Jay Foreman: Why does Russia have the best maps of Britain?

 

Nautilus Magazine: We Never Know Exactly Where We’re Going in Outer Space

In the early 1960s, during the space race, neither American nor Soviet scientists really knew where planets like Mars or Venus were—especially at the accuracy and precision essential for spacecraft navigation. That may sound faintly ludicrous. They of course knew roughly where a target like Venus would be when a spacecraft got there. But “roughly” in this context might be an offset of 10,000 or 100,000 kilometers. Planetary positions, their ephemerides, rely on the calibration of their orbits to extremely high precision over time. But the only way to do that properly is to make direct measurements, just as the mariners of old would need to sail right by an island or shoreline in order to nail down its latitude and longitude. [...]

It remains to be seen whether tiny spacecraft can carry the requisite computational toolkit or sensory and steering capacity to do this. The bright stars themselves might be the best markers to exploit, together with our own sun forming a navigational beacon. Tiny pulses from miniature laser diodes could provide thrust to maneuver with, and perhaps the key is to send hundreds, even thousands, of nanocraft, each with modest AI and an ability to learn from each other and to reach their goals in space and time through massive redundancy and the sacrifice of many. But when you’re trying to catch a flying bullet—whether star or planet—with another flying bullet, things can go wrong. [...]

In sending machines to other worlds, even to other stars, we have no choice but to fully admit our inaccuracies and imprecisions, to be entirely, brutally honest about our limited grasp of what’s out there. Even the laws of nature are deductions based on wholly imperfect measurements, whether of planetary orbits and gravity, or of the properties of logic and symbolic manipulation in algebra—the latter being “measured” through human minds and the machines those minds produce. The amazing thing is how well these laws let us model and predict aspects of the physical world, a capacity that has reassured and helped us for thousands of years. We have managed to turn the problem around, and can now predict the kinds of chaos that should occur across nature, from unsettled weather conditions and unstable stock markets to, of course, planets.

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The Pragati Podcast: Nuclear War, Deterrence and Peace.

 Nuclear war feels unthinkable, but how much peace does nuclear deterrence guarantee? Do nuclear programmes truly deter or compel adversaries in the real world? And can we imagine a world where 20+ countries have nuclear weapons?

Vipin Narang joins Pavan Srinath on Episode 124 of The Pragati Podcast to dive into the world of nuclear weapons and strategy. He shares the evolution of our understanding of nuclear strategy from early ideas of mutually assured destruction.

The Pragati Podcast is a weekly talkshow on public policy, economics and international relations hosted by Pavan Srinath.

Vipin Narang is an Associate Professor of Political Science at MIT and a member of MIT’s Security Studies Programme. He published his first book Nuclear Strategy in the Modern Era in 2014, and is currently working on his second book, Strategies of Nuclear Proliferation, in which he explores how states pursue nuclear weapons. He is on Twitter at @NarangVipin.

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New Statesman: Britain at the end of history

 While the prime minister was firefighting at home, her position was deteriorating abroad. In January 1989, one of the great love affairs of modern diplomacy came to an end, as US president Ronald Reagan left the White House. His successor, George HW Bush, did not share Reagan’s affection for Thatcher, calling her a “very difficult” woman who “talks all the time when you’re in a conversation”. Bush saw West Germany, not Britain, as America’s “partner in leadership”, making it harder for Thatcher to amplify her influence through the “special relationship”.

Relations were also poor with West Germany. The federal chancellor, Helmut Kohl, thought Thatcher “ice-cold” and “dangerous”, while Thatcher herself made no secret of their “acrimonious discussions”. She got on better with the French president, François Mitterrand, who credited her with “the eyes of Caligula, and the lips of Marilyn Monroe”. Yet the two had little in common politically, and Thatcher had spent much of the summer belittling the bicentenary of the French Revolution of 1789. [...]

Over the winter of 1989-90, Thatcher gave a series of inflammatory press interviews, warning of a resurgence of German nationalism. “What is reunification all about?” she asked rhetorically. “One people, one fatherland.” She underlined references to the two World Wars in documents, and astonished George Bush and François Mitterrand by pulling out wartime maps from her handbag. Notes for one speech were scribbled on the back of a newspaper cutting on the 1938 Munich Agreement: an indication, perhaps, of what she was requesting from the archives. [...]

Powell was at the centre of one of the most damaging incidents of this period: the Chequers seminar of March 1990. Thatcher had invited a group of historians – including Gordon Craig, Hugh Trevor-Roper, Norman Stone and Timothy Garton Ash – to discuss Germany, and Powell produced a hair- raising summary of the talks. An account of the German “national character” included “angst, aggressiveness, assertiveness, bullying” and “egotism” in a veritable alphabet of insults. There were still questions to be asked as to “how a cultured and cultivated nation had allowed itself to be brainwashed into barbarism”; and the “way in which the Germans currently used their elbows… suggested that a lot had still not changed”. The document was leaked to the Independent, causing outrage in Bonn and dismay in other capitals.

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UnHerd: Leon Trotsky’s disturbing afterlife

 But in many ways, what is most interesting about Trotsky is not his death, or life, but his afterlife. For, to a great extent he remained (and for some people amazingly remains still) the great ‘might have been’ of the Soviet era. Never mind the people who actually grew up while the horrors of the Soviet system were ongoing, I have heard people in my own adult life, born in my own lifetime, and sometimes younger than myself (people in their twenties or thirties), seriously describe themselves as being (or at some point having been) a Trotskyist. [...]

Several reasons present themselves. One is the possibility that his undoubted intellectual ability, plus his assassination in a far-away land gave him a certain martyr-like glamour. He was working on his magnum opus about his enemy right up until the moment of his death; the combination of work ethic and premature demise can be a heady brew. Especially so for a certain type of Western intellectual who likes the idea of fanaticism for a cause precisely because they have themselves never had to suffer at the hands of such fanatics.

But the greater reason would appear to be that reason which remains perhaps the greatest bit of unfinished business of the 20th Century. The recognition that the Soviet, Communist, Marxist experiments were not trees which just happened to give off some poison fruits. Or beautiful ideas which were just mishandled and misappropriated by misguided hands. But rather that the whole dream was a nightmare from beginning to end. And always was going to be. That the Communist experiment had no more likelihood of delivering peace on earth than did the Fascist attempt to try to produce the same.

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The Prospect Interview #141: How can nations atone for their sins?

 Why do some countries succeed in confronting their pasts, and others fail? Authors Ivan Krastev and Leonard Benardo join the Prospect Interview this week to discuss the question of the summer: how do nations come to terms with the historical crimes they’ve committed?

Ivan and Leonard write an essay on the (unsuccessful) Russian case in this month’s issue of Prospect, in which they trace the curious recent rehabilitation of Joseph Stalin in recent years. What does it take for a country to face up to its history—and what do they make about Britain’s ongoing debate on the statue of Winston Churchill?

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Freakonomics: How the Supermarket Helped America Win the Cold War (Ep. 386 Rebroadcast)

 Aisle upon aisle of fresh produce, cheap meat, and sugary cereal — a delicious embodiment of free-market capitalism, right? Not quite. The supermarket was in fact the endpoint of the U.S. government’s battle for agricultural abundance against the U.S.S.R. Our farm policies were built to dominate, not necessarily to nourish — and we are still living with the consequences.

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Architectuul: FOMA 38: Five Examples of Sacral Architecture in Kaunas

 A choice to turn a church into a warehouse is rather interesting, since a warehouse had a symbolic meaning in the Soviet Union. Some researchers believe that converting churches into warehouses “was not the abolition of the holy but, so to speak, its replacement. The warehouse is just as ideal an order in the material world as the church is in the spiritual world. The warehouse is a materialist church, but instead of collecting people who are seeking in prayer an exalted form of the soul, it houses a multitude of objects that have found a precise inventoried form.”[2]

Nevertheless, according to various data from 1953 to 1959 nearly 15-20% of churches were closed while some of sacral buildings went through radical transformations. Vilnius Cathedral Basilica (1783) by Gucevičius was closed in 1949. During 1950 sculptures of saints, which were on the rooftop were removed and destroyed. Since the Cathedral was closed a lot of artifacts were stolen while the interior was ravaged. The Cathedral become part of the Museum of Art and was in1956 transformed into a gallery. The building was returned to the Catholic community in 1988. [...]

Kaunas Mosque also known as Vytautas the Great Mosque is one of four remaining mosques in Lithuania. Its design reminds the mosques in Northern Africa, a compact, small-volume mosque combines historical forms with oriental motifs like an elliptical dome and a small minaret, which was never used for its traditional purpose.

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UnHerd: How Europe’s Last Dictator survived

But unlike the near-teetotal judo enthusiast Putin, Lukashenko was a very conventional type of strongman, already retro in 1994. With his combover and thick moustache he was the perfect image of a Soviet regional boss, as if he had been cloned in a test tube kept on a shelf at a dacha between a jar of pickles and a bottle of home made vodka that made grandpa go blind. [...]

Lukashenko, in fact, was not at all keen on this whole independence thing. He opposed the break-up of the USSR and retained close contacts with the Russian communist party; in 1994 he addressed the Russian parliament and called for the creation of a new union of Slavic states. Lukashenko was less of a friend-to-oligarchs type and more of a state power type, seeking to preserve the USSR he had grown up in like one of those mammoths you occasionally find intact in a block of ice in Siberia. [...]

His Soviet style was a strength in other ways: Europe’s last dictator he might have been, but he came from the tradition of dull Eastern European despots whose names and faces you can’t quite remember unless, for some reason, you take an interest in these things. Unlike Kim Jong-il he wasn’t a megalomaniac intent on starving his people into submission while drinking cognac and collecting nuclear warheads. The success of his policy of sustained dullness can be measured by a quick look at the archives of Vice which has 5,594 articles on North Korea and 149 videos compared to 29 articles and no videos on Belarus. If you’re boring, nobody cares; you’ll be left to your own devices. [...]

But this was not actually a sign of anything much: Lukashenko remained cautious and conservative. When Putin annexed the Crimea, he gave his first ever speech in Belarusian and attempted to distance himself from his powerful patron, but before long he was holding joint drills with Russia again. Earlier this year in a fight over energy prices with Russia he bought some Norwegian oil and invited Mike Pompeo to Minsk, but he was still a long way from the bitter exchanges that characterise Russia’s relations with Ukraine.

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New Statesman: The hot war in the east

In retrospect the hubristic complacency infecting all three communist capitals seems astounding. Stalin, of course, was operating on a policy of limited liability, turning Mao into the banker of last resort as his price for the new Sino-Soviet pact. In Fearing the Worst: How Korea Transformed the Cold War (Columbia University Press), a magisterial new study using archives from all the key countries, the American historian Samuel F Wells Jr observes that, “At Stalin’s insistence, Mao agreed to give Kim a blank cheque to cash if he got into trouble.” There were shades of Germany and Austria-Hungary in the July crisis of 1914. And the parallels don’t stop there. Kim lacked the logistical capacity for a war lasting more than a few weeks. “Much like the German Schlieffen Plan…” comments the military historian Allan Millett, “the North Koreans planned for a short war since it was the only war they could win.” [...]

Like many crisis decisions by leaders, the president was acting from the gut but also on his reading of the past. “Korea is the Greece of the Far East,” Truman told an aide – alluding to the firm line he had taken on providing anti-communist aid to Greece and Turkey in 1947. “If we are tough now,” he added, “they won’t take any next steps.” But, “There’s no telling what they’ll do if we don’t put up a fight now.” The president also took the international dimension seriously, commenting that the UN was “our idea” in 1945 and “in this first big test we just couldn’t let them down”. [...]

As Truman’s biographer Robert J Donovan observes, “war without congressional approval” was “a costly mistake”, for which the president later paid a heavy price when he lost control of the conflict. At this stage in the fighting, political and public opinion was largely supportive. That was true even of a senior Republican such as Senator Robert A Taft, who accused Truman on 28 June of embarking on “de facto war” with North Korea “without consulting Congress” and warned that “if the president can intervene in Korea without congressional approval” he could “go to war in Malaya or Indonesia”. (Taft might as easily have said Vietnam: in the 1960s Lyndon Johnson followed the same tactic as Truman.) Yet Taft added that he would be willing to vote for a resolution of approval if one were put before Congress. The president, however, considered that he had sufficient constitutional authority as commander in chief, and he was confident that the fighting would be over quickly. [...]

Yet Washington had no idea what that job would entail and lacked even rudimentary information about what was going on behind the bamboo curtain. Although Truman had created the Central Intelligence Agency in 1947, in its early years the CIA lived up to none of those three words. Not only did it fail to deliver accurate intelligence on many of the major crises of the late 1940s – including the Soviet atomic test – its actions were lethargic and, far from being centralised, it operated as a series of rival fiefdoms spread out in ten different buildings across Washington, DC. In the spring of 1950, after a Soviet spy notified Moscow that the US had broken the codes used by the USSR to communicate with its emissaries in Beijing and Pyongyang, the ciphers were changed and the CIA went blind during the crucial months before the North Korean attack.

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Phenomenal World: Trade Wars Are Class Wars

Michael Pettis: Our argument is fairly straightforward: trade cost and trade conflict in the modern era don’t reflect differences in the cost of production; what they reflect is a difference in savings imbalances, primarily driven by the distortions in the distribution of income. We argue that the reason we have trade wars is because we have persistent imbalances, and the reason we have persistent trade imbalances is because around the world, income is distributed in such a way that workers and middle class households cannot consume enough of what they produce. [...]

That's an important difference. Hobson’s interpretation was that there are middle courses between overthrowing the entire system and tolerating exploitative international relationships, and we agree. We don’t argue that we’re in an inevitable crisis of capitalism, but rather that the problems we face can be solved using the kinds of redistributional tools that policymakers have used in the past. [...]

mp: That's why it's interesting to go back to Hobson. He argued that the reason England and other European countries exported capital abroad was not military adventurism, but income inequality. You had incredibly high savings because much of the income was concentrated among the wealthy, and so England had to export those excess savings and the accompanying excess production. Imperialism enabled it to lock in markets for both of those exports. Hobson’s prescription was that increasing the wages of English workers such that they’re able to consume what they produce would make imperialism unnecessary—and this is where I see the connection to today. [...]

mk: Right. The Hartz reforms were named after Peter Hartz, who was also the head of HR at Volkswagen. During this period, there was a belief shared on both sides that the only way to preserve employment and induce growth was through a combination of wage and hour cuts. Much of this was rooted in the way German unification occurred. The belief was that there would be this incredible growth story when you brought West German technology, management, capitalism, and democracy to a new population with a shared language and history. But for a variety of reasons it didn't work out that way. The German government lost a lot of money underwriting this whole process and that soured a lot of people on the possibilities for fiscal policy to generate growth.

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UnHerd: Covid has exposed America as a failed state

In this coming struggle, America is starting with a great and self-inflicted handicap. Obama’s attempts to reposition US foreign policy away from its destructive and self-defeating entanglement in the Islamic world and towards the coming confrontation with China failed, distracted by the bloody chaos brought about by the Arab Spring and by the Washington foreign policy “blob’s” unwillingness to wean itself off wars it cannot win. [...]

When Trump urged the same thing for the United States, China’s autocrat Xi was treated to a standing ovation at Davos, and hailed as the new champion of the global liberal order. But now Larry Summers, the high priest of globalisation and of America’s offshoring to China, is warning us against fragile supply chains and the urgency of decoupling with no reference at all his long and glittering career midwifing this catastrophe. Here is the global system, finally stripped of all illusions. [...]

Yet when the rival superpower collapsed, exhausted, the United States took the wrong lessons from the fall of communism. American policymakers convinced themselves their global dominance was due to the success of their liberal ideology rather than of their industrial might, and that the sudden, unexpected disintegration of the Soviet Union was due to the vindication of liberalism rather than of the awakened nationalism of Russia’s subject peoples. [...]

If we observe the American war on Covid, we see it is America’s Chernobyl moment as much as China’s. The United States is by far the world’s worst-affected country in terms of total numbers, and its outbreak is still far from over. The symbolism of American states forming regional blocs to counteract the incompetence and total incapacity of its central government to save lives or arrest the virus’s progress lends weight to The Atlantic’s charge that the US now resembles a failed state.

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Meduza: Many Russians are continuing to ignore social distancing rules. A sociologist explains why.

Researchers then discuss what distances are specific to different countries. In Russia, the acceptable length of personal distance is sometimes estimated at 120 centimeters (approximately four feet), which is noticeably more than in Western European countries, and the United States. [...]

If we were to talk about some cultural differences, then we would first have to draw attention to the existing ideas of acceptable and unacceptable distances in the context of specific, day-to-day practices. Roughly speaking, both Russians and Germans stand in lines (for example, at an ATM), but they can have different understandings of what it means to “stand in line at the ATM.” Here, one of the most important differences is the notion of the borders between public and private. [...]

In Russia, it’s likely that the line between private and public is deeper than in Western Europe. One of the historical reasons for this separation can be found in the Soviet practices of pretense and hypocrisy, analyzed by sociologist Oleg Karkhordin. [...]

Accordingly, in Russia (although any generalizations should be taken with great care), public spaces are understood as impersonal — literally “without a face.” Russians don’t look at public space as a place for demonstrating one’s “I.” Therefore, in public space personal relationships are only possible in a very limited format: Russians prefer to save them for special, private or semi-private places (for example, kitchens or bars, respectively). In public space, one needs to behave as if they aren’t even there.

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History Of Ideas — Talking Politics: Fukuyama on History

Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History became associated with the triumph of liberal democracy at the end of the twentieth century. But was Fukuyama really a triumphalist? David explores what Fukuyama had to say about the strengths and weaknesses of liberal democracy and asks whether his analysis still holds true today. What have we learned about the modern state from its history? And can it, and we, really change now?

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UnHerd: How we mythologise the Second World War

But this is not the whole story. The Finest Hour speech appealed to a fundamentally patriotic understanding of the war, noting with regard to the Battle of Britain that “upon it depends our own British life, and the long continuity of our institutions and our Empire”. The “Fight Them On The Beaches” speech explicitly situated the danger from Hitler in the context of a long series of threats to British independence from Continental tyrants, and declared the Anglo-French intention to “defend to the death their native soil”.

And Britain had entered the war for old-fashioned strategic reasons; not to defeat a country with a wicked government that was oppressing its population, but to stand up to a continental power that threatened to dominate Europe and so undermine the British national interest. [...]

Something similar has been happening to the Second World War over the last few decades. Not only are the events of the war itself being repurposed to tell a simplistic tale about an idealistic war, but additionally the war is treated as an origin story for all that is considered good in the post-war world, from the NHS and the welfare state to our ability to rise above primitive notions like patriotism and national interest to the sunlit uplands of universal benevolence. [...]

There is another reason for this pivot to extreme deference to Second World War veterans, and it was neatly summed up by an astute Twitter correspondent of mine, who noted that the wartime generation have become less culturally threatening as they have aged. Discussing the recently-discovered footage of Captain Tom Moore on the TV show Blankety Blank in 1983, he suggested that at that time he was the right age (63) to be a resented authority figure, liable to tell you to get a haircut and turn that bloody racket down, rather than in the category of enormously ancient and hence admirable sage from times long past.

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UnHerd: How Putin subverts the past to seal his future

The constitutional change is remarkable for the cynicism in the assumption that fixing the constitution for the sake of Putin and his circle would pass without much opposition. According to the political scientist Ekaterina Schulmann, quoted in The Economist, the enriched Kremlin elite were “feeling nervous about their own future” if he were to leave office. The fragile shoots of democratic rule and the already-stunted growth of civil society have been stamped on hard — if not, hopefully, obliterated. Does it show that Russia cannot escape its authoritarian past? That depends to a large extent on the people: and history has not been kind to them as proactive agents of democracy, in the eyes of both foreign and Russian observers. [...]

In 2013, when a new set of history textbooks was commissioned, the then Culture Minister, Vladimir Medinsky, argued that “in historical mythology [facts] do not mean anything at all… everything begins not with facts but with interpretations… if you like your motherland, your people, your history, what you’ll be writing will always be positive.” Christopher Coker, who quotes Medinsky, writes (in The Rise of the Civilizational State) that “myths are usually immune to factual rebuttal…they tend to operate at a deeper level of consciousness in their claim to communicate a more immediate, metaphysical truth”. For many in Russia today, a deeper level of consciousness is picturing the Stalinist era as one in which Russia was greater and its society better. [...]

Ostrovsky writes that no-one, not even President Putin, is uniquely to blame, since he is “as much a consequence as a cause of Russia’s ills.” He governs corruptly, and now seems determined to stay at the apex of power by whatever means; yet he also restored order and a sense of greatness to Russia. He has kept some of the unprecedented freedoms of the Boris Yeltsin decade, such as travel, relatively free speech, internet use, while, Ostrovsky writes, “all the Kremlin asked in return was for people to mind their own business and stay out of politics — something they gladly did(my italics).”[...]

Yet Russia is authoritarian, not wholly despotic. Maxim Trudalubov, one of Russia’s sharpest commentators, wrote in the New York Times that “the Russian regime is slowly turning into a more rule-based governance system… today’s Russians seem to be less and less impressed by the show of strongman leadership at home and Russia’s military might abroad. A demand to be acknowledged as dignified citizens, not obedient subjects, is palpable in numerous protest movements that are ready to stand up to government and police pressure”.

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Jacobin Magazine: The Great Reformer

Palme’s background was unusual for a social democrat. A proletarian party through and through, the leadership was comprised almost entirely of men with working-class origins. Palme, in contrast, was born into an elite family and had a traditional upper-class education. [...]

Yet his international student assignment taught Palme the destructiveness and, even from an anticommunist perspective, the counter-productiveness of colonialist wars. After a visit to Malaysia, Palme wrote: “It is a strange paradox that the British government is spending millions of pounds in order to kill off a few communists in the jungle and at the same time is carefully cultivating an increasing number in the University of Malaya.” [...]

These were also the years when Palme made a name for himself as an anti-imperialist international statesman. It started with Vietnam. As early as 1965 he publicly condemned the war, and his criticism deepened under pressure from the solidarity movement. His comparison in 1972 of the US bombing of Hanoi to Guernica and Nazi atrocities outraged Henry Kissinger and prompted Richard Nixon to call him “that Swedish asshole”. [...]

To Palme, the new political and economic landscape did not imply that reformism’s potential had been exhausted. While politicians like Feldt wanted to permanently reorient the party and break with its former economic policies, much of what was done in the 1980s was in Palme’s eyes a necessary evil that would eventually bring order to the national economy. Palme’s position, Feldt explained, was “more about giving the party the opportunity, through undesirable means, to return to its former policies. We had to crawl through a tunnel. At the other end was the light.”

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Creative Boom: Photographs of abandoned factories and industry in the former Soviet state of Georgia

Koopmans and Wexell visited some of the country's most striking industrial sites and found a fascinating collision of the past and present. "Many places seem to be frozen in time," says Koopmans. "It's as if the machines have suddenly stopped working and as if the workers left from one day to the next.

"Some question the beauty and value of these places, as they come with a history that many, especially Georgians, find to be very problematic. However when you look at them as archeological relics, as indicators of a unique past in place and time, there's an interest that draws us to photograph them before they disappear forever."

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The Guardian: When Soviets met Stans: the tower blocks of central Asia – in pictures (3 May 2019)

Shares 544 Two Italian photographers, Roberto Conte and Stefano Perego, documented Soviet-era buildings in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan – and saw how Eastern characteristics crept into the brutal USSR designs.

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UnHerd: Russia’s brief encounter with the sexual revolution

Before 1917 was out, the regime had replaced church marriage with the civil variety, and also established a no-fault divorce law that required only a brief court hearing if both parties agreed to end the union. Divorces could still go ahead even if only one person wanted it; it just took a little more paperwork. The other party would receive a postcard letting them know. Homosexuality was decriminalised in 1917, and the concept of illegitimacy was abolished; all children were legitimate.

Zhenotdel, the Women’s Department of the Central Committee, was established in 1919, its mission to “refashion women”. Headed by Lenin’s alleged lover Inessa Armand, and then the prominent female Bolshevik Alexandra Kollontai, the Zhenotdel lobbied for the legalisation of abortion, which duly followed in 1920. [...]

Yet once these revolutionary ideas were put into practice, things got messy very quickly. The communists thought that their reforms would eliminate prostitution, but in the town of Saratov women were instead “nationalised” and men were allowed to satisfy their animal urges in legal brothels. In the ancient city of Vladimir, a “Bureau of Free Love” was established among the cupolas of the churches; women between the ages of 18 and 50 were told to register so that a sexual partner could be assigned to them — whether they liked it or not. [...]

This popular backlash was a harbinger of a major shift in attitudes that lay just around the corner, and which would be imposed from above by the Stalinist regime. So it was that in 1934 homosexuality was re-criminalised, while abortion was outlawed in 1936. Divorce remained legal but the law was revised to combat “frivolous attitudes to the family and to family responsibilities”.

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