to prevail over a state apparatus controlled by populists.

Duda eked out a victory, paving the way for the ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party to pursue its authoritarian agenda until the next nationwide ballot in 2023. Given how narrow Duda’s victory was, the party is very likely to accelerate its attempts to take over the judiciary, destroy any remaining independent media and subjugate local governments that don’t toe the party line.

These election results are a death blow to Poland’s liberal democracy. To those fighting populism around the world, they should also be a cautionary tale. [...]

Fundamentally, Trzaskowski failed to realize just how deeply right-wing populism has altered the political landscape and that he cannot hope to come to power without making a meaningful compromise with the other side of the debate. [...]

Nothing was more damaging to Trzaskowski’s prospects than the grotesquely misguided independent campaign of a centrist Catholic TV presenter, Szymon Hołownia, who ran on a vague promise to end the “Polish-Polish war” between PiS and Trzaskowski’s Civic Platform.

read the article

Five takeaways from the Polish presidential election

Experts said prior to the election it was a vote between two different visions of Poland. "This is, of course, a win, but in a psychological and social sense it is not a triumph," said Ewa Marciniak, a political scientist at the University of Warsaw. The election also saw a generational divide, she added, with young voters supporting Trzaskowski and older voters supporting Duda. [...]

LGBT rights were a key divisive point between the two presidential candidates, with Duda promising to protect families from the "LGBT ideology", stating it was more dangerous than communism. [...]

"It's an irony that, in an election where many see a negative development for democracy moving forward, such a sign of democratic health like high participation took place. But high participation is not a neutral development, it also carries political implications," said Angelos Chryssogelos, a lecturer in Politics and International Relations at London Metropolitan University

read the article

Architectural Digest: The Future of Apartment Towers Is Coming to Singapore

A pair of fascinating 56-story residential towers will soon rise on the western edge of Singapore’s urban core. The addition of more skyscrapers to a densely populated city-state is hardly surprising, but Avenue South Residences will also feature a selling point that will separate the building from all the rest. Slated to be completed in 2026, the towers will be the world’s tallest buildings created with Prefabricated Prefinished Volumetric Construction (PPVC) technology—where semi-finished apartment modules are built in factories offsite before being stacked, Lego-like, on top of one another. [...]

Modular homes also require less physical bodies to be present on a building site. This is an asset at a time when the U.S. construction industry—which has struggled to fill open positions—has seen its pool of migrant labor sharply reduced due to closed borders. Lower labor costs, faster construction times, and economies of scale mean that modular housing can produce cost savings of as much as 15% in some cities, experts say. [...]

But PPVC homes aren’t always cheaper: The median price of an apartment at Avenue South Residences is just under $1.1 million. The condominiums cost about 5% more to build than if traditional methods have been used, says Cheng, whose firm recently worked on another 40-story PPVC tower in Singapore. That said, he notes that prices are quickly becoming more competitive as the technology evolves further and more developers and builders achieve expertise in PPVC construction.

read the article

BBC4 In Our Time: 1816, the Year Without a Summer (Summer Repeat)

In a programme first broadcast in 2016, Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the impact of the eruption of Mt Tambora, in 1815, on the Indonesian island of Sambawa. This was the largest volcanic eruption in recorded history and it had the highest death toll, devastating people living in the immediate area. Tambora has been linked with drastic weather changes in North America and Europe the following year, with frosts in June and heavy rains throughout the summer in many areas. This led to food shortages, which may have prompted westward migration in America and, in a Europe barely recovered from the Napoleonic Wars, led to widespread famine.

listen to the podcast

BBC4 Analysis: The Post-Pandemic State

Government intervention on an unprecedented scale has propped up the British economy - and society at large - during the pandemic. But what should be the state's role from now on? Can Conservatives successfully embrace an enduring central role for government in the economy given their small-state, Thatcherite heritage championing the role of the individual, lower spending and lower taxes? And can Labour, instinctively keener on a more active state, discipline its impulses towards more generous government so that they don't end up thwarting its ambitions for greater equality and fairness?

Four eminent political thinkers join Edward Stourton to debate the lessons of political pivot points in Britain's postwar history and how these should guide us in deciding what the borders of the state should be in the post-pandemic world - and who's going to pay.

Those taking part: Andrew Harrop of the Fabian Society, who draws inspiration from Labour's 1945 landslide victory to advocate a highly active and determined state to promote opportunity, fairness and equality; former Conservative minister David Willetts of the Resolution Foundation, who sees the lessons of the Conservative revolution in 1979 as relevant as ever about the limits of the state but also argues core Conservative beliefs are consistent with bigger government; former Blairite thinker, Geoff Mulgan, who, drawing on the lessons of 1997, resists notions of a catch-all politics in the face of the multi-faceted demands on today's state; and Dean Godson of Policy Exchange, influential with the Conservative modernisers of the Cameron era, who insists a Thatcherite view of the state shouldn't rigidly define how the centre-right responds to our new circumstances.

listen to the podcast

Aeon: The necessity of awe

When a scientific paradigm breaks down, scientists need to make a leap into the unknown. These are moments of revolution, as identified by Thomas Kuhn in the 1960s, when the scientists’ worldview becomes untenable and the agreed-upon and accepted truths of a particular discipline are radically called into question. Beloved theories are revealed to have been built upon sand. Explanations that held up for hundreds of years are now dismissed. A particular and productive way of looking at the world turns out to be erroneous in its essentials. The great scientific revolutions – such as those instigated by Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Lavoisier, Einstein and Wegener – are times of great uncertainty, when cool, disinterested reason alone doesn’t help scientists move forward because so many of their usual assumptions about how their scientific discipline is done turn out to be flawed. So they need to make a leap, not knowing where they will land. But how? [...]

The need for cognitive accommodation makes you aware that there is a lot you don’t know. You feel small, insignificant and part of something bigger. In this way, awe is a self-transcendent emotion because it focuses our attention away from ourselves and toward our environment. It is also an epistemic emotion, because it makes us aware of gaps in our knowledge. We can feel overwhelmed looking at the night sky, deeply aware that there is so much we don’t know about the Universe. In one recent study, participants listed nature as their most common elicitor of awe, followed by scientific theories, works of art and the achievements of human cooperation. [...]

Empirical evidence suggests that awe plays a role in the appreciation of science. These studies provide a tentative glimpse of how awe and science relate, even though they focus on laypeople, and not (yet) on scientists themselves. Writing in 2018, the psychologists Keltner, Sara Gottlieb and Tania Lombrozo found that the tendency to feel awe (dispositional awe) is positively associated with scientific thinking in non-scientists. Participants with higher dispositional awe have a comparably better grasp on the nature of science, are more likely to reject Young Earth creationism, and also are more likely to reject unwarranted teleological explanations for natural phenomena. When awe is induced, people feel more positive toward science. One recent study showed participants a movie montage of the BBC TV series Planet Earth, containing sweeping vistas of waterfalls, canyons, forests and other awe-inducing views. Participants in a control condition watched humorous videos of cute animals engaged in capers and antics. Those who saw the awe-inspiring videos were more aware of gaps in their knowledge than those who saw the funny videos.

read the article

New Statesman: End of the Golden Decade

Two important developments have forced Johnson’s hand. The first, clearly visible even as he tossed out those Brexit promises, is the growing systemic competition between the US and China – a competition in which both superpowers will increasingly insist that smaller countries, such as the UK, take sides. The second is a startling reversal of attitudes to China within the Conservative Party. Its leaders, only a few years ago, declared undying friendship with the People’s Republic (a relationship that George Osborne embarrassingly titled as the “golden decade” of UK-China relations); now the party is settling into unremitting hostility.

The beginnings of this remarkable U-turn pre-date the pandemic. The process has been greatly reinforced, however, by Beijing’s early cover-up of Covid-19 and its subsequent aggressive propaganda, and by the imposition of a draconian security law on Hong Kong that effectively tears up China’s agreement with the UK to leave Hong Kong’s way of life unchanged for 50 years. The UK’s recent promise of a “pathway to citizenship” for Hong Kong citizens who hold British National (Overseas) passports – which was described by the Global Times, China’s ­nationalist mouthpiece, as a ­“rubber cheque” – provoked an angry ­response from Beijing, where the move was ­characterised as an ­imperial power trying to interfere in ­China’s internal affairs. [...]

The Huawei decision should also calm the fury that has been simmering in Washington, DC since Johnson’s initial failure to fall in line. Yet this reversal will, inevitably, provoke ear-splitting volumes of complaint from the Chinese government, along with threats of a general retreat of Chinese investment from the UK and retaliation against UK companies and interests. British companies that depend on the Chinese market – such as the bank HSBC, which backed China’s new security laws in Hong Kong – should be nervous. [...]

Pro-Brexit Atlanticists such as Duncan Smith and Owen Paterson sit alongside Remainers, such as William Hague and Tugendhat, concerned about China’s encroachment on liberal democratic values. Others, such as David Davis, are there for the civil liberties ques-tions, and human rights advocates such as Fiona Bruce, the MP for Congleton, and the activist Benedict Rogers, who runs the Conservative Human Rights Commission and is a co-founder of Hong Kong Watch, form another sub-set. A further group comprises those who fear the economic impacts of Chinese trade practices, and long-standing China sceptics such as Nick Timothy, Theresa May’s former aide and occasional New Statesman essayist.

read the article

Social Europe: Time to tackle the tax dodgers

In France, for example, half the CAC 40 index—representing the 40 top companies by market capitalisation—still decided to pay out between €35 and €41 billion in dividends, despite receiving state aid from the short-time-work scheme to compensate workers for reduced hours due to the pandemic. In Germany, the list is also extensive, with carmakers featuring prominently—Volkswagen has placed around 80,000 employees on short-time contracts, yet still plans to pay around €3.3 billion in dividends. And in the UK, the world’s largest chemicals company, BASF, which received £1 billion in support funding, voted last month to pay out more than three times that amount in dividends to shareholders. [...]

This is why, while keeping in mind that the US administration has just announced that it no longer wants to take part in negotiations to overhaul the international tax system, it is urgent for countries to introduce, regionally or unilaterally, at least temporary taxes on the digital giants. This is one of five main recommendations proffered last month by the Independent Commission for the Reform of International Corporate Taxation (ICRICT)—of which I am a member alongside economists such as Joseph Stiglitz, Thomas Piketty and Gabriel Zucman—to enable states to cope with the explosion in spending caused by the pandemic. [...]

We already know that, in normal times, it is not taxation that pushes a company to invest in a country: it is more about the quality of infrastructure, the workforce, market access or political stability. And while expansion projects are constrained by uncertainty and corporate overcapacity, tax cuts will not stimulate private investment anyway. But they would certainly deprive governments of valuable resources.

read the article

Nautilus Magazine: How the Pandemic Has Tested Behavioral Science

To their credit, the Nudge Unit has had some noteworthy successes, like developing interventions that have increased rates of tax payment and organ donation. But they’ve also been accused of overreaching; there is some evidence for behavioral fatigue, for example, but probably not enough for it to form the foundation of a country’s response to a deadly pandemic. As Anne-Lise Sibony, a researcher who studies the relationship between law and behavioral science, wrote in the European Journal of Risk Regulation, “[I]t is not clear why behavioral fatigue was singled out given that other, better-documented behavioral phenomena might—with equally unknown probability and distribution—be at work and either fuel or counteract it.” [...]

The flipside to this, of course, is when bad psychology comes from scientists. “If we’re overconfident in studies that don’t replicate,” psychologist Hans IJzerman told Nautilus in an email, “then we’re also establishing our own psychology.” Using evidence before it’s ready for primetime may not be better than nothing—it could be a waste of resources, or even actively harmful to those it’s intended to help. Concerns about behavioral fatigue, for example, were meant to protect the UK public, but they ended up indirectly facilitating the virus’ spread by delaying social distancing measures. [...]

Psychology and other fields are making progress in addressing their flaws, but it remains true that in the interplay between behavioral science and policy, puffs of smoke abound. For example, in the wake of worldwide protests against racist policing, there’s renewed interest in using science to change the behavior of police officers. For years, implicit bias training—classes and workshops designed to help participants recognize and counteract their own discriminatory thoughts and feelings—has been touted as the answer, not just for police departments but for white-collar office spaces and many other kinds of professional environments. The problem, though, is that it doesn’t seem to work, at least in its current form. A 2019 meta-analysis found that, while certain interventions can reduce measures of implicit bias, they don’t do much to change people’s behavior. “The reality is this multimillion, maybe billion, dollar industry has gotten way far ahead of the evidence,” said Patricia Devine, who runs a lab studying prejudice, on Marketplace Morning Report.

read the article

Freakonomics: Remembrance of Economic Crises Past

Christina Romer was a top White House economist during the Great Recession. As a researcher, she specializes in the Great Depression. She tells us what those disasters can (and can’t) teach us about the Covid crash.

listen to the podcast

Aeon: Why won’t the sin wash away? When thinking ethically goes awry

What does this look like in practice? A person with scrupulosity could spend hours a day praying, worrying that he must get his prayers exactly right or his family could be hurt. He wonders with each prayer if he had the right intention or whether some sinful impulse had crept in, so he repeats until it feels right. Or a person worries that a stray comment to a stranger might have led that person to sin, so she spends days tracking down that person to clarify her innocuous comment. Or a person insists on greeting everyone she sees in order to ‘love thy neighbour’, circling back to catch people she missed. Or a person checks and rechecks receipts to make sure he didn’t inadvertently steal from a business by underpaying.

Those with scrupulosity might realise that their actions are atypical – but it’s also atypical to act morally in a morally mediocre world. People who give 20 per cent of their income to charity act atypically too, but that doesn’t make their action an indication of a disorder. So recognising that the actions are atypical is compatible with thinking that these are the actions that morality requires. And their chronic doubt about their actions is also compatible with moral judgments: saints often wonder if they are sinners, and philosophers professionally doubt even the most obvious. [...]

What the person with scrupulosity overlooks is that morality makes multiple demands on us simultaneously. A genuine moral judgment has to consider more than just a single issue at a time. A waiter can give a narrow justification as to why, if all else is equal, he ought to doublecheck that no solvents from the storeroom inadvertently ended up in the food he is serving. But all else is not equal: it was all but impossible for the solvents to end up in the food, and the time spent checking the storeroom is time he could have spent doing other things with some real moral value, such as having a conversation with a lonely diner or helping a parent wrangle kids to the table.

read the article

Aeon: Love shouldn’t be blind or mad. Instead, fall rationally in love

As the title of the memoir makes plain, Steiner’s love is deeply irrational, verging on madness. Victims of domestic violence sometimes stay with their abuser out of fear of repercussions and backlash if they leave. This makes sense. But Steiner didn’t stay out of fear. Not initially, at least. When Conor broke a glass frame over her head, slitting open her face, her only thoughts were: ‘Don’t let this happen. I do still love him. He is my family.’ Staying with your abuser out of love, as Steiner did, is irrational because it vitiates prudential – or ‘self-regarding’ – concerns, which are the hallmark of practical rationaling.

As I have argued in my book On Romantic Love (2015), rational love – love that is sane, sound and sensible – is reason-responsive, grounded in reality and consonant with your overall mindset. These are lofty ideals but not unachievable goals. For love to be reason-responsive it must yield to reasons against it – reasons that your love is inimical to your interests. Your interests are those states of affairs that further your overall flourishing, or wellbeing. Performing an unpleasant activity might be in your best interest if it promotes your overall wellbeing. Think pelvic exams, colonoscopies and root canals – or breaking up with someone you are madly in love with. Despite knowing that Conor presented a threat to her safety and wellbeing, Steiner didn’t get out until she had suffered four years of domestic abuse. Instead, she rationalised the beatings and hid her bruises. Her love was immune to reason. [...]

To be consonant with your overall mindset, love must cohere with your beliefs, desires and emotions and not breed internal inconsistency. The love part of love-hate relationships is a paradigm example of love that vitiates this ideal. To love someone is to have a strong desire to promote their interests. But when you hate someone, you don’t want to promote their interests, and probably want to impede them. Simultaneously loving and hating someone thus breeds internal inconsistency, or what is also known as ‘cognitive dissonance’. It’s a kind of defence mechanism, where you often suppress your hatred to avoid the uncomfortable realisation that your relationship is dysfunctional. During her four-year relationship with Conor, Steiner’s rationalisations of his egregious behaviour become increasingly riven with internal contradictions and efforts to suppress her own anger and hatred.

read the article

TLDR News: Germany Takes Over EU Presidency: Germany's Plans for Europe, COVID & Brexit Explained

Germany has just taken over the Presidency of the European Council, and important role within the EU. In fact, that role has rarely been more important with Germany leading the union through turbulent times with economic uncertainty, Brexit negotiations and the pandemic. In this video, we discuss Germany's leadership, their plans and their ongoing influence over the union.

CGP Grey: Supreme Court Rules on Faithless Electors in the Electoral College

FiveThirtyEight: Biden’s Polling Lead Is Big — And Steady

Over the past month, Biden’s lead over Trump has been both incredibly stable and unusually large. Amidst Trump’s unpopular handling of the protests that followed the police killing of George Floyd, Biden’s lead has hovered within a tight band of 8.9 to 9.6 percentage points since mid-June, according to FiveThirtyEight’s national polling average. 

This is a sizable enough lead that Trump’s reelection chances are in a precarious position. Take what CNN analyst and FiveThirtyEight alum Harry Enten found earlier this month when he looked back at presidential elections where an incumbent was running since 1940. He calculated, on average, a 7-point difference between the final national popular vote margin and the polls conducted four months out. That might sound like a lot of movement — and it is — but the problem for Trump is even if the polls swung toward him by 7 points, he would still trail Biden by about 2 to 3 points nationally. The median difference Enten found, 4.5 points, would leave Trump in even worse shape. [...]

Additionally, Trump got a few favorable polls in Florida and Pennsylvania. In surveys conducted just before the Fourth of July, Trafalgar Group found Trump tied with Biden in Florida and trailing Biden by just 5 points in Pennsylvania. That might not sound like particularly good news for Trump in Pennsylvania, but considering Biden’s average lead there is more than 7 points, anything that shows that lead waning is a win for Trump. However, the fact that Trafalgar is a Republican pollster with a slight bias toward the GOP isn’t great news for Trump, as in many ways these polls offer his best-case scenario, and that scenario still isn’t very good. It has Trump either barely breaking even (Florida) or still underwater (Pennsylvania).

read the article

FiveThirtyEight: The Republican Choice

It wasn’t just Weyrich, either. During the 1971 Supreme Court confirmation hearing of future Chief Justice William Rehnquist, civil rights activists testified that he had run “ballot security” operations in Arizona and had personally administered literacy tests to Black and Hispanic voters at Phoenix polling places. Nor are these sentiments just a relic of a bygone era: In March of this year, President Donald Trump dismissed out of hand Democratic-backed measures that called for vote-by-mail and same-day registration to help ensure people could vote amid the COVID-19 pandemic: “They had things, levels of voting that if you’d ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.” [...]

But it wasn’t always the case that the GOP looked to suppress the franchise, and with it minority-voter turnout. In 1977, when President Jimmy Carter introduced a package of electoral reforms, the chair of the RNC supported it and called universal, same-day registration “a Republican concept.” President Dwight D. Eisenhower won nearly 40 percent of the Black vote in 1956, and President George W. Bush secured about the same share of Hispanic votes in 2004. [...]

Romney had pushed for the adoption of a civil rights plank to the 1964 Republican platform, but his efforts failed miserably. Instead, Goldwater’s nomination marked a full embrace of a strategy that sought to win the votes of white Southern Democrats disillusioned by their party’s embrace of reforms aimed at racial equity. Today’s GOP is still informed by this “Southern strategy.” [...]

It was an extension of Bush’s past success with people outside the party’s usual base. When he was governor of Texas, he won more than 50 percent of the Mexican American vote. “He was comfortable with Hispanic culture. His kids went to a large public high school in Austin that was very Hispanic,” former adviser Stuart Stevens said. “Much of his appeal among Hispanics in Texas was attributed to his personal charm and charisma,” Geraldo Cadava, a professor of history at Northwestern University, writes of Bush in his book, “The Hispanic Republican.” “He spoke Spanish, ate Mexican sweetbreads in border cities, and for Christmas he made enchiladas and tamales that he, unlike President Ford, shucked before eating.” Rove said the Hispanic population in Texas was “highly entrepreneurial,” signed up for the military at high rates, and was religious, “so they tend to have socially traditional values,” particularly on the abortion issue. “What’s not to like about that profile if you’re a Republican?”

read the article

Scientific American: Coronavirus Responses Highlight How Humans Have Evolved to Dismiss Facts That Don’t Fit Their Worldview

“Motivated reasoning” is what social scientists call the process of deciding what evidence to accept based on the conclusion one prefers. As I explain in my book, “The Truth About Denial,” this very human tendency applies to all kinds of facts about the physical world, economic history and current events.

The interdisciplinary study of this phenomenon has made one thing clear: The failure of various groups to acknowledge the truth about, say, climate change, is not explained by a lack of information about the scientific consensus on the subject. [...]

A 2015 metastudy showed that ideological polarization over the reality of climate change actually increases with respondents’ knowledge of politics, science and/or energy policy. The chances that a conservative is a climate science denier is significantly higher if he or she is college educated. Conservatives scoring highest on tests for cognitive sophistication or quantitative reasoning skills are most susceptible to motivated reasoning about climate science. [...]

Unwelcome information can also threaten in other ways. “System justification” theorists like psychologist John Jost have shown how situations that represent a perceived threat to established systems trigger inflexible thinking. For example, populations experiencing economic distress or an external threat have often turned to authoritarian leaders who promise security and stability.

read the article

UnHerd: Has BLM picked the wrong target?

This feeling of disrespect has been articulated by Alicia Garza, the activist co-founder of BLM: “Black Lives Matter is not just concerned with what happens in policing. The disregard, disrespect, and lack of dignity for black life transcends through the fabric of our society.” Meanwhile, a recent CNN survey showed that 49% of black Britons have experienced disrespectful treatment from the police, compared to 26% of whites.

How literally we should be interpreting subjective evaluations of ‘respectful treatment’ might be an issue for debate, but what ultimately matters for race relations is that these feelings are out there. Public opinion on any issue hinges on popular perceptions. What the poll also revealed was that black Britons are significantly more likely to see racism as a major problem in Britain than other ethnic minorities. [...]

Whether it is Libyans selling black Africans into slavery, which is happening right now, Chinese people contemptuously discriminating against blacks in China, or Indians doing same in India, a general low regard for black people across the world does seem to be a constant. In fact, the reason we focus on racism in the West and not elsewhere is because western societies are the most responsive to black opinion. As a general rule, the Chinese, Indians and Arabs don’t seem to care very much whether we consider them racist or not. Their societies are openly assertive of their felt superiority. [...]

This reactive construct of Africanness resembles very much the construct of global blackness offered by the BLM school of thought. The problem with this approach is that it appears more interested in portraying the present vulnerability of the black collective as a moral virtue rather than focusing on eliminating that vulnerability. It obsesses over the appeal and power of whiteness, instead of trying to figure out how to make blackness more appealing and powerful.

read the article

Conscientious Photography Magazine: The Print, the book, the screen

On their own, photographs have no meanings. Actually, even to talk about photographs “on their own” makes very little sense. We always see photographs in some context. We never see photographs outside of any context. One could argue that latent photographs exist “on their own”. But here, I don’t want to deal with the metaphysics of photography. [...]

For example, once digital photography had become widely established, there were a lot of things you could do easily that in the analogue world were very difficult and that often carried negative connotations. A good approach would have been to simply accept the fact that digital photographs can be “manipulated” easily and in a large variety of ways — instead of sticking with photographic orthodoxy and worrying about the supposed ill effects of manipulation. [...]

Obviously, it doesn’t help that the commercial world of photography — galleries and collectors — just love the idea of the unique object. If it’s not fully unique (most photographs simply aren’t — they can be made in any number), then they will have to be artificially limited: editions. [...]

It might help to consider the case of literature: a book in its original language isn’t the same as a translated one. In fact, there are different schools of translation, and as far as I understand it, the jury is still out what exactly is meant by the term ” a good translation”. Is it a translation that stays as close as possible to the original, even if the two languages operate quite differently? Or is it a translation that stays close to the spirit of the book, while making good use of the language it’s translated into?

read the article

Architizer: The Power of Tradition: Russia Unveils a Massive Cathedral Dedicated to the Military

The Russian Revival style of architecture, which combines historical details with modern building materials and techniques, remains popular in Russia. In fact, one of the largest and most ambitious buildings ever created in this style was just opened last month.

The Main Cathedral of the Russian Armed Forces is dedicated to the 75th anniversary of the Red Army’s Victory in the Great Patriotic War, which is what Russians call World War II. In addition to being a place of worship for practitioners of the Russian Orthodox faith, the cathedral is a monument to Russian military might, both in World War II and in all other historical conflicts where Russian armies prevailed. [...]

Clearly, the church was built with the intention that it would stand alongside St. Basil’s and other important Orthodox cathedrals as a significant Russian landmark. When the project was announced, in 2018, Russian President Vladimir Putin said it would be “one more symbol of the indestructibility of our national traditions, of our loyalty to the memory of our forefathers and their achievements,” according to a report in the Times of London. [...]

The dimensions of the church are symbolic. The diameter of the drum of the main dome is 19.45 meters, symbolizing the final year of World War II, 1945. The belfry is 75 meters heigh, representing the 75 years that have passed between 1945 and 2020, the year of the church’s consecration. And finally, the height of the small dome is 14.18 meters, reflecting the 1,418 days and nights that the conflict lasted. The steps to the cathedral are rumored to be clad in metal sourced from melted-down Nazi tanks.

read the article and see the photos

BBC4 Analysis: Thinking for the Long Term

"The origin of civil government," wrote the Scottish philosopher David Hume in 1739, is that "men are not able radically to cure, either in themselves or others, that narrowness of soul, which makes them prefer the present to the remote."

Today, Hume's view that governments can help societies abandon rampant short-termism and adopt a more long term approach, feels little more than wishful thinking. The "now" commands more and more of our attention - quick fixes are the order of the day. But could that be about to change?

Margaret Heffernan asks whether the current pandemic might be the moment we are forced to rediscover our ability to think long term. Could our ability to emerge well from the current health crisis be dependent, in fact, on our ability to improve our long-term thinking?

Among those taking part: Paul Polman (Co-founder of Imagine and former CEO of Unilever), General Sir Nick Carter (Chief of the Defence Staff), Justine Greening (former Conservative minister and founder of the Social Mobility Pledge), Lord Gus O'Donnell (former head of the Civil Service), Chris Llewellyn Smith (former Director General of CERN), and Sophie Howe (Future Generations Commissioner for Wales).

listen to the podcast