Critical State: Squirrel This Away
If you read just one thing … read about England’s squirrel obsession!
Berlin-based writer Ben Crair has a piece in The Dial on England’s obsession with squirrels and its drive to save the red squirrel, culling non-native gray squirrels in the process — a move, he explains, that has little to do with ecological concerns.
Crair takes the reader through the history of England and squirrels, explaining how, around the 19th century, “Englishmen started releasing eastern gray squirrels from North America on the grounds of their estates. The gray squirrels were larger and more gregarious than Britain’s native red squirrels, a solitary and adorable species with pointed ear tufts and white bibs.” (The spread of these squirrels coincided with the start of ecological study in the country.)
In the late 1800s, the red squirrel began declining, and “By the 1920s, Brits were observing only gray squirrels in forests where they had previously seen reds. Many people believed eastern gray squirrels violently killed the native reds, though there has never been much evidence to support the claim.”
“Despite valuable insights from British ecologists, the popular understanding of squirrel conservation as a war between two species, red and gray, persists,” writes Crair. What follows is a meditation on when conservation ends up being more about people than the animals they’re ostensibly working for.
If You Read One More Thing: Who Goes Nazi Purchaser?
VSquare published an investigative report, conducted by a range of publications across Europe (and led by the Swedish Expressen), on a neo-Nazi store based in Sweden and the customers across Europe who have made purchases there.
The piece takes readers through the history of Midgård, the online store in question, and also through the ways in which its paraphernalia evolved — how, for example, the changes to the music industry and advent and rise of downloading and streaming music presented a challenge for stores selling far-right bands’ records.
The bulk of the piece focuses on the contents of a leak from last December that shared information about roughly 20,000 purchases — and the people who made them. From this, the journalists were able to put together a picture of who buys from this store (including in countries where such purchases theoretically may be banned). For example, “In Hungary, according to Atlatszo.hu's analysis of the leaked data, one of Midgård’s customers was a pro-government journalist. Over the years, several shipments of white power music, including works by several Swedish neo-Nazi bands, have been sent to his address.” Meanwhile, in the Czech Republic, “people who have been punished by the Czech authorities for Nazi-related activities and their proximity to the neo-Nazi scene have been Midgård customers.”
Ukraine Tuned In
Leif Reigstad, a journalist based in Austin, Texas, has a piece in The Nation about Ukrainians anxiously tuning into this week’s presidential debate.
The stakes are thus: “The US has sent billions of dollars to Ukraine since Russia’s invasion began in February 2022. But whether that aid will continue to flow during the campaign season or after the next president takes office is up in the air.” And former US President Donald Trump, Reigstaf notes, has promised to “end” the war (he has also complained about the amount of aid that the United States has given Ukraine, and indeed did so during the last debate). Vice President Kamala Harris, meanwhile, is broadly expected to continue supporting Ukraine. Trump has warned, without evidence, that Harris wants to bring the United States into a third world war and has touted himself as the peace president.
Reigstad also puts the politicians’ policies in the context of the American public: “A Gallup poll in April found that an increasing number of Americans want more US aid to go to Ukraine, but voters were still split overall. A Quinnipiac poll released last week indicates that Ukraine may not be a high priority among voters.”
Deep Dive: Conspiracy Theories
Does a tendency toward conspiracism line up along our political spectrum? Not according to Adam Enders, Casey Klofstad, Shane Littrell, Joanne Miller, Yannis Theocharis, Joseph Uscinski, and Jan Zilinsky, who explore this question in a new paper, “Left–right political orientations are not systematically related to conspiracism,” published this month in the journal, Political Psychology.
The authors demonstrate that previous inconsistent findings on this question come from research designs, meaning they can’t be used to draw conclusions about how conspiracism relates to political identities.
They also examine specific studies that support “the extremity and asymmetry hypotheses,” meaning the idea that individuals who identify as right-wing are more likely to demonstrate conspiracism than their left-wing or centrist peers. (These are recent studies: two are from 2022, and one is from 2021.) But they conclude that these studies have “inappropriate measuring and modeling strategies.”
To test the extremity and asymmetry hypotheses themselves, the authors reexamine 18 US surveys and look at new surveys from 18 countries. They found “remarkable variability in the size, shape, and strength of the relationship between ideology and conspiracism — not only across countries, but over time within countries.”
They demonstrated the variability with correlation coefficients and turned to a methodology of multilevel meta-analysis to estimate the average correlation. “Even in the aggregate,” they found, “it seems that the most we can conclude about ideological asymmetries in conspiracism is that those on the right are slightly — albeit statistically significantly — more conspiratorial than those on the left, but that the size and direction of observed asymmetries vary considerably across countries and time.”
These provided weak support for the hypotheses, and the authors think that “differences in the relationship between conspiracism and political identities across political and temporal contexts do not stem from sampling variability, but rather from systematic forces that impact ideology, conspiracism, or both.” And so they decide that there’s “no single functional form” to characterize the connection between conspiracism and political identity across countries, or for that matter within countries at different points of time.
The authors feel that their research inspires questions of how to conceptualize and measure political extremism, and whether left-right identity measures or a spectrum along such identitarian lines is even a useful framing here. And they think their work can inspire guidelines for others: “Simply put, scholars should not employ cross-sectional or short-term data to make conclusive, broadly generalizable arguments about the relationship between conspiracism and the psychology of liberals or conservatives.”
They conclude by insisting that their findings “should not excuse the behavior of conservative politicians and media personalities who have, in recent years, trafficked in conspiracy theories or incited conspiracy-driven violence.” They also draw a distinction between conspiracism in the masses and elites, and express hope more research is devoted to the latter in the future.
Show Us the Receipts
Marc Martorell Junyent reported that the far-right Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ) is on track to be the big winner of this month’s parliamentary elections. The FPÖ was in the government three times before, which is notable as the party’s first two leaders served as SS officers in World War II. Junyent traces their path back to potential power, and connects it back to a broader trend in Europe: namely, “a growing normalization of far-right politicians in Europe, with the criteria for deciding which far-right leaders are ‘acceptable’ and which are not at the EU level increasingly becoming their position regarding Ukraine.”
Ramona Wadi wrote about Javier Milei, who is “attacking Argentina’s collective memory of dictatorship-era crimes.” As Wadi put it, “Between 1976 and 1983, a military dictatorship ruled Argentina, earning a reputation for its use of torture, extrajudicial executions, and forced disappearances. Now, less than a year into Javier Milei’s presidency, the far-right leader is overseeing an effort to obstruct justice and cover up the history of crimes under that dictatorship.” Though former right-wing President Mauricio Macri also played with denial, Wadi writes, “under Milei, it is taking a more sinister turn.”
Michael Fox brought readers to “Brazil’s Dubai,” Balneário Camboriú. As Fox described, “The city has been called Brazil’s Dubai for its rows of skyscrapers that line the beachfront, three of which are the tallest in the country. Meanwhile, Balneário Camboriú’s growth has changed the landscape for tourists and locals alike over the years.” The idea is to sell a “new world city,” a concept that’s driven demand: “Balneário Camboriú, today, has the highest square market real estate price in Brazil. And it’s become a bit of a playground for the country’s rich, with families buying vacation apartments along the shore.”
Well-Played
Nice wine bar gf, Marx’s grave bf.
Stumping the IT guy.
They’re right. We didn’t guess.
The profound empathy difference.
Lol.
“I voted yay.”
Critical State is written by Emily Tamkin with Inkstick Media.
The World is a weekday public radio show and podcast on global issues, news, and insights from PRX and GBH.
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Critical State is made possible in part by the Carnegie Corporation of New York.