27 September 2017
The School of Life: On Still Being a Virgin
Our era of sexual liberation encourages us to have sex; but at the same time, hugely stigmatises those who don’t have it, from choice or circumstances. It’s time to liberate the idea of lingering or ongoing virginity from the shame it’s currently surrounded by.
The Atlantic: Masculinity Done Well and Poorly
It’s possible to overanalyze these sentence fragments. The jumping from one topic to the next without completing a thought makes it so Trump rarely says enough to escape plausible deniability. This manner of speaking has been noted in objective linguistic analysis to be consistent with the sort seen in early stages of cognitive decline. Though at least some of the pacing here was the result of interruption from wild applause from a crowd that would not likely have reacted with such approval to a man apologizing for the stagnant health-policy situation.
Instead he drew cheers for projecting toughness and bravado—for saying his catchphrase, “You’re fired!” The crowd responded well to the shared sense of superiority over the more familiar other: black NFL players who protest the power structure. The crowd cheered for the days when men were men and they hit each other hard—when there was no discourse on the harm that could be done from head injuries, just as there was no concern for “safe spaces” for trauma victims or “political correctness” to call attention to divisive rhetoric. This was the time when America was apparently great. [...]
In all of these statements Trump could reasonably be—and widely is—said to be engaging in racial demagoguery for political gain. Over the weekend he would go on to praise the largely white NHL and NASCAR while calling for black athletes who protest state abuses of power to be fired. He is also quite possibly not so calculating as to consciously weaponize racism and authoritarianism, but is engaging in a sort of demagoguery fueled firstly by his own impulse to gain approval. His code of masculinity dictates that this is done by saying things that incline people to perceive him as a powerful man.
Financial Times: Germany’s election results in charts and maps
More than 1m voters shifted away from the CDU/CSU parties to the AfD — but even more went to the FDP.
The SPD lost votes in nearly equal measure to the FDP, the Left, the Greens and the AfD. The AfD was the big winner, drawing votes from all the big parties, especially the CDU/CSU bloc. Even more important, though, was its ability to mobilise previously disengaged voters and those who before voted for minor parties.
The FDP was the main beneficiary of the swing away from the CDU/CSU parties, while the Left offset losses to the AfD with gains from the SPD elsewhere. The Greens benefited from the decline of the SPD. [...]
Marcel Fratzscher, president of the German Institute for Economic Research, DIW said: “The SPD has lost its classic working-class voters and this explains its constant struggle in the past elections.”
Quartz: Germany and France thwarted far right populism—why did the US and UK fall to them?
The disruptions of the past decade, from the global financial crisis, to Brexit, and Trump, have combined to thoroughly derail the American and British governance models. In the face of crumbling infrastructure and public services, egregious inequality and stagnant policy-making, America’s reflex belief in eternal self-renewal appears somewhere between dangerously complacent and recklessly delusional. At least Britain, for its part, acknowledges that a stiff upper lip won’t suffice to salvage the country from its Brexit debacle. What is most worrying is the utter disconnect between the world-beating social and entrepreneurial dynamism of America and Britain and their total lack of plan to translate this into an inclusive future. There is simply no evidence that either country is ever going to get its act together again, period. [...]
This is the kind of long-term agenda—backed by action—that is simply unthinkable in the American and British systems today. And the reason for it is as simple as it is profound: Continental Europe actually has functional government institutions. While America and Britain are content to celebrate the theater of democratic campaigns and politics, France and Germany not only have more educated and informed voters but the candidates they have to choose from actually have experience governing cities, provinces and ministries. Equal if not more important is that they also have also strong civil services and well-funded public agencies that are seriously focused on how to expand the availability of affordable housing, create more jobs in urban services, and other long-term priorities.
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