23 February 2018
Vox: How the economy shapes our love lives
It may seem like the way we date is dictated by things like love and affection but it’s actually driven by something far less romantic: the economy.
Dating as we know it didn’t really start until the Industrial Revolution when young people left farms and small towns to flock to cities for work. They got jobs in factories, bars, and restaurants and being away from their families for the first time offered them the freedom to mix and match with other young people.
Ever since then the way single people have gotten together has been dictated by the ups and downs of the economy in the United States. We talk to Harvard’s Moira Weigel, author of “The Labor of Love: The Invention of Dating” about how our woes about dating are nothing new, they’ve been around since people starting pairing off.
The Washington Post: Sweden is taking on Russian meddling ahead of fall elections. The White House might take note
Russia has a big stake in Sweden’s political affairs: Sweden is a rare outlier in Europe, because it is not a member of the NATO military alliance, which the Kremlin sees as a strategic threat. But attitudes toward NATO started to shift here after Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine in 2014, and now Sweden’s center-right political opposition says it wants to join the alliance if it comes to power. About 47 percent of Swedes support joining NATO, a Pew survey found last year.
Separately, Sweden is embroiled in a debate about how widely to open its doors to immigrants, a split that Russian state media have played up. [...]
Before the presentation, Bay said Swedish authorities are not trying to predict exactly what Russia might do as they figure out ways to thwart such moves. Instead, he said, they want to improve the political system’s overall readiness. [...]
The project by Swedish public television, Swedish public radio and two major newspapers, Dagens Nyheter and Svenska Dagbladet, will seek to combat misinformation from both domestic and foreign sources, proponents said.
The Local: Italy is 'steeped in hate', Amnesty warns amid toxic election campaign
Against this background, the campaign for Italy's election on March 4th has only aggravated the problem, Amnesty said. The group has been monitoring comments made on social media by political leaders and candidates nationwide and in the past two weeks alone has identified more than 200 that it flagged as hateful or discriminatory on grounds of race, religion, gender or sexual orientation.
Virtually all were made by members of the centre-right alliance that the latest polls show leading, comprised of Forza Italia centrists, the populist League and far-right Brothers of Italy. [...]
Meanwhile the Brothers of Italy, while making fewer discriminatory statements about migrants, refugees and Roma people, made the highest number of negative comments about women and LGBTI people. While the party has a high-profile female leader, Giorgia Meloni, it promotes "traditional family values" that tend to exclude orientations other than heterosexual. [...]
Amnesty's Rufini warned that Italy is more polarized than ever before, saying that part of the public believes itself to be "great, pure, Italian while the rest don't deserve to share the country [...] creating an impossible climate in this country and killing all chance of debate".
openDemocracy: Brazil militarizes its war on crime
The military has repeatedly been called in to assist civilian police in Rio de Janeiro in recent years, but Temer’s decree — subject to congressional approval that is expected this week — represents the first time that the government is using the constitutional provision allowing the federal armed forces to assume control over civilian police since the end of the country’s military dictatorship in 1985. [...]
Moreover, the head of Brazil’s army, Eduardo Villas Bôas, recently cautioned against using the military for domestic crime-fighting, arguing that such actions increase the risk of politicization and corruption of the troops. [...]
Etchegoyen’s description of Rio as a “laboratory” for militarized security policies is telling, given that the city has seen multiple past deployments of the armed forces in recent years that have not achieved any sustainable security gains. The results of militarized anti-crime strategies implemented by civilian authorities in the city have proven to be similarly lackluster.
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