Haaretz: Behind Far-right German Party’s Successful Scare Campaign: Adviser to Netanyahu, Trump

The far-right Alternative for Germany party, which will soon enter the Bundestag for the first time after Sunday’s elections, hired the services of an American media consultant who has worked for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and U.S. President Donald Trump. [...]

Its election campaign stood out on social networks and used prominent billboards, focusing on a threat of an Islamic takeover of Germany. 

Behind the scenes, the AfD used the services of Vincent Harris, CEO of Harris Media, an online communications consulting firm founded in 2008. The company is based in Austin, Texas and is known for its provocative campaigns. It has also worked for a number of conservative Republican candidates, such as senators Ted Cruz and Mitch McConnell, former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin. Harris also worked with the right-wing UKIP party in Britain. [...]

Harris has used the growing “Muslim threat” before online. During Trump’s presidential campaign Harris produced a video clip warning of the dangerous implications of electing Hillary Clinton. Germany lost control of its borders, we must not let that happen in the United States, he said. The clip shows a Germany in the not distant future that has become part of Islamic State. The Cologne Cathedral, one of the symbols of Germany and German Christianity, has become a mosque and the Oktoberfest festival, another major symbol, now bans the sale of beer and pork.

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Politico: In pictures: For ‘the dispossessed,’ a safe loneliness in Germany

For more than six months, from late 2015 into 2016, I followed thousands of migrants along the Balkan route into Europe — photographing desperate people fleeing from war, poverty and persecution. Most came from Syria and Afghanistan. Through it all, I couldn’t shake the thought that, had I been born in a different country, I could easily have been on the other side of the lens.

More than a year later, I used social media to track down some of these subjects, now settled in Germany. Though I’d only exchanged a few words with some of them initially, seeing them again strengthened our bond: I didn’t know them well, but we’d shared some of the most trying moments of their lives.

 Everyone I spoke to was grateful to have ended up in Germany. That gratitude, however, is tempered by growing distrust toward refugees and asylum seekers. Times have changed and the open arms they were welcomed with in 2015 have closed a little.

All these young men came from war zones, where they left behind their lives — and their families. While they’re relieved to be out of war-torn environs, there’s a shared sense of deep loneliness in their new homes.

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The Atlantic: Love in the Time of Individualism

Mark Regnerus, a sociologist at the University of Texas at Austin, thinks a lot about the price of human relationships. His new book, Cheap Sex, is all about how the modern dating scene has been shaped by sexual economics, a theory which sees human mating as a marketplace. His idea, as you might suspect from the title, is that sex is not as costly to access as it once was—in terms of time, effort, and risk. Contraception makes sex less risky; online dating platforms make it more accessible. If that doesn’t work out, there’s always porn, which requires next to no effort to find. These factors, Regnerus argues, “have created a massive slowdown in the development of committed relationships, especially marriage.”

Marriage rates have indeed plummeted among young adults, to the point that a demographer cited by  Regnerus estimates that one-third of people currently in their early 20s will never get married. But another new book about modern relationships, Eli Finkel’s The All-or-Nothing Marriage, contends that while “the institution of marriage in America is struggling ... the best marriages today are better than the best marriages of earlier eras; indeed, they are the best marriages that the world has ever known.” [...]

Still, there is a lot in Regnerus’s analysis that is uncomfortably astute. He’s right that it can be hard to escape these old gender dynamics when dating, especially online dating. Popular dating apps put women in the position of gatekeeping, whether deliberately or not. It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a smartphone will swipe right on basically everyone. This forces women to be choosier about who they say yes to. Even if they also swipe with abandon, they end up with more matches to sort through—yet more gatekeeping. On Hinge and OkCupid, which don’t require a mutual opt-in before people can send messages, women’s inboxes are deluged with men whom they must then sort through. Bumble just went all-in and made gatekeeping a selling point: Women have to message men first, putting them in control of who has access to their attention. [...]

What Americans want from their marriages nowadays, Finkel argues, is love, yes, but also someone who will give their lives meaning, and make them into the best versions of themselves. “Marriage has a self-expressive emphasis that places a premium on spouses helping each other meet their authenticity and personal-growth needs,” he writes. “The pursuit of self-expression through marriage simultaneously makes achieving marital success harder and the value of doing so greater.”

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Quartz: Humans have way less agency than we think. Be grateful for the illusion

It certainly doesn’t come from having access to the brain processes that underlie our actions. After all, I have no insight into the electrochemical particulars of how my nerves are firing or how neurotransmitters are coursing through my brain and bloodstream. Instead, our experience of agency seems to come from inferences we make about the causes of our actions, based on crude sensory data. And, as with any kind of perception based on inference, our experience can be tricked. [...]

These observations point to a fundamental paradox about consciousness. We have the strong impression that we choose when we do and don’t act and, as a consequence, we hold people responsible for their actions. Yet many of the ways we encounter the world don’t require any real conscious processing, and our feeling of agency can be deeply misleading. [...]

The bond between agency and mutual accountability goes back at least as far as 300 BCE. The Greek philosophers, Epicurus and the Stoics, wanted to defend the idea of free will despite believing the universe to be pre-determined by the laws of nature. Free will has two fundamental features, they said. The first is the feeling of being in control: “I am the cause of this event.” The second is a grasp of the counterfactual: “I could have chosen otherwise.” Pangs of regret – something we’ve all experienced – make no sense unless we believe that we could have done something differently. Furthermore, Epicurus believed that we acquire this sense of responsibility via the praise and blame we received from others. By listening to our peers and elders, we become attuned to our capacity to effect change in the world. [...]

What’s more, by considering our experiences and sharing them with others, we can reach a consensus about what the world and we humans are really like. A consensus need not be accurate to be attractive or useful, of course. For a long time everyone agreed that the Sun went round the Earth. Perhaps our sense of agency is a similar trick: it might not be “true,” but it maintains social cohesion by creating a shared basis for morality. It helps us understand why people act as they do – and, as a result, makes it is easier to predict people’s behavior.

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Social Europe: The Euro’s Narrow Path

But the two sides remain deeply divided. Macron, in long-standing French tradition, insists that the monetary union suffers from too little centralization. The eurozone, he argues, needs its own finance minister and its own parliament. It needs a budget in the hundreds of billions of euros to underwrite investment projects and augment spending in countries with high unemployment.

Merkel, on the other hand, views the monetary union’s problem as one of too much centralization and too little national responsibility. She worries that a large eurozone budget wouldn’t be spent responsibly. While not opposed to a eurozone finance minister, she does not envision that official possessing expansive powers.  [...]

The solution lies in bulletproofing the banks by strictly applying the demanding capital standards of Basel III and limiting concentrated holdings of government bonds. The paradox here is that European regulators, including German regulators, have in fact been arguing for looser application of those regulations in negotiations with the United States. In doing so, they have been arguing against their own best interests.  [...]

The EMF could then take the place of the ECB and the European Commission in negotiating the terms of financing programs with governments. The final decision of whether to extend an emergency loan would no longer fall to heads of state in all-night talks. Rather, it would be taken by a board made up of eurozone representatives, including from civil society, nominated by the European Council and confirmed by the European Parliament, giving the process a legitimacy it currently lacks.  

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