Politico: Pass the Duchy: Luxembourg’s grand plan to legalize cannabis

Luxembourg, however, wants to go further and become the first country in the European Union to make cannabis completely legal. Its health ministry is slated to unveil a proposal to start the legislative process this fall, and the goal is for it to become law within two years. [...]

One of the main advocates is Health Minister Etienne Schneider, who cites health reasons as the most important driver. He said young people are already getting weed on the black market, coming into contact with drug dealers who provide cannabis of unknown quality, and getting access to more potentially dangerous drugs. [...]

A possible playbook for Luxembourg is the U.S. state of Colorado, the first in the country to legalize recreational cannabis. Legalization advocates say that they chose to frame the issue so that voters view pot the same the way they view alcohol — a substance that is widely available and socially acceptable. [...]

"In Germany, there is a consensus that there is a reason why medical cannabis is allowed and that there are patients who benefit from it," Goetz said. "So there's no reason for prohibiting that. But there is definitely not a consensus yet on legalizing it for recreational use."

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Curbed: The ‘free love’ utopia behind your forks and knives

In the 1940s, it wasn’t sex that sold—it was love. When Oneida, a silverware manufacturer, took out ads, instead of focusing on forks and knives and serving spoons, they showed a passionate embrace between a woman and man returning from war.

“Dare to dream...dare to cut yourself a slice of heaven. Some day you’ll have it...the storybook house, the crackling fire...and on your table your treasured Community,” stated one ad for Oneida’s Community Plate flatware. The “Back Home for Keeps” ads were so popular that they became the subject of a 1945 LIFE magazine article that called them “a new kind of pin-up craze.”

The irony is these ads were selling monogamous, possessive love—the exact opposite of what the founders of Oneida stood for. Long before making flatware, Oneida was a religious commune founded on polyamory.

Oneida was founded in 1848 by John Humphrey Noyes, a former theological student who believed that paradise could be found on Earth through nontraditional sexual and familial structures. This included communal child raising; “complex marriage,” a term Noyes invented to describe how all Oneidans were married to one another; and sexual rituals, like male continence. Noyes built an enormous mansion in upstate New York for his “family” and amassed hundreds of followers. For years, the community succeeded. But after Noyes died, the community pivoted—into a thriving business.

In this episode, host Avery Trufelman speaks with Paul Gebhardt, creative director and senior vice president of design at the Oneida Group; Ellen Wayland-Smith, author of Oneida: From Free Love Utopia to the Well-Set Table and descendent of the Oneida Community; and Kate Wayland-Smith, resident of the Oneida Community Mansion House.

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The New York Times: The Nuns Who Bought and Sold Human Beings

Historians say that nearly all of the orders of Catholic sisters established by the late 1820s owned slaves. Today, many Catholic sisters are outspoken champions of social justice and some are grappling with this painful history even as lawmakers in Congress and presidential candidates debate whether reparations should be paid to the descendants of enslaved people. [...]

And while she would like to see the order’s history of slaveholding incorporated into the curriculum of the schools they founded, few of those schools have publicly acknowledged their origins, she said, despite the extensive research that has been done.

“Not one of the school websites has anything about enslavement,” said Sister Dillard, who was also a member of the society’s committee on slavery, accountability and reconciliation. “We’ve whitewashed our history.” [...]

The Jesuit priests, who founded and ran Georgetown, for instance, were among the largest slaveholders in Maryland. And as women began to enter the first Catholic convents in the late-18th and early-19th centuries, some brought their human property with them as part of their dowries, historians say. (I stumbled across this history during my reporting on Georgetown.)

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BBC: Tomorrow's Gods: What is the future of religion?

We take it for granted that religions are born, grow and die – but we are also oddly blind to that reality. When someone tries to start a new religion, it is often dismissed as a cult. When we recognise a faith, we treat its teachings and traditions as timeless and sacrosanct. And when a religion dies, it becomes a myth, and its claim to sacred truth expires. Tales of the Egyptian, Greek and Norse pantheons are now considered legends, not holy writ. [...]

Now that we’re actually in the 21st Century, Berger’s view remains an article of faith for many secularists – although Berger himself recanted in the 1990s. His successors are emboldened by surveys showing that in many countries, increasing numbers of people are saying they have no religion. That’s most true in rich, stable countries like Sweden and Japan, but also, perhaps more surprisingly, in places like Latin America and the Arab world. Even in the US, long a conspicuous exception to the axiom that richer countries are more secular, the number of “nones” has been rising sharply. In the 2018 General Social Survey of US attitudes, “no religion” became the single largest group, edging out evangelical Christians. [...]

The pattern Pew predicted was of “the secularising West and the rapidly growing rest”. Religion will continue to grow in economically and socially insecure places like much of sub-Saharan Africa – and to decline where they are stable. That chimes with what we know about the deep-seated psychological and neurological drivers of belief. When life is tough or disaster strikes, religion seems to provide a bulwark of psychological (and sometimes practical) support. In a landmark study, people directly affected by the 2011 earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand became significantly more religious than other New Zealanders, who became marginally less religious. [...]

So the nones mostly represent not atheists, nor even secularists, but a mixture of “apatheists” – people who simply don’t care about religion – and practitioners of what you might call “disorganised religion”. While the world religions are likely to persist and evolve for the foreseeable future, we might for the rest of this century see an efflorescence of relatively small religions jostling to break out among these groups. But if Big Gods and shared faiths are key to social cohesion, what happens without them?

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openDemocracy: Going back somewhere: nostalgia and the radical right

The figureheads of Brexit – Nigel Farage, Jacob Rees-Mogg, and now the newly-appointed Prime Minister Boris Johnson – are self-consciously figures of British political nostalgia. As James Meek has written, perceptively, Rees-Mogg the politician embodies a ‘steak-and-kidney pudding Edwardian Britishness’; a performance that is consciously meant to evoke a lost time on the edges of cultural memory. With his simultaneous invocation of nanny and the Morris Minor, the Victorian age and the 1920s, Rees-Mogg is a perfect embodiment of what the French critic Roland Barthes famously termed a mythology. [...]

‘This country wants nostalgia’, mused the poet and musician Gil Scott Heron in 1981, reflecting on the election of Ronald Reagan. The American electorate had voted, he thought, ‘to go back as far as they can – even if it's only as far as last week’. In this analysis, the destination of our backwards gaze is less important to this type of politics than the fact that it’s backwards we’re facing. Indeed, for Scott-Heron, this gaze peered at a fictive, mythologized vision of America, one akin to the B-movie landscape in which Reagan had made his name. Yesterday was, for Scott-Heron, ‘the day of our cinema heroes riding to the rescue at the last possible moment’, the ‘man in the white hat or the man on the white horse’. It is, tellingly, the ‘white’ cowboy that saves America at the last moment; the figure riding into our vision from out of screen shot is an idealized image of Anglo strength. ‘Come with us back to those inglorious days when heroes weren’t zeros, before fair was square, when the cavalry came straight away and all American men were like Hemingway’. Hemingway’s projected vision of white masculinity – the great white hunter – has been undermined since, of course. Actually, it was undermined by Hemingway himself, in his own writing and career. Inscribed into the Hemingway mythos are the elements of its own collapse. It is a self-consciously stagey vision of the hard-shooting, hard-drinking, hard-fighting frontiersman, a hammy performance of American maleness. [...]

In other words, the electorate are engaged at some level in a fictive transaction, where we know that what we intend to buy is indeed a counterfeit. ‘Put your orders in America,’ Scott-Heron proclaims, ‘And quick as Kodak your leaders duplicate with the accent being on the dupes’. In a song that’s about cinema and authenticity, the Kodak reference speaks of a world in which value can be quickly and cheaply reproduced. Everything about this kind of politics, then, is fake, all is surface; and at some level its supporters know they are buying the cheap copy Rolex. ‘We’re starring in a B-movie, and we would rather have had John Wayne’, sang Scott-Heron in 1981. The point about the B-movie analogy is that the form makes no real attempt to refer to a ‘real world’ beyond its borders. [...]

Taken together, these seemingly innocuous emblems and rituals – foods, images, phrases – may hide a more sinister purpose, providing feel-good cover for dangerous new forms of ethno-nationalism, protectionism and racism. Neo-fascists are nostalgic nowadays; the Italian radical right group CasaPound have reconstructed fascism as what Pietro Castelli Gattinara and Caterina Froio have characterized as a ‘hybrid communication style’. Images of Mussolini and Fascist iconography mingle with references to cultural figures sympathetic to fascist ideas, or those who might be termed proto-fascist – Ezra Pound, obviously, but also Marinetti, D’Annunzio, Sorel, Knut Hamsun, Yeats, and Nietzsche. The effect is a strange collage of nostalgic nods to the years of the Fascist ventennio and to ‘pop culture’.

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