Week 37: Warm Meetings In Iceland
Week 37: Warm Meetings In Iceland
Meeting with researchers in Iceland for the European Conference on Domestic Violence, and paying close attention to political language.
This week the European Conference Conference On Domestic Violence was held in Reykjavík. I wasn’t attending the conference personally (I was priced out, unfortunately), but being in town at the same time afforded me the opportunity to meet with several people whose work on family court issues is outstanding and of vital importance. These are the people who do the actual difficult research that provides the platform from which my own writing on these issues is based.
It was a great honour especially to meet and have a cup of tea with Joan Meier the Director of the National Family Violence Law Center at the George Washington University Law School. Joan has done the most comprehensive study on family court cases in the United States where abuse by fathers is reported and a counter-claim of “parental alienation” is alleged. Her data demonstrated that this counter-claim doubles the risk that mothers will lose custody of their children.
Currently, coordinated by the University of Ottawa, a global study is being conducted into how this counter-claim (or legal ruse) is influencing custody outcomes in a range of countries. On Monday night we had a group dinner for people involved in this study. This enabled me to meet with, amongst others, Molly Dragiewicz and Zoe Rathus from Griffith University in Brisbane, who are leading the Australian study.
These are people who have an unwavering commitment to identify how violence manifests itself in our societies, and seek paths to minimise (or with hope, eradicate) its persistence. In my opinion, there is no more noble pursuit than such a dedication. It also comes with great bravery, given that those who resent the scrutiny of male violence often use the threat of it as a tool to silence.
On a related note - see below in this week’s reading for the passing of Piqui’s Law in California. A law which will ban the use of these ghoulish “reunification camps” in the state, which prey upon abused children, seeking to brainwash them against their protective parent.
Language Matters
In recent months I’ve been focusing some of my writing on the way we use language in our political debates. Being in an era of ideological flux, with the rapid shifting of interest groups, our current political lexicon is incapable of describing these changes. The conventional terms we use now obscure more than illuminate, and, it must be acknowledged, this is often their purpose. Ours is also an era of linguistic ruses.
Attempting to understand how some of this language is used I’ve written a series of essay on specific problems.
The first – What About Whataboutery – sought to understand the psychology of group competition, through a re-reading of George Orwell’s essay Notes On Nationalism.
The second essay – Our “So-Called” Problem – was a look at the incessant use of this appalling phrase. How it has become a linguistic virus, but also how it is steeped in bad faith and cynicism, and therefore reflective of our current politics in the West.
The third piece – America’s Liberal Dilemma – was about the unique (and infuriating) way that Americans use the word “liberal”. I attempted to understand where this usage has come from, why it contrasts with a conventional (and accurate) understanding of the term, but also the wider problem of how the United States is abandoning liberalism.
The fourth essay – Adam Smith vs the Ultra-Nationalists – sought to explain why authoritarian and populist parties are not “moving Left on economics” as they are often described, but a deep suspicion of liberalism has always been essential to their worldview and political projects. Only when we abandon the intellectually juvenile Left-Right spectrum will we be able to truly understand the danger that these parties pose.
In international relations the Hawk-Dove dichotomy could be seen as akin to the use of the Left and Right in domestic politics. Previously for The Diplomat I have written about why this framing is so lazy, and what are the implications from its usage. I’m currently working on another essay for this newsletter that is related to this theme. It will be the next essay in this language series.
This Week’s Reading
Adam Smith vs The Ultra-Nationalists
Grant Wyeth - International Blue
“However, ultra-nationalism’s suspicion of liberalism is more complex than just how it may erode their manipulative political aims. Smith’s most influential work – The Wealth of Nations – was a critique of the dominant mercantilism of the day. Smith’s counter-intuitive observation was that a nation’s wealth (as opposed to individual wealth) flourished when states stopped trying to direct how wealth was created. Individuals and businesses were best placed to make decisions without consideration of any “national” sentiment or objectives. The state simply does not have the knowledge to understand effective and efficient practices, and as a risk adverse entity, has difficulty sensing opportunity, or advancing innovation (except with war).
For political parties that have domination as their central operating principle, the zero-sum game of mercantilism fit nicely with their authoritarian psychology. Yet there was more than just a lack of centralised control that concerned them about liberalism, there was also the actual outcomes of a more liberalised world.”
Why Voting No Will Harm Australia’s Pacific Diplomacy
Misha Zelinsky – Australian Financial Review
“Rejecting the Voice risks irreparably setting back the cause of Indigenous reconciliation. And while that’s heartbreaking enough, the ramifications of a No vote will go well beyond our shores and directly affect Australia’s national security.
You can take it as fact that nations hostile to Australia’s brand of multicultural, democratic openness are desperate for the referendum to fail. And rest assured if it does, the bad guys will use it to their advantage.
If democratic values are a superpower in the battle for hearts and minds, then hypocrisy is the kryptonite. Authoritarians love it when self-declared good guys fail to live up to their own promises. It undermines democracy for them.
Fairly or not, a No vote will confirm suspicions that for all its talk of diversity and liberalism, Australia is still a British outpost. If you’re an authoritarian superpower building influence – or military bases – in the Indo-Pacific, that’s a handy thing to weaponise. In the Pacific Islands, where anti-colonialist narratives are particularly powerful and Australia is playing diplomatic catch-up, a No vote will be a gift to an expansionist China.”
California Legislature Passes Bill Aiming To Protect Children From Abusers During Custody Disputes
Olivia Gentile – Insider
“The law, which will take effect unless it's vetoed by the governor, establishes training on domestic and child abuse for custody judges and bars them from ordering children who resist contact with one of their parents into "reunification treatment" that cuts them off from the other parent.
That last provision is a heavy blow to reunification programs built on the concept of "parental alienation." This controversial theory, which hasn't been accepted by the psychiatric establishment, posits that when children of divorce accuse a parent of maltreatment or abuse, it's often because the parent they prefer has coached them to lie. Some programs that claim to address alienation, including Family Bridges, Turning Points for Families, and One Family at a Time, ask judges to remove children from the home of the preferred parent and prohibit that parent from contact with the children for at least 90 days. In practice, an investigation by Insider and Type found that the separations sometimes last years and leave children isolated with their abusers.
Family court judges have sent hundreds of children, many of them from California, to such programs, and both Family Bridges and One Family at a Time are based in the state. Piqui's Law would close off these programs' pipeline of referrals from California courts.
Young people from around the country who were sent to reunification programs have told Insider that clinicians pressured them to recant their allegations of abuse, sometimes threatening to commit them to psychiatric facilities or separate them from siblings. Many young people described being apart from the parent they trusted as acutely painful.”
Two Years of the Taliban’s ‘Gender Apartheid’ in Afghanistan
Belquis Ahmadi & Scott Worden – United States Institute Of Peace
“But Afghan women are not prepared to concede all that they had achieved over the last two decades. Many have bravely gone to the streets to demand their basic rights despite being met with Taliban violence and repression. While most public protests have largely subsided, they have been replaced with indoor protests with women and girls holding signs in Dari, Pashto and English rejecting Taliban policies. Outside the country, women have issued statements, launched media campaigns and even conducted hunger strikes to urge world leaders and the U.N. to recognize the Taliban’s gender apartheid and hold the regime accountable for crimes against humanity.
It has now been 725 days that girl students above sixth grade have not been able to attend school and 265 days since universities have stopped accepting female students. Under the Taliban today, Afghan women are deprived of their livelihoods, identity, education, employment, leisure, travel, sports and equal access to humanitarian aid. The Taliban dictate what women should or shouldn’t do in the privacy of their homes, even prohibiting listening to music. As a result, Afghan women face serious mental health issues including fear, anxiety, anger, helplessness, insomnia, lack of self-respect and thoughts of suicide and self-harm. The Taliban’s anti-women policies have emboldened the country’s patriarchal norms.”
Gordon Brown - Foreign Policy
“The United States is selling itself short. The country that led a unipolar world can still lead in a multipolar world, not by issuing orders to its fellow countries as if they were vassals but by persuading them as allies. Only through the power of cooperation can we square the circle whereby the United States champions a multilateral order and enlists countries to stand with it. If Washington can no longer successfully impose, it can successfully propose. And if it does so, the United States—the country that most of the world still looks to for leadership and wants to continue to do so—could and would be the only country able to rally a majority of the world around a rejuvenated multilateralism: global solutions to global problems through global institutions.
Two conclusions follow. The United States has to build alliances worldwide, taking time to bring countries on board. Benign neglect is an innocent explanation for the problem. For example, in the last 100 years U.S. presidents have visited fewer than two dozen of Africa’s 54 countries. We must find common cause with them by listening to them as equals and not labeling them and viewing them through the hackneyed lenses of old. We need to think of a world where the West cannot just lecture developing economies but instead have to sign up as partners in a common set of global causes.
And second, if the United States renewed its historical support for the global institutions that it played a major part in creating, China’s bluff would be called. It would force Xi to either defend the international order—which includes support for the U.N., IMF, WTO, and WHO—or admit that his Global Security Initiative is founded on propaganda, not truth.”
Anchal Vohra - Foreign Policy
“Gandhi, it seems, has finally taken a page out of Modi’s playbook by looking for support abroad. But rather than the Indian diaspora, he is reaching out to liberal institutions in leading Western democracies, hoping to attract elite audiences comprised of both Westerners and more liberal members of the Indian diaspora. He pitched himself as a more inclusive and democratic counterweight to Modi and someone who can be an ally against China’s hegemony over global production. He said the democracies of the United States, Europe, and India should come up with an “alternative vision,” where manufacturing is undertaken in “democratic conditions.”
But if Gandhi’s goal was to project an image of strength at home by associating with Westerners, the result may have been the opposite. The man who hopes to unseat Modi in next year’s elections did not spell out how India could replace China as a manufacturing behemoth. He has often accused Modi of a weak response to Chinese aggression in disputed areas on the India-China border but did not suggest a military alliance with the West, either. And Western experts say that leaders in Europe won’t fully embrace Gandhi until he first proves his mettle at home in general elections.”
Andrei Soldatov & Irina Borogan – Foreign Affairs
“In itself, it is unsurprising that the church could play an important part in furthering Russia’s strategic interests. For centuries, the church has been closely connected with the Russian state, a relationship that has spanned the eras of the Russian Empire to the Soviet Union to Putin’s Russia. From the eighteenth century until the Russian Revolution, the Russian tsar was the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, which in turn gave legitimacy to Russia’s imperial rule; Russia’s brand of orthodoxy is based on the concept that Moscow is “the Third Rome”—the successor to the Christian empires of ancient Rome and Byzantine Constantinople. The church’s influence also buttressed (and was bolstered by) a national-imperial ideology of Russian exceptionalism, which held that the church’s mission was to serve the tsar and defend the sacred motherland.
Ironically, communist rule didn’t change this orientation much, despite the Soviets’ systematic persecution of church leaders, the confiscation of church property, and the general dismantling of the church’s influence after the Bolshevik Revolution. During World War II, when the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin asked the church to help rally the population to the defense of the Soviet Union, church leaders responded to his call—not out of opportunism but because they recognized that the country’s ideology was rapidly moving from a vision of proletarian rule and universal communism to a renewed nationalist ideology that drew on the Russian Empire’s glorious past. Stalin understood that nationalism was more inspirational to soldiers who were risking their lives in a devastating war with Nazi Germany, and the church readily embraced that view.”
Joe Shute – Unherd
“Russia, whose territory spans around 53% of the Arctic Ocean shoreline, and China are rapidly developing plans to expand the Northern Sea Route. The maritime passage between the east and west of the Arctic Ocean is regarded by the Kremlin as vital to avoid Western sanctions. It is already possible to navigate the route for anyone with several briefcases full of dollars to pay for the mandatory Russian ice breakers which accompany any transit as patrol vessels. In 2024, the Kremlin is planning to commence year-round navigations of the route, through which it hopes to increase the amount of cargo shipped from around 30 million annually to 80 million.
China — which has ominously declared itself a “near-Arctic state” — also harbours ambitions to transform the passage into a silk road of the far north, while in March, a Russian delegation to India held talks over new co-operation over the route. The West is similarly flexing its muscles, with Finland (and the expected accession of Sweden) extending Nato’s borders into the Arctic. In June, the US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken announced that the US would be opening an outpost in the far-north Norwegian town of Tromsø, stressing the need to have “a diplomatic footprint” above the Arctic Circle. “The war in Ukraine has really torpedoed this idea of Artic exceptionalism,” explains Dr Neil Melvin, Director of International Security at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI). “The whole focus of northern Europe has basically now shifted to building security against Russia.”
Donald Trump’s Politics Of The Berserk
Damon Linker - Persuasion
“Viewed in the proper perspective, it’s not especially surprising that someone would say and do such things. The United States has always been a freewheeling place populated by more than its share of conmen, outlaws, blowhards, and bullshit artists looking for suckers to deceive. Mark Twain described it, with just the right touch of irony, in his essays. PT Barnum turned it into a comprehensive philosophy of life. Writing in the 1990s, the late novelist Philip Roth called it the “indigenous American berserk.” (No recent example of popular art has done more to explore the allure of this tradition in a contemporary setting than the television show Better Call Saul.)
Trump’s demonic genius was to blend this distinctively American tradition of antinomian hucksterism with politics, synthesizing the anti-government impulse within Reaganite conservatism with a far more radical populist drive to break free from and tear down any and all constraints imposed from above. John Dillinger turned himself into a folk hero by getting away (for a time) with bank robbery and prison breaks. Trump has done (and continues to do) something similar but on the vastly grander stage of presidential politics. His acts of defiance, his refusal to abide by the normal pieties of the political game, his willingness to do and try anything to prevail against his opponents, his ability to drive those opponents to apoplexy—all of it and more makes him seem almost superhuman to tens of millions of Republicans. Even if they don’t fully approve of his behaviour, his political tightrope dance is unlike anything else in our (or any other country’s) politics.”
Why Are Women Freezing Their Eggs? Look to the Men
Anna Louie Sussman – The Atlantic
“As Inhorn notes, strands of this story are decades old. Her generation of women (Inhorn is in her 60s) were the first to enter higher-educational institutions en masse. She writes about how many women in her cohort of female doctoral students, faced with men intimidated by their achievements, remained single or “‘settled’ for suboptimal relationships that subsequently ended.” And the plight of educated women such as Inhorn and her interlocutors is one that has long been confronted by women in communities where economic challenges, such as the loss of factory jobs, led to widespread male unemployment—surely a factor in their hesitation to commit to a partner or start a family. But egg freezing adds a new twist, at least for those with the means to access it: Today, women can spend thousands of dollars to theoretically extend their reproductive life span while continuing to search for a person who would make shared parenthood possible.
If they can’t have the “three p’s” of partnership, pregnancy, and parenthood, would they settle for just the latter two, the ones that are within their control? Tiffany, the Washington, D.C.–based patient, chose this route. If more professional women like her, with their resources and political clout, become single mothers en masse, how would family life in the U.S. need to change? It would require new support systems and communities, more expansive models of family-making, and better accommodations for working moms. This wouldn’t bridge the mating gap, but for some women, it might at least offer an alternative to what can feel like an endless and fruitless search.”