UnHerd: How Big Slave ruled Britain

 Throughout, the forces of Big Slave have the nation in their grip, bound with a tithe on every barrel of sugar brought from the West Indies — money that affords the plantation owners a £20,000 annual marketing budget to promote the titular Interest in the press and politics. This was lobbying, pure and simple. As detailed and devious as anything Bell Pottinger ever cooked up, served with much the same shrug of corporate amorality. Thus, for every Anti-Slavery Monthly Review, there are plenty of journals like the popular Quarterly Review, in which Regency Richard Littlejohns bash out punchy jeremiads against the wet snowflakes of abolitionism. [...]

In his opposition to emancipation, Canning was joined, often for quite different reasons, by figures as grand as Robert Peel, the Duke of Wellington, and the future prime minister William Gladstone, himself the son of a wealthy slave owner. Cardinal John Henry Newman, recently canonised by Pope Francis, called on slaves to be content with their situation. [...]

When non-white guests came to dine at Wilberforce’s society, Taylor reminds us, they had to sit at the other end of the table, behind a screen. Macaulay deplored “miscegenation”, and the anti-slavery barrister George Stephen announced he would not help a family of “halfcastes”. Who could have predicted none would have the mores of a 2020 Goldsmiths grad student?

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Nautilus Magazine: Why We Judge People Based on Their Relatives

We know that humans are inference machines. With very little information, people can guess at rates above chance whether someone is a psychopath. With a 10-second video clip, people can correctly guess whether someone is gay 81 percent of the time. To many, “stereotype” is a word practically synonymous with “false,” but stereotype accuracy is one of the best replicated findings in psychology. You can accurately infer a lot about someone simply by knowing their ethnicity, sex, or country of origin. Of course, when we know people better, we tend to rely relatively more on our own experience. [...]

For most characteristics, it looks like genetics are much more important than parenting. One large study found that, for adopted children, their rate of criminality was 12 percent if their biological parents were criminals but their adopted parents were not criminals—but just 6 percent if their adoptive parents were criminals and their biological parents were not. When both sets of parents, biological and adoptive, were criminals, the rate of criminality shot up to 40 percent. There is a similar pattern when it comes to drug and alcohol abuse. If we know that Pete is a criminal with a substance-abuse problem, his father Jack is much more likely to have these problems as well. [...]

It’s surprising that there is almost no research about how much we judge people based on their relatives, given the abundance of evidence showing that we make quick inferences about other people on the basis of little information. Some sociologists have looked into a related bias, called the “courtesy stigma.” If you associate with someone who is stigmatized in society, like someone with substance-abuse problems, schizophrenia, or a cognitive disability, that stigma can fall on you. “Family stigma” is one form of courtesy stigma.

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New Statesman: The divided heart of the GOP

Even then, a knife’s-edge majority will leave conservative Democrats such as West Virginia’s Joe Manchin arbiters of the Democratic policy agenda. Biden’s ambitious healthcare plan will die on the vine. Noises about changing the rules of the electoral game to favour Democrats (packing the conservative Supreme Court, awarding statehood to Washington, DC and Puerto Rico to counter the Senate’s “anti-democratic” – that is, anti-Democratic – bias) have already quieted to murmurs. [...]

Where does all this leave the Republican Party? A succession is beginning under obscure portents. The party was not given the cauterising rejection that its most anti-Trump elements were hoping for. A resounding loss would have made it easier for the Never-Trump exiles to return triumphant, bringing with them a more collegial, “compassionate conservatism” – and perhaps also a return to the orthodoxies Trump rejected: fiscal discipline, free trade with China, fewer compunctions about keeping troops in Afghanistan. [...]

The day Texas turns Democrat has been delayed for the umpteenth time: expect it to be delayed to the Greek calends. Meanwhile, where Democrats have made electoral inroads, as in Georgia, this has not been down to racial-historical notions of “demographic destiny”, but the political efforts of figures such as Stacey Abrams, who has become the party’s most valuable organiser in the Deep South. In other areas, such as Arizona and the Rust Belt, Democratic gains have come from the increased white support in the anti-Trump suburbs. [...]

To overturn this precedent would not end abortion in the US, but it would mean many heartland Americans would no longer feel that laws they disagreed with were being imposed on them by Washington. The pre-Trump model of the party, marrying secular suburban businessmen with zealous evangelicals, might cease to function. Without this moral motivation, the movement would be forced to rely more on economic, cultural – or racial – grievance, with uncertain prospects of success.

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TLDR News: The African Union Explained: Is Africa's 55 Member Union the 'European Union' of Africa?

 Described by some as the EU of Africa, the African Union is a 55 member union that works together to develop a "A United and Strong Africa". In this video we explain the union, how took inspiration from the European Union and what it's planning for the future.

CNBC: Trump underperformed in most counties where he held large rallies

 There were 30 Trump campaign stops in that period, according to an NBC News tally, in states from Arizona to Nebraska to Pennsylvania. In five counties that Trump visited he saw better results than he did in 2016, but in the remaining 25 his margins of victory got smaller, his margin of defeat grew or the county flipped Democratic. [...]

Crowd sizes are often held out as a way to gauge support for a politician, and sometimes they are. But during a pandemic, with a polarizing candidate on the stump, it’s possible the meaning of the rallies were misread. While the crowds were visible sign of enthusiasm for Trump, there were much bigger, and less visible, groups of people who were not at the rallies and who may have seen them in a negative light. [...]

To be clear, none of this is provable. These are correlations, not one-for-one causal relationships. Trump’s rallies may have helped him, even in the places where he underperformed in 2020. Maybe they prevented him from doing worse.

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