to set a mood • • •
some of the things I read while eating breakfast • • •
How a small Turkish city successfully absorbed half a million migrants
Gaziantep has grown by 30% due to newcomers fleeing the crisis across the border in Syria, but remains a model of tolerance and pragmatism.
Gaziantep is located on Turkey’s southern border with Syria.
Imagine you live in a medium-sized city such as Birmingham or Milan. Now imagine that overnight the population increases by about 30%. The new people are mostly destitute, hungry and with nowhere to stay. They don’t even speak the language.
Then imagine that instead of driving them away, you make them welcome and accommodate them as best you can.
Welcome to Gaziantep, a sprawling industrial city on Turkey’s southern border with Syria, where that exact scenario has played out over the past few years.
Gaziantep has a thriving textile industry and is the home of the pistachio; its food is reputed to be so good that people fly down from Istanbul just for lunch. It is also just 60 miles from Aleppo, the Syrian city devastated by war.
In April 2011, 252 refugees arrived in Turkey from the Aleppo area. One year later, there were 23,000 in the country; by 2015, 2 million. Today there are 3.6 million Syrian refugees (or protected persons, as they are officially known) in Turkey, with the majority living in the south, in places such as Gaziantep.
Many Syrians in Gaziantep scratch a living collecting recycling.
In one 24-hour period alone, Gaziantep took in 200,000 people. To put that in perspective, Turkey’s biggest city, Istanbul, with a population of 15 million, hosts 560,000 refugees in total. Gaziantep has just a 10th of the population but took in 500,000. …
Why Socialism Is Back
There is a direct link from the Wall Street bailout to the Presidential campaigns of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.
In the fall of 1999, I interviewed Tony Blair, who was then the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, at 10 Downing Street. I asked Blair, a former barrister who had rebranded the vaguely socialist Labour Party as the explicitly pro-enterprise New Labour, if he believed socialism was dead. He hemmed and hawed. Eventually, he said that if I meant old-style socialism—extensive government controls, punitive tax rates on the very rich, and a pervasive suspicion of capitalism—then, yes, socialism was done.
At the time, this wasn’t a particularly controversial thing to say. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, state socialism on the Eastern Bloc model had been discredited. China and India had both embarked on historic efforts to deregulate their economies and embrace global capitalism. In many Western countries, the parties of the center-left had adopted, or were about to adopt, more market-friendly policies. Blair and his friend Bill Clinton claimed to be pioneering a “Third Way” between capitalism and socialism.
Twenty years on, Jeremy Corbyn, a lifelong socialist, leads the Labour Party. Bernie Sanders is running for President again, under the banner of “democratic socialism.” Two members of the Democratic Socialists of America—Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib—are sitting in the House of Representatives. In Germany, the Greens and the socialist Left Party are challenging the once mighty S.P.D. What explains this left-wing revival? There are three answers, I think, and they are all linked: economic cleavages, political capture, and a crisis of legitimacy.
The most basic problem is that in rich countries like Britain and the United States the pro-market tilt failed to deliver the promised results on a consistent basis. (In China and India, the story was different.) Blair was operating under the theory that opening markets, cutting taxes, and stripping away restrictions on businesses would boost the growth rates of G.D.P. and productivity, leading to higher wages and living standards for everyone. Also, faster growth would expand the tax base, which would allow the government to spend more on things like education and health care. For a time, during the economic boom of the late nineteen-nineties, things seemed to be working to plan. But that didn’t last very long, and it culminated in the financial crisis and the Great Recession, the recovery from which was slow and patchy. …
Stonewall: a journey into the night that unleashed gay liberation
Stonewall was a rebellion, a riot and a release of fear. But it was also the celebration of personhood by queer Americans standing proud and unashamed.
A group of young people – including Tommy Lanigan -Schmidt on the far right – celebrate outside the boarded-up Stonewall Inn after the riots.
On a hot and humid summer’s evening in New York City in 1969, the tranquility of a small park in Queens was disturbed by jarring sounds of sawing and chopping and the thump of trees toppling to the ground.
Local residents were angry that gay men were meeting in the park at night under a lovers’ lane of trees. The men weren’t disturbing anybody – the park was otherwise deserted; nor were they harming each other – their trysts were fully consensual.
But that didn’t stop the locals forming vigilante groups. Growing at times to 40 strong, they prowled the park like packs of hunting dogs in search of prey.
When they found a gay man hiding behind a tree they beamed powerful lights into his face. Run and never come back, they said, or we will beat you to a pulp.
When that failed, the self-appointed defenders of morality took things to the next level. They went home, grabbed saws and axes, and on that sticky summer evening, under the approving eye of local police, they chopped down all the trees.
The strange incident was one of the more surreal manifestations of a country that in June 1969 remained trapped in homophobia’s grip. A week after the trees were felled in Queens, about 10 miles away in Manhattan a thread snapped in the social fabric of the city. …
5 Absurd (And Horrifying) Anti-Homosexual Sting Operations
Sex between men was a felony everywhere in the USA up until 1962, and if that sounds like ancient history to you, keep in mind that some states kept anti-sodomy laws on the books until the year Finding Nemo came out. In their quest to enforce these laws, authorities put together all kinds of sting operations that helped no one, sometimes backfired, and would have been hilarious if they weren’t so ugly. For instance …
5. Cops Stuck Hidden Cameras In A Men’s Room (And Made A Movie Out Of It)
In 1962, the police in Mansfield, Ohio knew they had a public safety scourge on their hands. A man had recently killed two ten-year-old girls for refusing to give him oral sex, and he’d previously received oral sex in a men’s room, so authorities logically decided they had to crack down on that second thing. Clearly the only way to do that was to secretly monitor every man who used a particular public restroom, in hopes of finding someone having sex outside of the way God intended. And of course, they needed to get this all on film.
Hiding a camera in a bathroom was a tricky prospect with ’60s technology. They couldn’t stick a CCTV camera in there, or simply slide an iPhone in a soap dispenser like you or I would do. Instead they constructed a tight compartment behind a two-way mirror, where an officer hid with a 16mm camera for hours at a time.
He watched all the men who entered go about their business, and whenever that business turned sexual, he filmed the whole thing. They made 79 arrests using this footage. Several of the accused were committed to an asylum for shock treatment. One of them later committed suicide.
If there was any severe legal objection to how the evidence had been obtained, it didn’t sway the courts. And with the footage having proved so successful, the police decided to put it to further use. They incorporated it into an instructional video called Camera Surveillance to teach other police forces how to conduct stings of their own. It’s unclear why such a video had to feature uncensored recordings of actual sex acts, but it absolutely did.
A guy involved in making that video later gave the original footage to artist William Jones, who made it into his own movie, called Tearoom, which is freely available on the internet (usually on porn sites). Meanwhile, that public restroom was ordered closed after the investigation, so the citizens of Mansfield could finally feel safe in their homes. …
White men were first to benefit from gay liberation – but it can’t end there
Fifty years ago, Edmund White witnessed the Stonewall riots. Here, he pays homage to the LGBT people of color, drag queens and tough kids of Harlem who paved the way to freedom.
‘Whereas gays had always run away in the past, these Stonewall African Americans and Puerto Ricans and drag queens weren’t so easily intimidated.’
I was at the Stonewall Riots 50 years ago, the beginning of the current gay rights movement. Not because I was a radical. Quite the contrary. As a middle-class white 29-year-old who’d been in therapy for years trying to go straight, I was initially disturbed by seeing all these black and brown people resisting the police, of all things! I had at one time been a regular patron of this Greenwich Village bar, but in recent months the crowd had changed to kids mainly from Harlem, many in drag.
In the early 1960s, Mayor Robert Wagner had closed all gay and lesbian bars in a misguided effort to “clean up” the city for tourists visiting the World’s Fair. But by 1969 those days seemed long gone. We had a new mayor, John Lindsay, who looked like a Kennedy and we assumed to be liberal. We gays weren’t in a good mood. Judy Garland (the equivalent of Lady Gaga today) had just died and was lying in state in a funeral home on the Upper West Side. It was very, very hot and everyone was sitting out on stoops. And then this! A crowded gay bar had just been raided, a reminder of the recent past.
Whereas gays had always run away in the past, afraid of being arrested and jailed, these Stonewall African Americans and Puerto Ricans and drag queens weren’t so easily intimidated. They lit fires, turned over cars and mocked the cops, even battering the heavy Stonewall doors where some policemen were retaining members of the staff and customers, waiting for the paddy wagon to return.
The protests went on for three days and the whole area around Christopher Street and Seventh Avenue was cordoned off. Ours may have been the first funny revolution. When someone shouted “Gay is good” in imitation of “Black is beautiful,” we all laughed; at that moment we went from seeing ourselves as a mental illness to thinking we were a minority. …
The New York Subway Is Afraid of the Humble Vulva
A startup focused on sexual wellness is suing the New York public transit system after its sex toy ad campaign was rejected. The company, Dame Products, includes a pretty exhaustive list of other sexually-oriented advertisements that the MTA has run, including erectile dysfunction medication, condoms, women’s libido medication, dating apps, and the Museum of Sex.
“By banning Dame’s advertisements, the MTA is telling the women of New York City that it does not care about their sexual health, well-being, and pleasure,” according to the complaint, which was filed on Tuesday.
In the complaint, Dame states that the company submitted multiple ads to the MTA for consideration for an ad campaign in July of last year, and was subsequently strung along for several months, asked to tweak their ads to be less sexually suggestive, only to ultimately have their campaign rejected. Dame included images on its website of the final ads it sent to the MTA for approval—they feature the company’s vibrator and clitoral stimulation devices. And, as Dame pointed out in the complaint, they are hardly more overtly suggestive or sexual in nature than a number of ads that have and are adorning subway stations and cars.
Screenshot: Dame Products
The company is suing the transit system for violating the first amendment and fourteenth amendment (both for an unconstitutionally vague regulation and an equal protection violation), as well as for a violation of freedom of speech, according to the complaint.
“Advertisements are hugely influential on our culture,” Dame wrote in a blog announcing its lawsuit against the MTA, “and have the potential to bring sexual wellness tools out of the shadows and into our lives.” …
Video Goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
“Who threw the first brick at Stonewall?” has become a rallying cry, a cliche and a queer inside joke on the internet — never mind the fact that it’s not clear whether bricks were ever thrown during the riots at all.
Harvard rescinds the admission of Parkland shooting survivor and pro-gun advocate Kyle Kashuv after his racist and sexist remarks from two years ago resurface.
THANKS to Comedy Central and The Daily Show with Trevor Noah for making this program available on YouTube.
The President kicked off his 2020 presidential campaign with some help from an opening musical act, The Guzzlers.
THANKS to CBS and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert for making this program available on YouTube.
Was President Trump more upset that the Pentagon hacked into a Russian power grid or that he learned about it in the New York Times?
伝説のマッサージ師まるシリーズ。本日のお客様は三毛猫さん。Legendary masseur Maru series.Today’s visitor is the mike cat.
Discredited inventor Robert Weich is more known for his ghoulish attempts at establishing a Nobel Prize for necromancy.
— Fake Atlas Obscura (@notatlasobscura) December 6, 2018
FINALLY . . .
The Cypress That May Have Inspired Dr. Seuss’s ‘The Lorax’ Has Toppled Down
Now there’s nothing left of its whimsical crown.
The whimsical cypress in better days.
OVER THE YEARS, TREES HAVE had a special place in children’s literature. Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree is a story of growth, dedication, sacrifice, and loss. In The Story of Ferdinand by Munro Leaf, a Spanish bull escapes a bullfight and finds refuge under his favorite cork tree. And in The Lorax by Theodore Geisel (that’s Dr. Seuss to you and me), the titular creature is an early advocate for environmental preservation (the book was first published in 1971). As it turns out, the Truffula trees the Lorax so valiantly defends may have been based on a real life Monterey cypress (Cupressus macrocarpa) in La Jolla, California’s Ellen Browning Scripps Park. The literary icon fatally fell over on Thursday, June 13.
The Monterey cypress is native to central California, and has been recognized for its whimsical, irregular trunk and flat-topped evergreen leaves. Some have been known to reach 140 years of age, while others only reach 40. The Seussian cypress in La Jolla had a good run. “Based on review of the tree, the arborist estimates the tree to be approximately 100 years old,” says Tim Graham, a spokesman for the San Diego Parks and Recreation Department. While the city is still determining what exactly caused the tree’s (possibly premature) fall, Graham says, “We have had a very wet winter and that may have impacted the tree.”
Geisel lived in La Jolla, a small seaside community enveloped by the city of San Diego, for 43 years until his death in 1991. His home, high up above the coast, overlooked Ellen Browning Scripps Park and the inspirational cypress. And though the story of inspiration is a bit of local lore and has never been officially confirmed, the trees he illustrated in The Lorax certainly bear an uncanny resemblance to the recently departed cypress. (Similarly, researchers found a connection between the fictional Lorax character and the real-life patas monkey in 2018.) …
Operation Schlägtihnenaufdenkopf, commenced and concluded by Germany in June 1916, was the only known military exercise which assumed the presence of zombie combatants.
— Fake Atlas Obscura (@notatlasobscura) December 6, 2018
IN SOLIDARITY
Ed. More tomorrow? Possibly. Maybe. Probably Not. Groundhog Day.