Philosophy Tube: Jordan Peterson's Ideology

 

Salon: Conservative women often don't perceive sexism as a social problem. Here's why

 "Women who have experienced gender discrimination report higher levels of political participation and a higher chance of voting in the general election," writes Dr. Alexa Bankert of the University of Georgia in a paper published in American Politics Research. "However, among conservative women, personal experience with sexism is not associated with this participatory impetus." In other words, the experience of being discriminated against seems to activate liberal women and encourage them to vote and be involved in politics. Peculiarly, that wasn't the same for conservative women.

Bankert told PsyPost that the difference related to how one perceives sexism, as a one-off thing or systemic. "Among conservative women, the perception dominates that sexist behavior consists of isolated incidents while liberal women view sexism as a more systemic problem," she said. That interpretation fits with a fundamental truth about the right-left divide, namely, the tendency of the right to deny the existence of the social sphere and view social problems rather as individual ones — whereas the left understands social issues as structural, related to large-scale cultural and social factors that must be changed at a political level. "This might explain why experienced sexism amplifies liberal women's political engagement but there is not a similar participatory impetus among conservative women," Bankert mused.[...]

"As liberal women experience sexism firsthand, further bolstering the belief in widespread gender discrimination, they are likely to turn to the political domain for solutions," Bankers writes in her paper. "This expectation is grounded in liberals' convictions that it is the government's responsibility to address intergroup inequalities and protect the rights of disadvantaged members of society. From this perspective, liberal women's personal experience with sexism should boost their political engagement." [...]

"Since many conservative women reject the feminist label and its associated battle against sexism, it is possible that conservative women either dismiss or rationalize their own personal experience with sexism," Bankert explains. "In fact, past research has demonstrated that women who endorse traditional gender stereotypes are also more likely to blame themselves for experiencing sexual harassment."

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Social Europe: The rise of right-wing nationalism: from Poland to Polanyi

Applebaum is appalled by the ‘extreme left’ which does not wholeheartedly trust such well-known forces for good as the US Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Central Intelligence Agency. Every movement or actor critical of the status quo contributes to ‘polarisation’ and is an enemy of democracy; to not believe in American ideals is to be a ‘cynic’. In Applebaum’s idealised narrative of the US there are no illegal wars, poverty or corruption or flaws in its increasingly distorted capitalism. [...]

Applebaum’s only material explanation for the weakening of democracy is ‘social media’, where propaganda spreads and people are radicalised. True, such mechanisms are powerful and often underestimated. But the logic of Twitter and Facebook confirms Applebaum’s own way of seeing the world: the moral and emotional stories of our time are reinforced and these platforms become the perfect scapegoat to avoid thinking about other, underlying factors. [...]

Democracy is not just the right to vote. What matters in the long run is justice, and justice can only be achieved through changes in the material conditions of people’s lives. The real dividing line in politics cannot be between ‘evil’ and ‘good’, moral and immoral. What is needed to save democracy is to create new counterweights to today’s capitalism—which undermines it.

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The Atlantic: What If Friendship, Not Marriage, Was at the Center of Life?

 In the past few decades, Americans have broadened their image of what constitutes a legitimate romantic relationship: Courthouses now issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, Americans are getting married later in life than ever before, and more and more young adults are opting to share a home rather than a marriage license with a partner. Despite these transformations, what hasn’t shifted much is the expectation that a monogamous romantic relationship is the planet around which all other relationships should orbit.

By placing a friendship at the center of their lives, people such as West and Tillotson unsettle this norm. Friends of their kind sweep into territory typically reserved for romantic partners: They live in houses they purchased together, raise each other’s children, use joint credit cards, and hold medical and legal powers of attorney for each other. These friendships have many of the trappings of romantic relationships, minus the sex. [...]

Beliefs about sexual behavior also played a role. The historian Richard Godbeer notes that Americans at the time did not assume—as they do now—that “people who are in love with one another must want to have sex.” Many scholars argue that the now-familiar categories of heterosexuality and homosexuality, which consider sexual attraction to be part of a person’s identity, didn’t exist before the turn of the 20th century. While sexual acts between people of the same gender were condemned, passion and affection between people of the same gender were not. The author E. Anthony Rotundo argues that, in some ways, attitudes about love and sex, left men “freer to express their feelings than they would have been in the 20th century.” Men’s liberty to be physically demonstrative surfaces in photos of friends and in their writings. Describing one apparently ordinary night with his dear friend, the young engineer James Blake wrote, “We retired early and in each others arms,” and fell “peacefully to sleep.” [...]

John Carroll, who met his platonic partner, Joe Rivera, at a gay bar, describes this type of romantic relationship as “one-stop shopping.” People expect to pile emotional support, sexual satisfaction, shared hobbies, intellectual stimulation, and harmonious co-parenting all into the same cart. Carroll, 52, thinks this is an impossible ask; experts share his concern. “When we channel all our intimate needs into one person,” the psychotherapist Esther Perel writes, “we actually stand to make the relationship more vulnerable.” Such totalizing expectations for romantic relationships leave us with no shock absorber if a partner falls short in even one area. These expectations also stifle our imagination for how other people might fill essential roles such as cohabitant, caregiver, or confidant.

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FiveThirtyEight: Why Many Americans Don't Vote

 In any given election, between 35 and 60 percent of eligible voters don’t cast a ballot. It’s not that hard to understand why. Our system doesn’t make it particularly easy to vote, and the decision to carve out a few hours to cast a ballot requires a sense of motivation that’s hard for some Americans to muster every two or four years — enthusiasm about the candidates, belief in the importance of voting itself, a sense that anything can change as the result of a single vote. “I guess I just don’t think that one person’s vote can swing an election,” said Jon Anderson, who won’t be voting for president this year because of moral objections to both candidates. [....]

Of the 8,000-plus people we polled, we were able to match nearly 6,000 to their voting history. We analyzed the views of the respondents in that slightly smaller group, and found that they fell into three broad groups: 1) people who almost always vote; 2) people who sometimes vote; and 3) people who rarely or never vote. People who sometimes vote were a plurality of the group (44 percent), while 31 percent nearly always cast a ballot and just 25 percent almost never vote. And as the chart below shows, there weren’t huge differences between people who vote almost all the time and those who vote less consistently. Yes, those who voted more regularly were higher income, more educated, more likely to be white and more likely to identify with one of the two political parties, but those who only vote some of the time were also fairly highly educated and white, and not overwhelmingly young. There were much bigger differences between people who sometimes vote and those who almost never vote.

Nonvoters were more likely to have lower incomes; to be young; to have lower levels of education; and to say they don’t belong to either political party, which are all traits that square with what we know about people less likely to engage with the political system. [...]

There are, of course, other systemic reasons why some people might vote more inconsistently. Our survey found, for instance, that occasional voters were slightly more likely than frequent voters to have a long-term disability (8 percent vs. 5 percent), and nonvoters were even more likely to fall into this category (12 percent). Black and Hispanic voters are also more likely to experience hurdles, perhaps in part because there tend to be fewer polling places in their neighborhoods. About 24 percent of Black respondents said that they had to stand in line for more than an hour while voting, and Hispanic respondents were more likely to say they had trouble accessing the polling place or couldn’t get off work in time to vote.

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VICE: The Next Generation of the French Far Right

All of the major political parties in France have youth wings, but the National Rally remains particularly concentrated on attracting young people, training them, promoting them to leadership positions, and encouraging them to run for office. It does this with an eye towards expanding its base and recruiting youth like Ferreira and her ambitious, well-educated peers in and around Paris—a population usually thought more likely to sympathize with the students of 1968 or the people who took to the streets to protest systemic racism this summer than with a party best known for anti-Semitism, nationalism, and xenophobia. But the next generation of the French radical right lives outside of the stereotype of National Rally voters as rural, less educated, older, and male. Instead, many of its dedicated organizers and future leaders reside in universities at the center of a city widely associated with protests, strikes, and revolution, antagonizing that centuries-long history from the inside. [...]

Founded in 1972 by Jean-Marie Le Pen, Marine Le Pen’s father, the National Rally has historically attracted men, both very young and very old, and been most notorious for the elder Le Pen’s Holocaust denial, hate crime accusations, and flirtations with Nazism. When Marine Le Pen took control of the party in 2011, she sought to change that image and professionalize the party. With her “de-demonization” strategy, she saw results fairly quickly: In 2014, the party began experiencing gains in municipal, regional, and European Parliament elections. Last year, the National Rally beat Macron’s party in elections for the European Parliament, riding a wave of anti-elite sentiment embodied by the Yellow Vest protest movement that rocked the country for months. The party’s 2018 name change was part of Le Pen’s larger strategy to distance herself from her father, whose reputation is seen as beyond salvageable. The presence of well-groomed students from elite universities, too, fits nicely into that strategy.

Everyone I interviewed differentiated Marine Le Pen’s party from the party of Jean-Marie Le Pen, accepting the National Rally’s former iteration as racist and anti-Semitic. Nevertheless, they also expressed blatantly nationalistic and Islamophobic views, remnants of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s party that remain hallmarks of the National Rally today. Just two years ago, the youth wing marked International Women’s Day by tweeting a meme that read, “Defending women’s rights is fighting against Islamism: The French woman is neither veiled nor submissive!” And last month, the National Rally launched a new campaign titled, “French, wake up!,” calling for security and justice in the face of “savagery” and promising to, among other things, increase prison capacity, apply zero tolerance, end “mass immigration,” reinstate mandatory minimums, and end social services for families of repeat juvenile offenders. [...]

But Rooduijn sees radical right parties gaining broader acceptance, gradually chipping away at the stigma surrounding them. “I think that the National Rally is a good example because you can really see when Marine Le Pen took over the leadership, she really changed the image of the party, trying to present the party as a party that you could vote for, a party that's there for everyone,” he explained. “At the same time, when it comes to policy positions, to the actual ideas and the ideological base of the National Rally, nothing really changed. The party is still very radical when it comes to immigration. It's still very radical on the European Union. It's still very strict on law and order. It's still very populist, meaning that it's still very negative about all kinds of elites, most importantly the political elites.... So these parties have become more generally accepted. However, they have not really become less radical.”

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The Atlantic: Trump Secretly Mocks His Christian Supporters

 The president’s alliance with religious conservatives has long been premised on the contention that he takes them seriously, while Democrats hold them in disdain. In speeches and interviews, Trump routinely lavishes praise on conservative Christians, casting himself as their champion. “My administration will never stop fighting for Americans of faith,” he declared at a rally for evangelicals earlier this year. It’s a message his campaign will seek to amplify in the coming weeks as Republicans work to confirm Amy Coney Barrett—a devout, conservative Catholic—to the Supreme Court. [...]

It helped that Trump seemed to feel a kinship with prosperity preachers—often evincing a game-recognizes-game appreciation for their hustle. The former campaign adviser recalled showing his boss a YouTube video of the Israeli televangelist Benny Hinn performing “faith healings,” while Trump laughed at the spectacle and muttered, “Man, that’s some racket.” On another occasion, the adviser told me, Trump expressed awe at Joel Osteen’s media empire—particularly the viewership of his televised sermons. [...]

The Faustian nature of the religious right’s bargain with Trump has not always been quite so apparent to rank-and-file believers. According to the Pew Research Center, white evangelicals are more than twice as likely as the average American to say that the president is a religious man. Some conservative pastors have described him as a “baby Christian,” and insist that he’s accepted Jesus Christ as his savior. [...]

In fact, according to two senior Utah Republicans with knowledge of the situation, Don Jr. has been so savvy in courting Latter-day Saints—expressing interest in the Church’s history, reading from the Book of Mormon—that he’s left some influential Republicans in the state with the impression that he may want to convert. (A spokesman for Don Jr. did not respond to a request for comment.)

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Politics.co.uk: The break-up of the UK is coming - but will it be violent or peaceful?

 Contrary to the current talk of the British empire and the nostalgia around it, they are not Powellites. Their overriding concern instead is the restoration of the Westminster system. For them, our EU membership has been an historical parenthesis. Westminster is all. A century ago, ceding part of Ireland was a price worth paying for keeping the Westminster system intact. So was the loss of India, and the loss of the colonies in the 1950s and early 1960s. Today, next year, whenever, Northern Ireland will follow.

The more troubling question is whether the Brexiters see Scotland in the same way, and whether their view of Scottish independence is the same as that of Unionists south and north of the border. Scotland is a nation of the United Kingdom, not a province that can be snapped off and tacked on to another state. It can only become separate by becoming independent and sovereign. [...]

That project's mode of governance is not the centralised one the less intellectual Brexiters constantly moan about, but actually about subsidiarity - decisions being made at the most local feasible level. By contrast, the heart and distinctiveness of the Westminster system is centralisation. Scottish nationalists believe Scotland would be freer to act autonomously within a federal, decentralised European Union than they are with devolution inside a unitary state.

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New Statesman: The twilight of the Union

The arrival of the Covid-19 pandemic overshadowed the trial, and made the constitutional debate about Scotland’s future seem trivial. Suddenly there were other more pressing issues to think about, a lethal and mysterious plague that threatened to overwhelm the NHS and devastate the economy. Although, technically speaking, NHS Scotland is a distinct entity, founded on separate Scottish legislation, this fact belongs to the arcane lore of policy wonks: the NHS is widely regarded in Scotland as a UK institution. During lockdown Scots banged pots and pans on a Thursday night for the NHS, not specifically for the NHS in Scotland. And everybody knew that the Chancellor Rishi Sunak’s generous furlough scheme came courtesy of the deep pockets of the UK Treasury.

Yet, bizarrely, the Scottish Question did not hibernate. Instead, opinion about Scottish independence shifted significantly during the Covid lockdown. At the start of the year, the pro- and anti-independence camps were running neck and neck in the opinion polls, and remained tied as late as May. But more recent polls demonstrate a marked rise in support for independence, which is now running at 54 per cent, once the don’t knows are excluded. [...]

To be sure, nationalism plays a significant part in the independence cause. But in the broad miscellaneous coalition of voters that supports independence, flag-waving nationalists, though the most obviously visible cohort, rub shoulders with a range of other social types. There are the voters, often middle-aged, who think independence is the best way of preserving what remains of Britain’s cherished welfare state; those who want to live in a normal northern European country – like Denmark or Norway – with a Nordic model of egalitarian social democracy; those who despair of the Brexity delusions of Britain’s post-imperial nostalgia; and a radical younger generation that identifies with Rise, the alternative movement for “Respect, Independence, Socialism and Environmentalism”.

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Aeon: Sex is real

There’s no need to reject how biologists define the sexes to defend the view that trans women are women. When we look across the diversity of life, sex takes stranger forms than anyone has dreamt of for humans. The biological definition of sex takes all this in its stride. It does so despite the fact that there are no more than two biological sexes in any species you’re likely to have heard of. To many people, that might seem to have ‘conservative’ implications, or to fly in the face of the diversity we see in actual human beings. I will make clear why it does not. [...]

Many people assume that if there are only two sexes, that means everyone must fall into one of them. But the biological definition of sex doesn’t imply that at all. As well as simultaneous hermaphrodites, which are both male and female, sequential hermaphrodites are first one sex and then the other. There are also individual organisms that are neither male nor female. The biological definition of sex is not based on an essential quality that every organism is born with, but on two distinct strategies that organisms use to propagate their genes. They are not born with the ability to use these strategies – they acquire that ability as they grow up, a process which produces endless variation between individuals. The biology of sex tries to classify and explain these many systems for combining DNA to make new organisms. That can be done without assigning every individual to a sex, and we will see that trying to do so quickly leads to asking questions that have no biological meaning.

While the biological definition of sex is needed to understand the diversity of life, that doesn’t mean it’s the best definition for ensuring fair competition in sport or adequate access to healthcare. We can’t expect sporting codes, medical systems and family law to adopt a definition simply because biologists find it useful. Conversely, most institutional definitions of sex break down immediately in biology, because other species contradict human assumptions about sex. The United States’ National Institutes of Health (NIH) uses a chromosomal definition of sex – XY for males and XX for females. Many reptiles, such as the terrifying saltwater crocodiles of northern Australia, don’t have any sex chromosomes, but a male saltie has no trouble telling if the crocodile that has entered his territory is a male. Even among mammals, at least five species are known that don’t have male sex chromosomes, but they develop into males just fine. Gender theorists have extensively criticised the chromosomal definition of human sexes. But however well or badly that definition works for humans, it’s an abject failure when you look at sex across the diversity of life. [...]

Nothing in the biological definition of sex requires that every organism be a member of one sex or the other. That might seem surprising, but it follows naturally from defining each sex by the ability to do one thing: to make eggs or to make sperm. Some organisms can do both, while some can’t do either. Consider the sex-switching species described above: what sex are they when they’re halfway through switching? What sex are they if something goes wrong, perhaps due to hormone-mimicking chemicals from decaying plastic waste? Once we see the development of sex as a process – and one that can be disrupted – it is inevitable that there will be many individual organisms that aren’t clearly of either sex. But that doesn’t mean that there are many biological sexes, or that biological sex is a continuum. There remain just two, distinct ways in which organisms contribute genetic material to their offspring.

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SciShow Psych: Identity Politics: How All Your Identities Sway Your Vote

People throw out the term "identity politics" as a way to say that someone is wrong, but the truth is, it's something that affects the way all of us vote.

Nautilus Magazine: Your Brain Makes You a Different Person Every Day

 Every moment of your life, your brain is rewiring. You’ve got 86 billion neurons and a fraction of a quadrillion connections between them. These vast seas of connections are constantly changing their strength, and they’re unconnecting and reconnecting elsewhere. It’s why you are a slightly different person than you were a week ago or a year ago. When you learned that my name is David, there’s a physical change in the structure of your brain. That’s what it means to remember something. [...]

There’s a study that’s been running for a few decades with nuns who’ve lived in a convent their whole lives and agreed to donate their brains upon their death. At autopsy, researchers discovered that some fraction of these nuns had Alzheimer’s disease, but nobody knew it when they were alive. The reason is because they were constantly challenging themselves. They had responsibilities and chores. They dealt with each other all the time, and one of the most challenging things for the brain is other people, in a good way. So till the day they died, they were cognitively active. Even though their brains were physically getting chewed up by the disease, they were constantly building new roadways in the brain. [...]

This question got me really interested in whether we could create new senses for humans. Could you feed in some kind of data stream where the brain is getting new data about something in the world that’s useful? This is called sensory substitution. In my lab, we started doing this with individuals who are deaf. We built a vest that’s covered in vibratory motors, kind of like the buzzer on your cell phone. The vest captures sound and turns the sound into patterns of vibration. The motors are ranged from low to high frequency, which is how your inner ear is also arranged, so we’re taking the inner ear and transferring it to the skin of the torso. It turns out that people who are deaf can understand what is happening in the auditory world by getting the information just through the patterns of vibration on their skin. You’re not using your skin for much of anything, but it’s this incredible computational material that you can pass a lot of data through.

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Social Europe: Intersectionality: time for a rethink

 The term intersectionality was first used by the legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989. But the intersectional approach is rooted in the social movements of the US in the 70s and 80s, as a critique of feminist and anti-racist struggles. The general experience of black women was that in feminist activism the interests of white women were at the forefront, whereas in anti-racist struggles men predominated.[...]

First, the current practice of the intersectional idea presumes that those who experience the most oppressions will understand best the nature of the oppressive system and pursue the least particularistic politics. But one cannot simply add (or multiply) such positions in the manner of an oppression Olympics—who has more points in the oppression race, in how many dimensions one is standing on the losing side of the Excel sheet. [...]

If the main issue becomes recognition of individual uniqueness or an identity mix, then not only is it an ad absurdum extension of the feminist slogan ‘the personal is political’—to only the personal is political. This also renders particular identities inscrutable—which means that groups so constituted can neither show solidarity with each other nor formulate a common goal. They can then fit in with the individualistic neoliberal spirit of the era, which delegitimises all systemic critique, for instance concerning its categories of class and gender. [...]

The focus should not be on ahistorical intersections of differences and repressed groups of identities, but on examining how distinctions and hierarchies are established between them. Identities should not be interpreted as some kind of inner, intimate, unquestionable substance, but as a personal experience of a relative position in a system of social relations.

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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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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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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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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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Reuters: Hungary's Orban calls for central Europe to unite around Christian roots

 “Western Europe had given up on ... a Christian Europe, and instead experiments with a godless cosmos, rainbow families, migration and open societies,” Orban said in a speech.

He said the monument, a 100-metre long and 4-metre wide ramp carved into a street near Budapest’s parliament building, was a call to central European nations to strengthen their alliance and rally around what he called the “Polish flagship”. [...]

Orban himself had rarely criticised rainbow, or same-sex families, but Parliament’s speaker - a long-time ally of Orban - had equated gay adoption with paedophilia.

Last weekend, two rainbow flags were torn down from municipals buildings in Budapest, prompting a warning from the U.S. Embassy that neo-Nazi groups should not be tolerated.

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BBC4 Thinking Allowed: Metrics

Laurie Taylor explores the increasing use of metrics across diverse aspects of our lives. From education to healthcare, charities to policing, we are are target-driven society which places a heavy emphasis on measuring, arguably at times at the expense of individual professional expertise. 

Laurie is joined by Jerry Muller, Professor of History at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., who asserts in his book, The Tyranny of Metrics, that we are fixated by metrics, to the extent to which we risk compromising the quality of our lives and most important institutions. He is also joined by Btihaj Ajana, Senior Lecturer in the Department of Digital Humanities at King's College London, who, in the introduction to the book, Metric Culture - Ontologies of Self-Tracking Practices, explains the concept of the 'Quantified Self Movement' - whose philosophy is 'self-knowledge through numbers'.

With such a plethora of personal information about ourselves being generated daily are we complicit in creating a culture of surveillance with the blurring of boundaries between the private and public? Stefan Collini, Professor of Intellectual History and English Literature at the University of Cambridge, joins the discussion. Revised repeat.

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National Public Radio: It's More Than Racism: Isabel Wilkerson Explains America's 'Caste' System

 Pulitzer Prize-winning author Isabel Wilkerson says racism is an insufficient term for the systemic oppression of Black people in America. Instead, she prefers to refer to America as having a "caste" system.

Wilkerson describes caste an artificial hierarchy that helps determine standing and respect, assumptions of beauty and competence, and even who gets benefit of the doubt and access to resources. [...]

That means that until arriving here, people who were Irish, people who were Hungarian, people who were Polish would not have identified themselves back in the 19th century as being white, but only in connection to the gradations and ranking that occurred and was created in the United States — that is where the designation of white, the designation of Black and those in between came to have meaning. [...]

One of the examples, a Japanese immigrant petitioned to qualify for being Caucasian because he said, "My skin is actually whiter than many people that I identified as white in America. I should qualify to be considered Caucasian." And his petition was rejected by the Supreme Court. But these are all examples of the long-standing uncertainties about who fits where when you have a caste system that is bipolar [Black and white], such as the one that was created here. [...]

It turned out that German eugenicists were in continuing dialogue with American eugenicists. Books by American eugenicists were big sellers in Germany in the years leading up to the Third Reich. And then, of course, the Nazis needed no one to teach them how to hate. But what they did was they sent researchers to study America's Jim Crow laws. They actually sent researchers to America to study how Americans had subjugated African Americans, what would be considered the subordinated caste. And they actually debated and consulted American law as they were devising the Nuremberg Laws and as they were looking at those laws in the United States.

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