A new series of talks by David Runciman, in which he explores some of the most important thinkers and prominent ideas lying behind modern politics – from Hobbes to Gandhi, from democracy to patriarchy, from revolution to lock down. Plus, he talks about the crises – revolutions, wars, depressions, pandemics – that generated these new ways of political thinking. From the team that brought you Talking Politics: a history of ideas to help make sense of what’s happening today.
12 April 2021
History Of Ideas — Talking Politics: De Beauvoir on the Other
Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949) is one of the founding texts of modern feminism and one of the most important books of the twentieth century. It covers everything from ancient myth to modern psychoanalysis to ask what the relations between men and women have in common with other kinds of oppression, from slavery to colonialism. It also offers some radical suggestions for how both women and men can be liberated from their condition.
The Guardian – Politics Weekly Extra: The hypocrisy of the Christian right
Amidst allegations central to the Matt Gaetz scandal, Jonathan Freedland speaks to Peter Wehner of the Ethics and Public Policy Center. They discuss the decades-old pattern of prominent Christian political leaders and commentators, who forgive allies for the same transgressions for which they harshly judge their opponents.
Vox: Can we get rid of Covid-19 forever?
As of March 2021, Covid-19 has killed more than 2.5 million people. It’s brought on a dramatic economic downfall, a mental health crisis, and has generally just put the world on pause. But we don’t have to look far back in history to see how much worse it could have been.
Smallpox was twice as contagious as Covid-19, and over 60 times as deadly. It plagued humanity for centuries, left many survivors blinded and covered in scars, and killed hundreds of millions of people in the 20th century alone. But today, smallpox has been eradicated. Through a massive global effort, we were able to wipe the disease completely out of existence.
The New Yorker: Inside the U.S. Army’s Warehouse Full of Nazi Art
Much of Nazi propaganda was ephemeral: posters and flyers, designed to be mass-produced and spread quickly. The paintings stored on high metal racks in Fort Belvoir’s warehouse were part of a different project, meant to give the Reich’s predations a patina of high culture. One of the best-known works is “The Flag Bearer,” painted by Hubert Lanzinger a year after Hitler came to power. It depicts the Führer astride a black horse, clad in shining armor and carrying a Nazi flag. “It’s Hitler as a Teutonic knight,” Sarah Forgey, the Army’s chief art curator, told me, standing before the painting. “It’s showing there’s a connection between the Third Reich and Germany’s feudal past.” [...]
All propaganda is meant to obscure the truth, but two paintings inadvertently highlight the decline of the Nazi project. The first, “Hitler at the Front,” was painted by Emil Scheibe in 1942, about a year after Hitler launched his titanic, megalomaniacal invasion of the Soviet Union. It shows a buoyant Führer surrounded by a throng of German soldiers—young, well-scrubbed Aryans gazing at him in adoration. The second work—“East Front Fighters,” by Wilhelm Sauter—was painted two years later, when the Nazis were being rolled back by the Soviet Army. The soldiers in this canvas are exhausted and battered, if still unbowed. The message to Germans is clear: The war is tougher than we thought, but our soldiers are indomitable. Not long afterward, Hitler killed himself, and the Nazi regime imploded.[...]
Among the hundreds of pieces at Fort Belvoir, the most curious are four watercolors by Hitler. During the First World War, when he served as a foot soldier, he carried paper and often spent free moments drawing—the remnants of an early dream of succeeding as an artist. As a young man, Hitler was twice rejected for admission to the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, and the works at Fort Belvoir make it easy to see why. The draftsmanship is painstaking but stolid, without personal vision or lightness of touch. Most of the pieces are nostalgic street scenes, like something that might hang in a dentist’s office—except that the streets are eerily devoid of people. “Hitler couldn’t paint the human form,” Forgey said. One of the works—“Railway Embankment,” a brown-toned, faintly Impressionist work from 1917—depicts two human beings, but they are little more than dark blurs. Over the years, the Army has lent pieces from the collection to museums, but curators don’t ask for the Hitler watercolors. “They are only interesting because of who produced them,” Forgey said.
Social Europe: A rail renaissance for Europe
The momentum for a European rail renaissance is growing. A recent survey by the European Investment Bank revealed that 74 per cent of respondents intended to fly less frequently for environmental reasons, once restrictions were lifted, and 71 per cent planned to choose trains over planes for short-haul trips.
The rail system is not yet in shape, though. On average, rail accounts for only 8 per cent of passenger transport. The Achilles heel is cross-border rail: the European system is only a patchwork of national systems. Ask anyone who has ever tried to cross several European countries by train.[...]
EU funding makes up an important share of overall transport infrastructure funding and can be a lever for other sources. Yet too much goes into roads and airports, too little into rail. Much even of that is spent on mega-projects with exploding costs, long delays and sometimes only limited European value. The European Court of Auditors cautioned in 2018 that projects were often chosen on a political basis—not sound cost-benefit analysis—and lacked co-ordination across borders.
CityLab: Barcelona Wants to Ban Renting Private Rooms to Tourists
Since 2011, Barcelona has required entire apartments offered for short stays to have a license from the city, but it froze granting new licenses in central Barcelona in 2014. In 2018, the city introduced a host ID system that allowed it to verify whether apartments offered online were done so legally, making it easier to identify and pursue rule-breakers. And in August 2020, the city imposed a temporary rule to ban room rentals for less than 30 days; the new proposal would make that rule permanent. [...]
The plan, which will now undergo three months of public consultation before being submitted to a vote in the city’s council chamber, would extend the city’s campaign against short stays to a new front line. In extending permanent controls of vacation lettings into shared apartments, the city’s goal is, according to its press release, is to “guarantee the social function of housing and avoid a saturation of tourist rooms that would cause problems of coexistence, impact the housing market and harm neighborhood trade.” [...]
The arguments for the ban made in the city’s proposal make for dramatic reading. If no regulations whatsoever were placed on tourist rooms, it says, a potential 670,000 homes might be able to rent out rooms. This figure far exceeds the actual numbers of tourist rooms offered before the pandemic — 14,000 beds, overwhelmingly clustered in the Old City and Eixample district, But the city also expressed fears that its own efforts to regulate platforms like Airbnb could drive more landlords towards the tourist room sector.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)