Meagan Day and Bhaskar Sunkara in the New York Times:

A growing majority of Americans agree: Health care shouldn’t be a business. They’re finally coming around to the idea that it can and should be a public good instead — something we can all turn to when the need arises.

The favorite right-wing argument against Medicare for All — the most popular approach to universal, publicly financed heath care — is that it’s too expensive. More on those costs in a moment. But first, we should note that our current health care system is actually the most expensive in the world by a long shot, even though we have millions of uninsured and underinsured people and lackluster health outcomes.

This is partly because a lot of that money doesn’t go directly toward keeping people healthy. Instead it goes to the overhead costs required to keep businesses running. These include exorbitant executive salaries, marketing to beat out the competition, the labor-intensive work of assessing and denying claims and so on. None of these would be a factor in a single-payer, Medicare for All system. Taiwan and Canada both have single-payer systems, and both spend less than 2 percent of total expenditures on administrative costs — and so does the United States’s current Medicare program. By contrast, private insurers in the United States spend as much as 25 percent on overheads.

But the most important way Medicare for All would save money isn’t by slashing administrative costs.

More here.

Ty Joplin in Albawaba:

Jihadi violence ebbs and flows, with groups rising and falling in prominence as they gain and lose followers and legitimacy. Al Qaeda, once the premium jihadi brand that local groups scrambled to associate with, was made to look stale and outdated by the explosive rise of ISIS. As ISIS fades, many around the world are holding their breath for the next global terror group.

But some Indonesian families have associated themselves with radical extremism for decades, spanning generations.

Inside the terror networks of Indonesia, a global lesson is laid bare; that even though particular manifestations of violent jihad come in waves, the ideology can remain firmly entrenched. Indonesia’s long history of radical violence and of families fostering extremist sentiments can serve as a blueprint to understand how jihadism remains resilient, and how it can be combated at its core.

More here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OAJ9qQOO3Sc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b8qdg84iyGw

Hakan Yavuz in Boston Review:

Turkey is entering a new era. Following a failed military coup against President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in 2016, a referendum last April approved sweeping constitutional amendments amidst a government-declared state of emergency and allegations of electoral misconduct. The changes call for a super-executive presidency without robust checks and balances. And as a result of June’s presidential elections, not only is the government being reorganized under Erdoğan’s authoritarian leadership, but Turkish society is being recreated in his vision of the Ottoman past.

In speech after speech, Erdoğan has called Turkey’s identity essentially Ottoman (Osmanlılık). The premise has policy implications both at home and abroad. It is supposed to follow that Turkey has a right, if not a duty, to defend the rights of Muslims in former Ottoman territories. It was Erdoğan who supported the independence of Albanian Muslims in the Republic of Kosovo, telling a cheering crowd in the capital of Priština that “Turkey is Kosovo and Kosovo is Turkey.” His language is similar when it comes to the Palestinians: they, too, are claimed as Ottoman Muslims. If there is a master key to this code of the New Turkey, it is a reimagined Ottoman-Islamic identity—one pioneered by Turgut Özal in the 1980s as prime minister and then president, and now reconstituted for the twenty-first-century by Erdoğan and his fellow Justice and Development Party (AKP) member Ahmet Davutoğlu.

The Ottoman Empire dissolved in 1922. It was superseded by the Republic of Turkey, whose first president, Mustafa Kemal, embarked on a sweeping program of secular, westernizing reforms—a period known as the Atatürk era. The Ottoman Caliphate was abolished, Islamic canon law was replaced with a secular civil code, and women were granted full political rights.

What does Ottomanism signify nearly a century later?

More here.

Alex Johnson in The Independent:

A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
How I Became a Socialist by Helen Keller
The Iron Heel, The Jacket and Martin Eden by Jack London
Deutsche Ansprache: ein Appell an die Vernunft (An Appeal to Reason) by Thomas Mann
All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
The Outline of History by HG Wells
Monographs about Marc Chagall and Paul Klee
All works published before 1933 by Sigmund Freud, Bertolt Brecht, Stefan Zweig, John Dos Passos and thousands of others

No to decadence and moral corruption! Yes to decency and morality in family and state! I consign to the flames the writings of Heinrich Mann, Bertolt Brecht, Ernst Gläser, Erich Kästner
​Joseph Goebbel​, 10 May 1933, Berlin

It is impossible to put together an exhaustive list of all the books burnt by the Nazis between 1933 (when burnings started in earnest) and 1945, but estimates put it at well over 4,000. Herrmann and a 1935 issue of Die Bucherei, the Nazi journal for lending libraries, featured a list of guidelines for deciding which books and writers were fit for the flames. This included anything written by Jewish authors (irrespective of the subject), all pacifist literature, all Marxist literature and anything by foreigners or German emigrants in a foreign country badmouthing the new Germany. More specifically, anything supporting the Weimar Republic, primitive Darwinism, or encouraging decadent art was also doomed.

More here.

Tom Barnes in The Independent:

Nobel Prize-winning British novelist VS Naipaul has died at his home in London at the age of 85, his family have said.

The Trinidadian-born author, most famous for his seminal 1961 novel A House for Mr Biswas, died peacefully on Friday, his wife Lady Naipaul announced.

“He was a giant in all that he achieved and he died surrounded by those he loved having lived a life which was full of wonderful creativity and endeavour,” she said in a statement.

Naipaul published more than 30 works spanning both fiction and nonfiction in a career spanning 50 years.

Born into an Indo-Trinidadian family in Trinidad and Tobagoin 1932, the author’s earlier, comic novels were often set in the Caribbean nation.

In 1948 he won a government scholarship to read English at Oxford‘s University College, where he suffered a nervous breakdown.

More here.

Paul Bloom and Matthew Jordan in the New York Times:

There is a dial in front of you, and if you turn it, a stranger who is in mild pain from being shocked will experience a tiny increase in the amount of the shock, so slight that he doesn’t even notice it. You turn it and leave. And then hundreds of people go up to the dial and each also turns it, so that eventually the victim is screaming in agony.

Did you do anything wrong? Derek Parfit, the influential British philosopher who died in January 2017, called this the case of the Harmless Torturer. Parfit first considered a simpler scenario in which a thousand torturers each turn the dial a thousand times on their own victim. This is plainly terrible. But then he explores a contrasting case where each of the torturers turns a dial a thousand times — each turn shocking a different one of the thousand victims. The end result is the same; a thousand people in agony. And yet morally it feels different, since nobody, individually, caused any real harm to any single individual.

This seems like the sort of clever technical example that philosophers love — among other things, it’s a challenge to a utilitarian view in which the wrongness of an act is reduced to its consequences — but one with no actual real-world relevance. But the world has changed since Parfit published his scenario in 1986.

More here.

Claudia Dreyfus in the New York Times:

As a science writer at The New Yorker, Maria Konnikova, 34, focuses on the brain, and the weird and interesting ways people use their brains.

Dr. Konnikova is an experimental psychologist trained at Columbia University. But her latest experiment is on herself. For a book she’s researching on luck and decision-making, Dr. Konnikova began studying poker.

Within a year, she had moved from poker novice to poker professional, winning more than $200,000 in tournament jackpots. This summer Poker Stars, an online gaming site, began sponsoring Dr. Konnikova in professional tournaments.

We spoke recently for two hours at the offices of The Times. An edited and condensed version of the conversation follows.

More here.

Frances Wilson in Spectator:

‘The Divine Comedy is a book that everyone ought to read,’ according to Jorge Luis Borges, and every Italian has read it. Dante’s midlife crisis in the dark wood, his journey down the circles of hell, up the ledges of Purgatory and into the arms of Beatrice is mother’s milk to Italian schoolchildren. Today lines from La divina commediaare printed on T-shirts; before the war, as Primo Levi recalled, there were ‘Dante tournaments’ on the streets of Turin, where one boy would recite the start of a canto and his rival would try to complete it. I had two Italian students in an English literature seminar last year who sniggered when I mentioned the once standard Penguin translation of the Comedy by Dorothy L. Sayers, inventor of the Dante-loving Lord Peter Wimsey. ‘Dante in translation,’ they explained, ‘isn’t the real Dante.’ But, as Ian Thomson shows, the real Dante is hard to find even in Italian. Over 800 pre-Gutenberg editions of La divina commedia are known to exist, most marred by errors and nibbled by rats, but because none is in Dante’s hand we can’t be sure what he actually wrote. An example of the way his poem was doctored by the copiers can be seen by the fact that it was Boccaccio (author of The Decameron and Dante’s first biographer) who added the divina to what Dante had simply called La commedia.

As Thomson explains, by ‘comedy’, Dante did not imply that he was trying to be funny, although he very often is, particularly when he details the punishments meted out to his enemies in Hell. A comedy was a story with a happy ending, but Dante also referred his readers to the fact that this was ‘low’ rather than ‘high’ literature, written not in Latin but the Tuscan vernacular and therefore accessible to weavers, brewers, workers and even women. The reason Dante still matters, Thomson argues, is not because readers today ‘fear damnation or are moved by the beauty of the Christian revelation, but because he wrote the story of an ordinary man — an Everyman — who sets out hopefully in this life in search of renewal’.

More here.

Steve Donoghue in The Christian Science Monitor:

Mrill Ingram in The Progressive:

In his new book, In Defense of Public Lands: The Case against Privatization and Transfer (Temple University Press), Steven Davis, political science professor at Edgewood College in Madison, Wisconsin, takes on the “privatizers.” His book is an even-handed and thorough look at public lands in the United States. Although public support for wilderness, national parks, and other public lands is high, Davis is rightly concerned that these open spaces—from national parks like Yosemite to county-owned lands—face serious threats.

The sentiments that led to the Sagebrush Rebellion and Wise Use Movement are not in the past, Davis tells us. In his first chapter, “Public Land and its Discontents,” Davis details how, since the gains of the Tea Party in 2010, those against public lands have the support of a large number of office-holders in state and federal legislatures. “What was previously seen as the intemperate agitation of fringe activists is now the standard stuff of political platforms, floor debates, and campaign speeches,” he writes.

The Republican Party’s 2012 platform, for example, stated, “Congress should reconsider whether . . . federal government’s enormous landholdings and control of water in the West could be better used for ranching, mining, or forestry through private ownership.”

More here.

america

am I not your baby?
brown & not allowed

my own language?
my teeth pulled

from mouth, tongue
bloated with corn syrup?

america, didn’t you raise me?
bomb the country of my fathers

& then tell me to go back to it?
didn’t you mold the men

who murder children in schools
who spit at my bare arms

& uncovered head?
america, wasn’t it you?

who makes & remakes
me orphan, who burns

my home, watches me rebuild
& burns it down again?

wasn’t it you, who uproots
& mangles the addresses

until there are none
until all I have are my own

hands & even those you’ve
told me not to trust? america

don’t turn your back on me.
am I not your baby?

brown & bred to hate
every inch of my skin?

didn’t you raise me?
didn’t you tell me bootstraps

& then steal my shoes?
didn’t you make there no ‘back’

for me to go back to?
america, am I not your refugee?

who do I call mother, if not you?

by Fatimah Asghar
from Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here Festival
D. C., 2016.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Fatimah Asghar is a nationally touring poet, screenwriter and performer. She created Bosnia and Herzegovina’s first Spoken Word Poetry group, REFLEKS, while on a Fulbright studying theater in post-violent contexts. She has performed on many stages, including the Dodge Poetry Festival, The Nantucket Project, and TedX. Her work has appeared in many journals, including POETRY Magazine, Southern Indiana Review, The Margins, The Paris-American, and PEN Poetry Series. She is a member of the Dark Noise Collective and a Kundiman Fellow. Her chapbook After was released on Yes Yes Books fall of 2015. Her web series Brown Girls was released in February 2017.

Cordelia Fine in the Financial Times:

In 2009, in the aftermath of the global financial crisis, the “Lehman Sisters” hypothesis was born. If only there had been more senior women in the banking industry, would the credit crunch have happened? Journalists, politicians and scientists speculated that the Lehman Sisters might indeed have saved us, on the grounds that “women managers are naturally more risk adverse,” as Neelie Kroes put it in a speech as European Commisioner for Competition in July 2007.

The idea that women — not so very long ago legally unable to own properties and securities — might be the saviours of the financial system may seem like a new and radical idea. But the notion’s heritage is an old one, both scientifically and politically.

Part of its cultural inheritance is a character I dubbed Testosterone Rex. You already know him. He was at that drinks party, telling us that testosterone is so potent that assumed average differences in testosterone levels between chief executives in mid-middle age versus late-middle age have a material, detectable influence on multi-party negotiations that involve discussions with the top management team, directions from the chair of the board and investors, and receipt of detailed financial advice from an investment bank. Testosterone Rex is, in short, the legend of that familiar scientific story that tells us risk-taking evolved more strongly in males than in females because of the greater reproductive advantages of status and resources for men in our ancestral past, and that these qualities are therefore wired into the male brain and fuelled by testosterone.

More here.

Richard V Reeves at Aeon:

The Indian economist and philosopher Amartya Sen observed that everybody is in favour of some kind of equality – the real question is, ‘Equality of What?’ (1979). Relational equality, based on equality of respect, is distinct from two other kinds of equality: basic equality based on equality of legal rights; and material equality, based on equality of resources.

Basic equality, sometimes referred to as deep or moral equality, underpins human rights, which are, as a matter of principle, universal and unconditional. In his book One Another’s Equals (2017), the New Zealand legal philosopher Jeremy Waldron draws on an Anglican prayer for ‘all sorts and conditions of men’, to emphasise basic equality. He argues that ‘we believe there is just one sortal status – one kind of human being’, even if people exist under different conditions, for example in terms of their economic situation. To treat a person differently because they are a woman, or have darker skin, negates this principle.

But basic equality does not ensure or demand relational equality based on respect. I can defend the right of a criminal to a fair trial, without respecting him as my equal in any broader sense. Basic equality, then, generates a rather thin, legalistic egalitarianism.

Material equality, by contrast, is focused on the second part of Waldron’s prayer, the ‘conditions’ of men. The currency this time is resources, typically economic ones. Egalitarian arguments are here focused on the justification for reallocating resources between person A and person B. But no account is taken of the relationship between person A and person B. In contrast to both basic equality and material equality, relational equality is created between people, in our relationships with each other.

More here.

Eric Levitz in NY Magazine [h/t: Leonard Benardo]:

The Reward Work Act would require every large company in the United States to have one-third of its board of directors directly elected by its labor force. Which is to say: It would force companies to give their workers a say in how profits are allocated. This arrangement, widely known as “worker co-determination,” is prevalent in Western Europe and a pillar of Germany’s economic model. Both historical evidence and common sense suggest that, had workers’ representatives been in every corporate boardroom this January, the Trump tax cuts might have actually trickled down into workers’ paychecks (instead of pooling in wealthy shareholders’ bank accounts). At a time of record corporate profits, and stubbornly tepid wage growth, co-determination is a simple way of rebalancing the gains of growth in ordinary Americans’ favor — without raising taxes by a single cent.

And new polling suggests it is among the most broadly popular ideas in American politics.

For a while now, the progressive think tank Data for Progress (DFP) has been commissioning national polls on far-left ideas, and then applying state-of-the-art demographic modeling techniques (i.e., the ones used by well-funded political campaigns) to estimate the likely level of support for said policies in every state and district in the country. With the help of the data science firm Civis Analytics, DFP recently ran the concept of worker co-determination by the American public, and found that the proposal has a positive approval rating in 100 percent of the nation’s states and congressional districts.

More here.

Santiago Ramos at Commonweal:

A common argument against Bergman is that he is fated for oblivion because his movies did not advance the art of film; they were closer to theater than to the pure cinematic art of other art-house directors of that generation, such as Godard, Resnais, and Antonioni. Bergman’s religious themes, it is said, are pretentious and outdated; people don’t brood over God and death anymore the way his characters do. We brood over social conditions and economic injustice, or else we are too happy at the End of History, too secular and self-satisfied to brood at all. Bergman will only be remembered, the argument goes, by scholars, who will credit him for bringing Scandinavian exoticism and a certain “seriousness” to the cinema, as well as for the great actors who graced his movies: Max von Sydow, Harriet Andersson, Bibi Andersson, Ingrid Thulin, Liv Ullmann, et al. But neither his stories nor his ideas will move people the way they once did.

Even if all these criticisms were true—and I’d dispute at least some of them—there is still something else that is of lasting value in Bergman: the unique aesthetic attitude that his movies invite the viewer to assume.

more here.