Political Critique: Abandoned Checkpoints: Photographer documents Europe’s forgotten borders

With everything that’s been happening in Europe lately and the EU struggling to cope with the biggest wave of migrants and refugees its ever known, it’s interesting to discover Polish photographer Josef Schulz’s Übergang series – meaning Crossing – which explores abandoned military checkpoints across the continent.

Uncovering every corner of Europe, Schultz digitally fades the background surrounding each redundant station as though they are shrouded in fog, allowing these forgotten borders to stand out and make an impact.

Interestingly, each former checkpoint no longer belongs to anywhere. They just sit, going to waste with broken or shuttered windows, rusty doors and peeling paint – merging the past with the present. And although the border police are long gone, and the buildings themselves are quite harmless, they still provoke an unsettling feeling – potentially conjuring up bad memories of the past when Europe was divided by borders.

This particularly holds true for Schulz, as he hopes his series will highlight how these physical traces of borders are impossible to forget. He explains: “Borders were lines, drawn not only across territories but also through our heads.”

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Bloomberg: Modi's Idea of India

Modi is far from realizing his promises of economic and military security. Pakistan-backed militants continue to strike inside Indian territory. The anti-Indian insurgency in Kashmir has acquired a mass base; Maoist insurgents in central India attack security forces with impunity. Industrial growth, crucial to creating jobs for the nearly 13 million Indians entering the workforce each year, is down, at least partly due to Modi’s policy of demonetization.

That gambit was, as the economist Kaushik Basu writes, “a monetary policy blunder,” which “achieved next to nothing, and inflicted a large cost on the poor and the informal sector.” Yet Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party subsequently swept elections in Uttar Pradesh, India’s politically most significant state. He looks almost certain to be reelected as prime minister in 2019. [...]

Ascendant in both new and old media, Twitter as well as radio, television, and the press, Modi is moving India away from debate, consensus-building and other democratic rituals. He is presiding over what Mukul Kesavan, a sharp observer of Indian politics and culture, calls an “infantilization of Indians.” “Instead of being proud, equal, adult members of a republic,” Kesavan writes, they “are reduced to being the wards of an all-seeing parent.” [...]

The devastating flaw in Modi’s project is this: He is trying to build a homogeneous national community in an irrevocably diverse country. It commits him and his party to demonizing, excluding and alienating too many members of the Indian population. Moreover, he has arrived too late in history, decades after Park Chung-hee, Chiang Kai-shek, and Lee Kuan Yew accomplished their tasks of national self-strengthening.

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The Guardian: Study finds mushrooms are the safest recreational drug

Of the more than 12,000 people who reported taking psilocybin hallucinogenic mushrooms in 2016, just 0.2% of them said they needed emergency medical treatment – a rate at least five times lower than that for MDMA, LSD and cocaine.

“Magic mushrooms are one of the safest drugs in the world,” said Adam Winstock, a consultant addiction psychiatrist and founder of the Global Drug Survey, pointing out that the bigger risk was people picking and eating the wrong mushrooms. [...]

Magic mushrooms aren’t completely harmless, notes Winstock. “Combined use with alcohol and use within risky or unfamiliar settings increase the risks of harm most commonly accidental injury, panic and short lived confusion, disorientation and fears of losing one’s mind.” [...]

One of the riskiest drugs, according to the survey, was synthetic cannabis. Over one in 30 of users in the sample sought emergency medical treatment – the highest of any drug studied except crystal methamphetamine. That rises to one in 10 among people who use the drug at least 50 times per year. These figures echo the data from the previous year’s report.

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Scientific American: Special Report: The Psychology of Terrorism

The experts writing in this special report share some valuable insights from recent studies, classical research and professional experience. Social psychologists Stephen D. Reicher and S. Alexander Haslam make the case that most terrorists are not psychopaths or sadists, much as we would like to believe. Instead the majority are ordinary people, shaped by group dynamics to do harm in the name of a cause they find noble and just. Critically, those group dynamics involve all of us: our overreaction and fear, Reicher and Haslam explain, can beget greater extremism, thereby fueling a cycle other scholars have termed “co-radicalization.”

French anthropologist Dounia Bouzar describes what she has learned from deprogramming hundreds of young people caught up in this cycle. She notes that only the tug of emotion, not reason, can pull teens back from the call to jihad. Bouzar emphasizes that parents should talk to their children about the shadow world on the Internet—a major recruitment arena in both Western Europe and the U.S.

Last but not least, social psychologists Kevin Dutton and Dominic Abrams consider how we can all help break the cycle of co-radicalization, drawing on seven key studies for concrete suggestions. Among those ideas: bridging the toxic divide of mutual distrust by celebrating broader social identities—much as President Barack Obama did so powerfully in his address to Muslim Americans at a Baltimore mosque this past February. Instead of listening to “polemical pundits and belligerent blowhards,” Dutton and Abrams write, we all need a brain check: keep calm and “tune in to the quieter, more discerning notes emanating from some of our laboratories.”

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Land of Maps: Unemployment rate, Germany, 2013

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