Deutsche Welle: Just how far will the nativist vote get Trump and the AfD?

As the US winds up its most unwound presidential campaign in modern history, Germany is preparing for the 2017 Bundestag battle to unspool. The rise of Donald Trump as a major-party presidential candidate in the US and the likelihood that Alternative for Germany (AfD) will enter parliament show that nativism remains an effective election strategy.  Advocating for "the people" but preferring policies that exclude large segments of the population, nativist candidates and parties exploit insecurity to steer the political conversation in directions that had no longer been politely permissible. [...]

Like Trump in the United States, the AfD is letting everything ride on German voters' distrust of foreigners. And, so far, enough of the electorate has been willing to gamble on the party's lack of a track record. In many ways, it is the AfD's very inexperience that appeals to its voters. German Chancellor Angela Merkel is three-quarters of the way through her third term, and her Christian Democrats (CDU) have chosen to form coalitions with their primary rivals, the Social Democrats (SPD), for two of those terms, with another round of joint governance looking increasingly possible after the 2017 elections. [...]

About 20 percent of voters display xenophobic tendencies, according to "The Disinhibited Middle: Authoritarian and Extreme Right Disposition in Germany," a study by the Leipzig researchers Oliver Decker and Elmar Brähler released during the summer. The researchers found that 52.6 percent of AfD voters demonstrate prejudice against foreigners. But the population more broadly has xenophobic tendencies. The study found that one-third of Germans believe that migrants come only for social benefits. Another third say the country has too many foreign influences. A quarter want migrants deported in times of low employment. The study found anti-foreigner sentiments in 16.6 percent of SPD supporters, 14.6 percent of CDU voters, 13.7 percent of Free Democrats (FDP), 8.4 percent of Left voters and 7.2 percent of Greens.

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Quartz: Ancient Roman mythology shows an obsession with sex robots that’s lasted thousands of years

At a New York University conference on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence earlier this month, Kate Devlin, lecturer in computing at Goldsmiths, University of London, pointed out that interest in sex robots is apparent in the ancient myth of Pygmalion. [...]

“Pygmalion doesn’t like the outside world, he doesn’t like women, he sees them as prostitutes. They disgust him because they wear make-up and behave inappropriately,” she says. “For Pygmalion in Ovid’s story, having a sexbot of his own is great because he doesn’t have to interact with real women, he doesn’t have to engage with the world. He’s no longer living a life of celibacy, which is something David Levy picks up on in his work Love and Sex with Robots, arguing that sexbots in the 21st century will be an answer to loneliness.” [...]

Pygmalion is far from the only tale that draws on sex robot themes. The story was inspired by the Greek myth of Pandora, in which a woman is molded from the earth by the gods. “She’s inherently artificial. She’s a technological creation,” says Liveley. “She’s programmed by the gods to behave in certain ways that are all about being seductive and erotic.” The earliest surviving writing on Pandora dates from 8th century BCE, though Liveley says it likely has much older roots. The tale is also the Greek version of the tale of Adam and Eve, a connection that highlights how the first woman of the Abrahamic religions was molded to serve the needs of the man.

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Deutsche Welle: 'Turks in Germany still lack a sense of belonging'

I think the cause lies in that in the beginning people weren't viewed as having needs, but only viewed as labor. Therefore, measures weren't undertaken - there was little interest - that those coming here also learnt German. They were here to work: Germany needed extra hands. The so-called guest workers from Turkey were welcomed to that end. It was an oversight that they didn't also learn the language. This denied them contact to society and everyday contact with people. [...]

German politicians always say they've learned from their mistakes. But when I look at the regulations over the last years or decades - I've been here for 36 years - they aren't very heartening for people in Germany. They more resemble sanctions that don't convey a sense of belonging. Nevertheless, there have been German courses at language schools for several years. I think we're moving in the right direction, albeit 50 years too late. [...]

Compared with 20 years ago, the education situation is better. There are more high school graduates, more university students - despite how socially disadvantaged Turks as a group are. The Turks who came here weren't academics. They were workers, often unskilled, who couldn't further support their children academically. This made for a low education level also in the second generation. Now in the third generation, we see more jurists, medical professionals and businesspeople. They are more successful than the previous generation.

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The Huffington Post: How a new generation is changing evangelical Christianity

Since the late 1970s, American evangelicalism has been largely identified with right-wing politics. Conservative religious values entered the political sphere through movements such as Moral Majority and Focus on the Family that opposed gay rights, abortion, feminism and other liberal issues.

Evangelical leaders have influenced national elections and public policy. They have been instrumental in pushing the Republican Party toward increasingly conservative social policies. They have generally been the most consistent voting bloc within the Republican Party. [...]

For example, in most surveys and political polls, “evangelical” is limited to white believers, with others who may be similar theologically being classified into other racial/ethnically identified categories such as “Black Protestant,” “Latino Protestant” or “Other nonwhite Protestant.”

Further, as with all religious groups in the U.S., the evangelical movement began struggling to keep its young people in the fold. Recent research shows that among young adults who were identified as evangelicals as teenagers, only 45 percent can still be identified as such. [...]

Further, while the educational successes of evangelicalism, through its many and varied curricula, have served to socialize young people into the “biblically based” moral world, it has also taught them how to read the Bible critically and to pay attention to biblical themes and narrative through-lines that resonate with their own life experiences.

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Vox: The pope tried to convince skeptical US Catholics that climate change is real. Here’s why he failed.

There was much hue and cry among climate hawks in 2015 when Pope Francis issued his "Laudato Si," an impassioned, 184-page statement decrying humankind’s ill treatment of the Earth. In particular, it framed global warming as a challenge to the religious conscience. [...]

Now another, more thorough investigation of the pope’s climate influence has been done by researchers at the Annenberg Public Policy Center. (It was just released in the journal Climatic Change.) After more than a thousand 20-minute phone interviews with Catholics across the country, both before and after its release, influence of "Laudato Si" has become clearer. [...]

The Annenberg researchers spend a lot of words trying to explain this, but it’s not that complicated: Partisanship is more powerful than religion in the US. Or as the authors put it, "the worldviews, political identities, and group norms that lead conservative Catholics to deny climate change override their deference to religious authority when judging the reality and risks of this phenomenon."

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