The Guardian: Tudormania: Why can’t we get over it?

 Right now, the Tudors hold the nation in an especially fearsome grip. In the British history section of my local Waterstones, in a not terribly royalist part of London, I measured four shelves of Tudoralia, covering the period from Henry VII’s snatching of the crown on Bosworth field in 1485 to the death of Elizabeth I in 1603. (The next most popular period was the 19th century, with two-and-a-half shelves.) The Tudor titles were mostly variations on a very limited set of themes: The Six Wives of Henry VIII; Henry VIII: King and Court; Elizabeth the Queen; The Elizabethans; Young Henry: the Rise of Henry VIII; Six Wives: the Queens of Henry VIII; Elizabeth’s Women. [...]

The Tudors are the first people in British history into whose eyes we feel we can gaze. We slip into their world – or what we imagine to be their world – with ease. They were the first people to have lived in recognisable houses, rather than in the draughty great halls and militaristic castles of their medieval forebears. There is something comfortingly domestic and ineffably English about these dwellings, which is surely why mock-Tudor has been, since the late 19th century, such a persistently revived vernacular architecture. Some of the inhabitants of these houses had even been women, whose characters were a little more than cyphers (such as the redoubtable matriarch Bess of Hardwick who, with her four husbands, rivalled Henry VIII in marital energy if not murderous tendency). Hans Holbein’s portraits of Henry’s court carry an air of realism verging on the photographic; even those stiff, flat-as-a-pancake Elizabethan portraits of country squires and their be-ruffed wives have something bewitching about them. Unlike their forebears, they spoke what we can recognise as our language, the language crystallised by England’s most towering and inescapable literary figure. [...]

The different ways in which the Tudor period was used by past generations can throw light on the way we see them now. Take the narrative of Hampton Court, which was opened to the public by Queen Victoria. The 19th-century tourist clutching the standard guidebook, published in 1841, would have received a completely different view of the palace from that conveyed today. The palace had “a striking lesson” to teach “on the mutability of human greatness”. Its hero, however, was not Henry VIII or Anne Boleyn, but Cardinal Wolsey. Henry gets short shrift – a single brief chapter, as opposed to Wolsey’s six. The Victorian story was much more invested in the lad who pulled himself up by his bootstraps, attained the chancellorship of England – and “fell a sacrifice to his own ambition”. The message was that worldly desires should be tempered by “humility and piety” – a lesson quite absent from our present dealings with the 16th century, whose protagonists provide spectacle rather than moral instruction. [...]

This secularisation, as well as perhaps a discomfort with the idea of revolution, explains how relatively little thought we give, as a culture, to the following century – the century of the English civil war. Martin Davidson told me that for him and his colleagues at the BBC, historical periods have certain textures; they serve as “story engines” for different kinds of narratives. “This place, this time that we call Tudorland, Tudorville has irresistible ingredients,” he said. “It is sex becomes death, via intrigue … I wish we could do more on the civil war, to be honest. But it’s difficult to find attractive characters, and it doesn’t help that they have zero sex lives,” he said. And, besides, the 17th century is too complex. “In a 60-minute programme, you spend 57 minutes explaining the rump parliament, ship money, the Irish issue.” Had we more confidence in the Westminster parliament now, perhaps, like the Whig historians of the 19th century, we would have more fondness for its 17th-century champions.

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BBC Radio 4 Analysis: Humans vs the Planet

 As Covid-19 forced humans into lockdown, memes emerged showing the earth was healing thanks to our absence. These were false claims – but their popularity revealed how seductive the dangerous idea that ‘we are the virus’ can be.

At its most extreme, this way of thinking leads to eco-fascism, the belief the harm humans do to Earth can be reduced by cutting the number of non-white people.

But the mainstream green movement is also challenged by a less hateful form of this mentality known as ‘doomism’ – a creeping sense that humans will inevitably cause ecological disaster, that it’s too late to act and that technological solutions only offer more environmental degradation through mining and habitat loss.

What vision can environmentalists offer as an antidote to these depressing ideas? And how can green politics encourage radical thinking without opening the door to hateful ideologies?

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99 Percent Invisible: Ubiquitous Icons: Highways 101

 Our first point of interest is the classic American stop sign — you know the one: octagonal, red background, white print. But a fan wrote in after spotting a strange blue stop sign in Hawaii. The reason some stop signs are blue was a neat little story in itself, but the exception also got Kurt wondering: why are the rest red? [...]

While technically not a graphic icon as such (at least not until the digital age), there is a certain kind of iconic rural mailbox that dates back over 100 years. But to understand how this classic design came to be, we have to go back even further. It all started in the 1800s, when the United States Postal Service introduced Free City Delivery. [...]

That last story is something we pulled from the pages of our upcoming book, The 99% Invisible City, which is about everyday designs. In our research, we looked both globally and locally for compelling stories and characters, like a pavement expert from Halifax and the cat that inspired his life-saving invention — a device that went from being one man’s hobby to a mechanism for national defense during WWII.

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BBC4 Thinking Allowed: Au pairing and domestic labour

 With her 1974 study The Sociology of Housework, Ann Oakley offered a comprehensive sociological study of women’s work in the home. Analysing interviews with urban housewives, she found that most women, regardless of class, were dissatisfied with housework. It was a finding that contrasted with prevailing perspectives, and a study that challenged the scholarly neglect of housework. Now that this landmark text has been reissued, Ann talks to Laurie Taylor about its significance and reflects on what has changed in the decades since it was published.

Also, Rosie Cox discusses her co-authored study of au pairing in the twenty first century, As an Equal? Drawing on detailed research, the book examines the lives of au pairs and the families who host them in contemporary Britain, arguing that au pairing has become increasingly indistinguishable from other forms of domestic labour. Revised repeat.

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Social Europe: The European minimum wage will come—but how?

The commission’s objective is to develop common European standards on all these points. In view of the great differences across Europe, however, the commission is explicitly not seeking to introduce a single European minimum wage, nor to harmonise existing minimum-wage regimes. [...]

Accordingly, a minimum wage is considered adequate when it is at least 60 per cent of the national median. By analogy with poverty research, a minimum wage of 60 per cent of the median wage is the wage that enables a single full-time worker to avoid a life in poverty, regardless of living and household circumstances, without relying on state transfers. [...]

The European standard for the adequacy of minimum wages would then become surpassing both thresholds—60 per cent of the median wage and 50 per cent of the average. Figure 2 shows by how much the minimum wage in various countries would have to rise to reach the respective floors. Application of the double, 60-50 threshold would lead to an increase—sometimes considerable—in the minimum wage in all EU countries with a statutory minimum, except Slovenia and France. In 12 countries the median threshold and in six the mean would have the greater impact; in four the outcome would be the same. The double 60-50 threshold would thus contribute to a general upward convergence of minimum wages across Europe.

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The Red Line: Somalia (Al Shabaab, Pirates and Nuclear Waste)

 Somalia is often referred to as a failed state, with the nation being fractured into 4 parts, piracy and Al Shabaab controlling large chunks of the country, but Somalia seems to be getting back on its feet now. What will this mean for the rest of East Africa, and who might be working to knock Somalia back down? We speak to our panel of experts about the regional ramifications. This weeks panel is Omar Mahmood (Crisis Group) Degan Ali (Adeso Africa) Alex De Waal (Tufts University) Follow the show on >> @theredlinepod or Michael on >> @MikeHilliardAus More info at www.theredlinepodcast.com

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UnHerd: Enoch Powell reconsidered

 “Throughout his political career,” Corthorn notes, “Powell grappled with what is arguably still the central issue in British foreign policy: the precise nature of the UK’s role in the world.” Yet, as a result of what Corthorn characterises as “a deeply polarized, and politicized, historiography”, Powell’s potential contribution to today’s debate has been minimised, a failing his excellent new book seeks to rectify, recentring Powell’s turbulent career as “part of a long-running and wide-ranging public debate over the ‘decline’ of the British nation”. [...]

The loss of India and Britain’s consequent diminished place in the world became the central pole of Powell’s worldview; the bloodshed of Partition fuelled his later fears both of mass immigration and of civil war in Northern Ireland, convincing him that “communalism and democracy, as the experience of India demonstrates, are incompatible”. His entire political career after 1947 would be devoted to defining, with an obsessive clarity not far from madness, the nature of British sovereignty in this new post-imperial world. [...]

Praising de Gaulle for pulling France out of NATO, Powell foreshadowed the French strongman’s modern heir Macron in eyeing Russia as the counterweight to preserve his own nation’s strategic autonomy, asserting that “historically the existence of Russia has been the ultimate guarantee of the survival of Britain as an independent nation… When in the last decades of the twentieth century necessity restores an understanding between Britain and Russia, the entente will not be cordiale; but entente it will still be…” As Corthorn notes laconically, at the height of the Cold War, “Powell’s argument for an alliance with the Soviet Union was a radical one to make. [...]

As for Brexit, Powell’s eventual, fierce opposition to the European Union would please many of the Conservative Party’s Brexiteers, yet his ridiculing of the Global Britain “delusions and deceits of a vanished Empire and Commonwealth” and his total and absolute hatred of the United States would have few takers in the modern Tory party. Perhaps it is here, as a foreign policy realist, that Powell’s uncompromising vision speaks most clearly to modern concerns.

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The Diplomat: China Doesn’t Understand Europe, and It Shows

 While his tour was designed to improve China’s post-pandemic image in Europe, some of Wang’s statements only made things worse for China. In Norway, while answering a question about the Nobel Peace Prize and Hong Kong, Wang said that China won’t allow the politicization of the Nobel Prize by interfering in China’s internal affairs — a response that many in the West read as a Chinese threat against awarding the Nobel Prize to Hong Kong protesters. Later, while in Germany, Wang criticized the Czech Senate President Milos Vystrcil’s visit to Taiwan and warned that it would incur a “heavy price” — another threat against a European country for doing something considered normal in a democratic state.[...]

China’s run of European mistakes started in 2012, when it decided to set up the 16+1 mechanism with the Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries, among them both EU members and non-members. Back then, China’s decision was watched with suspicion in Brussels and with every step China has taken in the CEE region the European Union’s fear of division has increased. While the EU seems to have gotten over the 2018 Visegrad (V4) moment, when China inaugurated a V4+China format for meetings with Hungary, Poland, Czechia, and Slovakia, and Wang even praised the V4 as the EU’s “most dynamic force,” things changed a lot in 2019. Two crucial moments were Italy’s decision to join the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and Greece’s addition to the 16+1. [...]

Moments like these have shown that China doesn’t understand the EU at all. While world powers no longer create agreements like the Treaty of Tordesillas, the idea of spheres of influence still exists in their minds. Sixteen formerly communist CEE countries teaming up with a communist great power set off alarm bells in Brussels. The EU doesn’t want any new “Berlin Walls” and it definitely doesn’t want to swap out Russian influence with Chinese in the CEE region, creating a new Iron Curtain. The European Union’s fear of division was mainly generated by China, which failed to understand how sensitive and important this subject is for Brussels. [...]

Sometimes, China doesn’t even seem to understand the basics of the European Union. The EU is a supranational entity, which receives its mandate from all 27 EU member-states, yet remains separate from the national institutions of each member state. The members of the European Parliament, although they come from each EU country, represent not their countries, but the EU. China’s failure to grasp the bloc’s basic structure became clear when it scolded the Estonian Ministry of Foreign Affairs after an Estonian member of the European Parliament went to Taiwan.

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Notes from Poland: Polish prime minister committed “gross violation of law” in organising elections, rules court

 Poland’s prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, committed a “gross violation of the law” and the constitution when ordering preparations for elections earlier this year, a court has ruled. [...]

“The manner of [conducting] elections cannot be restricted by any actions of the executive branch,” wrote Rudnicki. “[Poland] cannot be considered a state of law if [state] organs infringe the provisions of the law.”

The judges also declared that the decision to hold a postal-only vote meant that “voters were not guaranteed an equal, direct and secret ballot”, reports RMF24. [...]

However, Ewa Siedlecka, a commentator for the Polityka weekly, notes that the court’s decision is mainly “symbolic”. Some organisations or individuals – such as voters whose personal data was provided to the post office – could launch civil cases. But Morawiecki and other officials are unlikely to face legal consequences, as PiS has created a system that “guarantees freedom and impunity”, she writes.

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European Council on Foreign Relations: The slow dismantling of the Belarusian state

 The first and most visible parts of the intervention were in the media. The Belarusian regime not only replaced striking Belarusian state media personnel with Russian teams but also adopted the Kremlin’s style in its overall communications effort: depicting the protesters as foreign-orchestrated agents of a “colour revolution”, and promoting the idea of a border conflict with Lithuania. State media outlets broadcast stories that bore little resemblance to the reality on the ground, and that citizens could easily disprove. The amateurish ‘copy and paste’ techniques Russian media operatives used to spin the situation only reflected the prejudices of many Russians audience on Belarus. The protesters have increasingly responded by mocking Russia and its political leadership. In parallel, Russia will help Belarus refinance some of its debt. [...]

The third remarkable change in Belarus concerns domestic security. By calling on the police and the (Belarusian) KGB to restore order on 19 August, Lukashenka initiated a second crackdown that followed a completely different playbook than the first. Instead of engaging in random violence and repression, the security forces targeted the leaders of the demonstrations on 22-23 August and the following weekend. This crackdown struck at the political representation of the protest movement: members of the transition council and strike committee leaders. Without leaders, the regime reasons, the protests will lose steam sooner or later. The fact that the Russia Federal Security Service has closely consulted its Belarusian counterparts suggests that Moscow is, in fact, directing these targeted operations. And, when Lukashenka appeared to congratulate the riot police for handling street protests on 23 August, he was accompanied by bodyguards from an unknown security service who were carrying Russia’s new service rifle, the AK-12. As the rifle has not been introduced into any branch of the Belarusian security services, Lukashenka may well be receiving personal protection from Russia. [...]

Beyond the current crisis, the dismantling of the Belarusian state will have profound long-term consequences in the region. Before the 2020 election, Lukashenka preserved a minimal degree of independence from Moscow by refusing to recognise the annexation of Crimea or to allow Belarus to become a springboard for Russian military interventions. He will no longer have this freedom, and will have to accept new Russian military bases and deployments on Belarusian territory. Accordingly, Ukraine will have an even longer border with territory in which Russian forces can manoeuvre, leaving the country more vulnerable. The shift will alter the regional balance of power on NATO’s eastern flank to the detriment of the alliance. Europe must now prepare for all these changes.

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New Statesman: The return of American fascism

 The role that patriotic symbolism, mass entertainment and a corporate state might play in an incipient American fascism was clear to astute observers at the time. In Sinclair Lewis’s novel, It Can’t Happen Here (1935), an American fascist dictatorship is brought about by the “Corporatist” party, led by the reactionary populist Buzz Windrip. Windrip takes power by forging alliances with media giants, including Father Prang, a character based on Father Charles Coughlin, whose weekly radio show was listened to by millions of Americans at its height in the mid-1930s. Coughlin was virulently, and conspiratorially, anti-Semitic, disseminating the (fraudulent) Protocols of the Elders of Zion and confirming Nazi accusations of a Jewish-Communist plot for world domination led by a cabal of “international bankers”. Windrip whips his crowds to a frenzy with patriotic music and populist jingles about clearing the “rot” in Washington, taking power thanks to the carnival he’s created. “Great ­showmanship,” the reporter who serves as Lewis’s resistant voice of liberal democracy observes of Windrip’s performance. “PT Barnum or Flo Ziegfeld never put on a better.” [...]

The absurdity of this bizarrely entertaining spectacle does not make it less dangerous, but more so. The clownish aspect of both Hitler and Mussolini were often noted at the time – not for nothing did Charlie Chaplin lampoon Hitler in The Great Dictator (1940). The Ku Klux Klan was clownish, too, with its pointy hats, its puerile rituals, its risible attempts at occultism. As a historian observed in 1931, the Klan’s “preposterous vocabulary” and “infantile love of hocus-pocus” offered a “chance to dress up the village bigot and let him be a Knight of the Invisible Empire”. That didn’t make the Klan any less murderous.[...]

Historians of fascism have also demonstrated that all fascism is indigenous by definition. As Robert O Paxton explained in his seminal 1998 essay “The Five Stages of Fascism”, “authentic fascism is not for export” because all fascisms draw “their slogans and their symbols from the patriotic repertory of one particular community”. Paxton also noted that “religion, for example, would certainly play a much greater role in an authentic fascism in the United States than in the first European fascisms”. [...]

Fascism is not a principled or ­ideological stand; it is the politics of grievance, an ­instrumentalist response to a ­political ­situation it perceives as unacceptable. ­Fascism is the counter-revolutionary politics of force, justified by ultra-nationalism, glorified by myths of ­regeneration and purification, performed by masculine cults of personality and sold as the will of the people.

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The Guardian: How Angela Merkel’s great migrant gamble paid off

 But Hallak is not a complete outlier either. More than 10,000 people who arrived in Germany as refugees since 2015 have mastered the language sufficiently to enrol at a German university. More than half of those who came are in work and pay taxes. Among refugee children and teenagers, more than 80% say they have a strong sense of belonging to their German schools and feel liked by their peers. [...]

The German phrase Merkel used, Wir schaffen das, became so memorable mainly because it would in the weeks and months that followed be endlessly quoted back at her by those who believed that the German chancellor’s optimistic message had encouraged millions more migrants to embark on a dangerous odyssey across the Med. “Merkel’s actions, now, will be hard to correct: her words cannot be unsaid,” wrote the Spectator. “She has exacerbated a problem that will be with us for years, perhaps decades.” [...]

Yet today Merkel still sits at the top of Europe’s largest economy, her personal approval ratings back to where they were at the start of 2015 and the polling of her party, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), buoyed to record levels by the global pandemic. When Merkel steps down ahead of federal elections in 2021, as is expected, her party’s successor currently looks more likely to be a centrist in her mould than a hardliner promising a symbolic break with her stance on immigration. [...]

Many experts think that the integration classes that have been mandatory for refugees in Germany since 2005 are no longer fit for purpose, holding back those with academic qualifications while failing to offer real help for those who arrive without being able to read or write. The percentage of those failing the all-important B1 language test has risen rather than fallen over the last five years. And yet, Niewiedzial is optimistic. “Germany can be a very sluggish country, full of tiresome bureaucracy,” she says. “But it’s also able to learn from its mistakes and draw consequences from them.”

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TLDR News: The Vatican's Secret Deal with China - Is The Catholic Church Being Paid to Stay Quiet?

 In 2018 the Vatican and the Communist Party of China signed a deal ostensibly to try and make life easier for Chinese Catholics. Since then though it's been alleged that the Catholic Church has allowed the CCP to take over Catholocism in China for payment, a payment which has also led the Church becoming increasingly subservient to China.

UnHerd: The last gasps of a European empire

 What happens in The Man Without Qualities? Nothing much. Characters have long and seductive conversations about the soul, bisexuality, the blossom in the garden. There are weather reports. A bit of incest looms in the last few hundred pages, but Musil’s final workout prevented its consummation. It lacks a few other things, too. It doesn’t take place across a great span of time and space — Musil gives you a year in Vienna, starting in the summer of 1913. There’s no big cast of characters of the sort you find in Proust or Dickens. Ulrich, the title character, isn’t a tragic hero, but a privileged and directionless dilettante with a background in mathematics, a married mistress and a slightly misguided philanthropic interest in a sex murderer called Moosbrugger. [...]

So what are you supposed to draw from it? Don’t take the title as an insult to the PM — Polly Toynbee may have described Boris Johnson as “a man without qualities, devoid of public spirit or regard for anyone but himself … a man to shame the country as its figurehead.” But this is unMusilian: to be without qualities is not a state of moral and intellectual poverty. That’s too easy. Musil is a funny writer, but he’s not an easy one. His protagonist is no self-serving charlatan. Ulrich is possessed of great philosophical and spiritual capital. He knows about history, meteorology, criminology, Buddhism, Leibniz. This wealth, however, remains inconvertible: Ulrich’s command of detail, his passion for ideas, his sensitivity to subtlety and scruple, have brought him to an impasse with himself. And yet, Musil does not ask us to condemn his position, nor even to regard it as an error of judgement. [...]

Here, though, is a kind of consolation. Musil shows us that the world is too complex to be completely understood or mastered, and that it is foolish to pretend otherwise. If a phrase such as “take back control”, “super-forecasting” or “oven-ready” was inserted into The Man Without Qualities, you could imagine it shrivelling to death on the page. It’s a book that encourages you to express self-doubt and to have some cognisance of your limits. Because even if you can’t see them, others will. This is why Ulrich, despite his paralysis, is hard to despise. He can’t see the catastrophes to come, but when they do arrive to shake his little knot of nations to pieces, they will not find him in a dreamworld built of empty phrases.

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Psyche: Recognising our common humanity might not be enough to prevent hatred

 None of us are exempt from these forces. In contemporary Western societies, it’s not uncommon to hear immigrants referred to as a ‘swarm’ or an ‘infestation’. Psychological research also suggests that dehumanisation is not the preserve of extremists. When volunteers are asked to rate the qualities of different groups, even those holding moderate political views will often subtly deny outgroups uniquely human qualities, such as civility, rationality and refinement. In studies of emotion perception, in which volunteers are asked to evaluate the emotional experiences of others, they report that outgroup members experience complex human emotions such as pride, admiration and guilt to a lesser extent than do their fellow ingroup members.

However, look more closely at the evidence, and the claim that outgroups are dehumanised loses some, perhaps most, of its explanatory value. There are two key problems. First, it’s not clear that outgroups really are perceived as less human than the ingroup. Second, even if outgroups are perceived as less human, it’s not clear why this should increase the risk of harm against them. [...]

There are also challenges for neuroscientific research that purports to show evidence of dehumanisation. In a widely cited paper published in 2006, the researchers Lasana Harris and Susan Fiske argued that, when people dehumanise outgroups, they think of them as lacking mental states such as desires, beliefs and goals. Apparently supporting this view, the pair reported that when their research volunteers viewed pictures of outgroup members, such as homeless people or drug addicts, they exhibited less activation in brain areas associated with mentalising, particularly the medial prefrontal cortex. However, Harris and Fiske’s characterisation of dehumanisation is undermined by supposedly prototypical examples of extreme dehumanisation in which perpetrators appear to make mental-state inferences about their victims. For instance, Nazi propaganda is replete with references to what Jews were supposedly lying about and scheming to achieve. These references to Jewish people’s beliefs and goals were inaccurate and filled with malicious intent, but they were mental-state inferences nonetheless – to accuse someone of lying is to make an inference about what they are thinking. [...]

My critique of dehumanisation as an explanation for intergroup harm has implications beyond academic debate. Inspired by work in this area, some researchers have started to develop interventions for social change that aim to reduce dehumanisation. Though well-intentioned, such efforts could be misguided. My analysis suggests that attempts to foster a more inclusive and egalitarian society might be better targeted at other well-established psychological processes, such as the human tendency to stereotype and derogate people seen as outsiders.

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The Guardian: White US professor Jessica Krug admits she has pretended to be Black for years

 “To an escalating degree over my adult life, I have eschewed my lived experience as a white Jewish child in suburban Kansas City under various assumed identities within a Blackness that I had no right to claim: first North African Blackness, then US rooted Blackness, then Caribbean rooted Bronx Blackness,” she wrote. [...]

In 2015, the civil rights activist and former chapter president of the NAACP Rachel Dolezal was outed by her parents for impersonating a Black person when she was born white. Dolezal’s own history of childhood trauma was later revealed. Dolezal later referred to herself as “the world’s first trans-black case”.

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FiveThirtyEight: Election Update: Polls Are Good For Biden Pretty Much Everywhere — Except Florida (SEP. 9, 2020)

 But even though the topline numbers haven’t changed all that much, that doesn’t mean there hasn’t been some movement at the state level. It’s not super easy to find patterns where Biden is gaining or losing ground — still a lot of noise at this point — but it does seem as if, on the whole, there’s been mostly good news for Biden. Except for Florida, which, as you can see in the chart below, is where Trump has closed the gap the most.

And at this point, though, it’s really only Florida that’s moved all that much. In most other states which have been polled about as much as Florida — there’ve been 12 polls there since the start of the Democratic convention — they’ve seen far less of a change or barely any movement at all. Four other states have at least 10 polls in the same timeframe — Pennsylvania (17 polls), Wisconsin (12), Michigan (10) and North Carolina (10) — yet their numbers have budged only a little.1 What’s more, it’s mostly good news for Biden at this point. [...]

As for what’s happening in Florida, we’re still a little unsure of what to make of it, as we’d expect the numbers in fellow Sun Belt states Arizona and Texas to have moved in similar ways — but they haven’t. Some of this might have to do with Florida’s Hispanic population, however. Whereas Mexican Americans comprise more than 80 percent of the Hispanic population in Arizona and Texas, Cuban Americans form a plurality — 29 percent — of Florida Hispanics, and on the whole they are much more conservative.

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99 Percent Invisible: Podcast Episode

After the oil crisis, the global economy went into a recession. American unemployment hit 11 percent. And suddenly, middle-class families didn’t have money for name brands like Coke or Kellogg’s. Consumers wanted cheaper food. In response, supermarkets had to figure out how to make their store brands more appealing. One chain in France, called Carrefour, was developing a discount store brand when they had an idea. Instead of using bright colors, or putting their own name on the box, or using slogans or beautiful photos, their products were brandless. They would include just the name of the food, in black text, on a white background. This minimalist design was a brilliant marketing tool. It delivered the message that the food was cheap, and the savings were being passed down to consumers.[...]

The company hired a designer named Don Watt who created packaging that had a stark yellow background with plain black Helvetica type for every product. And Nichol didn’t just launch this new product line. He made it an entire store. The worst performing Loblaws stores were shut down and rebranded as No Frills. These new stores carried very few name brands and were dominated by No Name products. To make this painfully clear, the entire store was painted black and bright yellow. [...]

The generic brand became so powerful, it started showing up on the fringes of pop culture. In the sci-fi movie Repo Man, Emilio Estevez works in a grocery store that is slowly crushing his soul, and only stocks generic products. In one scene, Estevez eats out of a can simply labeled “Food.” Generic products represented the conformist direction of culture. These products were also featured in a music video by the punk band Suicidal Tendencies. And there was a whole series of books thrillingly called “No Frills Books.”

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99 Percent Invisible: The Revolutionary Post

 Benjamin Franklin, one of the early postmasters for the Crown, traveled to every colony to make improvements in the system. As he did so, he began to see the colonies differently. In 1754, at a meeting of colonial representatives in Albany, New York, Franklin proposed a plan for uniting the colonies and electing their own representatives rather than having them appointed by the Crown. Franklin’s idea didn’t go anywhere at the time.

Twenty years later, ideas about American self-governance were spreading, and revolutionaries in the colonies knew they would need something other than the Crown’s post (which could be intercepted by England) to communicate. In 1774, these American revolutionaries created the “Constitutional Post.” Before they had a Declaration of Independence or fought the revolution, before there was a constitution, Americans had the post. [...]

Women in particular became avid letter writers. As more women began using the post office, the place itself began to change. Post offices had historically been social spaces for men where it was not uncommon to find liquor, prostitutes, and pickpockets. Eventually, post offices added special “ladies windows” so that “ladies” could pick up their letters without coming into contact with these unseemly elements. Slowly post offices transitioned into more professional spaces.

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The Guardian: The last of the Zoroastrians

 The Parsis promised their Hindu hosts they would not proselytise, and over the centuries this morphed into a dogmatic aversion to conversion. The rigorous tribalism kept the small community alive and distinct for more than a millennium, but in today’s world, the same intransigence is killing it off. “You’ve seen four weddings and a funeral – well, for Parsis, it’s four funerals and a wedding,” says Jehangir Patel, who has edited the community’s monthly magazine, Parsiana, for almost 50 years. When he finally retires, he fears the magazine will simply close, as more of its readers are dying off each year. India’s Parsi population shrank from 114,000 in 1941 to 57,000 at the last census in 2011. Projections suggest that by the end of the century, there will be just 9,000 left. [...]

I started to ponder the idea of having a late-in-life navjote, egged on by many of the friendly co-participants in the tour, who thought it would be a fun excuse to all meet up again. I floated the idea with Sherry, but as we got chatting on the bus, I quickly realised I had been mistaken to infer from his bleached hair and carefree demeanour that he was a reformer and would approve of the idea. In Zoroastrianism, there is no need to be ascetic or severe in order to be conservative. Sherry told me that if either parent was not a Parsi, he would not perform a navjote. He did not accept the century-old ruling allowing navjotes for those children who have just a Parsi father. It seemed odd, given that Sherry was clearly devoted to the community’s survival, and spoke with visible passion about his work as a priest. Wasn’t this kind of attitude hastening its decline? “We want to focus on quality, not just quantity,” he said. [...]

Dastoor told me that nowhere in the Zoroastrian texts does it say children from mixed families should not be allowed to be Zoroastrians. When I asked him about Mistree’s assertion that people like my grandfather who chose to be cremated would go to hell, he became irate. “This is where we’ve gone wrong as a religion,” he said. He told me that while he would personally prefer to be consigned to a dakhma, adherence to ritual and dogma was a secondary concern: “The improvement of your soul, ideas, the kindness you show to people, to help educate and show charity to your family, your whole community and all of society – this is how we should measure a good Zoroastrian.”

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TLDR News: 630 Days Without a Government: Belgiums Complex Politics Explained

 It's been over 600 days since Belgium had a government, yep that's right no government for approaching two years. In this video we discuss the issues that Belgium faces and how the countries history deeply impacts the countries politics and future.

New Statesman: Keir Starmer’s quest to reshape Labour

 Like Cameron, Starmer inherited a party that had made a habit of losing elections: in terms of seats won, the 2005 election was the third-worst in the Tories’ modern history, and the 2019 election Labour’s worst since 1935. In both 2005 and 2019, the incumbent government had a large but not unassailable majority in the Commons, which nonetheless caused most people to write the opposition’s chances at the next election off long before it started.[...]

Starmer and Cameron share a recognition that many of Britain’s socially liberal voters are also economically conservative. Cameron sought to woo the socially liberal middle classes. He wanted to persuade those who were in sympathy with Tory economic objectives that they could have both social liberalism and traditional right-wing economies (the “double liberalism” championed by the Economist). Starmer’s aims run the other way: he wants to woo voters who are socially and culturally conservative but are economically on the left. Cameron wanted voters to know that he would “hug a hoodie”; Starmer wants them to know that he would make sure that the hoodie felt the full force of the law.[...]

Since becoming leader Starmer has appealed to the preoccupations and priorities of the new Tory-voting, Brexit-supporting working class. His tactical silences have been notable too. There have been small but significant gestures: opposition frontbenchers taking care to tweet their respects on the anniversary of the soldier Lee Rigby’s murder; Starmer’s support for retaining “Land of Hope and Glory” and “Rule Britannia” at the Proms. And there have been larger ones, such as Starmer’s vocal opposition to the Black Lives Matter campaign to abolish the police. Starmer is positioning himself against Corbyn on cultural matters. [...]

For Starmer and his inner circle, a more economically and socially liberal Labour might do better electorally, but it would be at the expense of the party’s soul. Winning back seats Labour lost in 2019 and 2017 is not just about achieving power, but about what type of party it is. As one of his close allies put it to me, “we’re not the Democrats” (meaning a loose coalition of social liberals, big-city progressives and some trade unions). Labour is a party of the labour interest, of working people and the trade unions movement. It is this Labour Party’s desire to revive that historic identity that distinguishes it both from its recent Corbynite past and its electorally successful New Labour days. It’s not just victory Starmer aims for, but to save Labour as we know it.

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New Statesman: How China’s strategy of repression has led to decades of violence in Tibet

 In the years following 1958, some 20 per cent of the Tibetan population were arrested and more than 300,000 died. Some committed suicide, others fled into exile. Gonpo and her family survived until the Cultural Revolution began in 1966, when they once again came under attack. Both her ­parents died: her father committed suicide in despair when her mother disappeared after being detained. Gonpo was sent to do hard labour in Xinjiang. [...]

Tibetans are now an underprivileged minority in a land transformed by Chinese roads, railways, big hydro and the inward migration of settlers from China’s poorest provinces, who enjoy the privileges of the coloniser. Many Tibetans are also materially better off than 50 years ago, and do not oppose modernisation, despite the West’s preconception of them as a rural, tradition-bound people. [...]

Demick attributes this phenomenon to intergenerational trauma: the young people setting fire to themselves were the actual or spiritual grandchildren of Tibetans who had fought the Red Army in the 1930s and 1950s. In response, Chinese police patrols began to carry fire extinguishers, and to arrest the families, the witnesses and suppliers of kerosene to the suicides. To avoid arrest, self-immolators took to drinking the kerosene as well as dousing themselves in it, and bound their padded clothing with wire so that it could not be easily removed.

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Politico: Dutch courts to stop extraditing Polish suspects

 The Netherlands will stop extraditing suspects or convicts to Poland over concerns that the country's courts are no longer independent, an Amsterdam court said on Thursday.

The same court had already asked the Court of Justice of the EU in a similar case in July whether the extradition of Polish suspects must be halted considering that "the independence of Polish courts and thus the right to a fair trial have come under increasing pressure." [...]

Similar doubts about the independence of Polish courts from political interference have been expressed by courts in Germany, Ireland and Spain. [...]

The EU's top court ordered the suspension of a new judicial body created by the Polish government after the Commission expressed concern about its independence.

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EN24: Yellow vests: only 10% of French people still say they support them

 “The movement remains a pole of protest which continues to be regenerated by new frustrations, however, underlines Jerôme Fourquet, director at Ifop. To the historical ones who rebelled against the increase in taxes on fuel and denounced the gap between the people and the elites, were added the directors of nightclubs affected by the economic impact of the health crisis or the anti-masks . The yellow vests crystallize all the anger which itself is constantly renewed. What does not change, however, is that the Vests are recruited mainly from the extreme parties (15% vote for Jean-Luc Melenchon, 19% for Marine Le Pen).

The yellow vests also suffer from their inability to agree on a common political platform. “It is true that the Yellow Vests have not succeeded in becoming a French“ Five Star ”, Fourquet analysis. In Italy, this movement had gained momentum thanks to Bepe Grillo, in whom he had found incarnation. Jean-Marie Bigard, who for a while believed to bring the movement to France, was exfiltrated from a parade this Saturday. The Ifop poll also points out that only 32% of those who say they are close to the yellow vests could consider voting for the comedian. We are far from the plebiscite. And now, it is Professor Didier Raoult who, according to Jerôme Fourquet, would be popular with them.

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The Guardian Politics Weekly: What kind of conspiracy theorist is Trump?

 In our new US Politics Weekly Extra, Jonathan Freedland chats with some of the Guardian’s best reporters and columnists in the US about a single question prompted by the 2020 presidential election campaign. This week, he speaks with senior political reporter Lauren Gambino about Donald Trump’s history with conspiracy theories, and the motives behind them.

This week, after Donald Trump went on Fox News to claim there was a mysterious flight carrying thugs dressed in black, a crack force of troublemakers jetting from city to city to cause trouble, Jonathan and Lauren mull over the question: “What kind of conspiracy theorist is Donald Trump?” Does he truly believe in conspiracies, or is it a pose, designed to stir up his base?

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UnHerd: Hypocrisy is not the worst thing on earth

 Yet I think in most cases it is one of the lesser vices. Consider two men: John and Joe. John is a habitual and callous cheat with no pretensions to virtue and Joe is a religious family man who once betrayed his wife. I think most of us would agree that John’s behaviour is more condemnable — and that Joe’s worst sin was cheating and not hypocrisy. Joe might be more satisfying to condemn, because dragging the righteous from their perch has a thrill which denouncing the lowly does not, but that isn’t quite the same thing. [...]

Another weakness with charges of hypocrisy is that using someone’s failure to uphold their standards as a means of discrediting those standards is a classic example of the ad hominem fallacy, or, in British English terms, playing the man and not the ball. I don’t want to be too much of a debate nerd. Such accusations can reveal some things about those standards — not least that they are hard to keep. But it does not prove that they are wrong to hold. [...]

Again, this does not mean that charges of hypocrisy are worthless. For example, the enthusiasm with which many leftists greeted Black Lives Matter protests in the midst of lockdowns they had tended to ferociously support might not have proven anything about coronavirus but it was a powerful indictment of their priorities. Yet the Right should recognise their limits, since their opponents use charges of hypocrisy too. Long before the #metoo’d male feminist, the Christian moralist with a colourful sex life, for example, has been a classic archetype, as Jerry Falwell Jr. recently reminded us.

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Jacobin Magazine: The Pandemic Is Making the European Union More Integrated — And More Unequal

 During the last ten years, this vision has suffered some major challenges. Instead of continuous uninterrupted progress, the modern European Union has had to follow the path of crisis management. The Great Recession led to the sovereign debt crisis, then the Portuguese crisis, the Spanish crisis, the Irish crisis, and, of course, most drastically, the Greek crisis. The talk of a “Grexit” — the possibility of the other countries booting Greece from the Union — smoothly transferred to talk on the crisis over Brexit, as the British right actually split their country from the union. This, at the same time as the mounting environmental crisis, the so-called refugee crisis, the crisis of democracy caused by right-wing populism in countries like Hungary and Poland. But from crisis to crisis, the Union lurches forward, and the solution is always the same — more integration. [...]

The knights don’t go into the lair alone, of course. Another thing the press likes to do is to divide Europe into convenient blocs. Populations of countries like Finland are, time and again, led to believe that the problem with the European Union is that there are too many Mediterranean countries in it, that everything would be okay if the EU could just somehow drop or at least ignore the Southern countries for their profligacy. The name of choice for the Northern nations for the negotiations was the “frugal four,” part of the former “New Hanseatic League.” This group set out to oppose the package, eventually getting some concessions, but in the end having little effect on the basic forms of the package itself. [...]

This isn’t really a matter of the so-called political families within the European sphere. In the “Northern” group, the Austrian conservative Sebastian Kurz joined the Dutch liberal Mark Rutte and the social democrats in Nordic countries, such as Finland’s Marin, to oppose the social democrat Pedro Sánchez in Spain, the conservative Angela Merkel in Germany, and — stretching the meaning of the word quite a bit — the “liberal” Macron in France. The one country in the EU that currently has the far right in government is Estonia, where the nationalist EKRE party has talked tough about the EU and federalism. But in the end, it presented no effective opposition to the package, after Estonia was promised a windfall of EU subsidies as a result. Other right-wing populists, like Matteo Salvini in Italy, muted their criticisms even longer ago. [...]

Even a federal Europe would not, as such, alter the underlying economic systems leading to more and more environmental destruction in search of personal and national profits. Indeed, once one looks under the hood of the European liberalism’s internationalist rhetoric, the practical work of European integration is often advanced by the same inward-looking arguments as nationalism always has been: the idea of a continent threatened by, say, China or Russia, or international terrorism. Indeed, when looking at Macron talking about the “cultural vitality” (though not the values) of Hungary and Russia as a model for his preferred European “civilization state,” or Belgian liberal Guy Verhofstadt — for decades almost the living personification of the EU — literally referring to an “EU empire,” one wonders whether the idea of a European federation guided by the values of the Polish or Hungarian governments is as far off as one might think, even now.

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TLDR News: Serial Incompetence or Government Flexibility: Johnson's Twelve Major U-Turns Explained

 The last few months have certainly been unusual, a phase of chaos that no other modern government has had to handle. As such there's been a lot of u-turns and flip-flopping out of Number 10, with government strategy seemingly changing like the wind. So in this video, we take a look at the government's 12 major u-turns and consider if this represents government flexibility or incompetence.

Social Europe: Building an electoral coalition: social-democratic parties in western Europe

 Simply put, the basic strategic paradigm which allowed for postwar social-democratic electoral success during les trente glorieuses no longer exists. The ‘third way’ did attempt to reconcile a globalised economic climate with social-democratic policy-making but in the long-run it turned into an electoral failure. [...]

Using post-electoral data from the Belgian National Election Study, I have shown that this opposition literally cleaves the Flemish social-democratic electorate. Appealing to both left-particularistic production workers and left-universalistic socio-cultural professionals is proving challenging when the new cleavage is salient—especially as populist radical-right parties strategically position themselves to align with production workers, while green parties increasingly specialise in addressing socio-cultural professionals.

Nor do the welfare-state preferences of the two electorates align entirely. While both strongly support an interventionist state, 30 per cent of production workers but a negligible 2 per cent of socio-cultural professionals adopt a populist stance, combining a nativist, exclusionary egalitarianism with a critique of the functioning of the national welfare state. Socio-cultural professionals are more likely to believe in universal, boundary-crossing solidarity than production workers (15 per cent, compared with 7 per cent of production workers) and tend to have a left-wing profile supportive of social investment (52 per cent, compared with 23 per cent). Both production workers and socio-cultural professionals can however agree on the importance of a redistributive and interventionist state. [...]

Higher perceived ethnic discrimination is linked to a vote for the radical left, instead of the social democrats, at least partly explaining the surge of minority voters behind the PVDA in recent elections. In trying to recover some of their former electorate of left-particularistic production workers, social democrats thus stand to lose their ethnic-minority electorate, which has arguably been the only consistently loyal section in recent decades.

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UnHerd: Stop searching for the ‘gay gene’

 The history of the search for the gay gene is not a comfortable one. One of the most controversial studies was conducted by gay neuroscientist Simon LeVay in 1991, who claimed that gay men’s brains were “more like women’s”. Then there was the study suggestion that boys with older brothers are 33% more likely to be gay because of occupying a womb where a male foetus has already been.

Appallingly, the then Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom Immanuel Jakobovits reacted to news of LeVay’s research by saying: “If we could by some form of genetic engineering eliminate these trends, we should — so long as it is done for a therapeutic purpose.” [...]

The response to Hamer’s study was largely that of horror. Alarmists said the discovery would be used to try to “cure” homosexuality, ignoring the fact that Freudians, fascists and supporters of eugenics alike have been trying to eradicate homosexuality for decades on the assumption that it was something that could be “fixed”. Yet gay rights activists in the US and Britain were, on the whole, delighted at the discovery of the “gay gene”, seeing it as ammunition in the war against homophobia. To them, the gene proved that their sexuality was instinctive and inevitable, not perverse. [...]

A further analyss in 2003 led researchers to say that they had found persuasive evidence to support the theory that a person’s sexuality is developed before birth. They had measured the “eye-blink reaction” of straight and gay test subjects who were subjected to sudden loud noises, finding significant differences in the response between male and female, heterosexual and homosexual participants which, they said, could be linked to the area of the brain which determined sexuality.

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Notes from Poland: Poland’s human rights commissioner on the state of democracy, LGBT protests and “dormant civic energy”

 Agnieszka Wądołowska: “Poland in 2020 is a completely different country than it was in 2015,” you said in the Senate in a statement summarising your term as commissioner for human rights. “Poland is no longer a constitutional democracy”, but a state of “electoral authoritarianism” and a “hybrid democracy”. What do you think we have lost in those five years? [...]

For example, with the [ruling] Law and Justice party’s anti-refugee advert, it was impossible to hold anybody who produced it accountable. The prosecutor’s office discontinued the proceedings. And the matter of the antisemitic post of a member of the National Council of the Judiciary will probably not be ruled upon, because the statute of limitations will apply in a few weeks’ time. Even though the case has been known about for years. There are many such examples. [...]

In many cases, the hardest thing is the fact that the changes stop me from helping people as I would like to. Every commissioner used to be able to take a case to the Constitutional Tribunal. Now I must make a rational judgement on whether that might not make the situation worse – because, for example, the Constitutional Tribunal legitimising a given law can make the work of the courts difficult, as they can always directly apply the constitution. [...]

There is one more thing to mention. What is happening is, in my view, a repercussion of the presidential campaign and the fact that the subject of LGBT became an electoral fuel used to heat up the atmosphere and take votes away from the [far-right] Confederation party. A moment ago, we had the Istanbul Convention on the table, now it’s LGBT rights – this all seems to me to be a political game. And I find this regrettable because one should not play with human rights. This is of course connected to a very real, concrete threat to the people who become victims of this situation.

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Nerdwriter1: Caravaggio: Master Of Light

 

euronews: Montenegro election: Who are the triumphant opposition factions and what do they stand for?

 Consisting of three blocs or alliances, For the Future of Montenegro, Peace is Our Nation and Black on White, the opposition won a wafer-thin majority with 50.7 per cent of the votes, or 41 out of 81 seats in the Montenegrin parliament. [...]

Despite the unifying goal of unseating the current DPS government and assurances that they are collectively committed to staying the course on issues such as EU integration, the rule of law and the overturning the DPS government's law on religious freedom, the opposition’s disparate values and agendas may mean that forming a viable alternative government is not an easy task.

One of the biggest challenges will be the reconciling of opposing pro-EU and pro-Serbia and Russia stances across the competing opposition alliances. The general opinion among voters tends to reflect an anxiety that ideological antagonisms will most likely be the source of any future instability within the new government.

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Reuters: Steve Bannon’s effort to export his fiery popularism to Europe is failing

 After Bannon was charged with fraud for his role in an effort to raise money to help build Trump’s wall on the U.S.-Mexico border, two people working with him said an effort to found an academy for right-wing Roman Catholic activists in Italy faces a criminal inquiry by the Rome criminal court and a project aimed at ending the European Union has closed up shop. [...]

Along with Bannon, the institute has been trying to set up a two-track program: an “academy for the Judeo-Christian West” with a Bannon-designed curriculum and the Cardinal Martino Academy, which will promote Catholic social teachings, said Benjamin Harnwell, a former British Conservative party activist who leads the institute and works with the former Trump aide.[...]

Separately, a Brussels-based Bannon-backed project aimed at undermining the European Union shut up shop last year, said Mischael Modrikamen, the Belgian lawyer who teamed up with Bannon to promote the anti-EU “The Movement.”[...]

Populist candidates from France, Italy and Britain did well, but their counterparts in Germany, Austria, Denmark and Spain did not. And Bannon’s “Movement” found little support from right-wing leaders.

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WorldAffairs: White Supremacy, at Home and Abroad

 The outrage of the last two weeks has made it clear that we are at a moment of national reckoning. The Black Lives Matter movement is calling to abolish the police and redirect police funding toward education and public services. Ideas that once seemed radical are now being discussed by politicians both on the local and federal level. On this week’s episode, historian Nell Irvin Painter and anthropologist Christen Smith join Ray Suarez to talk about the global Black Lives Matter movement, policing in the Western Hemisphere and why it’s important to understand the role white supremacy has played in building our institutions.

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Balkan Insight: Poland Struggles to Deal With Pedophilia in Catholic Church

 Piotr M.’s case, while shocking, is sadly not unusual in Poland, where hundreds of Catholic priests have been accused of pedophilia, with over one hundred convicted so far in court, according to a map of the cases created by the victims’ rights group, Do Not Be Afraid. According to a 2019 report by the Polish Episcopal Conference, the central organ of the country’s Catholic Church, 382 complaints against priests over sexual molestation were filed with the Church between 1990 and 2018.

Artur Nowak, a lawyer who has supported victims in tens of cases, including Magda’s, told BIRN that these numbers are underestimates and there are probably thousands of cases of pedophilia among priests in Poland, many of which will likely never come to light. [...]

Artur Nowak, the lawyer, says pedophilia is such a big problem in the Polish Catholic Church because young men hardly out of adolescence are forced into a life of celibacy and given no education or support in how to deal with their evolving sexuality. [...]

When the Church pedophilia scandal broke last May, the governing Law and Justice (PiS), whose key politicians have been loudly accusing the “LGBT lobby” of posing a threat to Polish children, was faced with a tough balancing act: suddenly, facts revealed in the documentary indicated the threat was actually coming from inside the Polish Catholic Church, a PiS ally. While PiS leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski and his party colleagues promised tough action against pedophiles, they were quick to stress that the phenomenon was present everywhere in society and not especially linked to the Church.

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Nautilus Magazine: No, Animals Do Not Have Genders

It wasn’t until the 1950s that the psychologist John Money started using the term “gender role” to refer to something that associates with biological sex, but is not the same. From there, a theoretical distinction emerged where sex refers to facts about biological bodies. Gender, on the other hand, is cultural. It involves a set of behaviors and norms that shape how men and women act, prescribe how they ought to be, and specify what it means to be a man or a woman. These behaviors and norms emerge as a result of cultural evolution, and are transmitted to new generations through cultural learning. (Notice here that I implicitly refer to a two-gender system. I am not making a political point. This is just the most common type of system across cultures, traditionally.)

As gender theorists like Judith Butler and Anne Fausto-Sterling have pointed out, sex and gender cannot be fully pulled apart. Facts about our sexed bodies influence the cultural rules surrounding gender. (For instance, in many cultures it is a norm that men, who are typically males, do jobs that require a lot of upper body strength.) And facts about gender in turn shape our sexed bodies. (For instance, norms of what is attractive lead to different patterns of exercise, like weightlifting for men and running on the elliptical for women.) And these feedback on each other. (When men only weightlift, this creates further sex differences that reinforce our cultural norms.) But despite this intertwining, peacocks still do not have genders. And the reason is that peacocks do not have culture.

How do we know that gender is not simply a biological fact? What makes it cultural, rather than analogous to sex-differentiated behavior in animals? Here is some of the key evidence. Unlike in any other animal, gendered behavior in humans is wildly different across cultures. What is considered appropriate for women in one culture might be deemed completely inappropriate in another. Even the number of genders is culturally variable. While most cultures have settled on two genders, associated with biological sex differences, others settle on three or more.

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TLDR News: QAnon Explained: How The Conspiracy Became Mainstream

QAnon is a conspiracy theory that's been around for a few years now, but since COVID the theory seems to have really taken off. Believers think there's a secret underground group of people committing horrific crimes and that Trump's the only person who can stop them. In this video, we explain the theory, but more importantly how it took off and the social media platforms that allowed the theory to become mainstream. 

QAnon is a conspiracy theory that's been around for a few years now, but since COVID the theory seems to have really taken off. Believers think there's a secret underground group of people committing horrific crimes and that Trump's the only person who can stop them. In this video, we explain the theory, but more importantly how it took off and the social media platforms that allowed the theory to become mainstream.

New Statesman: Libya’s storms of history

 The impact of this unprovoked attack on three integral provinces of the Ottoman empire in Africa was profound. The Italian pursuit of Ottoman naval forces led to repeated closures of the Turkish Straits, blocking the passage of transport ships carrying Russian grain for export and seriously disrupting the Russian economy. A series of knock-on crises broke out in south-eastern Europe, triggering two major wars in 1912 and 1913 and sweeping away security arrangements that had previously prevented Balkan conflicts from escalating into continental wars. In short, the war for Libya proved a milestone on the road to the conflict that broke out in 1914. [...]

There was no third world war in 2014, of course. But the airstrikes of 2011 did exacerbate tensions among the major powers, partly because Nato’s humanitarian intervention quickly morphed into an assault on the Gaddafi regime. Vladimir Putin, then prime minister of Russia, compared the action to a “medieval call to crusade”. It was an unsettling feature of the world order, he remarked, that armed interventions could so easily be unleashed against sovereign states. Russia, Putin declared, would respond by strengthening its own defensive capacity. Commentators who know Putin well have suggested that the Libyan crisis of 2011, and especially the lynching of Gaddafi, were decisive in placing the Russian leader on the path to a more aggressively anti-Western foreign policy. [...]

It is still unlikely that a direct clash between Egyptian and Turkish troops will result from these steps. Egypt has for the moment promised only training, equipment and logistical support for its eastern Libyan proxies. But whereas the events of 2011 recalled the history of Western colonial and imperial violence, the prospect of an Egyptian-Turkish stand-off in northern Africa has switched on memories that extend far beyond the war of 1911 to the 1830s, when an ambitious Egyptian leader challenged Ottoman power in the eastern Mediterranean. [...]

There is a religious dimension to the crisis. The al-Sisi government claims that the fighters loyal to the Turkish-supported GNA include partisans of Islamic State. More specifically, Turkey is accused of sending Isis fighters from Syria to support the GNA. But it should be noted that a US Pentagon investigation found this accusation to be false. As many as 3,000 Syrians had been transferred by Turkey to Libya and paid to fight there, but these were mercenaries and not Islamist militiamen, according to the Pentagon’s report. On the other hand, Erdogan’s sympathy for the Muslim Brotherhood, ruthlessly suppressed by al-Sisi in Egypt and still active in Libya, is well known. Erdogan is often seen making the rabaa sign to his supporters. This gesture, in which the four fingers are raised and the thumb tucked into the palm of the hand, recalls the massacre in Cairo’s Rabaa Square on 14 August 2013, when Egyptian security forces fired on a sit-in of Muslim Brotherhood supporters, killing more than 800 civilians (the Arabic word rabaa means “four”, hence the raised fingers).

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The Guardian: Why the Germans Do It Better by John Kampfner review – notes from a grown-up country

 Like so much British writing on Germany, this is also a book about Britain. We need to see, in effect, post-Brexit Britain in a German mirror, not in a fantasy global one. This mirror does not flatter: Kampfner sees a Britain “mired in monolingual mediocrity, its reference points extending to the US and not much further”. It borrows and it shops, and lives in a nostalgic dreamworld. [...]

Kampfner tells us that in an interview shortly before becoming chancellor, Angela Merkel was asked what Germany meant to her. She replied: “I am thinking of airtight windows. No other country can build such airtight and beautiful windows.” German windows are indeed something to be proud of. This telling detail speaks to the reality that Germany is richer than the UK. This requires a little more spelling out than Kampfner gives it. Its income per head is substantially higher. It is a far larger global player: it has more than 6% of the world’s manufacturing, compared with 2% for the UK. As an exporter it is also in a different class from the “world-beating”, “global Britain”. [...]

Germany has had some deindustrialisation, particularly in the old German Democratic Republic, which had a transition to capitalism more brutal in terms of industry destroyed and jobs lost than British industry in the Thatcher years. Yet, as Kampfner notes, despite continued criticism in Germany of the lack of progress in levelling up, trillions of euros were spent and the GDP per capita of the east is now 80% of that of the west. That is, incidentally, a smaller difference than there is between the GDP per capita of the English north (which has about the same population as the former East Germany) and the rest of England. Large parts of England and Wales and Northern Ireland now have a GDP per capita lower than the old East Germany.

Kampfner’s Germany doesn’t do everything right. It has its scandals such as the new Berlin airport which cannot yet be used, and the unfinished and over-budget Stuttgart railway station. The train system no longer runs on time as it once did, one sign of a general neglect of infrastructure. Its environmentalism (it has a notably strong Green party) is tarnished by keeping coal-burning power stations going. It did not cover itself in glory when, through the EU and other agencies, it bailed out its banks and crashed the economies of Greece and others. Its deep conservatism means Germany has remarkably low rates of employment of women with children, in contrast to the old GDR.

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New Scientist: Covid-19 is becoming less deadly in Europe but we don't know why

 In England, the proportion of people infected by the coronavirus who later died was certainly lower in early August than it was in late June. Over the period, this infection fatality rate (IFR) dropped by between 55 and 80 per cent, depending on which data set was used, found Jason Oke at the University of Oxford and his colleagues. [...]

Nonetheless, why this is happening isn’t so clear. According to data for England, a larger proportion of younger people are being infected than was happening around the first peak of cases in April, with cases rates for 10-16 August the highest among 15-44 year olds. [...]

The jury is out on whether one variant of the coronavirus, known as D614G, explains why covid-19 is becoming less deadly. Paul Tambyah at the National University of Singapore told Reuters that the rise of the D614G mutation had coincided with drops in death rates in some countries, suggesting that it might be “more infectious but less deadly”.

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Reuters: As president, Biden would not trash all Trump's foreign policy legacy

Indeed, while Trump has sought to portray both Obama and Biden as “soft” on China, the previous administration pursued a tougher line against Beijing than Trump did initially. [...]

Tom Fletcher, a foreign-policy adviser to three past British prime ministers, said he did not expect big changes on China under a Biden administration, but a less abrasive style. [...]

O’Sullivan and others said Biden would likely seek to revive the Iran agreement and Asia trade deal, but not without revisions to secure the sort of “better deal” Trump often talks about getting.

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The Red Line: Who is India's Biggest Strategic Enemy?

 India is fast becoming one of the world's great powers, set to take the number 2 or 3 slot by 2050. This is unless another country were to derail India's current path, and the list of potential derailers is fairly long. So this week we take a look into who will be India's great strategic threats over the next 3 decades, and where India sits in the power struggle for leadership of South Asia today. This weeks guests are Swaminathan Aiyar (CATO Institute) Dhruva Jaishankar (ORF/Brookings) Harsh V Pant (London School of Economics)

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Notes from Poland: Polish bishops call for “clinics to help LGBT people regain natural sexual orientation”

They also call for the creation of “clinics to help people who want to regain their…natural sexual orientation”. Such “conversion therapy” has been rejected by the established medical community as unethical and harmful, and has been completely or partially banned in a number of countries. [...]

The bishops admit that this idea “stands in clear contradiction to positions regarded as scientific, as well as to so-called ‘political correctness'”. [...]

The premise that non-heterosexual orientations are a mental illness has in recent decades been rejected by leading medical bodies, including the World Health Organisation in 1990. The practice of “conversion therapy” to “cure” or “correct” such orientations has also been deemed unethical and harmful. [...]

Further countries are currently considering legislation to outlaw the practice. In 2017, the Church of England declared conversion therapy to be a “discredited” and “theologically unsound” form of “abuse”, and called on the British government to ban it.

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Social Europe: Where did Trumpism come from?

Hacker and Pierson stress the long backstory of right-wing populism in the US. An ‘immense shift’, as they put it, preceded the rise of Trump, who must be understood as ‘both a consequence and an enabler’ of his party’s steady march to the right. As with other scholars of American politics, Hacker and Pierson emphasise how much further the Republican party is to the right than its ‘sister’ parties in Europe—more like the French Rassemblement national than Britain’s Conservatives. (The Democrats, meanwhile, retain the profile of a fairly typical centre-left or even centrist party). [...]

Republican elites were aided in their ability to organise and mobilise angry white voters by ‘aggressive and narrow groups’ specialising in ‘outrage-stoking’ and the ‘politics of resentment’, such as the National Rifle Association and the Christian right. They were also aided by the rapidly growing ‘outrage industry’ of right-wing media, which proved extremely effective at ‘escalating a sense of threat’. And if all this proved insufficient to garner a majority, Republicans resorted to dirty tricks, ‘from voter disenfranchisement to extreme partisan gerrymandering, to laws and practices opening the floodgates to big money’. [...]

Moreover, while it is true that the right-wing economic policies pursued by the Republican party diverge from the centre-left economic preferences of a majority of voters, it is also true that a majority of US voters have preferences on social and cultural issues which diverge from those advocated by the Democratic party—as demonstrated by the same surveys on which Hacker and Pierson rely. This is also true for European voters, a majority of whom are to the right of social-democratic and other left parties on social and cultural issues.

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Wendover Productions: How COVID-19 Broke the Airline Pricing Model

 

openDemocracy: Poland is moving further towards autocracy

For many years after the collapse of communism Poland's political landscape was characterised by consensus. But consensual politics frayed in the mid-2000s and gave way to contention between two main political parties, PiS and Civic Platform. The rivalry of these two parties has fostered polarisation in Poland. Since 2015, when PiS won an outright majority in parliamentary elections and when Duda first became President, PiS has aggressively pursued its policy agenda (including troubling reforms to the judiciary, anti-abortion measures, and politically targeting LGBTQ individuals), pushing Poland's liberal democracy toward conservative autocracy. In turn, the government's actions have stoked the fires of polarisation. [...]

What about when polarisation gets ratcheted up? The PiS government has been marked by politicisation of gender equality and regression for LGBTQ Poles. Quite often, actions in these areas have been justified on political bases with few appeals to biblical canon or Catholic dogma. Nevertheless, Poland's Catholic establishment (chiefly, the Polish Episcopal Conference) and religious conservative voters endorse and take succour from PiS's reactionary measures. Resultantly, Poland is among the most polarised countries in the EU along religious and gender and sexual orientation dimensions. [...]

Events following President Duda's re-election, such as the arrest of an LGBT activist and resultant protests as well as the persistence of so-called 'LGBT free zones' in several Polish towns, have signaled the continuation of polarisation trends. As long as PiS retains its control of governing authority – which it will do at the national level for at least three more years, until the November 2023 parliamentary elections – polarisation is a useful strategy that allows the party to pursue its conservative autocratic agenda. The liberal opponents of PiS are left to pursue resistance through collective action and to build resilience in local communities.

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