Quartz: New research explains why moving abroad is the best way to find yourself

Cliché as it may sound, a lot of people can testify from personal experience that moving abroad helps you find yourself. Now a new study by Hajo Adam, an assistant professor of management at Rice University in Houston, Texas, explains why that is.

His meta-analysis looked at six studies that examined subjects’ “self-concept clarity”—a scale used to measure how well people know themselves. The scale includes a series of twelve statements, such as “my beliefs about myself often conflict with one another,” or “I spend a lot of time wondering about what kind of person I am.” [...]

Adam’s study found that what makes the expat experience so clarifying is not the number of countries people live in, but how long they live there. “It’s better to live 10 years in one country than two years in five countries,” he said. That’s because when you’re new to a country, you’re more absorbed with practical considerations. “In the first weeks, you think where you are going to live, how to get a doctor, but once you settle, you have more time to focus on yourself,” Adam told me. [...]

Another 2010 study conducted by Adam found that living abroad and interacting with many different cultures made people more creative. For my own part, in the Netherlands, I started seeing stories around me everywhere. For example, when I picked up a Dutch magazine at the supermarket and read an article about niksen—the Dutch trend of doing… nothing—I knew I had to write about that. I started developing an eye for stories that are quirky, such as American crayfish invading Delft, or people yelling at rice.

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The New York Times: The Failures of Anti-Trumpism

We have persuaded no one. Trump’s approval rating is around 40 percent, which is basically unchanged from where it’s been all along.

We have not hindered him. Trump has more power than he did a year ago, not less. With more mainstream figures like H. R. McMaster, Rex Tillerson and Gary Cohn gone, the administration is growing more nationalist, not less.

We have not dislodged him. For all the hype, the Mueller investigation looks less and less likely to fundamentally alter the course of the administration.

We have not contained him. Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party is complete. Eighty-nine percent of Republicans now have a positive impression of the man. According to an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, 59 percent of Republicans consider themselves more a supporter of Trump than of the Republican Party. [...]

Why has Trump dominated? Part of it is tribalism. In any tribal war people tend to bury individual concerns and rally to their leader and the party line. As late as 2015, Republican voters overwhelmingly supported free trade. Now they overwhelmingly oppose it. The shift didn’t happen because of some mass reappraisal of the evidence; it’s just that tribal orthodoxy shifted and everyone followed.

Part of the problem is that anti-Trumpism has a tendency to be insufferably condescending. For example, my colleague Thomas B. Edsall beautifully summarized the recent academic analyses of what personality traits supposedly determine Trump support.  

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The Guardian: Brexiters seek campaign memorabilia for 'museum of sovereignty'

 The brainchild of a small number of people closely connected to Ukip and the wider leave campaign, it has been launched with a website containing details of places where people can donate items, anything from drafts of major speeches to campaign memorabilia and photographs.

While a location for the planned museum is yet to be determined, the organisers stress the project is as much about gathering an archive of material connected to a pivotal moment in the UK’s postwar history that might otherwise be lost. [...]

The hope, he said, would be to collate an academic trove of artefacts, papers and books chronicling not just Brexit, but also the decades of often fringe Eurosceptic activism that preceded it – the bulk of it not preserved in digital form – going back to 1973, when the UK joined the European Economic Community. [...]

Farage will also be asked for a donation, Towler said. “I know Nigel is a supporter of the project. I haven’t got anything specific from him yet. Maybe an ashtray and an empty pint glass.”

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Jacobin Magazine: Bangladesh’s Incomplete Revolution

East Pakistan faced what amounted to internal colonialism. Economic exploitation extracted millions annually, and the Pakistani government still heavily discriminated against Eastern citizens. Badruddin Umar, active during this time in the East Pakistani Maoist movement, wrote that “the slogan of Independent Bengal had begun to be raised in the streets of Dhaka, especially by the workers belonging to the leftist students’ organisations during the 1968–69 movement. At mass rallies, demonstrators chanted Joi Bangla (Long Live Bengal) and called for Krishok-Sramik Raj, “rule by peasants and workers.” [...]

Though the East had stronger left-wing traditions than the West, Communist parties failed to lead the mass movement or profit from the elections. One reason for this was that both the most dynamic parts of the Left and Pakistan itself had strong ties to Mao’s China. Most left-wing forces were in some way influenced by Maoism, and the government maintained friendly relations with China as a counterweight to their shared rival, India. Because of Ayub’s “objective anti-imperialist characteristics,” much of the Maoist left did not oppose his regime and avoided making demands that might weaken Pakistan’s position in relation to India, including self-determination for the East. [...]

The pro-Moscow left was much smaller, but it enjoyed disproportionate representation in the press and academia. In both halves of Pakistan, these leftists focused on restoring parliamentary democracy so single-mindedly that they became almost indistinguishable from liberal forces. In the East, Soviet sympathizers supported self-determination but were little more than an appendage of the AL. [...]

But the new government quickly became mired in corruption and nepotism, and its radical promises went unfulfilled. Despite American opposition to the independence struggle, large parts of the AL leadership held fundamentally pro-US positions. The nationalization program avoided touching American or British interests, and the government tried to refrain from antagonizing the United States. Prices multiplied while wages dropped. The nationalizations that took place just allowed the politically connected to loot the expropriated companies. [...]

But the new government quickly became mired in corruption and nepotism, and its radical promises went unfulfilled. Despite American opposition to the independence struggle, large parts of the AL leadership held fundamentally pro-US positions. The nationalization program avoided touching American or British interests, and the government tried to refrain from antagonizing the United States. Prices multiplied while wages dropped. The nationalizations that took place just allowed the politically connected to loot the expropriated companies.

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Jacobin Magazine: Why Israel Kills

Palestinian nonviolent protests have an additional virtue. They internally divide Israeli society rather than unite it in hatred and violence, strategically undermining the efficacy of Israel’s favorite political glue: anti-Arab racism. As I write, the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem has launched an unprecedented campaign for Israeli soldiers to refuse illegal orders to shoot unarmed protestors. [...]

First: occupied Palestinians have tried unarmed resistance before. The first intifada, in 1987, was, in Edward Said’s words, “one of the most extraordinary anti-colonial and unarmed mass insurrections in the whole history of the modern period.” An entire society mobilized itself and self-organized not only to counter Israeli domination and occupation but to actively build alternative self-governing structures as well. Women, students, teachers, and workers formulated independent modes of resistance (strikes, demonstrations, tax boycotts, etc.) that allowed them to counter Israel’s stranglehold over their lives. Workers realized the Israeli economy was massively dependent on the cheap labor of Palestinian migrants, giving them leverage over Israel’s occupying society. Israeli peace activists, following the lead of Palestinian activists, actively organized against the country’s occupation regime. [...]

Second: the failure of the first intifada and the Oslo Accords generated a groundswell of political cynicism. While governing elites profiteered, the overwhelming majority of occupied Palestinians experienced deteriorating socioeconomic conditions. Settlements grew, closure intensified, freedom of movement was internally and externally restricted or blocked. In these desperate times, the only way many Palestinians felt they could directly get at their occupiers (which had left the big cities in the hands of the PA’s repressive security apparatuses) was violently — through suicide bombings. Palestinian factions began fetishizing such armed resistance. Organized individual martyrdom increased. Though this violent tactic blasted Israel’s security-with-occupation policy, it ended up harming Palestinian society itself and its international image. Israel’s state terror was unleashed even more harshly, in sync with the global fight against Islamic terrorism after 9/11.   [...]

Lastly: if Oslo divided Palestinian society, Israel tried to stoke these divisions into violent eruptions through its security coordination with the PA (fighting Palestinian resistance factions) and through its policy of isolating Gaza and separating it off from the West Bank. Fueling Palestinian conflict ultimately led to Hamas’s violent takeover of Gaza in 2007 and its banishing of the PA’s security apparatus. The schism persists more than a decade later. Hamas is on one side, carrying the old mantle of armed struggle abandoned by Fatah (the PLO’s ruling group) in 1988; Fatah is on the other, carrying the mantle of endless bureaucratic diplomacy and concessions.

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