Politico: Eastern Europe strikes back at EU establishment with Eurogroup bid

Kažimír had fallen out of favor among his fellow eurozone socialists, who overlooked him amid concerns about his unpredictable nature. Several eurozone officials told POLITICO that the Slovak has a tendency to “speak without thinking,” with one person questioning whether Kažimír would be able “to do the job without insulting people.”

But Slovakia’s curveball comes less than two weeks after its capital, Bratislava, lost out in the race to host the European Medicines Agency (EMA) which must relocate from London after Brexit. Amsterdam edged out Milan for the EMA, with Bratislava not even getting past the first round of voting despite having been considered a leading contender. [...]

The Commission, Parliament and Council are all headed by conservatives from the European People’s Party (EPP), which deliberately didn’t field its own candidate for the Eurogroup race to keep political peace with socialists in Brussels. Spain’s Finance Minister Luis de Guindos orchestrated that EPP strategy, which should have paved the way for the socialist candidate to win the Eurogroup presidency. [...]

The winner will exert significant influence over economic and monetary policy across the 19-country bloc as it embarks on ambitious reforms to strengthen its foundations. Another immediate task facing the next Eurogroup president will be the delicate process of shepherding Greece toward the exit from its €86 billion bailout program next summer.

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The New Yorker: Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds (February 27, 2017)

The Stanford studies became famous. Coming from a group of academics in the nineteen-seventies, the contention that people can’t think straight was shocking. It isn’t any longer. Thousands of subsequent experiments have confirmed (and elaborated on) this finding. As everyone who’s followed the research—or even occasionally picked up a copy of Psychology Today—knows, any graduate student with a clipboard can demonstrate that reasonable-seeming people are often totally irrational. Rarely has this insight seemed more relevant than it does right now. Still, an essential puzzle remains: How did we come to be this way? [...]

Stripped of a lot of what might be called cognitive-science-ese, Mercier and Sperber’s argument runs, more or less, as follows: Humans’ biggest advantage over other species is our ability to coöperate. Coöperation is difficult to establish and almost as difficult to sustain. For any individual, freeloading is always the best course of action. Reason developed not to enable us to solve abstract, logical problems or even to help us draw conclusions from unfamiliar data; rather, it developed to resolve the problems posed by living in collaborative groups. [...]

Mercier and Sperber prefer the term “myside bias.” Humans, they point out, aren’t randomly credulous. Presented with someone else’s argument, we’re quite adept at spotting the weaknesses. Almost invariably, the positions we’re blind about are our own. [...]

The Gormans don’t just want to catalogue the ways we go wrong; they want to correct for them. There must be some way, they maintain, to convince people that vaccines are good for kids, and handguns are dangerous. (Another widespread but statistically insupportable belief they’d like to discredit is that owning a gun makes you safer.) But here they encounter the very problems they have enumerated. Providing people with accurate information doesn’t seem to help; they simply discount it. Appealing to their emotions may work better, but doing so is obviously antithetical to the goal of promoting sound science. “The challenge that remains,” they write toward the end of their book, “is to figure out how to address the tendencies that lead to false scientific belief.”

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Jacobin Magazine: How Washington Hacked Mongolia’s Democracy

Many people are familiar with the Clinton administration’s efforts to give then-Russian president Boris Yeltsin a much-needed — and decisive — boost in the country’s 1996 presidential election. Fewer are aware that from 1991 to 1996, US political operatives, funded by the federal government and directed by an influential senator, played an active role in bringing Mongolia’s right-wing opposition to power, a move that would prove as much a disaster to ordinary Mongolians as it would a boon to US government and corporate interests. The incident is so little-remembered today, it’s not even listed in Carnegie Mellon University political scientist Don Levin’s otherwise exhaustive list of superpower meddling in foreign elections.  [...]

Strategists sent by the IRI to Mongolia taught the parties about membership recruitment, campaign messaging, and grassroots party building. At the start of 1996, they convinced the opposition to form a united coalition — the Democratic Union Coalition (DUC) — and advised the candidates to personally tour their message around the country, routine practice in most Western democracies but a new concept in Mongolia at the time. [...]

It’s doubtful all this could’ve happened without the large sums of US taxpayer money being lavished on the coalition. According to the NED’s annual reports at the time, between 1992 and 1996 it gave a total of $480,520 to the IRI for expressly partisan purposes — to help the free market opposition “develop strategies to make them a more effective force within the legislature,” and to help them “solidify their platforms and develop comprehensive and viable communications strategies for the parliamentary elections.”

To put that into perspective, the total cost of Mongolia’s 2000 parliamentary elections was $333,000. In 1996 alone, the NED gave the IRI $158,327 to assist the coalition in that year’s election, nearly half that total. [...]

But the damage was already done. Driven partly by a collapse in world copper prices, the economy quickly fell apart after the DUC’s victory. Unemployment ballooned over 20 percent, helped along by the purging of government departments and the decline of domestic industries. Close to four hundred children were estimated as living permanently on the streets. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization determined that one-third of the population was below nutritional-starvation levels. Even the founding chairman of one of the parties in the DUC admitted that average real incomes had dropped by 30 percent in the year they were in power.

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Jacobin Magazine: Brazil’s Abortion Battle

The tactic was simple: find a bill that women of all political visions will support, work directly with the women involved, create an emotional narrative about the connection between a mother and her child, and insert, somewhere in there, what’s known in Brazil as a “turtle” clause: a provision snuck into a separate, unrelated bill. If the bill is time sensitive, the “turtle” clause might get pushed through without due public debate. [...]

Though there are different strands of Evangelism, it’s the mega-church, prosperity gospel, morally conservative kind that has a national political project in Brazil. Unlike the Catholic church, the Evangelical churches have invested heavily in electing their pastors and members to all levels of political representation. They also work to establish relationships with the judiciary, the executive, and high-ranking bureaucrats and successful businessmen. Mirroring the televangelists and mega-churches of the United States, they preach financial prosperity as the path towards a “nation chosen by God.” [...]

Members of the Evangelical front come from different parties, from the extreme conservative right to the moderate left, including the Workers Party. Though they don’t vote together on everything, they collude on issues involving religion and traditional family values.[...]

In September, the front sparked a frenzied movement to close a queer art exhibit, claiming it promoted incest, pedophilia, and religious heresy. Then there was the campaign against São Paulo’s Museum of Modern Art, for admitting children to an exhibit involving artistic nudity. These culminated into a generalized crusade against art and progressive intellectual work, setting the stage for the outrageous physical confrontation against Judith Butler and her partner Wendy Brown when they visited Brazil earlier this month.

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Wendover Productions: Why Public Transportation Sucks in the US