#rural vs urban germany

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

“Landbundpolitik,” Simplicissimus. Vol. 37, issue 45, February 5 1933. p. 540. ---- (Wilhelm Schult) ---- Die Industrie, das ist der Feind, So hat der Landbundstier gemeint. Er stürmt heran der Schornstein kracht- - Der Stier hat selbst sich umgebracht.

[Industry is the enemy, That's what the Landbund bull meant. He rushes up the chimney cracks- - The bull killed himself.]

#german poliitics #weimar republic #weimarer republik #satirical art #landbund #agricultural interests #rural vs urban germany #agriculture vs industry #social criiss #junkers

[zhabe]

Hi I would really love resources on US propaganda against the dprk and what it’s actually like there. I don’t have the knowledge yet to differentiate between propaganda and reliable sources so I’d love to read what you have to share

of course, thanks for reaching out!

aside from direct resources on the dprk, which i will provide below, much of our understanding of the dprk comes from knowledge of how the united states engages with other communist countries. it's impossible to understand the dprk without acknowledging how false testimonies, psychological operations, and imperialism (broadly speaking) have affected other countries.

it's of utmost importance to remember that the united states has an agenda. we have to understand us-funded information through a particular lens, because it's produced to evoke distrust and dehumanization of people from communist or socialist countries. i could go on and on about this but i'll stick to the resources for now! comrades are welcome to suggest any additions, i’d be happy to add!

edit: my final project for my undergrad degree was on us corporate-owned media framing of north korea, so i actually started doing a lot more research. you can reference that portfolio here. it contains a literature review concerning how and why the us mass media frames north korea negatively and a subsequent research project about discrepancies between how strongly us citizens form opinions on north korea despite lacking concrete knowledge of north korea. the citations and extra resources pages list some nice sources. check it out if you’d like :]

my personal suggestions :-)

youtube

loyal citizens of pyongyang in seoul - this short 40-minute documentary changed my life. this is a critical first-step into understanding the dprk.

my brothers and sisters in the north - beautiful documentary of a south korean, living in germany, who goes to north korea to understand their life from their perspectives. great insight into both urban and rural life in the dprk.

why do north korean defectors keep changing their stories? - addresses the lies of celebrity defectors like bak yeonmi

how yeonmi park is a right wing grifter and the fake news of radio free asia - addresses yeonmi park as a right-wing figurehead and celebrity and her lies

dprk education explained (dprk explained channel) - dispels common myths about education in the dprk. dprk explained has simple, easy to understand videos about the structure of the dprk.

we went to north korea to get a haircut - two youtubers go to the dprk to get a haircut of their liking. dispels common myths about "authoritarianism" in the dprk and freedom of expression.

inside america's meddling machine: ned, the us-funded org interfering in elections across the globe - not necessarily about north korea but essential to understanding disinformation campaigns and destabilization

usa vs. dprk: ignoring history paves way to disaster - uses korean and historian perspectives to understand the dprk and united states' shared history

dispelling myths about north korea - dr. suzy kim dispels common myths about north korea. really really insightful

north korea: myths, lies and truths - dr. kathy moon dispels myths about north korea. similar to the former but also great!

why is north korea so weird? - dispelling myths again, short and sweet!

eid al-fitr in north korea (jaka parker channel) - dispels common myths about religion in the dprk. jaka parker has some great videos about living in the dprk as a foreign national.

interview of an official of the catholic church in pyongyang, north korea (eric lafforgue channel) - dispels common myths about religion in the dprk. eric lafforgue has some nice interviews with people in the dprk.

lee fang on how a little-known u.s. libertarian think tank is remaking latin american politics - i don't love democracy now! but i think this video is helpful in understanding ngos and us-backed programs that form disinformation campaigns.

five days in north korea - pyongyang, dmz, dandong train

north korean fashion show

pyongyang's downtown

how much do you know about north korean cosmetics?

books and text

understanding korea by kfa - understanding korea is a series of texts that give a very in-depth look at how north korean society is structured. interestingly, these very accessible resources dispel myths that celebrity defectors propagate (like the myth that there’s one working train in the dprk and no electricity)... lol

anti-communism and the korean war 1950-1953 by jon halliday - great for understanding motive and outcome of the korean war

sanctions of empire by notdutdol - answering the question of how sanctions devastate nations, great from the perspective of koreans

everyday life in the north korean revolution, 1945-1950 by suzy kim - i mentioned her earlier and she has some great content with really nuanced views

north korean constitution - delineates the rights of north korean people

the us didn't bring freedom to south korea –– its people did by kap seol - not a big fan of jacobin mag but good for understanding the gwangju massacre and uprising of communists in south korea

juche! the speeches and writings of kim il sung ed. li yuk-sa - incredibly dense for a foreigner (like myself) but insightful into the development of a formerly occupied nation into a developed system

against empire by michael parenti - not necessarily on the dprk but very informative concerning us meddling and violence in countries around the world. also has a great lecture from 1986 on imperialism available on youtube (great to sit and eat to lol)

inventing reality by michael parenti - again, not really about the dprk but very insightful for understanding how the news media functions as an agent of the state

organizations

nodutdol - organization of diaspora koreans fighting for reunification. great, brief infographics on instagram with sources and has a bunch of great resources in their linktree!

the tongil peace foundation - organization for people looking for peace and reunification on the korean peninsula

korean friendship association - exactly like it sounds, foreigners showing support to the dprk, some great tools and resources on their page

masterlists of dprk resources

dprk reading list - some have defunct links and stuff, which is why i didn’t link this itself. also i can’t attest to the quality as i haven’t read all of this!

dprk study guide - same as above :-)

#dprk #north korea #pol #owen.tg #answered

[thegeminisage]

the south is like another country

i have an entire essay on how the current radicalism and steep political divide in this country can be traced directly back to the civil war - rural white southerners here playing the part pre-ww2 germany, the part of a resentful, conquered nation assimilated into the nation that conquered them, because if you think about it the south/the confederacy WAS its own nation for a time, that lost a very bloody war, and paid very steeply for it (not that slavers didn’t deserve every bit of misery the “carpetbaggers” threw at them), and the bitterness from that loss/the lost capital from having their slaves freed has been handed down through the generations, to people who now live in abject poverty while their livelihoods are destroyed by late stage capitalism, and their schools are so broke a lot of people here don’t even know how to read, and their towns are eaten alive with meth, and they’re still looked down upon by most of the country for being racist uneducated backwater hicks (to be clear, we should always look down on racism and racists, but it’s not making them any less bitter/ripe for being drawn into the cult of tr*mp’s america and f*cism).

but anyway this post isn’t about that! this post is about how when i go up north and i say “y’all it really is like i’m living in a different country” NOBODY BELIEVES ME. we speak the same language, we’re all americans, right? PFFFFFT. this amazon van thing just drives it home (pun intended). here’s a list of differences from the deep south* to the rest of the country*:

*the deep south here meaning the RURAL deep south. sorry to everyone who lives in cities/the suburbs and/or in border states like maryland and virginia. i’ve been to maryland and virginia and they are technically southern and some of this applies to them but it is not quite as extreme as it is here. the rest of the country includes the other states i’ve been to (california, washington state, new york, etc), which are in mostly every area except the midwest. i cannot personally vouch for the midwest. sorry, midwesterners! rural midwest probably has a lot of things in common with the deep south because rural life is different and also how easily people move around this country, but whatever

this is a long-ass post get ready

difference #1: DRIVING. driving & pedestrians are entirely different un rural areas vs urban areas. for starters, southern towns often do not even have sidewalks. this is because of 1. budget and 2. racism.

budget: rural towns are very spread out, and it costs major $$$ to put sidewalks in. it’s just not worth the trouble, financially, to put a sidewalk where only 12 people are ever going to use it, AND spend the money to maintain it. never gonna happen. racism: initially, suburbs especially in the south were seen as safe havens where people could get away from the stress of living in “urban” (re: integrated) areas. that the neighborhoods were only accessible by car and NOT by people who were too poor (black) to afford automobiles were just an added bonus. 

as such, the first time i left the southeast, i was SHOCKED to see people walking and biking WITH (or indifferent to) the flow of traffic. down here we are taught that if you are walking along the road (or biking, because bikers get lumped in with pedestrians down here), it is very very very crucial that you walk against the flow of traffic, because you cannot expect drivers to see you and not mow you down. the onus is on YOU to get out of THEIR way. additionally, walking in knee-high grass along the side of the road sucks, and because there aren’t many people here, the roads are usually totally empty. so oftentimes pedestrians just straight up walk ON the road. and if you do that you absolutely have to be able to see a car coming from a long way away, because rural drivers on completely empty roads tend to take them at extremely high speeds just for fun. the people who live diagonally across from me have had to replace their mailbox four times because folks take that blind curve at 90mph. i had a cat get hit by a car on that road. (they all live indoors now.) i even witnessed a car accident happen there when i was just outside minding my own business. ever see a tire fly 12 feet into the air and come down into someone’s windshield? that’s what happens when you hit power line pole driving like that.

the first time i ever encountered one of those pedestrian crossing buttons was in california in the early 2010s. i had literally never seen one before because we simply don’t have them here. they’re not very self-explanatory if you have been jaywalking your whole entire life because all you’re taught to do is look both ways and make sure the street is empty before you cross. northern/urban roadways are made so that pedestrians and drivers can both get to where they’re going. in rural/southern areas pedestrians might as well not bother.

interestingly, while not an entirely southern problem, there’s a loose correlation between rural areas and more problems with drunk drivers.

on the driving side, driving in a city is batshit insane. it’s both faster and slower. there is NO space and you’re expected to go whenever you have so much as an inch to worm your way in. there’s more traffic, and the traffic totally dictates your speed. in the south you can change lanes if you want to drive faster or slower and weave around traffic or let it weave around you, but in a city there’s no other lane to change to and if you don’t drive at the speed of the people ahead of and behind you you will die. you turn fast, you brake fast, etc. whenever i come back from driving in a city the people who ride with me think i’m insane. you don’t PULL ONTO A ROAD if you can SEE ANOTHER CAR THERE, what the fuck? meanwhile i’m like “lol that is six miles of space i have plenty of time” and give everyone in my vicinity heart palpitations until i readjust. 

tailgating in a rural area is something only assholes do (done by people on a two-lane road to encourage the person in front of them to go faster because the only other lane is for oncoming traffic), and if someone gets within one car length of me on a two-lane road i can very passively aggressively slow my vehicle to a crawl until they back the fuck off. in a city you’re lucky if you have a twelve inches between your bumper and the next car’s hood ornament.

difference #2: LANGUAGE. this is a small one, but the southern dialect combined with the lack of literacy means i am learning certain things late in life. phrases i have heard verbally with my ears but had never seen written out include: “chest of drawers” which i thought was “chester drawers” - “seven year itch” which i thought was “seven year each” - “albeit” which i thought was “i’ll be it.” i’ve made a deliberate effort to unlearn mine own accent/dialect but i run into weird shit all the time. remotes are mashers, shopping carts are buggies, you put stuff up instead of putting it away, i fix you a drink instead of pouring you one, we shoot the game instead of play it. my mom LITERALLY can’t understand me if i speak too quickly - she has to remind me all the time to slow down and put on my southern.

difference #3: TECHNOLOGY. issue of whether or not you personally have the creepy amazon vans aside, the rural south is behind the rest of the country on technology. things in cities are AUTOMATED. things like the little button you press to cross the street, tickets you take at parking garages, even the parking meters you find in cities, that’s just the beginning of it. one time i came across a little computer touch screen in a MCDONALDS where you put your order in. you didn’t even go up to the counter. you just put your order on the screen and swiped your card and then they got it ready for you and you never had to speak to a human person. self-checkouts, gas pumps where you can swipe your card and not go in and pay at first...the south got those YEARS behind everybody else. in the mid-2010s i went to DC and visited a target for maybe the 5th time ever and i was BAFFLED by the self-checkout. i had no idea how to use it! it was like less than ten years ago and i was IN MY TWENTIES and i had never seen one before! when we send a package we have to talk to a human person. when we order food we usually have to talk to a human person. apps for places like dominos and subway have not been in use here for very long. my county just got doordash LAST YEAR. 

because i am 31, and because the south is so technologically behind, i am actually old enough to remember how when you used to go to a gas station an attendant would not only pump your gas but wash your windshield for you while you just SAT IN THE CAR. that seems like something from the 50s but it actually was a thing here in my childhood IN the 90s. i wish i was making this up.

difference #4: INFRASTRUCTURE. this sort of goes hand-in-hand w/ the last point because so much of our infrastructure is made of technology, and it’s also more of a rural/urban thing than a south/north thing. but just for fun here’s a non-exhaustive list of things i don’t have in my town:

starbucks* - the first time i went to a starbucks i was in my 20s

a public pool - we used to, but now the only pool here requires a YMCA membership. the only baseball diamond in this county is also at the Y.

walmart

in fact, ANYWHERE to buy clothes that is not a goodwill or other secondhand store. i cannot buy clothing unless i order it online or LEAVE MY TOWN. almost all of the clothing i own is from walmart because it’s one of the only places in my entire county where you can actually PURCHASE clothing.

grocery store chains? pffft. my town has two entire stores and both are small southern chains. i didn’t go into a publix for the first time until two years ago when i went to florida. i’ve NEVER entered a whole foods.

food delivery? yeah, no. like i said, we got doordash last year, but before that the only place you could get delivery from was a pizza chain. we only have two pizza places in my town that deliver, and one is a local place, not attached to any chain, so i can’t spend my loyalty points there. (it’s very expensive there too.) last year it was CLOSED for six months because the manager got caught dealing meth. every last one of the delivery drivers was trafficking it for him. they all got fired and had to restart from the ground up. for that short time, it was not possible to get any food delivered to your house whatsoever.

a hospital/ambulance services - if someone is sick, we have to take them to the hospital in laurens, the town next door (about 15-20 minutes by car). the town i live in lucky - we have our own police and fire departments. (acab but you know what i mean.) joanna is a smaller town next to mine that isn’t a real town - it’s been demoted to a census designated area because only 2000 people live there. if they have an emergency, they have to use OUR fire and police departments, and LAURENS’s ambulance/hospital system

after-school places kids can go to keep from getting into trouble. we have the Y, if you have money (no one here has money), and we have churches, but mostly schools can’t afford to run too many extracurriculars. there’s nothing to do here but church and meth.

food banks: zero. we have food DRIVES sometimes where people will come from further away and bring free food, but if you’re hungry, there’s nowhere you can go for help - you have to wait for help to come to you.

libraries: we don’t have our own library. we have a branch of the county library that’s physically located in our town. but we share books with the rest of the entire county, so everything is always checked out or at the other branch. 

*we technically have a starbucks that’s in the local college campus, but only college students are allowed to be there. they’ll still serve people without a college ID because no one gives a fuck, but you can’t linger and loiter and hang out like you do in a normal starbucks. we also have one in the barnes and noble in greenville, which is about an hour away by car, but again, it’s a mini starbucks that serves a limited menu and none of that weird Starbucks Culture™

here’s a few things i don’t have in my ENTIRE COUNTY:

movie theaters - technically. we have a Historial™ one-screen theater in laurens that shows one movie for two weeks a month after it hits regular theaters and then switches to another, and if you miss it, too bad. this is a VERY recent addition - it wasn’t restores until i was in my 20s as a kid and a teenager i had to ride in a car an hour or more to go to the movies.

target. only commies and yankees have target. down here we do walmart.

malls

arcades

skate parks/skating rinks

bowling

museums

zoos/aquariums

campgrounds

fairs. our county fairground got razed a decade ago because there just werent enough people showing up to justify the expense. so no more fairs. you have to have people to fund things and down here there just aren’t enough people anywhere.

you get the idea. we don’t have entertainment. like i said, nothing to do but church and meth.

CLASSES FOR STUFF: knitting classes, dancing classes, driving classes? nope. gymnastics, karate dojos, golf, knitting groups, books clubs, cooking classes? [GAMESHOW BUZZER]. you can’t even hire a clown for a birthday party out here. we do have a shooting range. ONE. in the entire county. and a race track. and a rather infamous former kkk memorabilia store. they made a movie about that (serious tw for this trailer - they’ve got white hoods, burning crosses, pepper spray, the whole nine), which, yes, takes place in laurens, aka right next door to me. i used to walk by that place all the time when i was playing pokemon go. haven’t seen the movie but the shooting locations in the trailer make laurens look a lot bigger and prettier than it really is in real life - especially the racetrack, which, in the trailer, is actually PAVED. (this is inaccurate to real life.)

EDUCATION: lots of people can’t read. we have two schools for illiterate adults, one religious college, and one branch of one of the state colleges that has a skeleton staff and a fuck ton of computers (you basically just go there to distance learn/e-learn - if you want to take real classes from this college, you have to drive at least an hour.)

support groups/group therapy: almost none. we have al-anon and weight watchers, but that’s about it. there’s only half a dozen therapists in my entire county, and none that operate from my town. mental healthcare down here is bullshit.

on food: we don’t have many sit-down restaurants, where servers bring you your menu and your food. if you don’t count waffle houses, my town has 4. my county has 9. in and out, 5 guys, applebees, ruby tuesday, red lobster, olive garden, panda epxress? forget it. those places were and still are rare treats. i’ve only been to an olive garden twice. red lobster once. whenever i leave my county i BEG for chinese because there’s only two chinese restaurants in our entire county and one of them is crazy expensive and the other one sucks. 

we also don’t have the more important stores you need to like, live. if we need to exchange our router at a charter store? yeah, we don’t have one. need to visit the sprint store to get your phone repaired? nuh-uh, we don’t have any phone stores either. my family recently switched to at&t because it was the only company that had a physical location in our county. before that, we had to drive an hour for even the smallest repair.

on a grimer note: we don’t have homeless shelters! homeless in laurens county? too bad for you. we do have homeless PEOPLE. they just have nowhere to go except the churches

hospitals? only kind of. like i said, our county has one, but it’s not equipped to take seriously sick people. when my mom had a heart attack she had to be driven straight to greenwood, which is 45 minutes away if you’re not in an ambulance. they obviously made it faster than that, but still. that was scary. it took them a long time to get here. i had a distant relative of mine die before the ambulance made it because they were SO far out in the sticks, even further than me.

we also don’t have any specialty stores. sporting goods, gamestops, shoe stores, florists, craft stores, bookstores, best buys...forget it. if you can’t buy it at walmart, you just can’t buy it. the exceptions: my TOWN has one jewelry store, two hardware stores, and two auto repair stores. my COUNTY has three clothing stores, none of which are in my town, one place that sells used TVs, and one movie rental place. thrilling, right? i can rent a movie if i drive out of town. (i know streaming killed the rental business, but we also only had two places when i was a kid, if you counted the rental section in the grocery store.)

so, yeah. i know the term “shithole” is really loaded these days, but rural areas are just plain less developed, and often in seriously poor repair because nobody fucking uses them. there USED to be more stuff here - my mom was on a bowling league, and as a kid i had a birthday party at a skating rink - but late stage capitalism and drugs destroyed it all. people ran out of money to do things like skate and bowl and so those places closed. the south is full of empty store fronts and deserted strip malls slowly being eaten by kudzu. my brother got out of this town and whenever he winds up back here (not often) he remarks on how completely and utterly dead everything feels. “my friends who live in greenwood now think they’re all rural,” he said once. “they complain constantly about how remote it is. but they have no idea. they wouldn’t make it five minutes out here.” greenwood has its own movie theater, mall, starbucks, homeless shelter, food bank, and hospital.

so, yeah! if you were wondering what rural white southerners are so fucking mad about, that’s part of it. propaganda and xenophobia and racism has their anger directed ENTIRELY at the wrong people, but it’s hard to argue that the anger itself isn’t just a little bit justified.

difference #5: CULTURE. specifically culture around food, and the culture around the civil war. i could write an entire other essay about the culture of the church being everything because the church IS the only semblance of infrastructure we have and this is why the south is so homophobic, but we’ll skip that for now.

food: this is a quickie, because i sort of touched on it already, but there are like, almost NO vegetarian options here. there’s very limited choices of cuisine. it’s ALL waffle house and soul food. we have a lot of mexican places because we’re physically close to the mexican border, but aside from that, forget finding like indian or thai or japanese or anything like that. no sushi. forget finding a menu that has meals that are halal or kosher. there’s just. no culture here. no variety. you know? like i said, our entire county doesn’t even hit double-digits for proper sit-down restaurants.

civil war: i’m not going to go into the big stuff since i sort of covered it at the top and also this post is getting way too long, but to other white rural southerners there is legitimate baggage around the fact that my mom married a yankee and that i am half-yankee. and he’s not even a real yankee! he was born up north but raised in southern florida. (florida is weird. the further south you go geographically, the less southern you are culturally.) yet: my family makes jokes that are sometimes not jokes about this. when i drop this information in casual conversation people get that look on their faces like: ah, that explains it. it being that i am not religious and don’t laugh at racist jokes and maybe i am queer?? (strangers tend to be unsure about this last part, even when i’m wearing rainbows.) it’s because i’m half-yank! that explains everything! the xenophobia is SO strong here that white people are even xenophobic at OTHER WHITE PEOPLE. 

so in conclusion when i say the north is like another country, it’s because the people who raised me think of it like another country. and culturally! it is buck wild! the differences that there are! when i leave this town i feel like i step into fucking star trek! if you are not from the rural south, and you have never been to the rural south, please do not come here! i’ve been to a few different places now and this is definitely my least favorite one. 

#personal #i guess #it's ok to rb if you want to though??? tbh i don't think most people will even get to the end lol #anyway here's my college lecture about the south it's not very good or college level actually lmao #this is AIRQUOTE FIELD STUDY AIRQUOTE #the experiences u have as a half-yank white person in the rural south are crazy #bc other white people think you're okay to listen to them say what they REALLY think #and then backtrack rapidly when they realize you aren't #now that i'm grown and woke i can't believe half-yankee is even a thing. #anyway this post brought to you by the maddening realization of how technologically far behind we are #WE DON'T EVEN HAVE THE CREEPY AMAZON VANS #the automated package sending...what i wouldn't give not to have to talk to people to mail stuff #rip. :/

[dillydedalus]

september reading

there is literally no way it is september. impossible. anyway this month we have  horror, Fake Dating, the rashomon effect, a time war, and most importantly, no neutrals to be found anywhere

the old man & his sons, heðin brú (tr. from faroese by john f. west) published on the faroe islands in 1940 and the first faroese novel to be translated into english, this is a story about the dramatic shift in life style during the 30s on the faroe islands, from hardscrabble subsistence farming/fishing to market economy. interesting look at changing life on isolated isles, and a much lighter (and shorter) take on the stubborn autonomous subsistence farmer than laxness’s independent people. 3/5

the white shroud, antanas škėma (tr from lithuanian by karla gruodis - english/claudia sinnig - german) a modernist, fragmented, nonlinear novel about a lithuanian poet gone into exile, now working as an elevator operator in a new york hotel, who is involved with a married woman but might also be terminally ill. in between the present timeline, the book flashes back (both in the character’s own writing and in third person) to his youth in lithuania, his torture at the hands of the soviet regime, his time at a DP camp in germany and so on. quite interesting, with some great writing. 3/5

things we lost in the fire, mariana enríquez (tr. from spanish by megan mcdowell) really good collection of horror-ish short stories that also touch on gendered violence, child abuse, poverty and argentinian history (esp. dictatorship and disappearances) - some stories are more overtly horror, with clear supernatural elements, others are more ambiguous. i don’t read (or watch) horror stuff so i’m a bad judge of how scary this is - i found it more gruesome and upsetting than terrifying, but the dread is strong in this one. favourites: adela’s house (hungry haunted house), end of term and the title story (women & self-inflictred violence), under the black water (the poisoned oil-choked river is very bad but maybe.... there’s something worse in there). good, vividly gruesome, sharp sharp sharp. 3.5/5

axiom’s end, lindsay ellis i really like lindsay ellis, of all the ~youtube video essayists~ she’s probably my favourite and this book a) has a cool premise - aliens + conspiracies + alien communication and b) a really cool cover, and it’s lindsay, so i was super excited for this one. and it would be unfair to say i was disappointed with it; it’s a fun first contact romp with really good pacing, cool aliens, on-brand lindsay ellis humour and some interesting ideas on communicating with someone who is truly alien and incomprehensible. it’s fine! i enjoyed it and will definitely read the sequel, it’s just... i was hoping it would be AMAZING, and it just wasn’t. no huge problems (except for a few lines i would have liked to take a red pen to), just.... it was fine. 3.5/5 

zeno’s conscience, italo svevo (tr. from italian by william weaver) imagine you’re a businessman in trieste who does a little unsuccessful writing on the side and one day you decide to take english lessons to improve your business opportunities with the uk and your english teacher is JAMES FUCKING JOYCE who tells you that you need to keep writing. incredible. anyway these are the autobiographical notes of one zeno cosini, a hapless hypochondriac smug self-delusional fool, who just cannot quite quit smoking, marries the one sister out of three he least desires, & works as an accountant (for the man who married his most-desired of said sisters) despite his rather tenuous grasp on bookkeeping. my favourite scene is when his future sister in law (2nd most desired) complains lightly about her difficulties with latin, he tells her that he believes latin is a man’s language and even roman ladies probably didn’t actually speak it, only for her to correct him on a latin quotation. i will say tho that this book is way to long to maintain the endearingness and often drags. 3/5 tfw u write for an audience of one but that one is james joyce so fair enough

der hund/der tunnel/die panne, friedrich dürrenmatt dürrenmatt (in addition to having a cool-ass name) really fucking slaps!  his stuff is really good, and often really really wild. these three stories are all weird & slightly existentially scary, two degrees left of reality, and just. so interesting! we have a man stalking a street preacher and his monstrous dog, a train going through a tunnel for way too long (and it is very scary), and a man becoming involved in a pretend-trial (or is it) and becoming convinced that he actually is a murderer (or is he, really?). anyway, dürrenmatt.... slaps. 4/5

wow, no thank you., samantha irby a mix of memoir and comedy blogpost and social critique blogpost about growing up poor & black, dating while fat, chronic illness, and settling down in rural america. it’s fine. i haven’t read irby’s previous collections so maybe i’m missing that emotional connection, but i thought it was mostly...okay?? not especially funny imo & i prefered the more serious chapters of which there weren’t enough. 2/5

they say in harlan county: an oral history, alessandro portelli really impressive oral history about life in harlan county, appalachia, focusing on the labor strikes and conflicts in the 30s and 40s, but really exploring life and politics in the region from the first non-native settlement there to today. really interesting, sometimes inspiring and often infuriating and probably worth reading if you’ve ever listened to which side are you on. 4/5

rashomon & other stories, ryunosuke akutagawa (tr. from japanese by jay rubin) fun fact: if you read the short story “rashomon” expecting to get the, y’know, rashomon effect, you won’t get it bc the film actually takes its plot from the story  “in a grove”. anyway this is an interesting collection of classic japanese short stories, many of which are actually about unreliable witnesses/narrators. i particularly enjoyed “in a grove” and the truly disturbing “hell screen”, but found this particular collection just a bit too long. 3/5

women without men, shahrnush parsipur (tr. from farsi by kamran talatoff & joceyln sharlet) a magical realist feminist novella about 5 women in iran who all try to liberate themselves from men in one way or another, more or less successfully (one of them turns into a tree, another becomes undead), until they end up in a semi-utopian garden together for a time. disturbing in its depiction oppression and sexual/gendered violence. i don’t really know how i feel about it, but it’s a really unique and interesting reading experience; very fraught and ambivalent in the end. 3.5/5

take a hint, dani brown, talia hibbert i think this is the first actual pure genre-romance book i’ve read... in years??possibly ever? idk. anyway this is mostly a pretty fun & sweet story about ambitious & emotionally constipated phd student dani brown and security guy with tragic past zaf ansari, who begin a fake relationship for Various Reasons (as you do) and both develop Real Feelings (as you do, predictably). it’s mostly really enjoyable but man i’m really not used to Romance writing & it’s a lot. in the end everyone is very genuine & earnest & emotionally honest which.... not to be even more emotionally repressed than dani but i cannot deal with that. anyway given that 2020 truly is the gift that keeps on giving this was a fun fluffy delight & i might  read more from the series. 3.5/5

this is how you lose the time war, amal el-mohtar & max gladstone two agents (red and blue) on opposing sides of a time war (the futuristic techy Agency vs the eco/organic Garden - neither of them is Good or Bad exactly) start writing letters as they hunt each other through the strands of time’s braid and eventually (inevitably) fall in love. really interesting concept of time travel and different timelines (if, like me, you conceptualise past as down and future as up, this will trip you up so much), very lyrical writing that sometimes toes the line to overwritten but mostly really works. 3.5/5

DNF: the madman of freedom square & the iraqi christ, hassan blasim (tr. from arabic by jonathan wright, german tr. by hartmut fähndrich) bindup of these two short story collections about iraq. these are incredibly brutal, depressing & horrifying stories about a country in a constant state of war & struggle. couldn’t bear it, probably not ever & certainly not right now. 

allegro pastell, leif randt (audio) this is brilliant, bitingly funny novel about a millenial couple, tanja & jerome, and their on-and-off long distance relationship. they are privileged (and half-aware of it), attractive, successful, very in touch with their own feelings (couldn’t be me), self-reflective, faintly ironic in everything bc sincerity might be cringe, and you will hate them. these are people who perform their feelings rather than feel them, dissect all their opinions and impulses to the point of both paralysis and narcissism, engage in constant navelgazing and cannot form any relationship that isn’t based in constant evaluation and judgment. they pride themselves on their nonconformity but are really the greatest conformists of all, and the most square, boring, spießig people under the veneer of their urban liberal drug-and-club lifestyle. had so much fun with it even as i was constantly cringing at these people. 4/5

#the books i read #long post

[agrojayyworld]

India Vs. World Farm Mechanization and Technology

Indian agriculture is experiencing a quick change with expanded automation and the presentation of new agriculture innovations. When compared with nations like the USA, Canada, Brazil, France, Germany, Italy, Australia, Russia, South Korea, Japan, and China, be that as it may, we despite everything have an extensive approach in accomplishing food security through ranch mechanization. As per a report by the Indian Council of Food and Agriculture.

(http://icfa.org.in/resources/doc/reports/RTC_Farm_Mechanization.pdf), just 40% to 45% of Indian agriculture has been automated. Contrast this with mechanization rates in different nations – 95% of US farming, 90% of Australian agriculture, 99% of Japanese agriculture, 97% of South Korean farming, 75% of Brazilian agriculture, and 91% of Chinese agriculture. It should be noted, in any case, that these mechanization rates can shift as per various harvests. Cultivating for certain yields –, for example, rice, for example – is profoundly automated while cultivating for different harvests –, for example, cotton – might be nearly less mechanization. There can likewise be a distinction in mechanization rates for crop planting and yield reaping exercises.

All things considered, the high agricultural creation in these nations unmistakably exhibits the verifiable connection between the utilization of automated farm executes and a higher crop. In the event that India is to keep up in the worldwide food creation stakes and satisfy the needs of her own developing populace, a more profound mechanical entrance is basic. This can be supported with ideal government motivating forces, ecologically practical approaches, and an expanded creation of ranch apparatus by Indian farm gear makers.

India Vs. World

Other than the conspicuous contrasts in the atmosphere, crop species, and land sizes, there is a disparity difference between the utilization of farm apparatus in nations like the USA, Canada, Germany, France, Italy, Russia, South Korea, Japan, China, and Australia, and the remainder of the world. In numerous Asian and African nations – and this incorporates India, regardless of our present advancement – a great part of the farm work is as yet manual and provided by men, ladies, youngsters, and menial worker animals. This influences general profitability and proficiency and it is one of the main reasons why the Indian agricultural segment lags behind as far as agricultural output.

There is no doubt that utilizing various sorts of farm apparatus like tractors, harrows, turners, rotavators, consolidates, seed drills, harvesters, cultivators, sprayers, and irrigation system pumps would eliminate time and exertion, and redirect the work of farm laborers to other important yet less difficult farm chores. It would likewise resolve the developing issue of the work lack in rural territories. While 56.6 (http://censusindia.gov.in/Census_And_You/economic_activity.aspx) of the Indian populace is occupied with horticultural exercises – rather than 2.5% of the populace in the USA, 1.3% in the UK, 1.4% in Germany, 2.8% in France, 1.2% in the Netherlands, 4% in Italy, 3.6% in Australia, 5.3% in Argentina, 9.4% in Brazil, 9.4% in Russia, 27.7% in China, 2.9% in Japan, 11% in Malaysia, 32% in Indonesia, and 42.7% in Bangladesh – quick urban turn of events, development of other modern divisions, and government plans, for example, the Mahatma Gandhi Rural Employment Guaranteed Annual Work Scheme has opened up increasingly rewarding openings for work for the provincial youth and has prompted a consistent migration from country territories to urban regions.

There has been a climb in farm compensation so as to hold work, however, the occasional idea of farming work, just as the drudgery in question and an impression of the work as low status, are extra reasons that cause individuals to settle on other accessible business ways. The rural to urban relocation has likewise been influenced by an expanded utilization of manufacturing plant created devices instead of craftsman made devices. As indicated by the Indian Journal of Agricultural Economics, movement from rustic zones to urban zones has been happening at the pace of 3.15 percent every year and it is normal that by 2020, 35 percent of India's population will be living in urban territories.

The Indian Economic Survey of 2017-2018 appraisals that agrarian work will diminish by 25.7 percent by 2050. This will unfavorably influence work-intensive crop, for example, wheat, rice, sugarcane, groundnuts, and cotton.

With agricultural mechanization, just a couple of farm laborers would be expected to achieve a bigger measure of work. It would improve cultivating productivity, cut down on the reap and post-gather misfortunes, and produce a higher and better nature of crop yield. Whenever applied wisely, farm mechanization and innovation could likewise help with maintainable farming rehearses.

Farm Mechanization in India and Other Countries

Farm mechanization in India must be adjusted and changed in accordance with suit explicit regional conditions and necessities and must be associated with the more extensive rural approaches and the social and social structure of the Indian cultivating network. Applying such procedures to cultivating in Bangladesh and Indonesia has just exhibited positive outcomes. As per Bangladesh's Farm Machinery and Postharvest Process Engineering Division, farm motorization made it workable for the nation to raise the yearly agrarian yield from 11 million tons (1971) to 30 million tons (2007). Utilizing agricultural innovation, Indonesia is pushing towards independence in rice creation. The Indonesian government reported a national rice creation of 79 million tons in 2016, and increasingly across the board agricultural mechanization will permit them to put 200,000 hectares of extra farmland under rice development.

In contrast to the broad farmlands in the USA (444 acres average), Canada (820 acres average), Russia (10,000 acres average for corporate farms), and the European Union (620 acres average for bigger farms), and separated from some huge farm in Punjab, Haryana, Maharashtra and some different states, the normal land sizes of Indian farm are just around five to seven sections of land. This utilizes huge farm apparatus illogical and even outlandish now and again. A larger part of these little farmers are from financially ruined foundations and can't bear the cost of the extremely high buy and upkeep costs of the farm apparatus.

While the Indian government offers 25 percent to 50 percent sponsorships for purchasing the apparatus under the Sub-strategic Agricultural Mechanization (SMAM) plan of the National Mission on Agricultural Extension and Technology (NMAET) plan, a large number of the minor farmers would even now need to take out credits for the buy, and a considerable lot of them are probably going to be discovered ineligible for the advances since they can't outfit the insurance that most money related organizations require to embrace the advance hazard.

A potential answer for this would be the utilization of littler and nearly more affordable homestead apparatus, for example, power turners. Farmers can shape co-agents to purchase or recruit the farm actualizes and hardware and they can share these case by case for plowing, gathering, and post-collect activities. Under the SMAM plot, the Indian government is building up custom employing focuses in rural regions and offering impetuses to Indian business visionaries to do likewise. Research and development focus and Indian agricultural equipment producers are additionally being urged to think of increasingly imaginative farm advances to suit Indian conditions.

Somewhat, European nations like Germany, France, and Italy face comparable issues as India does with regards to contracting farm measures also decrease in the general number of homesteads. In 1900, European farmers framed half of the population and by 1950, their numbers had tumbled to 30%. Fast urbanization is one reason for this. More youthful individuals incline toward the draws of the urban areas and maturing ranchers, with nobody to take over after them, may auction their agricultural land, either to another farmer, to a rural organization, or to a non-rural substance. The circumstance in the USA, Canada, Russia, and Australia isn't a lot of various. The Canadian and the Russian governments are offering different motivating forces for their residents to take up cultivating; in Russia, this incorporates free land for cultivating. They've additionally made their ways for horticultural migrants. Australia, as of late, has become a famous goal with Indian farmers, especially from Punjab; they sell their couple of sections of land in Punjab for 4 or 5 crores and use some portion of that cash to purchase a few thousand sections of land of agricultural land in Australia.

Movement isn't altogether an answer however, as working farmers keep on wrestling with an expanding absence of talented and experienced specialists. Most European farms are profoundly motorized, thanks to a limited extent to the budgetary help and sponsorships from the EU's Common Agricultural Policy, and agricultural machinery producers regularly refer to the presentation of the SMART farm apparatus as a practical answer for the issue of farm work lack. Be that as it may, over the long haul, the decrease in the homestead numbers means a diminished client base for ranch hardware, SMART, or something else.

In 2005, the EU corrected its agricultural machinery industry strategy to class tractors as cars and applied guidelines that neglect to consider the farm apparatus segment's particular specialized gauges and market requests. These guidelines may likewise be incompletely answerable for the general decrease in tractor deals in Europe.

In Germany, tractor deals fell from 100,000 out of 1951 to 34,611 of every 2013, and in Italy, tractor deals dropped from 42,000 out of 1987 to 12, 186 out of 2016. The farming business sector stayed down in 2016 in the UK, the Netherlands, and Belgium, while Spain, Austria, and Denmark demonstrated shockingly in good spirits results. The European agricultural market seemed to balance out in 2017 and a few examiners anticipate an upward swing in 2018, in spite of the fact that CEMA financial specialists keep on prompting alert.

 For the agricultural machinery industry, this spells a requirement for higher interest in promoting and appropriation to arrive at the contracting client base. There will likewise be an expanded rivalry between the different tractor brands, for example, John Deere, AGCO, ARGO, Kubota, CLASS, and CNHi for a lot of the restricted market.

Indian Farm Technologies and Sustainable Farming

Indian agriculture is reliant generally on the Monsoon downpours. A progressively boundless utilization of water system innovations like dribble water system framework and water gathering could diminish this reliance. It should be noticed that these aren't actually 'new' advances for Indian farmers. They are just present-day renditions of the bamboo pipe, stone channels and tanks, and other water system frameworks that have been generally utilized in Indian agriculture.

India, it should be remembered, has a long history of agriculture and it was just unavoidable that Indian farmers thought of methods to manage the continuous floods and dry spell that happened throughout the hundreds of years; their endurance relied upon such advancement. These water protection procedures discover notice in Vedic writing, in Chanakya's Arthashastra, and different other Indian memorable and scholarly messages, and are bolstered by proof discovered during archeological excavations and by existing structures. Numerous conventional advance wells, water supplies, tanks, underground water pits, check dams, trenches, and embanked directs are as yet being used and are as effective now as they were in ancient times.

The Jaintia farmers of Meghalaya and the Adi farmers of Arunachal Pradesh have since a long time ago utilized bamboos to fabricate a system of water channels to set up drip irrigation system frameworks to irrigate areca nut, betel vines, dark pepper, and other manor crops. Since bamboo is accessible all over India, there is no motivation behind why this training can't be adjusted and actualized on a more extensive premise all through the nation.

Bench terrace irrigation system is another basic practice used to flood patio farmlands in uneven territories. This includes tapping common streams and directing the water with the goal that it streams persistently from the upper to the lower patios. Stone dividers are set up to forestall soil disintegration and hold run-off water to flood the fields.

The Indian government has likewise been empowering such customary practices as they are feasible and environment-friendly.

#agribusiness #digitalagriculture #agriculture #agrojay

[bluewatsons]

Elaine Hatfield & Richard L. Rapson, Culture and Passionate Love, in F. Deutsch, M. Boehnke, U. Kühnen, & K. Boehnke (Eds.), Rendering borders obsolete: Cross-cultural and cultural psychology as an interdisciplinary, multi-method endeavor: Proceedings from the 19th International Congress of the International Association for Cross-Cultural Psychology (2011)

Abstract

For more than 4,000 years, poets and storytellers have sung of the delights and sufferings of love and lust. This chapter reviews what scholars from various disciplines have discovered about the nature of passionate love and sexual desire. Anthropologists and evolutionary psychologists have assumed that passionate love is a cultural universal. Cultural researchers, historians, and social psychologists have emphasized the stunning diversity in the way passionate love and sexual desire have been viewed and experienced. Culture, ethnicity and the rules passed down by political and religious authorities have a profound impact on the way people think about and act out love and sex. Marriage for love and sex for pleasure have always been deeply threatening to political and religious leaders who have feared the individualistic implications of permissive approaches to romance and passion. Individualism and personal choice are seen as the enemies of order and authority; such freedom are deemed heretical, sinful, dangerous, and an invitation to chaos, selfishness, and anarchy. The fight over the rules governing love, marriage, divorce, and sex stands as one of history’s central and most powerful themes. Today, however, in the era of widespread travel, global capitalism, and the World Wide Web, many of these traditional cross-cultural differences seem to be disappearing. Authority is giving way nearly everywhere to increased freedom, particularly in the personal realm, in the world of passion. Is the erosion of traditional authority and strict personal rules really happening—and if so what does that portend for personal and societal futures?

In all cultures, men and women feel the stirrings of passionate love and sexual desire. Yet despite its universality, culture has been found to have a profound impact on people’s definitions of passionate love and on the way they think, feel, and behave when faced with appropriate partners in settings designed to spark such feelings. Cross-cultural studies provide a glimpse into the complex world of passionate love and increase our understanding of the extent to which people’s emotional lives are written in their cultural and personal histories, as well as ��writ in their genes.”

Defining Passionate Love

The Sufi poet Jelaluddin Rumi, who was born in Afghanistan in 1207 A.D., contended, “whoever has been taught the secrets of love is sworn to silence with lips sealed.” Nonetheless, Rumi penned ecstatic missives celebrating the glories of love (Mathnavi and Diwan-I-Shams). In this snippet, he rhapsodizes:

With love, bitter turns into sweetness. With love, dregs turn into honey. . .

With love, thorns become flowers. With love, vinegar becomes wine. . . .

With love, misery turns into happiness.

In all cultures, people distinguish between two kinds of love: “passionate love” and “companionate love.” Passionate love (sometimes called “obsessive love,” “infatuation,” “lovesickness,” or “being-in-love”) is the variety of love with which we will be concerned in this paper. We will not discuss companionate love, a deeper, more intimate, and longer lasting variety of love and friendship.

Passionate love is a powerful emotional state. It has been defined as:

A state of intense longing for union with another. Passionate love is a complex functional whole including appraisals or appreciations, subjective feelings, expressions, patterned physiological processes, action tendencies, and instrumental behaviors. Reciprocated love (union with the other) is associated with fulfillment and ecstasy. Unrequited love (separation) is associated with feelings of emptiness, anxiety, and despair (Hatfield & Rapson, 2005, p. 71).

The Passionate Love Scale (PLS) was designed to tap into the cognitive, emotional, and behavioral indicants of such longings (Hatfield & Sprecher, 1986). The PLS has been translated and utilized by researchers in Germany, India, Indonesia, Iran, Italy, Japan, Korea, Peru, Poland, Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland. The PLS has been found to be a useful measure of passionate love with men and women of all ages, in a variety of cultures, and has been found to correlate well with certain well-defined patterns of neural activation (see Bartels & Zeki, 2000; Fisher, 2004; Hatfield, Rapson, & Martel, 2007; Hatfield & Rapson, 2009; Landis & O’Shea, 2000).

Theoretical Understandings of Passionate Love

Passionate Love: A Cultural Universal

Passionate love is as old as humankind. Love poems have been discovered on the outskirts of the Valley of Kings. Written during Egypt’s New Kingdom (1539-1075 B.C.E.) but surely composed much earlier, these songs (recorded on cuneiform tablets) speak to lovers today. Consider this fragment:

The Flower Song

To hear your voice is pomegranate wine to me.

I draw life from hearing it. Could I see you with every glance, It would be better for me Than to eat or drink.2

Today, most cultural theorists consider passionate love to be a universal emotion, transcending culture and time (Hatfield & Rapson, 2005; Jankowiak, 1995; Tooby & Cosmides, 1992). Jankowiak and Fischer (1992), for example, drew a sharp distinction between “romantic passion” and “simple lust.” They proposed that both passion and lust are universal feelings. Drawing on a sampling of tribal societies from the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample, they found that in almost all of these far-flung societies, young lovers talked about passionate love, recounted tales of love, sang love songs, and spoke of the longings and anguish of infatuation. When passionate affections clashed with parents’ or elders’ wishes, young couples often eloped. Cultural anthropologists have recorded folk conceptions of love in such diverse cultures as Indonesia, Morocco, Nigeria, the Fulbe of North Cameroun, the People’s Republic of China, Trinidad, Turkey, the Mangrove (an aboriginal Australian community), the Mangaia in the Cook Islands, Palau in Micronesia, and the Taita of Kenya (see Jankowiak, 1995, for a review of this research). A number of studies document that in both tribal and modern societies, people’s conceptions of passionate love are surprisingly similar (Neto et al., 2000).

Passionate Love: Cultural Differences

Americans are preoccupied with love—or so cross-cultural observers once claimed. In a famous quip, Linton (1936) mocked Americans for their naïve idealization of romantic love and their assumption that romantic love is a prerequisite for marriage:

All societies recognize that there are occasional violent, emotional attachments between persons of opposite sex, but our present American culture is practically the only one which has attempted to capitalize these, and make them the basis for marriage. . . . The hero of the modern American movie is always a romantic lover, just as the hero of the old Arab epic is always an epileptic. A cynic may suspect that in any ordinary population the percentage of individuals with a capacity for romantic love of the Hollywood type was about as large as that of persons able to throw genuine epileptic fits. (p. 175)

Throughout the world, a spate of commentators once echoed Linton’s claim that the idealization of passionate love is a peculiarly Western institution.

Background. The world’s cultures differ profoundly in the extent to which they emphasize individualism or collectivism (although many cultural researchers focus on related concepts such as independence vs. interdependence, modernism vs. traditionalism, urbanism vs. ruralism, affluence vs. poverty, or a family focus vs. an individualistic focus). Individualistic cultures such as the United States, Britain, Australia, Canada, and the countries of Northern and Western Europe tend to focus on personal goals. Collectivist cultures such as China, many African and Latin American nations, Greece, southern Italy, and the Pacific Islands, on the other hand, press their members to subordinate their personal interests to those of the group (Markus & Kitayama, 1991; Triandis, McCusker, & Hui, 1990). Triandis and his colleagues point out that in individualistic cultures, young people are allowed to “do their own thing.” In collectivist cultures, the group comes first.

Hsu (1953, 1985) and Doi (1963, 1973) contended that passionate love is a Western phenomenon, virtually unknown in China and Japan, and so incompatible with Asian values and customs that it is unlikely ever to gain a foothold among young Asians. Hsu (1953) wrote: “An American asks, ‘How does my heart feel?’ A Chinese asks, ‘What will other people say?’” (p. 50). Hsu pointed out that the Chinese generally use the term “love” to describe not a respectable, socially sanctioned relationship, but an illicit liaison between a man and a woman. Chu (1985; Chu & Ju, 1993) also argued that although romantic love and compatibility are of paramount importance in mate selection in America, in China such feelings matter little. Traditionally, parents and go-betweens arranged young peoples’ marriages. Parents’ primary concern was not love and compatibility but men dang hu dui. Do the families possess the same social status? Are they compatible? Will the marriage bring some social or financial advantage to the two families? (A note: Later in this chapter, we will discuss the fact that since the 1950s, in the wake of globalization, Chinese attitudes and values have begun to undergo revolutionary changes.)

On the basis of such testimony, cross-cultural researchers once contended that romantic love is common only in modern, industrialized countries. It should be less valued in traditional cultures with strong, extended family ties (Simmons, Vom Kolke, & Shimizu, 1986). It should also be more common in modern, industrialized countries than in developing countries (Goode, 1959; Rosenblatt, 1967). In recent years, cultural researchers have begun to test these provocative hypotheses.

Recent Research on Culture and Passionate Love

Recently, cultural researchers have begun to investigate the impact of culture on people’s definitions of love, what people desire in romantic partners, their likelihood of falling in love, the intensity of their passion, and their willingness to acquiesce in arranged marriages versus insisting on marrying for love. From this preliminary research it appears that, although a few cultural differences do in fact exist, cultures frequently turn out to be more similar in their profoundest of feelings than one might expect. Let us now turn to this research.

The Meaning of Passionate Love

Shaver, Wu, and Schwartz (1991) interviewed young people in America, Italy, and the People’s Republic of China about the way they viewed love. They found that Americans and Italians tended to equate love with happiness and to assume that both passionate and companionate love were intensely pleasurable experiences. Students in Beijing, China, possessed a darker view of love. In the Chinese language, there are few “happy-love” words; love is associated with sadness. Not surprisingly, then, the Chinese men and women interviewed by Shaver and his colleagues tended to associate passionate love with ideographic words such as infatuation, unrequited love, nostalgia, and sorrow love. Other cultural researchers agree that cultural values may, indeed, have a profound impact on the subtle shadings of meaning assigned to the construct of “love” (Cohen, 2001; Kim & Hatfield, 2004; Kitayama, 2002; Luciano, 2003; Nisbet, 2003; Oyserman, Kemmelmeier, & Coon, 2002; Weaver & Ganong, 2004). A few cultural researchers argue, for example, that romantic love is more important in modern, industrialized, individualistic cultures (Levine et al., 1995), in Latin cultures (Ferrer Pérez et al., 2008), and in European cultures than in Asian or Indian samples (Simmons et al., 1986, 1988; Medora et al., 2002), or in societies where men and women possess sexual equality (DeMunck & Korotayev, 1999).

There is, however, considerable debate as to how important such differences are. When social psychologists explored folk conceptions of love in a variety of cultures—including the People’s Republic of China, Indonesia, Micronesia, Palau, and Turkey, as well as a variety of other nations—they concluded that people in the various cultures possessed surprisingly similar views of love and other “feelings of the heart” (for a review of this research, see Contreas et al., 1996; Fischer, Wang, Kennedy, & Cheng, 1998; Jankowiak, 1995; Kim & Hatfield, 2004; Shaver, Murdaya, & Fraley, 2001; Xu et al., 2008). In a typical study, for example, Shaver and his colleagues (2001) argued that love and sexual mating, reproduction, and parenting are fundamental issues for all humans (pp. 219-220). To test the notion that passionate and companionate love are cultural universals, they conducted a “prototype” study to determine (1) what Indonesian (compared to American) men and women considered to be “basic” emotions, and (2) the meaning they ascribed to these emotions. Starting with 404 Indonesian perasaan hati (emotion names or “feelings of the heart”) they asked people to sort the words into basic emotion categories. As predicted, the Indonesians came up with the same five emotions that Americans consider to be basic: joy, love, sadness, fear, and anger. Furthermore, when asked about the meanings of “love,” Indonesian men and women (like their American counterparts) were able to distinguish passionate love (asmara, or sexual/desire/arousal) from companionate love (cinta, or affection/liking/fondness). There were a few differences in the American and Indonesian lexicons, however:

The Indonesian conception of love may place more emphasis on yearning and desire than the American conception, perhaps because the barriers to consummation are more formidable in Indonesia, which is a more traditional and mostly Muslim country (p. 219).

Why are these diverse societies so similar in their views of love? Perhaps love is indeed a cultural universal. Or perhaps the times they are “a-changin’”. One impact of globalization (and the ubiquitous MTV, Hollywood and Bollywood movies, chat rooms, and foreign travel) may be to ensure that when people throughout the world speak of “passionate love,” they may well be talking about much the same thing. We would argue that culture and historical pressures produce visions of passionate love that are variations on a theme. Shading, melody, and tempo may vary with culture, but the underlying architecture of the mind may remain the same. Cultural traditions and values may affect romantic visions, how one describes one’s feelings when in love, how demonstrative people are in displaying their love, but the fact of passionate love may indeed be a cultural universal based on similarities in the architecture of the mind and a common neural substrate (Aron et al., 2008; Xu et al., 2008).

The Likelihood of Being in Love

Sprecher and her colleagues (1994) interviewed 1,667 men and women in the United States, Russia, and Japan. Based on notions of individualism versus collectivism, the authors predicted that whereas American men and women would be most vulnerable to love, the Japanese would be the least likely to be “love besotted.” The authors found that they were wrong. In fact, 59% of American college students, 67% of Russians, and 53% of Japanese students said they were in love at the time of the interview. In all three cultures, men were slightly less likely than women to be in love. (In America, 53% of men and 63% of women; in Russia, 61% of men and 71% of women; and in Japan, 41% of men and 63% of women indicated they were currently in love.) There was no evidence, however, that individualistic cultures breed young men and women who are more love struck than do collectivist societies.

Surveys of Mexican-American, Chinese-American, and European-American students have revealed that in a variety of ethnic groups, young men and women show similarly high rates of “being in love” at the present time (Aron & Rodriguez, 1992; Doherty et al., 1994; Hatfield & Rapson, 2005).

The Intensity of Passionate Love

Cultures also seem to share more similarities than differences in the intensity of passionate love that people experience. In one study, Hatfield and Rapson (2005) asked men and women of European, Filipino, and Japanese ancestry to complete the PLS. To their surprise, they found that men and women from the various ethnic groups seemed to love with equal passion. (In the following table 1, none of the ethnic group differences nor any of the gender x ethnic group differences were significant.)

Table 1. PLS Scores of Various Ethnic Groups

Hatfield and Rapson’s (2005) results were confirmed in a study done by Doherty and his colleagues (1994) with European-Americans, Chinese-Americans, Filipino-Americans, Japanese- Americans, and Pacific Islanders.

After viewing the preceding results, some cultural researchers observed: “True, people might fall in love, but they don’t expect to have these desires indulged. When it comes to marriage, in family focused societies people sacrifice their own desires, and accede to the wishes of parents, authorities, and friends.”

To test this notion, Sprecher and her colleagues (1994), asked American, Russian, and Japanese students: “If a person had all the other qualities you desired, would you marry him or her if you were not in love?” (Students could answer only “yes” or “no.”) The authors assumed that only Americans would demand love and marriage; they predicted that both the Russians and the Japanese would be more practical. They were wrong! Both the Americans and the Japanese were romantics. Few of them would consider marrying someone they did not love (only 11% of Americans and 18% of the Japanese said “yes”). The Russians were more practical; 37% said they would accept such a proposal. (These ethnic group differences were significant at the p < .001 level.) Russian men were only slightly more practical than men in other countries. It was the Russian women who were most likely to “settle.” (This gender difference was significant at p < .05).

Despite the larger proportion of Russian women willing to enter a loveless marriage, a large majority of individuals in the three cultures would refuse to marry someone they did not love (see Table 2).

Table 2. Would You Marry Someone You Did Not Love?

For additional information on culture, love and sex, see Boratav (2008); Gabreyna (2008); Gabrenya & Fehir, 2008; Levine et al., 1995; Ryder, Pfaus & Brotto (2008); Schmitz (2008)— several of whose work are represented in this volume.

In Conclusion

The preceding studies, then, suggest that (in the area of passionate love and sexual desire) the large differences that once existed between Westernized, modern, urban, industrial societies and Eastern, modern, urban industrial societies may be fast disappearing. Those interested in cross-cultural differences may be forced to search for large differences in only the most underdeveloped, developing, and collectivist of societies—such as in Africa or Latin America, in China or the Arab countries (Egypt, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Saudi-Arabia, Iraq, or the United Arab Emirates).

However, it may well be that even there, the winds of Westernization, individualism, and social change are blowing. In spite of the censure of their elders, in a variety of traditional cultures, young people are increasingly adopting “Western” patterns—placing a high value on falling in love, pressing for gender equality in love and sex, and insisting on marrying for love (as opposed to arranged marriages). Such changes have been documented in Finland, Estonia, and Russia (Haavio-Mannila, & Kontula, 2003) as well as among Australian aboriginal people of Mangrove and a Copper Inuit Alaskan Indian tribe (see Jankowiak, 1995, for an extensive review of this research).

Naturally, cultural differences still exert a profound influence on young people’s attitudes, emotions, and behavior, and such differences are not likely to disappear in our lifetime. In Morocco, for example, marriage was once an alliance between families (as historically it was in most of the world before the 18th century), in which children had little or no say. Today, although parents can no longer simply dictate whom their children will marry, parental approval remains critically important. It is important, however, that young men and women are at least allowed to have their say (see Davis & Davis, 1995).

Many have observed that, today, two powerful forces—globalization and cultural pride/identification with one’s country (what historians call “nationalism”)—are contending for men’s and women’s souls. To some extent, the world’s citizens may be becoming one but in truth the delightful and divisive cultural variations that have made our world such an interesting (and simultaneously dangerous) place, are likely to add spice to that heady brew of love and sexual practices for some time to come. The convergence of cultures around the world may be reducing the differences in the ways passionate love is experienced and expressed in the modern era, but tradition can be tenacious, and the global future of passionate love cannot be predicted with any certainty.

References

Aron, A., Fisher, H. E., Strong, G., Acevedo, B., Riela, S., & Tsapelas, I. (2008). Falling in love. In S. Sprecher, A. Wenzel & J. Harvey (Eds.) Handbook of relationship initiation (pp. 315-336). New York: Guilford.

Aron, A., & Rodriguez, G. (1992, July). Scenarios of falling in love among Mexican-, Chinese-, and Anglo-Americans. Paper presented at the Sixth International Conference on Personal Relationships, Orono, ME.

Bartels, A., & Zeki, S. (2000). The neural basis of romantic love. Neuroreport, 11, 3829-3834.

Boratav, H. B. (2008, July). Sexual socialization among college students in Turkey: Messages, beliefs and practices in context. Paper presented at the XIXth International Congress of the International Association for Cross-Cultural Psychology, Bremen, Germany.

Chu, G. C. (1985). The changing concept of self in contemporary China. In A. J. Marsella, G. DeVos & F. L. K. Hus (Eds.), Culture and self: Asian and Western perspectives (pp. 252-277.) London, England: Tavistock.

Chu, G. C., & Ju, Y. (1993). The great wall in ruins. Albany: State University of New York Press. Cohen, D. (2001). Cultural variation: Considerations and implications. Psychological Bulletin, 127, 451-471.

Contreras, R., Hendrick, S. S., & Hendrick, C. (1996). Perspectives on marital love and satisfaction on Mexican American and Anglo couples. Journal of Counseling and Development, 74, 408-415.

Davis, D. A., & Davis, S. S. (1995). Possessed by love: gender and romance in Morocco. In W. Jankowiak (Ed.), Romantic passion: A universal experience? (pp. 219-238). New York: Columbia University Press.

DeMunck, V. C., & Korotayev, A. (1999). Sexual equality and romantic love: A reanalysis of Rosenblatt’s study on the function of romantic love. Cross-cultural Research, 33, 265-277.

Doherty, R. W., Hatfield, E., Thompson, K., & Choo, P. (1994). Cultural and ethnic influences on love and attachment. Personal Relationships, 1, 391-398.

Doi, L. T. (1963). Some thoughts on helplessness and the desire to be loved. Psychiatry, 26, 266-272.

Doi, L. T. (1973). The anatomy of dependence (J. Bester, Trans.). Tokyo: Kodansha International.

Ferrer Pérez, V. A., Fiol, E. B., Guzmán, C. N., Palmer, C. R., & Baudes, E. G. (2008). El concepto deamor en España. [The concept of love in Spain]. Psycothema, 20, 589-594.

Fischer, K. W., Wang, L., Kennedy, B., & Cheng, C.-L. (1998). Culture and biology in emotional development. In D. Sharma & K. W. Fischer (Eds.), New directions for child development: Vol. 81. Socio-emotional development across cultures (pp. 21-43). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Fisher, H. E. (2004). Why we love: The nature and chemistry of romantic love. New York: Henry Holt and Company.

Gabrenya, W. (2008, July). Sex and culture: Comparative and indigenous studies. Paper presented at the XIXth International Congress of the International Association for Cross-Cultural Psychology, Bremen, Germany.

Gabrena, W., & Fehir, S. (2008, July). Culture and the participation in new forms of sexual activity: A cross-cultural study of sybersex. Paper presented at the XIXth International Congress of the International Association for Cross-Cultural Psychology, Bremen, Germany.

Goode, W. J. (1959). The theoretical importance of love. American Sociological Review, 24, 38-47.

Haavio-Mannila, E., & Kontula, O. (2003). Single and double sexual standards in Finland, Estonia, and St. Petersburg. The Journal of Sex Research, 40, 36-49.

Hatfield, E., & Rapson, R. L. (2005). Love and sex: Cross-cultural perspectives. Lantham, MD: University Press of America.

Hatfield, E., Rapson, R. L., & Martel, L. D. (2007). Passionate love and sexual desire. In S. Kitayama & D. Cohen (Eds.), Handbook of cultural psychology (pp. 760-779). New York: Guilford Press.

Hatfield, E., & Sprecher, S. (1986). Measuring passionate love in intimate relations. Journal of Adolescence, 9, 383-410.

Hsu, F. L. K. (1953). Americans and Chinese: Passage to difference (3rd ed.). Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii.

Hsu, F. L. K. (1985). The self in cross-cultural perspective. In A. J. Marsella, G. DeVos & F. L. K. Hsu (Eds.), Culture and self: Asian and Western perspectives (pp. 24-55). London, England: Tavistock.

Jankowiak, W. (Ed.) (1995). Romantic passion: A universal experience? New York: Columbia University Press.

Jankowiak, W. R., & Fischer, E. F. (1992). A cross-cultural perspective on romantic love. Ethology, 31, 149-155.

Kim, J., & Hatfield, E. (2004). Love types and subjective well being. Social Behavior and Personality: An International Journal, 32, 173-182.

Landis, D., & O’Shea, W. A. O. III, (2000). Cross-cultural aspects of passionate love: An individual difference analysis. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 31, 754-779.

Levine, R., Sato, S., Hashimoto, T., & Verma, J. (1995). Love and marriage in eleven cultures. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 26, 554-571.

Linton, R. (1936). The study of man. New York: Appleton-Century.

Luciano, E. M. C. (2003). Caribbean love and sex: ethnographic study of rejection and betrayal in heterosexual relationships in Puerto Rico. Paper presented at the 29th annual meeting of the International Academy of Sex Research meetings, Bloomington, IN.

Markus, H. R., & Kitayama, S. (1991). Culture and self: Implications for cognition, emotion, and motivation. Psychological Review, 98, 224-253.

Medora, N. P., Larson, J. H., Hortacsu, N., & Dave, P. (2002). Perceived attitudes towards romanticism: A cross-cultural study of American, Asian-Indian, and Turkish young adults. Journal of Comparative Family Studies, 33, 155-178.

Neto, F., Mullet, E., Deschamps, J., Barros, J., Benvindo, R., Camino, L., Falconi, A., Kagibanga, V., & Machado, M. (2000). Cross-cultural variations in attitudes toward love. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 31, 626-635.

Rosenblatt, P. C. (1967). Marital residence and the function of romantic love. Ethnology, 6, 471-480.

Ryder, A. G., Pfaus, J. G., & Brotto, L. (2008, July). The mutual influence of culture and evolution on mating strategies: Preliminary results from national-level and individual-level studies. Paper presented at the XIXth International Congress of the International Association for Cross-cultural psychology, Bremen, Germany.

Schmitz, P. G. (2008, July). Dimensions of love and sexual behavior: The influence of culture and personality factors. Paper presented at the XIXth International Congress of the International Association for Cross-Cultural Psychology, Bremen, Germany.

Shaver, P. R., Murdaya, U., & Fraley, R. C. (2001). Structure of the Indonesian emotion lexicon. Asian Journal of Social Psychology, 4, 201-224.

Shaver, P. R., Wu, S., & Schwartz, J. C. (1991). Cross-cultural similarities and differences in emotion and its representation: A prototype approach. In M. S. Clark (Ed.), Review of Personality and Social Psychology (Vol.13) (pp. 175-212). Newbury Park, CA: Sage.

Simmons, C. H., Vom Kolke, A., & Shimizu, H. (1986). Attitudes toward romantic love among American, German, and Japanese students. Journal of Social Psychology, 126, 327-337.

Simmons, C. H., Wehner, E. A., & Kay, K. A. (1988). Differences in attitudes toward romantic love of French and American students. The Journal of Social Psychology, 129, 793-799.

Sprecher, S., Aron, A., Hatfield, E., Cortese, A., Potapova, E., & Levitskaya, A. (1994). Love: American style, Russian style, and Japanese style. Personal Relationships, 1, 349-369.

Tooby, J., & Cosmides, L. (1992). The evolutionary and psychological foundations of the social sciences. In J. H. Barkow, L. Cosmides & J. Tooby (Eds.), The adapted mind: Evolutionary psychology and the generation of culture (pp. 19-136). New York: Oxford University Press.

Triandis, H. C., McCusker, C., & Hui, C. H. (1990). Multimethod probes of individualism and collectivism. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 59, 1006-1020.

Weaver, S. E., & Ganong, L. W. (2004). The factor structure of the Romantic Belief Scale for African Americans and European Americans. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 21, 171-185.

Xu, X., Aron, A., Cao, G., Feng, T., Fisher, H., Brown, L., & Weng, X. (2008). The universality of love and neural correlates of relational outcomes: an fMRI study of intense romantic love in China with follow-up relational data. Talk presented at the biannual meeting of the International Association of Relationship Research, Providence, RI.

#culture #love #emotion #comparison #cross-cultural studies #universalism #passion #interpersonal relationships #marriage #romantic love #cultural differences

[nchyinotes]

Women, China and the Two Child Policy

October 7 2017

https://tnew-template.southbankcentre.co.uk/whats-on/123992-women-china-and-two-child-policy-2017

Thoughts: Had high expectations for this, and didn’t disappoint. Came in knowing nothing really about either topic, and left feeling enlightened about both. Mei Fong was funny, and the dialogue/chemistry between her and Kailing was great in the discussion. It was just quite a fun and informative event in general. Side note, but I attended an event later that day (the Keynote, featuring Hung Huang), which was dreadful and honestly quite offensive to me, as I’m sure it was to many others in the audience. She was disrespectful (don’t remember what she even talked about, but what I remember being most pissed about is what she said about feminists in China), seemed to have no knowledge of anything, and full of BS. I walked out early cause I was so pissed off, and Kailing did as well, and we shared a rant in the elevator and lobby about it afterwards LOL. So yeah, Kailing is great.

Transition from one to two child policy - Mei Fong

1 year inception so far

Policy on its last legs, huge population imbalance (too old, male, few)

Suddenness of Beijing’s reversal: from discouraging → actively encouraging births

“Please have one more child” policy. Slogan: “doing it starts with me”

Very positive, early days:

longer paid maternity leave (Hainan)

more choice and freedom

more FFP (compared to US - “disability” pregnancy leave)

extended honeymoon leave

Adversely affected / negative:

For urban women, which was the only group benefiting from one child policy - was the single beneficiary of all your parents’ resources.

Get married later (25+) policies cancelled

Employment discrimination, China doesn’t have strong laws. Have to give two leaves, come back later, demoted, fired.

Socially pressured to not have C-sections (because may cause complications for 2nd child)

Rural women bore the brunt back then (forced abortions).

2030: 30 million surplus men. Wives in rural areas?

Rent a sex doll a day for 45 USD: life / wife / ufe ?? app

Rise in human trafficking

Wife sharing suggestions

Dehumanisation of women?

Accelerated developments in robotics (???)

Birth rates have gone only slightly up (vs expectations)

Short term burst due to relaxed policies, not sustained

It’s expensive to induce births - more services, etc

China will have a serious deficit in people. Trajectory -

5 working adults : 1 retiree →

1.5 working adults : 1 retiree

Mind boggling from public health, personal POV

Population in world (?)

Need of wives, caregivers, workers: shortage of 40-60M women

Don’t think 2 child policy will help

How gender affects privileged (well educated, white collar) urban chinese women born in the 1980s - Kailing Xie

Left over women discourse, eugenics discourse (best age for good quality children)

Sense of anxiety in societal expectations. Intensified time pressure.

Mother is naturalised - single moms, stigmatised.

Practically impossible. Multiple demands (contradictory) on young mothers.

Sacrificial love, liberal economy: competitive in labour force / working identity

Double income is necessary to maintain living standards

Expect wives to be working mothers (status symbol) even though regard selves as main breadwinners.

Embody a successful nation

Practical cost of raising up good quality (high, shuzhi) children

Fathers involvement in childcare is low.

Mao’s re-assigning of gender roles is now back

Filial piety, emotional labour (privatised, silenced behind family doors)

Pressure/burden largely bore by women

Reproduction decision is never personal, but complicated negotiation / family politics

Persistent traditional norms

Discussion

New generation of young, aspiring, urban daughters

Do they challenge the roles assigned to them? How they negotiate this identity by husband / mother in law

Hardly see collective struggle because so individualised - issue

Looking for husbands who share the same values

Demonised: standards for men are too high

→ show their agency!

Digest this pressure internally → perseverance

Women reach peak at 35? Penalised for having 2nd child without welfare / maternity leave

Disproportionate burden on daughter to take care of parents / in laws. Family / home responsibilities. Gendered society. Men not raised with same expectations.

How has one child policy affected dating?

City registration vs rural registration = for men.

hukai = status of eligibility. Black market.

→ entitled (what)

Can’t lie about age because look at IDs + stickers (LOL story)

Most population demographics can really only predict accurately for 20 years

Post natal depression? (subset)

Loving, sacrificing mother = hegemonic norm

Mental depression is not well covered / accepted. Not overtly recognised.

Burdens placed on private sector

Socialist kindergarten for privileged few / disappeared

No provision for 0-3 year olds - go to mothers or mother in laws

Live in right parts of city for better kindergartens (billingual)

Grandmothers play a decisive role on whether can afford to have 2nd child

China has one of the most early retirement ages (50-55)

Granny dancing (?)

Policy was created by men/rocket scientists in the 70s

Right out of cultural revolution → no academics / experts with competing views that were available to advise

Thinking of women as machines - want more babies? ON.

Rise of feminism, contraception: not factored in

Population is a slow growing thing - easy to see for change

It had become a real revenue generator

Requires a lot more control to get people to make more babies

Physical force? By police for forced abortions before

Public fear of how policy could be implemented

Evolution of how government is working - subtly transmitted in to fam hands

Alternative solution to population issues

Migration? (germany, singapore) - not much because v homogenous population

Encourage overseas Chinese to come back?

Human trafficking (thailand, north korea) - sex slaves, brides (turned blind eye)

Not allowed to publicly discuss this policies?

Private forums about why you do/don’t want 2nd child, etc

No criticism about the parties themselves

Media censorship: even more, esp HK + Taiwan

China does have paternity leave, but very minimal (same as UK!)

Rule of “proper father” = provide for family

Outsourcing responsibility to won mothers

Uneven distribution of education resources

Columbia study: gender issues + property prices. Her name is not on the property register deeds (40-50%) even if she did help to pay for it.

#feminism #china #2017 #london #policy #event

[techsciresearch]

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[tachyon-at-rest]

No, he is not my president, and no, this is not my government.

I've suggested before that there is no longer an "American nation", that the US is now two mutually-hostile nations superimposed on the same territory. I emphasize the word "superimposed" because the division is not really geographical. There is a strong urban-vs-rural element to it, and whole states are misleadingly called "blue" or "red" depending on which culture has the numerical majority, however slim, but in practice both "blue" and "red" cultures exist almost everywhere in the US.

For Blue America, the Trump regime is not a government but more like a foreign occupation. Trump's bullying and threats toward the governors of Michigan, New York, and Washington, and his earlier malign neglect of disasters in California and Puerto Rico, reflects this. So does the regime seizing medical supplies ordered by our governors and diverting them, and Moscow Mitch suggesting that "blue states" should declare bankruptcy rather than expect further help from the federal government -- which is primarily funded by our tax revenue, because our culture and the cities it dominates are the real engines of the economy, on which Red America has been battening like a lamprey for generations.

It is time to recognize reality. The Bible-thumpers, reactionaries, racists, and miscellaneous paranoid morons comprising Red America are not our fellow countrymen. They voted for Trump largely because he would "own the libs" and inflict pain on us. They are our enemies, they hate us, and they are actively waging aggressive war against us. I have nothing in common with this horde of gibbering barbarians.

This division didn't start with Trump. It goes back at least to the Civil War. We beat them then, at huge cost, and we should have completely crushed them and forcibly reformed their politics and culture, as we did with Germany and Japan after World War II. Instead, over time the internal enemy gradually metastasized through the whole territory of the United States, bringing the Ku Klux Klan and Jim Crow and creationism in the schools and a bitter-end resistance to gay rights and women's independence -- and, in the last few decades, an infestation of increasingly stupid and deranged politicians culminating in Trump.

But even if the division has existed for generations, Red America's hysterical vilification of Obama during his presidency, and then their imposition of Trump on the country, have widened it into an unbridgeable chasm and destroyed whatever sense of common American identity did manage to exist before.

As I've pointed out before, partitioning the US is not the solution. The two populations are too intermixed across its whole territory for any such division to be practical. But we outnumber them, and the gap is widening as each new generation grows up more cosmopolitan and less religious than the one before. They can only win on the national level by anti-democratic practices like gerrymandering, vote suppression, and an increasingly-open alliance with the Putin gangster-state. Any Republican administration is a minority-rule administration. If we win full control of the government this November, we need to be ruthless in restoring real democracy by eradicating these practices. Red America's other device for inflicting minority rule, the Electoral College, can't be similarly abolished because it would take a Constitutional amendment -- but we are already undermining it by colonizing red states, and that will continue.

There must be no more self-delusion or mincing of words. We will win in the end, but we need to accept the reality that we're in an all-out struggle with a real enemy that hates and despises us -- a continuation of the Civil War by other means and under new conditions.

[moreyouread]

What you should know about politics but don’t

A non partisan take on issues

VOTING

- Hanging chad and how all machines are controversial voting systems

- Gerrymandering set after a census every 4 years

- Generally incumbents are voted in until they die? How again?

- Campaign funding is controlled by large organizations technically not associated but largely supported by the candidate

ECONOMY

- Great Recession bail out and why it was necessary, as well as the Dodd-Frank laws to constrain proprietary trading

- Taxes and how the rich are taxed at higher rates, while supply-side and trickle down Reaganomics believe tax cuts for the rich stimulate the economy with investments from the rich (largely not true), and types of taxes like income, capital gain, death tax and sales tax, some of which is double taxation

- Deficit and why it’s especially unfair to young people, why we have to keep China, Japan, Brazil, and Britain happy, and why whoever in power says deficit is ok, how Germany lent to Greek and fell due to the banking crisis in the US, and how deficit means higher interest rates for everyone

- Oil and how selling oil in Euros spiked the price for Americans, and how Russia and Iran approach oil differently

FOREIGN POLICY

- Opinions of war policy range from passive to active: liberal internationalists (diplomacy first), paleocons (weak today but at the time willing to fight in strategic situations), realists, liberal hawks, and neocons (super aggressive)

- Difference in realist and neocons are their motivation for security vs ideology. Liberal hawks are somewhere in the middle

- Middle East is a mess with the US invading Iraq for preemptive reasons when Bin Laden was in Afghanistan and then Pakistan

- Iran also has power with nuclear power and is clearly anti American

- Arab Springs led to the downfall of many governments, including an especially gory revolution in Syria

- Russia: oil, India and China: economic powers, and North Korea: built nuclear bombs without US consent

MILITARY

- military contractors: are they a good thing or is it dangerous to give power to wealth, connect private companies with government? Needed bc military is made up of volunteers but bad given they answer to no one

- don’t ask don’t tell: should we have repealed or were we merely protecting gays?

- drones: are they ethical? Or do we risk violating rights and killing civilians?

HEALTHCARE

- Universal access

- Healthcare is too expensive

- HMOs

ENERGY

- Coal is big in the US and though it is dirty it powers most of our electricity — most politicians are ok with it

- Electricity prices are controversial, as the FERC does not cap wholesale prices, leading to the great heatwave in 2000 in CA

- Oil is controversial bc the suppliers are Russia, Iran, Iraq, and Saudi. OPEC controls prices, and we are shifting towards Canada. Countries like Iraq have invaded Kuwait for oil, and some say the US Iraq war is for the same thing. The risk for the US all depends on when the Hubbert peak occurs

- Nuclear power is risky but most of France runs on it, due to what happens when it leaks

- Democrats want alternative energy and efficiency (CAFE sets average mpg rules for cars) and Republicans want more of what we have

ENVIRONMENT

- acid rain: spent billions to reduce acid rain being caused by coal burning

- ozone hole: easily reduced because had technology to replace it

- both Republicans and Democrats generally believe environment is a problem; started EPA with Republicans through Teddy

- aesthetics >> public health

- environmental moralists, utilitarians, deregulators

- Kyoto Accords cancelled eventually in 2009, but the US didn’t sign it; developing markets didn’t need to reduce

- Cap-and-trade market vs carbon dioxide tax, both strategies to reduce energy and adopted in the US in small ways

- renewable energy vs. Alaska for more oil: wind (disrupts nearby habitats), biofuel (needs a lot of land), solar panels (expensive and requires sun), hydrogen (need electricity to power)

CIVIL LIBERTIES

- philosophical inconsistencies between libertarians and executivists, along party lines

- free speech - Vietnam War and Occupy Wall Street led to questionable police behavior towards peaceful protestors, as well as obstruction of press

- gun violence - Brady Gun Law, urban and rural split

- Warrants and wiretapping - controversial during Bush era of PATRIOT ACT, but it helped prevent a lot of attacks, lenient post wiretapping approval

- Torture - rendition to other countries that will torture or move to offshore places helps get past US habeas corpus, which Obama didn’t really back down on, leaves the US in morale low ground

- Declaring war - similar lenient Congress support but presidents usually ignore this, saying only large world wars need congressional approval

- Capital punishment - is this cruel and unusual? Varies by state

CULTURE WARS

- Abortion: Rode vs Wade, not consistent by state

- Right to Die: Republicans support Terri’s Law to prevent state sanctioned murder, physician-assisted Suicide

- Stem cell research: not super political but Republicans don’t believe in it as much due to Bush’s restrictions that Obama incrementally lifted

- Gay marriage - prop 8 in California in 2008 legalizing gay marriage supported by Mormons

- Pledge of Allegiance, Ten Commandments - allow people to not say it, not put it on public facilities

- Mostly people don’t care about culture wars any way these days, except for the Christian Right

SOCIOECONOMIC POLICY

- Immigration: while everyone agrees illegal immigrants should not be here and that immigration should be controlled in numbers for practical reasons, we cannot figure out ways to deal with illegal immigrants already in the US

— Allowing drivers licenses to immigrants allows for better tracking of them but leads to risks like illegal voting, etc.

— Immigrants kept prices for low income work low as they increased supply with increased demand

— Deporting parents leads to higher costs for the children

- unions are supported by democrats in theory and criticized by republicans for taking jobs overseas

- social security - argue for privatization because government always loans from it, helps the poor or financially illiterate bc there is a cap on how much you get annually, and it is always projected for bankruptcy

- unemployment subsidies and the costs of hiring a woman

- agriculture subsidies - food wonks, food protectionists, and food free marketers; almost everyone supports it; it is needed to compete for markets in Europe that will pay more for food and to bring together dispersed interests

- food stamps and welfare - in the past food stamps were sold to buy drugs but has been fixed with electronic swipe system; today still mostly Democrats support stamps only, believing it is a private matter to support people;

- welfare was important in the Great Depression but became a dependency to be reduced; many poor immigrants work harder and better than the poor; culture is the root cause

HOMELAND SECURITY

- Pork infrastructure jobs get hired through ricision or earmarking, eg bridge to nowhere, and generally politicians support infrastructure for whatever region they represent

- Republicans usually favor privatization of roads, transportation. However Amtrak and private airlines are both examples of how this fails

- roads remain heavily subsidized with tolls or taxes (people prefer tolls on the turnpikes)

- Department of homeland security started after 9/11 by Republicans — doesn’t receive federal employee benefits of non-firing

- Infrastructure is failing, e.g. 2007 bridge collapse in Minneapolis

- Disaster response from FEMA is terrible, demonstrated by Katrina. However more of that could have been a wealth issue

EDUCATION

- has always been connected to race and class, with Republicans favoring freedom and Democrats favoring improvements to public schools

- busing, desegregation of schools in 1950s

- affirmative action quotas were outlawed but a middle ground was allowed as long as individual consideration still happened

- vouchers for private school is controversial given 70% or private schools are religion

- NCLB by Bush failed 50% of schools and was lifted by Obama, not providing support to failing schools — compassionate conservatism or just support McGraw for its political funding

TRADE

- protectionist (Democrats) vs liberalist or free traders

- Great Depression was the start of the trade wars of tarifs for all foreign imports, with protectionism generally looked down upon

- bureaucratic tariffs like more checks etc also exist

- After WW2, created:

—- World Bank to loan money to European banks suffering

—- WTO to regulate trade and provide IP protection

—- IMF to provide cash when a country goes bankrupt

- from this emerged the free traders, who believe developing worlds should not have free trade or protectionism pushed onto them

- free traders believe in morality issues and protectionists believe it hurts the US:

—- lose jobs to people overseas

—- pollution in China makes its way here

—- lack of labor standards abroad is immoral

—- corporations getting around taxes with overseas taxes

—- trader deficit since US imports more than it exports is a bad thing for the US

—- race to the bottom to compete within developing world for jobs from the US, hurting those in developing markets while the US affords more

- agreements like NAFTA pop up around the world: Arab, ASEAN, CAFTA, Malaysia and China, Russia and China, EC or parent of EU, with some challenging trade in the dollar

- banana war: forced EU to buy US Dole bananas thru sanctions and the WTO, angering the EU

- steel tariffs from GW Bush harmed auto industry buying steel in US

[biofunmy]

Bad News for Germany’s Economy Might Be Good News for the Far Right

BERLIN — Despite Germany’s 10-year economic boom, a far-right party has managed to become Germany’s main opposition in Parliament, enter every state legislature in the country and vie for first place in elections in the former Communist East next month.

And now the economy is slowing.

At a moment when populism is riding high in various corners of Europe, often against the backdrop of economic distress and high unemployment, a downturn in the Continent’s richest and most stable liberal democracy could add fuel to the fire and strengthen the nationalist Alternative for Germany party, or AfD, analysts said.

“Economic crises fuel a fear of the future, a sense of decline and the sense that the elite is failing the people,” said Yascha Mounk, an expert on populism and author of “The People Vs. Democracy.” “That’s fertile ground for populists.”

Marcel Fratzscher, a respected German political economist and professor at Humboldt University in Berlin, put it more directly: “The economic slowdown should rather help the AfD.”

Professor Fratzscher, who also heads the German Institute for Economic Research, pointed to a forthcoming study from his institute which will show that the AfD is much stronger in economically and structurally weak regions.

“This regional inequality and polarization is a threat to democracy,” he said, adding that “with the economic slowdown, structurally weaker regions will be hit harder, which will increase regional inequalities and accelerate the polarization.”

That is as true for Europe broadly as it is for Germany in particular. Signs that a period of exceptional economic growth may come to an end in Europe’s biggest economy sent shivers through global markets this week.

But beyond the economics, the political implications of the slowdown are just as disconcerting.

A weaker German economy not only threatens to open a broader path for the AfD. It may also further reduce the influence of Berlin and its lame-duck chancellor, Angela Merkel, precisely at a moment when German leadership is needed to address the European Union’s manifold problems, including Britain’s scheduled departure on Oct. 31, as well as global trade issues.

“It would strengthen the case for German leadership, but it could also weaken its negotiating position,’’ said Guntram Wolff, a German economist who is the director of the Bruegel research institute in Brussels. ‘‘Whenever you get economically weaker, you have a weaker negotiating position.”

The AfD, which won less than 13 percent in the last national election, is weaker than far-right nationalists in neighboring countries like France or Italy, where wages are stagnant and youth unemployment has been in the double digits for years.

But that may change — if the current slowdown turns out to be prolonged. That’s still a big if, some point out.

Steffen Kampeter, head of the BDA, Germany’s employers’ federation, dismisses gloomy comparisons with the 1920s, when mass unemployment and hyperinflation boosted the Nazis.

“I don’t see mass unemployment coming our way any time soon,” said Mr. Kampeter, a conservative who was once a junior minister in the Finance Ministry. “I don’t share the markets’ hysteria. Germany is an economically stable country.”

But as the trade war between the United States and China heats up, businesses may soon begin to feel the pinch, economists say.

The German economy shrank 0.1 percent from April through June and may shrink again this quarter, meeting the technical definition of a recession, as President Trump’s trade tariffs began to bite. The government now expects the economy to expand by only 0.5 percent this year, compared to 1.5 percent last year.

In an ominous coincidence, a high-profile survey also released this week showed that a majority of Germans are now dissastified with democracy.

“The current numbers are a wake-up call and a warning,” said Peter Altmaier, the conservative economy minister in Ms. Merkel’s governing coalition.

Germany is the world’s third-largest exporter and particularly vulnerable to the uncertainties weighing on international trade because of Mr. Trump’s tariffs but also the prospect of a disorderly departure of Britain from the European Union this fall. According to a leaked report by the German Finance Ministry, Berlin now considers a no-deal Brexit on Oct. 31 “highly likely.”

“We have a whole cocktail of international problems,” said Klaus Deutsch, chief economist at the Federation of German Industries, warning that this could hand another argument to the far right.

“They will say: ‘Nothing works, big industry is firing employees, globalization is creating problems,’ ” he said.

One reason Germany proved more resistant to the tide of populism after the 2008 financial crisis is that the economy held up so well, said Mr. Mounk, the author.

The AfD was created in 2013 as an anti-euro party in the wake of the Greek debt crisis. It then got its big break after Ms. Merkel welcomed over a million migrants into the country in 2015 and 2016.

Fanning fears about migrants, crime and a loss of control on the part of the German authorities, the AfD became the first far-right party since World War II to enter the national Parliament in 2017 and has since become a fixture of the political landscape at the local and regional level, too.

But with migration receding in the news, the party has been looking for a new crisis to latch on to.

“The refugee issue has driven voter numbers for the AfD so far but that issue is receding,” Mr. Mounk said. “A slowdown could be a welcome next thing.”

Some observers say that the economy will be harder to exploit as an issue for the AfD because unlike with migration, it does not have a radical policy response to offer voters that sets it apart from traditional parties.

“On economic policy the AfD does not really have a clear profile,” Professor Fratzscher said.

Others observe that in recent years economic hardship has tended to help leftist populists — Syriza in Greece, or the Five Star Movement in Italy — more than far-right ones in Europe.

Far-right populism, by contrast, “has often thrived in a situation of solid economic growth,” said Holger Schmieding, chief economist at Berenberg Bank. “Think Trump or Brexit.”

A more meaningful variable than aggregate economic growth in trying to understand the rise of nationalism and far-right populism is economic inequality — and the growing regional polarization between the relative winners and losers of economic growth, Professor Fratzscher of Humboldt University said.

“There are many parallels with the U.S.,” he said.

In rural areas of northern and eastern Germany, where shrinking towns and villages have lost important infrastructure like shops, schools and regular train or bus services, people’s absolute income levels may not necessarily be that low.

But they feel left behind by a politicians who appear unwilling or unable to address their grievances.

One in three German municipalities is now so indebted that it’s unable to maintain public buildings like schools, Professor Fratzscher said. The risk is that an economic slowdown will intensify regional inequalities as tax revenues decline and even more people flock to find work in urban areas, perpetuating the decline.

The prospect of an export-led slowdown has fanned a debate about whether Germany needs to do more to increase public and private investment at home — and loosen its fetish-like commitment to balance its budget.

Many in Ms. Merkel’s conservative party favor tax cuts to boost spending. Their coalition partners, the Social Democrats, want to boost pensions and the education budget. The Greens, now the second-strongest party in opinion polls, demand major investment in measures to combat climate change.

But if politicians want to stabilize not just Germany’s economy but also its democracy, they should start investing serious sums in rural areas to shore up rail services, schools and tackle the notoriously bad broadband coverage, Professor Fratzscher said.

“The government has been doing nothing to fight regional inequalities,” he said. “Now would be a good time to start.”

Those regional inequalities have become a major theme in critical, Sept. 1 elections in the state of Saxony in the east, where the AfD is strongest.

“Already, there are a lot of companies that have recruitment problems because of the AfD,” said Mr. Deutsch of the Federation of German Industries. “The rise of the AfD threatens the image of Germany in the world.”

Sahred From Source link Business

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[liloxen]

Rural vs Urban High School Dropout Rates Correlation to Low Unemployment Rates in the US.

High school dropout rate and unemployment seem to be related. There are a few specific locations that can show a larger number of associations. Holmes county, Ohio shows that the higher the dropout rate the lower the unemployment, or (more likely) the lower the unemployment the higher the high school dropout rate. 72.3% of Students dropped out and 0.85% of the population over the age of 16 are unemployed. [1]

Interesting enough, the specific Tracked within Holmes that causes the correlation with a satellite view shows mostly farms. The assumption that can be concurred from the correlation is that the high school students drop out of school to help/ work on the farmland. This would correlate to the low unemployment rate, with everyone working on the farms.

Shannon County in South Dakota shows an inverse correlation where the high dropout rate may be causing a higher unemployment rate. To further investigate the theory that Holmes county was employed by mostly farms, allowing people to be employed without High School Diplomas is seen by Shannon is a mountainous landscape, with little opportunities for farmland and similar labor workplaces.

In Kings County, New York another relationship is noticed. There is a high unemployment rate and a high school dropout rate. These may be because in such an urban area as New York City and its surrounding counties are very high in homelessness, gang activity, and living off other people simply because there are so many around. In other words, in a very urban area it is easier to drop out of high school to join gangs and other groups, be unemployed, work jobs outside the law, be homeless in the streets, or just simply living within the “system” without following the social structure.

In general, rural areas with higher potential for work without public education can have a higher High School dropout rate and lower unemployment rate. This is a point of interest for the United States public education system. If high schools aren’t meeting the needs of the people, then why do we pour so much money into them? High schools should be able to educate the working force to be able to get a high school diploma specific for them. In other cultures, Germany to be specific, there are a verity of levels of High school students can choose to be a part of. Working force which is less amount of schooling, general education or a medium level for a little higher education requiring jobs, and high level education to prepare for college. In the United States we offer one option, that doesn’t apply very well to the students who would prefer to get out of school sooner to do labor work (such as farming). It would be ideal to have a tear system where students can get educated on the things that apply to them. Farmers would get more education on agriculture, biology, ecosystems, etc and less education on higher level maths like calculus. This may help areas like Holmes to get a better education that applies to them, rather than get kids dropping out of high school.

I would be interested to see what the correlation is today. This number is from the 2000 census. It is assumed that the data is accurate and uncounted individuals are negligent to the data. To have more accurate information and to further the study more specific questions would need to be asked in survey form or with more observations of the areas. There is not enough information about the local areas to confirm or deny the statements in this post. Other factors such as religious, social obligations, war, crime, drugs, and many more could be at play to cause students to be dropping out of high school or being unemployed. These issues are shown by the wide difference in the Urban vs Rural areas and a wide range of outcomes averaging out to make the relationship between work and schooling go unnoticed in a lot of the United States. It is important that we consider a change in layout to our education to increase the usefulness and efficiency of our dedication to education and the students for a better future.

Figures and values are from:

[1] Social Explorer 2017. Accessed Sep 20, 2017. https://www.socialexplorer.com

[abdulrahman79-blog]

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[telecomupdate]

Smartphone Market Continues to Grow, Up 6.6 Percent Year-on-year in 2016

NUREMBERG, Germany, Feb. 8, 2017 /PRNewswire/ --

Continued 4G expansion in China, plus accelerating growth in Russia, drove global demand over the year 

Smartphone sales in 4Q16 totaled 391 million units globally, up six percent year-on-year  

All regions except Western Europe saw year-on-year growth in 4Q16 

Global smartphone demand totaled 391 million units in 4Q16, up six percent year-on-year. North America returned to growth in the final quarter of the year, spurred on by flagship device launches and aggressive operator promotions. Despite strong demand in Great Britain during Black Friday promotions, sales in Western Europe fell four percent year-on-year in 4Q16.    

Smartphone sales 4Q 2016 vs. 4Q 2015

Units sold            

    Sales value

 (in million)

(in billion USD)

Y/Y %

Y/Y %

 4Q15

4Q16

change

4Q15

4Q16

change

Western Europe

40.4

38.6

-4%

16.3

16.2

-1%

Central and Eastern Europe

20.9

24.2

16%

4.3

5.6

30%

North America

56.2

58.0

3%

21.9

22.9

5%

Latin America

29.9

32.3

8%

7.1

9.8

38%

Middle East & Africa

41.5

41.9

1%

10.3

10.7

4%

China

106.6

118.9

12%

33.7

36.9

9%

Developed Asia

19.8

20.5

4%

12.3

13.6

11%

Emerging Asia

53.3

56.8

7%

8.5

9.8

15%

Global

368.6

391.2

6.1%

114.4

125.5

9.7%

Source: GfK Point of Sales (POS) Measurement data in 75+ markets, December 2016

Based on GfK's Point of Sales data, smartphone demand totaled 1.41 billion units in 2016, in line with GfK's previously projected figures. Looking ahead, GfK forecasts global smartphone growth in 2017 to moderate to five percent year-on-year, with total demand reaching 1.48 billion.

Western Europe: A saturated market 

Smartphone demand totaled 38.6 million units in 4Q16, down four percent year-on-year. In Great Britain, demand was strong during November's Black Friday promotions. However, this was not enough to offset 10 percent year-on-year declines in both Germany and France in the quarter. In 2016, the region saw a three percent fall in demand year-on-year, bringing sales for the year to 131.6 million units. GfK forecasts flat year-on-year demand in Western Europe in 2017, as the overall region reaches saturation.

Central and Eastern Europe: A Russian recovery

Here smartphone demand totaled 24.2 million units in 4Q16, up 16 percent year-on-year. Due to improving political stability, Ukraine saw an impressive growth of 34 percent year-on-year. In Russia, currency stablization was the leading catalyst for improving smartphone demand, pushing sales up 10 percent year-on-year. GfK forecasts smartphone demand to reach 84.4 million in 2017, a rise of eight percent year-on-year.

North America: Flagship device launches and operator promotions power 4Q 

Following a dip in 3Q16, the market saw a turnaround in demand in 4Q16. This was driven by operator promotions and flagship devices launches, both coinciding with the holiday season. Smartphone demand hit 58 million units, an increase three percent year-on-year. GfK forecasts that tough competition between the carriers this year will drive marginal growth in smartphone demand of one percent year-on-year, totaling 193.4 million units in 2017.

Latin America: Argentina enjoys a stellar 2016, Brazil bounces back 

Smartphone demand in the region reached 32.3 million units in 4Q16, building on the turnaround which started in 3Q16. This is up eight percent year-on-year. Brazil's improving political and economic situation heralded a gradual recovery in demand during 2016, with November posting the first year-on-year increase in demand of the year. Argentina demand remains strong, with 4Q16 up 38 percent year-on-year. In 2016, demand across the region is down one percent year-on-year. However, GfK has an optimistic outlook for 2017, as demand in Brazil continues to grow after two years of economic downturn.

Middle East and Africa: Growth continues to abate 

Smartphone demand totaled 41.9 million units, up one percent year-on-year. This was weighed on by macroeconomic weakness in Saudi Arabia, Nigeria and Egypt. However, GfK forecasts year-on-year smartphone demand growth in the region to accelerate in 2017, helped by expected economic improvements.

China: The spread of 4G powers rising demand 

In China, smartphone demand totaled 118.9 million units in 4Q16, up 12 percent year-on-year. The 4G smartphone user base hit 57 percent by the end of the year, driven by operator subsidies. Having penetrated the highly populated urban areas, 4G is now expanding to smaller cities and rural areas, as 2G and 3G users are encouraged to upgrade. GfK expects four percent year-on-year growth in 2017, bringing sales to 467.9 million units.

Developed Asia: South Korea drives growth in a saturated region 

Overall smartphone demand totaled 20.5 million units in 4Q16, up four percent year-on-year. South Korea saw impressive growth of 17 percent year-on-year, helped by increasing demand for mid-range smartphones. However, like Western Europe and North America, the region is saturated and GfK expects smartphone demand to fall two percent year-on-year in 2017 to sales of 72 million.

Emerging Asia: India and Bangladesh drive growth in the region 

Smartphone demand in the region totaled 56.8 million units, up seven percent year-on-year, a slight slowdown from 3Q16. Demand in India grew five percent year-on-year, with strong Diwali sales in October partially offsetting the negative impact of demonetization. GfK has a positive outlook for the region for 2017, with smartphone demand expected to grow nine percent year-on-year, reaching 229.4 million units. Bangladesh's projected growth of 28 percent year-on-year, added to India's rise of nine percent year-on-year, provides a major contribution to this forecast figure.

Smartphone sales 2016 vs. 2015

Units sold (in mil.)

Sales value (in billion USD)

2015

2016

Y/Y

2015

2016

Y/Y

 sales

sales

change

sales

sales

change

Western Europe

135.4

131.6

-3%

52.9

53.6

1%

Central and Eastern Europe

71.5

78.5

10%

14.5

17.1

18%

North America

191.0

191.3

0%

72.1

71.8

0%

Latin America

108.4

107.1

-1%

26.8

31.7

18%

Middle East & Africa

157.5

165.5

5%

40.4

41.8

3%

China

385.3

450.1

17%

116.2

133.6

15%

Developed Asia

73.4

73.8

1%

43.0

45.3

5%

Emerging Asia

197.9

210.2

6%

32.2

34.1

6%

Global

1,320.5

1,408

6.6%

398.1

428.9

7.7%

Source: GfK Point of Sales (POS) measurement data in 90+ markets for calendar years 2015 and 2016.

Arndt Polifke, Global Director of telecom research at GfK, comments, "There is no other technology product that is as intensively used by consumers as the smartphone. As a result, smartphone demand remains stable even in saturated markets. Spurred on by the impressive range of exciting innovations, such as virtual reality, artificial intelligence, smart home functionality, mobile payments and mobile health, smartphones are going to gain further relevance for consumers in developed markets. On top of this, developing regions such as the Middle East/Africa and Emerging Asia have yet to mature and as such still have significant potential for growth. These two factors lead to a solid growth outlook for smartphone demand in 2017."

This release is based on final GfK Point of Sales data for October and November, and December estimates based on preliminary data. For more information, please visit http://www.gfk.com or follow GfK on Twitter: https://twitter.com/GfK

Read this news on PR Newswire Asia website: Smartphone Market Continues to Grow, Up 6.6 Percent Year-on-year in 2016

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