<br /> Oh yes, we’re all worried about our LPG <keyword id="6354916" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="80" keywordseo="Subsidy">subsidy</keyword>. Will the government’s ad blitz finally convince us all to give it up or will our will to hold on to small benefits be the ultimate victor? When I asked Specky, my wife, she smiled and replied, ‘The important question is if giving up our LPG subsidy entitles us to brag about our sacrifice on Facebook, Twitter, and all the other social media platforms?’ Well, her perception isn’t entirely wrong, considering that even our PM loves to upload loads of selfies that seem to give him a positive projection.<br />
 <br />
Life is all about projections indeed. Look at our politicians. They love to have the entire country weep for their state of poverty. So they wail, they whine, and they grovel until they’re allowed to get together and howl for a raise in their pay package or another allowance or yet another subsidy for themselves. They are, after all, the brains behind all the complex legislation that is planned for every parliamentary or assembly session. It is a different matter that the opposition never allows sessions or blocks legislations or they themselves make sure that the right laws remain dormant. It isn’t their fault that the economy of the country is in a perpetual state of coma though they insist that it dreams of a great spike in growth. Dreams matter because it is their job to sell dreams.<br />
 <br />
The government dreams of boosting their reserves by making the common man give up his LPG subsidy. Do they forget that even the common man now dreams of seeing his MP or MLA give up their subsidies… well, at least a few if not all from a large list that includes cars, petrol, housing, electricity, telephone, helpers… and lest we forget, their demand for a raise. How about returning in value the years of having sumptuous food at the parliamentary canteen at a subsidised cost? I’m sure one of them will get up and say, ‘Listen, it was that subsidy that probably gave my brothers the idea that Rs 32 per day is enough to keep the urban poor above the poverty line.’ Ah yes! I now remember that our rural poor dip lower to Rs 26 per day… I guess a family of four can have rice and dal at the parliamentary canteen for this amount, right? Dreams of our parliamentarians are as crude as this. But we really need to see the good things in their deliberations.<br />
 <br />
Our legislatures work hard on the issue of subsidies. I’m sure their excel sheets with the data of friendly corporates who donate generously to their party is what determines which of them get how much subsidy benefits… and you thought it is some core sector that qualifies for it? How daft can you be, my dear common man to even dare to have such absurd thoughts.<br />
 <br /> We have some really brainy people walking the haloed corridors of our parliament and assemblies as they are the ones who understood what Sigmund Freud wrote in ‘Civilization and Its Discontents’: ‘Most people do not really want freedom, because freedom involves responsibility, and most people are frightened of responsibility.’ So they simply transposed such gems on to even our education <keyword id="28351" type="ORGANIZATION" weightage="80" keywordseo="policy">policy</keyword> and decided that most people do not actually want real education because education involves responsibility and they’re all afraid of it. Well yes, we have millions of people who have been forced to accept an ‘education subsidy’ that is, exit one class and enter a higher one without knowing what was really happening. All they have is a rather vague sense of education that report cards and certificates give. Yes sir, we’re all victims of ill-planned subsidies.<br />
 <br />
Did you know that Noam Chomsky wrote that ‘everyone’s worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there’s really an easy way: Stop participating in it.’ Do you think that this game of ill-placed subsidies has been going on for a long time now and that the common man must decide to stop participating in it? Do you think we need to begin by universally rejecting the LPG subsidy… unless the politician too has the initiative and the courage to give it all up and prove that selfless service isn’t just lip service that has gone on for decades now? Do you think that instead of just posing question, we now need to get up and tell the politician, ‘Give it up dammit or…’<br />

Everyone's worried about subsidy

<p></p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image on-image"></div><p></p></div></div>Aziz Ansari's "Master of None" is the master of a lot of things, one of which is revealing that the phrase "Two Indian guys walk into a coffee shop" can be the beginning of an expertly crafted scene about Hollywood's race problem, not just a tone-deaf punchline.<p>That scene, delivered early in the series' fourth episode, "Indians on TV," is just one of the many pointed conversations Ansari's character Dev has about the experience of being a 20- to 30-something in America.</p><p>Others involve the trauma of eating the second-best taco in the city and the way immigrant parents and the elderly get mistreated.</p><p>These scenes coalesce into a smartly executed show. But more than that, they exemplify how comedians are the most important philosophers in America right now. Rather than offer light-hearted escape from the world's pressures, today's best comedians embrace and ruminate on them.</p><p></p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image on-image"></div><p></p></div></div>In the early days of comedy, you were considered a comedian if you took a pie to the face. The Three Stooges built their empire this way.<p>By the late 20th century, comedy had taken a turn toward the observational - the Era of Seinfeld. Riffs on airline food and the pains of rush hour brought audiences together because they revealed our personal moments weren't so singular after all.</p><p>In the last five or 10 years, comedy has undergone another tectonic shift. The titans of today - Louis CK, Amy Schumer, Aziz Ansari, John Oliver, Jon Stewart, Trevor Noah - have risen so high and so fast because they address heavy topics that many people normally shy away from.</p><p>They reflect on the experience of being alive as a single person, as an immigrant, as a woman, as someone of a different race. They show us where truth lives, but use setups and punchlines as their smoke and mirrors to avoid coming off as preachy.</p><p>In his 2008 stand-up special "Chewed Up," Louis CK <a href="https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&amp;rct=j&amp;q=&amp;esrc=s&amp;source=web&amp;cd=3&amp;cad=rja&amp;uact=8&amp;ved=0CCMQtwIwAmoVChMIq5LoiryOyQIVSV4aCh03IAb5&amp;url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3D6CmzT4OV-w0&amp;usg=AFQjCNGtVoQenqGlUPajBKsEOs7nVEY2Dg">explains the intricacies</a> of white privilege. In his latest hour-long stand-up special, Aziz Ansari <a href="https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&amp;rct=j&amp;q=&amp;esrc=s&amp;source=web&amp;cd=1&amp;cad=rja&amp;uact=8&amp;ved=0CB8QyCkwAGoVChMIhKj5sLyOyQIVTNIaCh1Yzgo_&amp;url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DIAHVCvV6vE4&amp;usg=AFQjCNE5zSfKrWAuMaIWBChhXiMvrGaBEg&amp;bvm=bv.107467506,d.cGU">criticizes creepy dudes</a> on the street. On "The Daily Show," Trevor Noah <a href="https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&amp;rct=j&amp;q=&amp;esrc=s&amp;source=web&amp;cd=1&amp;cad=rja&amp;uact=8&amp;ved=0CB0QFjAAahUKEwjujdG4vI7JAhXKXBoKHVd5CHc&amp;url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.cc.com%2Fvideo-clips%2Fxsvgpu%2Fthe-daily-show-with-trevor-noah-are-all-cops-racist-&amp;usg=AFQjCNF6pCEyukTfTw0xQJe-ZjPP4mGrzw&amp;bvm=bv.107467506,d.cGU">investigates</a> whether all police officers are racist.</p><p>It's a radical approach to humor: Rather than find a larger (typically absurd) sense of meaning in a minor observation - <em>What's the deal with flip flops? -</em> today's comedians begin with a complex topic and see what humor they can draw out.</p><p>Earlier this year, Amy Schumer's sketch show "Inside Amy Schumer" took comedy's most dangerous topic - rape - and managed to find a bit of humor.</p><p>The sketch was called "Football Town Nights." It lampooned the hit NBC drama "Friday Night Lights." The show's iconic catchphrase, "Clear eyes, full hearts, can't lose," became "Clear eyes, full hearts, don't rape" - <a href="http://thinkprogress.org/culture/2015/04/22/3649528/clear-eyes-full-hearts-dont-rape-inside-amy-schumer-writers-tell-story-behind-sketch/">a nod to the 2012 rape case</a> involving high school athletes from Steubenville, Ohio.</p><p><div></div></p><p class="embed-spacer">In cases like these, comedy serves as the springboard for larger discussions. People like Schumer and Ansari and others can air grievances that, in all likelihood, have been on the audience's mind for awhile.</p><p class="embed-spacer">The ideas aren't necessarily novel - formal philosophers have been wrestling with feminist and racial thought for decades. The innovation lies in the way those ideas get packaged and distributed.</p><p>Comedians work in a popular medium, so their ideas become fodder for conversation. Academics like Noam Chomsky, Daniel Dennett, Saul Kripke, and Martha Nussbaum keep their ideas confined to lecture halls and the written word, so they rarely reach the mainstream.</p><p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"></span><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image on-image"></div><p></p></div></div>On TV and in stand-up, b</span>ig ideas that are difficult to understand or appreciate shrink to bite-sized morsels.</p><p>What's abstract becomes concrete, which becomes relatable. The same person that gets turned off by a discussion of wage inequality suddenly starts to care because his favorite show, starring his favorite comedian, wrote a funny scene around it.</p><p>And since we typically like what our friends like, people start to care when their friends are tuning in.</p><p>In that way, the trend of comedy becoming more socially minded mirrors a change in generational attitudes. Millennials <a href="https://students.rice.edu/images/students/AADV/Oweek2008AADVResources/Characteristics%20of%20the%20Millenial%20Generation.pdf">are known for</a> their social connectivity and civic-mindedness. Shows like "Master of None" speak directly to this.</p><p>"Seinfeld" was a sitcom, but what is "Master of None"? What is "Louie"? What is "Last Week Tonight"? Calling them comedies feels unfair because there are times when the bottom drops out and suddenly we're left to deal with real issues head-on. We stop laughing, and we start to think - not just in general, but about specific issues happening in the world <em>right now</em>.</p><p>"A great thing about comedy," <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKY6BGcx37k">Louis CK once said</a>, "is taking people to places that they have fear and foreboding and making them laugh in that place. I think you help them."</p>    <div class="margin-top">        <h3>NOW WATCH: <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/aziz-ansari-addresses-hollywoods-race-problem-in-master-of-none-2015-11">Aziz Ansari nails Hollywood's race problem in one great episode of his new Netflix show 'Master of None'</a></h3>        <div>            <div>        <div class="ooyala-video-player" data-video-autoplay="false" data-video-id="l2anNzeDqVV-G8W6hbOhtmPBm-SwS5Mj" data-player-variable="ooyalapopvideo" id="ooyalaplayer_popvideo" style="width:1280px;height:720px"></div>        </div>        </div>            </div>

Aziz Ansari's 'Master of None' proves America's best philosophers are all comedians

<p><table class="image-container float_right" width="200"><tr><td><div class="image"></div><p class="source"><a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/eb/Stephen_Hawking.StarChild.jpg">wikipedia commons</a></p></td></tr></table>Professor <keyword id="61369" type="PERSON" weightage="60" keywordseo="Stephen-Hawking">Stephen Hawking</keyword> is backing the academic boycott of <keyword id="6355882" type="COUNTRY" weightage="60" keywordseo="israel">Israel</keyword> by pulling out of a conference hosted by Israeli president Shimon Peres in Jerusalem as a protest at Israel's treatment of Palestinians.</p>
<p>Hawking, 71, the world-renowned theoretical physicist and Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge, had accepted an invitation to headline the fifth annual president's conference, Facing Tomorrow, in June, which features major international personalities, attracts thousands of participants and this year will celebrate Peres' 90th birthday.</p>
<p>Hawking is in very poor health, but last week he wrote a brief letter to the Israeli president to say he had changed his mind. He has not announced his decision publicly, but a statement published by the British Committee for the Universities of Palestine with Hawking's approval described it as "his independent decision to respect the boycott, based upon his knowledge of Palestine, and on the unanimous advice of his own academic contacts there".</p>
<p>Hawking's decision marks another victory in the campaign for boycott, divestment and sanctions targeting Israeli academic institutions.</p>
<p>In April the Teachers' Union of Ireland became the first lecturers' association in Europe to call for an academic boycott of Israel, and in the United States members of the Association for Asian American Studies voted to support a boycott, the first national academic group to do so.</p>
<p>In the four weeks since Hawking's participation in the Jerusalem event was announced, he has been bombarded with messages from Britain and abroad as part of an intense campaign by boycott supporters trying to persuade him to change his mind. In the end, Hawking told friends, he decided to follow the advice of Palestinian colleagues who unanimously agreed that he should not attend.</p>
<p>Hawking's decision met with abusive responses on Facebook, with many commentators focusing on his physical condition, and some accusing him of antisemitism.</p>
<p>By participating in the boycott, Hawking joins a small but growing list of British personalities who have turned down invitations to visit Israel, including Elvis Costello, Roger Waters, Brian Eno, Annie Lennox and Mike Leigh.</p>
<p>However, many artists, writers and academics have defied and even denounced the boycott, calling it ineffective and selective. Ian McEwan, who was awarded the Jerusalem Prize in 2011, responded to critics by saying: "If I only went to countries that I approve of, I probably would never get out of bed … It's not great if everyone stops talking."</p>
<p>Noam Chomsky, a prominent supporter of the Palestinian cause, has said that he supports the "boycott and divestment of firms that are carrying out operations in the occupied territories" but that a general boycott of Israel is "a gift to Israeli hardliners and their American supporters".</p>
<p>Hawking has visited Israel four times in the past. Most recently, in 2006, he delivered public lectures at Israeli and Palestinian universities as the guest of the British embassy in Tel Aviv. At the time, he said he was "looking forward to coming out to Israel and the Palestinian territories and excited about meeting both Israeli and Palestinian scientists".</p>
<p>Since then, his attitude to Israel appears to have hardened. In 2009, Hawking denounced Israel's three-week attack on Gaza, telling Riz Khan on Al-Jazeera that Israel's response to rocket fire from Gaza was "plain out of proportion … The situation is like that of South Africa before 1990 and cannot continue."</p>
<p>Israel Maimon, chairman of the presidential conference said: "This decision is outrageous and wrong.</p>
<p>"The use of an academic boycott against Israel is outrageous and improper, particularly for those to whom the spirit of liberty is the basis of the human and academic mission. Israel is a democracy in which everyone can express their opinion, whatever it may be. A boycott decision is incompatible with open democratic discourse."</p>
<p>In 2011, the Israeli parliament passed a law making a <a href="http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/israel-passes-law-banning-calls-for-boycott-1.372711">boycott call by an individual or organisation a civil offence</a> which can result in compensation liable to be paid regardless of actual damage caused. It defined a boycott as "deliberately avoiding economic, cultural or academic ties with another person or another factor only because of his ties with the State of Israel, one of its institutions or an area under its control, in such a way that may cause economic, cultural or academic damage".</p>

<p>This article originally appeared on <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/may/08/stephen-hawking-israel-academic-boycott">guardian.co.uk</a></p>
<p></p>

Famed Scientist Stephen Hawking Joins Boycott Of Israel

<p></p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image on-image"></div><p></p></div></div><p>It started, like most memes, with a random clip&#xa0;of video from a few years ago. In <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrLO0F-nKYs">a scene&#xa0;from the comedy show "Little Britain" where a reporter interviews people parodying&#xa0;Shirley Bassey and Tom Jones</a>, the singers talk about the celebrities they know.</p><p>They get into a discussion of&#xa0;the <a href="http://www.thisisinsider.com/emily-blunt-should-be-the-next-james-bond-2016-6">James Bond</a> theme songs they've made (Bassey wrote three of them). "What do you think of the more recent efforts?," the reporter asks. "'Goldeneye?'" Shirley asks. "I love Tina [Turner], <strong>but she doesn't have the range.</strong> I'm sorry, Tina. I love you. You know I adore you. <strong>But you don't have the range!</strong>"</p><p>The interviewer asks about more Bond theme songs. He likes Garbage's "The World is Not Enough." Does Bassey? "She doesn't have the range!" Sheryl Crow? "She doesn't have the range." Gladys Knight? "She doesn't have the range." Paul McCartney? "She doesn't have the range."</p><p>Shirley Bassey herself? "She doesn't have the range. I'm sorry, Shirley. I love her to bits. But she doesn't have the range."</p><p>"But that's you," the interviewer responds.</p><p>"I don't care. I don't have the range."</p><p>On June 20, someone tweeted&#xa0;part of the clip, <a href="http://nymag.com/selectall/2016/06/she-doesnt-have-the-range.html">as spotted by Select All</a>:</p><p><div></div></p><p>And thus, a meme was born. <strong>"She doesn't have the range" is a way to dismiss people who don't live up to your standards.</strong> In a music context specifically, it's a backhanded compliment. "Katy Perry is a good singer, but she doesn't have the range."</p><p>The meme really took off when&#xa0;@KingBeyonceStan (it means he likes Beyonce) employed the line against a string of singers.</p><p><div></div></p><p><div></div></p><p>&#xa0;<div></div></p><p><div></div></p><p><div></div></p><p>&#xa0;</p><p><div></div></p><p><div></div></p><p>&#xa0;<div></div></p><p><div></div></p><p>&#xa0;<div></div></p><p>&#xa0;<div></div></p><p>&#xa0;<div></div></p><p>&#xa0;<div></div></p><p>&#xa0;<div></div></p><p>&#xa0;<div></div></p><p>&#xa0;<div></div></p><p>&#xa0;<div></div></p><p>&#xa0;<div></div></p><p>&#xa0;<div></div></p><p>&#xa0;<div></div></p><p>&#xa0;<div></div></p><p>And now it's everywhere.</p><p><div></div></p><p>&#xa0;<div></div></p><p>&#xa0;<div></div></p><p>&#xa0;<div></div></p><p>&#xa0;<div></div></p><p>&#xa0;Here's the full 9-minute original clip:</p><p><div></div></p><p>&#xa0;</p>    <div class="margin-top">        <h3>NOW WATCH: <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/chocolate-luge-dessert-from-union-fare-in-nyc-2016-6">An ingenious chef created a chocolate luge dessert</a></h3>        <div>            <div>        <div class="ooyala-video-player" data-video-autoplay="false" data-video-id="doaHB3MzE6J3dXtyx-g185LlEp0VdO6F" data-player-variable="ooyalapopvideo" id="ooyalaplayer_popvideo" style="width:1280px;height:720px"></div>        </div>        </div>            </div>

'She doesn't have the range' is the new way to throw shade - here's what it means

<p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image on-image"><p class="source"><span>REUTERS/Stefan Wermuth</span></p><p class="caption">The new leader of Britain's opposition Labour Party Jeremy Corbyn waves after making his inaugural speech at the Queen Elizabeth Centre in central London, September 12, 2015.</p></div><p></p></div></div>Jeremy Corbyn provided one of the biggest upsets in British political history on Saturday <a href="http://uk.businessinsider.com/why-people-support-labour-and-its-leader-jeremy-corbyn-2015-9">when he was elected as the new leader of the opposition Labour party</a>.</p><p>Who is Corbyn? And why was his landslide victory such a surprise to Britain?</p><p>The MP has been a feature of British <keyword id="6358883" type="PERSON" weightage="100" keywordseo="Politics">politics</keyword> for far longer than almost all of Prime Minister David Cameron's political allies - but he's mostly been on the backbench. At 66, he's 18 years older than Cameron, and he will be nearly 71 at the presumptive 2020 general election.</p><p>Corbyn is an unashamed socialist whose views have not shifted significantly since the mid-1980s, when he was elected as an MP. While colleagues with similar views have either lost their positions, resigned, or mellowed toward New Labour's more centrist stance, Corbyn barely moved an inch. Under the Blair and Brown governments, he was a rebel, constantly pushing back against their policies.</p><p>When Corbyn announced that he was running for Labour leader, he was given 100-1 odds by bookmakers. He didn't really even seem to want to run. He explained his decision to the Guardian back in June, saying that it was merely "<a href="http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/jun/17/jeremy-corbyn-labour-leadership-dont-do-personal">his turn"</a>:</p><p style="padding-left: 30px;">We had a discussion among a group of us on the left about how we might influence future developments of the party. All of us felt the leadership contest was not a good idea - there should have been a policy debate first. There wasn't, so we decided somebody should put their hat in the ring in order to promote that debate. And, unfortunately, it's my hat in the ring.</p><p>But no one thought he would actually win, let alone in a landslide.</p><p>With 59.5% of the vote, he's beaten the share that Tony Blair got in 1994. The nearest contender, former health secretary (and presumed front-runner) Andy Burnham came in with 19%.</p><p>Corbyn's victory is part of a larger trend that sees growing support of anti-austerity politicians. In Greece, the crisis catapulted radical Syriza to power. Podemos, a leftist party in Spain that was only founded last year, has often led opinion polls. In the US, Senator Bernie Sanders is doing unusually well in the Democratic primaries, offering a platform usually much more recognisable from the European left.</p><p>Corbyn is offering a platform that's unlike anything Labour has run on in the last quarter of a century. Many of his young supporters weren't even born the last time a mainstream political party was pledging renationalisation and the abandonment of nuclear weapons.</p><p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image on-image"><p class="source"><span>Reuters</span></p><p class="caption">Prime Minister Tony Blair's centrist economic policies and close transatlantic alliance are out of the window.</p></div><p></p></div></div>Here are some of the major points:</p><h3>Defence</h3><ul><li><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Abolish Trident, the <keyword id="6354868" type="COUNTRY" weightage="60" keywordseo="UK">UK</keyword>'s nuclear missile system. Corbyn doesn't want a replacement. </span></li><li><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Scale back military activity and spending generally.</span></li><li><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Give people the opportunity to opt out of spending their taxes on the military.</span></li></ul><p><strong>Significance:</strong> Corbyn's defence policies would spark a pretty massive diplomatic crisis. Though the United States is a much bigger spender than the UK, London is one of Washington's most reliable international allies. On issues like Syria and Ukraine, British policy is closer to American policy than most other European countries. A Corbyn-controlled defence policy would almost certainly reduce that.</p><h3>Other foreign affairs</h3><ul><li>Corbyn says he has "<span>always campaigned against neo-colonial wars that are fought for resources on the pretence of fighting for human rights."</span></li><li><span>He believes there should be a way forward on the sovereignty of the Falkland Islands through discussions with the Argentinian government. </span></li><li><span>Corbyn was always a supporter of Hugo Chavez' government in Venezuela, offering similar views <a href="http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/British-MP-Jeremy-Corbyn-Speaks-Out-For-Venezuela-20150605-0033.html">as recently as June</a>. </span></li></ul><p><strong>Significance:</strong> Though this is one area where the UK print media exaggerate Corbyn's stance, he's closer to Noam Chomsky than Winston Churchill. He's shared stages with a lot of extremely unsavoury characters, from groups like Hezbollah. Shortly after the Brighton bombing, in which Irish republicans attempted to assassinate Margaret Thatcher, <a href="https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=2507&amp;dat=19841217&amp;id=iP49AAAAIBAJ&amp;sjid=Y0kMAAAAIBAJ&amp;pg=3074,3464356&amp;hl=en">Corbyn met two IRA members convicted of bomb-making</a>.</p><p>Again, this doesn't exactly look like the start of a beautiful relationship between US foreign policy and a Corbyn-led British government.</p><h3>Economic policy</h3><ul><li>Corbyn favours generally higher rates of taxation, and opposes the current approach of reducing the budget deficit largely through spending cuts. He would bring the higher rate of income taxation from 45% to at least 50%.</li><li>Corbyn favours a type of quantitative easing, but instead of buying bonds on the secondary market, the monetary financing would be used to pay for infrastructure spending.</li><li>Re-nationalising major utilities. Some of the privatised utilities of the 1980s and 1990s, like the rail network and the national grid, would be taken back under government control.</li></ul><p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image on-image"><p class="source"><span>BBC Newsnight, Youtube</span></p><p class="caption">Corbyn has been a perennial Labour party rebel for decades, and has been in a small group of its most left-wing MPs since the 1980s.</p></div><p></p></div></div><strong>Significance: </strong>Corbyn's economic policies break from the orthodoxy of the past 35 years. Though some economists remain supportive of renationalisation, it is not a mainstream position. The use of quantitative easing to pay for infrastructure has provoked particular opposition even from Keynesian-minded economists, who argue that the UK should simply borrow more money, since government bond yields are extremely low and there are fewer potential risks.</p><h3>Public services</h3><ul><li><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The academies and free schools, schools run independently of local government control, which have boomed under the last two governments would likely be rolled back and taken back under the command of local politics.</span></li><li><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Tuition fees for university, which were brought in under the Blair government, and which were increased under the coalition government which ran from 2010-2015, would be abolished.</span></li><li><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">An end to any privatisation efforts and increased private provision in the National Health Service.</span></li></ul><p><strong>Significance: </strong>Corbyn's views on public services are actually a little closer to many Labour MPs than his views on the economy and foreign policy. They are pretty predictable once you know his views on other issues.</p><p>Can he win? The smart money says no. During the 1980s, the British public consistently rejected the Labour party, which was perceived as too left-wing. In fact, Labour has not won a general election without Tony Blair as leader for more than 40 years.</p><p>What's more, Labour's own inquiry into what happened in the last general election suggests that <a href="http://labourlist.org/2015/08/labour-lost-because-voters-believed-it-was-anti-austerity/">voters thought the party was too anti-austerity</a>. Ed Miliband, the previous leader, wanted to put distance between himself and New Labour, but Corbyn's victory marks a much further move to the left than Miliband did.</p><p>Then again, the same people saying that Corbyn could not possibly win the election largely said that he would come fourth in the leadership election that he just won. It's long been a left-wing talking point in the UK that the country just needs a proper, leftist platform to be put to the people.</p><p>If he manages the next five years as leader all the way up to the election, we'll find out.</p>    <div class="margin-top">        <h3>NOW WATCH: <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/stratfor-world-predictions-security-politics-international-2015-7">Chilling predictions for what the world will look like in a decade</a></h3>        <div>            <div>        <div class="ooyala-video-player" data-video-autoplay="false" data-video-id="1pYTM5djpSYabqeT1brJ-L8aGD5z-MR6" data-player-variable="ooyalapopvideo" id="ooyalaplayer_popvideo" style="width:1280px;height:720px"></div>        </div>        </div>            </div>

Where Jeremy Corbyn, the radical leftist who just became Labour Party's new leader, stands on all the big political issues

<p><div class="KonaFilter image-container float_right"><div class="image on-image"></div><p></p></div>In Vladimir Putin's quest to amass more power, the Russian government has <a href="http://www.cnbc.com/id/100805382#.">become increasingly corrupt</a> and ever more dangerous for critics and political activists.</p><p>Case in point - <a href="http://www.vox.com/2015/3/4/8149751/nemtsov-murder-russia-politics">the suspicious murder of Boris Nemtsov</a> as he walked home across a busy bridge in Moscow almost two weeks ago.</p><p>We recently sat down with Ilya Ponomarev - a representative in the lower house of the Russian Parliament who has been banned from Russia for his opposition to Putin - and got his take on what's going on in Russia today.</p><p>Ponomarev believes that the people who killed Nemtsov were affiliated with one of Russia's state security forces, and says that his murder was meant as a "message to Russian elites... and a message to the West."</p><p>Yet, he thinks that in general Russians are closer aligned to Americans than they are to Europeans and<span> that change will come to the country as early as 2017: </span></p><p>"The actual uprising might start in 2017... We will have major elections in 2016, and that is when economic and financial resources might get depleted by that time because of sanctions and issues with financial liquidities. All the problems will mount and be at their height in 2017. We need to be ready and we need to present Russia with a clear program, with a clear vision of Russia after Putin."</p><p>Ponomarev is a former president of Yukos Oil, the former oil and gas giant that was effectively shut down in 2007 by the Russian government, which redistributed <span>its assets </span>to state companies. He was elected to the <a href="Ilya%20Ponomarev:">Russian State Duma</a> in 2007, and was the only member who voted against the annexation of Crimea last year. <span>The final vote in Russia's lower house was 445 to 1. <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/29/world/europe/Russia-Duma-Crimea.html?_r=0">Colleagues warned him beforehand</a><span>, saying things like "Putin will crush you," and "Don't ruin your career." </span></span></p><p>The year before, he was the only member of the Duma not to support <a href="http://mic.com/articles/58649/russia-s-anti-gay-law-spelled-out-in-plain-english">Russia's anti-gay "propaganda" law</a>. Eventually, in August 2014, Ponomarev and several of his aides were banned from Russia (along with several of his aides) and falsely charged with funneling money out of the <a href="http://sk.ru/news/">Skolkovo Foundation</a> - an organization that supports high-tech startups - to finance protests against Putin.</p><p>Though he has been banned from Russia, he is still an active member of the Duma. He says that since his constituency voted him in, they are the only ones with the power to revoke his mandate. </p><p>Speaking before an audience at the <a href="http://www.commonwealthclub.org">Commonwealth Club</a>, the bearded and battered politico spoke about Putin with disdain. He believes that Putin "wants people to negotiate with him and he wants to have the tradeoffs here and there and spheres of influence." To Ponomarev, Putin is a creature of the last century.</p><p>However, throughout the night, Ponomarev talked with a glimmer in his eye - his wife, whom he had not seen for months, had finally reunited with him after clearing up a visa problem in Bulgaria.  </p><p><span>We talked to Ilya Ponomarev before his presentation</span>. Here's what he had to say:</p><p><em>The following is a transcript of our conversation with Ponomarev; it has been edited for clarity and length.</em></p><p><strong>BUSINESS INSIDER: Who do you think killed Boris Nemtsov?</strong></p><p>ILYA PONOMAREV: <span>I think it was somebody very close to Putin. I have doubts that it was his direct order, although he has created this very system which killed [Nemtsov]. I think it was one of the clans who are fighting for influence on Putin. And they want to trigger instability and be those saviors to offer a solution to everything.</span></p><p><strong>BI: Are you worried that what happened to Nemtsov might happen to you?</strong></p><p><span>IP: <span>We have a Russian proverb - "Those who are doomed to be sunk will never be hanged." I think that you shouldn't run away from what is in front of you. You should do what you have to do, and leave to it. What can you do? Hire bodyguards? Stop doing anything? It will not save you either.</span></span></p><p><strong>BI: Are politicians scared of Putin? Are there people looking at what you and Nemtsov have done and being inspired, in that sense?</strong></p><p><span><span>IP: <span>Some politicians are scared and some are extremely apologetic, actually. And I feel very sorry for this because some people who are like my friends from the left flank, they praise Putin because they see him as the fighter against American imperialism - which he is not. You know, why would you select between American imperialism and Russian imperialism? To my mind, it's exactly the same thing. Others - conservatives - they say 'Oh, Putin is a real leader, he's a true man, he stays [firm] on his position, he's not like this weak Obama.' And also they are very much wrong. Because Putin is not a strong man, he is actually a man that put himself into a corner, and he's fighting and biting from that corner, being very weak.</span></span></span></p><p><strong>BI: Has anyone else you know been fined, kidnapped, or murdered?</strong></p><p><span><span><span>IP: <span>We have a lot of people - journalists - that were murdered in Russia. But my own situation is pretty unique. <span>I haven't seen my wife for half a year. She lives now in Bulgaria and couldn't get her here because of visa [problems].</span></span></span></span></span></p><p><span><span><span>[Editor's note: Since 1992, there have been <a href="https://www.cpj.org/killed/europe/russia/">56 journalists killed in Russia</a>.]</span></span></span></p><p><strong>BI: How would you best describe your political ideology?</strong></p><p><span><span><span>IP: The best description would be that I am a progressive libertarian.</span></span></span></p><p><strong>BI:  Which political figures do you look up to, people that you base your ideas upon?</strong></p><p><span><span><span><span>IP: </span></span></span></span><span style="line-height: 1.5em; color: #000000;">I think that my political position of course is very much influenced by thinkers of the left, and those are different people. I pay a lot of attention to what was written by Marx and by Lenin, but also by modern leftists like Wallenstein. I very much pay a lot of attention to what has been written by Noam Chomsky. We have such thinkers in Russia as well, like Boris Kagarlitsky, who is a good friend. </span></p><p><span style="line-height: 1.5em; color: #000000;">My political tradition is one the left, but I think that more modern leftists, they sometimes get stuck with this vision of large government and social benefits and everything and that's against what is my position, because I think that the ultimate vision of Marx, Engels and those people was to eliminate government entities and to give as much power to the people. And in modern standing that means direct democracy, that means all the power to the communities, it means gradually eliminating all government oppression on the society. And 100 years ago, leftists' major allies were labor unions. </span></p><p><span style="color: #000000; line-height: 1.5em;">In the world of today, I think that entrepreneurs are the new emerging ruling class - I identify it as the startup class. That's the new proletariat of the 21st century. These are the people that are the drivers of that change.</span></p><p><strong><span style="line-height: 1.5em; color: #000000;">BI: How is it that you're still an active member of Duma?</span></strong></p><p><span style="line-height: 1.5em; color: #000000;">IP: <span>From the point of view of legislation of the Constitution, my mandate has been given by my constituency. So it's only my constituency that can revoke my mandate. So until the next election, nobody is supposed to do anything. The next election is in 2016.</span></span></p><p><strong><span style="line-height: 1.5em; color: #000000;">BI: When was the last time you were elected?</span></strong></p><p><span style="line-height: 1.5em; color: #000000;"><span>IP: <span>Last time in 2011. The first time I was elected was in 2007. Originally it was a 4-year term and now it's a 5-year term. </span></span></span><span style="color: #000000;">If I would not be able to campaign, I would lose my post. They can use such reasons like if I'm doing business, then they could justify that I am violating my status. But I'm cautious not to do it. They are looking through a magnifying glass from the outside. </span></p><p><span style="color: #000000;"><span>I have a group of very loyal people. We are in the minority very much, basically 10 to 15% of the population that supports what we do. It's temporary. I think that the high numbers for Putin, they will pass as soon as economic tensions mount. And then the whole situation will be flipped. It's important not to alienate people, not to receive negative reaction on yourself but we have to wait a little bit. Bolsheviks in 1914 were a dying sect, the only ones against the war, but just two and a half years later, they came to power.</span></span></p><p><span style="color: #000000;"><span><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image on-image"></div><p></p></div></div><br /></span></span></p><p><strong><span style="color: #000000;">BI: Russia is obviously a surveillance state. That being said, America has its own conundrums: NSA phone tapping, Edward Snowden, CIA torture tapes. How is the United States different from Russia in this regard?</span></strong></p><p><span style="color: #000000;"><span>IP: </span></span><span style="line-height: 1.5em; color: #000000;">I think that there are excesses that exist in all societies. I won't say it's normal to have them, but it's natural to have them. I'm watching very closely...what Snowden has done. I don't know him personally. I wanted to talk to him, but all of the security people didn't allow me to. But I think that he took the wrong approach to a very right thing which he was doing. Just the implementation was wrong. There was a clear platform to what he was doing, although of course that there were some mistakes made. </span></p><p><span style="line-height: 1.5em; color: #000000;">I think that it's inevitable if society will be run by old-timers who are still in the paradigm of the past, so I think the real way to resolve this is if the entrepreneurs go into <keyword id="6358883" type="PERSON" weightage="100" keywordseo="Politics">politics</keyword> and gradually take over and push for their agenda. You named a bunch of privacy issues which are at this stage secondary to me. The primary issue is the competition between Uber and traditional taxis, or contradictions between FDA and 23 and me. That, I think is most important. And I think that we are right now - the society - is living in the Facebook era and the political system is still in the 19th century prior to the Industrial era.</span></p><p><span style="line-height: 1.5em; color: #000000;">Why for God's sake do you need to be socially liberal and economically conservative? Or to be economically market-oriented but at the same time socially, extremely conservative? Why can't you be free in both dimensions?</span></p><p><strong><span style="line-height: 1.5em; color: #000000;">BI: Now let's bring our conversation to a global scale. Especially now with ISIS looming large close to Russia, what is Russia's end-goal in the Middle East?</span></strong></p><p><span style="line-height: 1.5em; color: #000000;">IP: <span>I don't think there is a conscious and strategic play there. Putin is not a strategist at all. He has brilliant tactics, but he is a very bad strategist overall. And I think he is acting very opportunistically there, just to play the cards with America. He was very proud of himself when he convinced us to give up on chemical weapons so that it could be played down and prevent an invasion and that was very helpful for Obama because Obama saved his face and didn't order airstrikes at that very moment. Putin was extremely proud. That's the kind of thing Putin does. Generally, he thinks of himself as Christian. I don't think he is, but he pretends to think that he is. In terms of his ideology he's more like Bush Jr. But he's less ideological. He's [thinking] more 'how to stay in power.'</span></span></p><p><strong><span style="line-height: 1.5em; color: #000000;">BI: What is it about Putin then?</span></strong></p><p><span style="line-height: 1.5em; color: #000000;">IP: He's just maneuvering. He wants to be respected. He wants to be an important player in global politics. He wants people to negotiate with him and he wants to have the tradeoffs here and there and spheres of influence. He's very much a person of the 20th century in the global and geopolitical space.</span></p><p><span style="line-height: 1.5em; color: #000000;"><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image on-image"></div><p></p></div></div><br /></span></p><p><strong><span style="line-height: 1.5em; color: #000000;">BI: Stratfor predicted in its recent decade report that the Russian Federation will disintegrate into an archipelago of loosely-connected and more localized entities over the next decade as the ruble plunges, the price of oil declines, and  the country's politics get crazier. Do you think Russia is essentially falling apart? What will be of the Russian Federation in the next 10 years?</span></strong></p><p><span style="line-height: 1.5em; color: #000000;">IP: </span><span style="line-height: 1.5em; color: #000000;">Russia can fall apart. It's not because of the oil prices.... It's because what sticks a country together is a common interest of people. It has to be economically and socially profitable - beneficial - for people to be together. They should understand how they benefit from a large country. And if they start to feel like a large country is a source of problem, then the country collapses as the Soviet Union collapsed. And right now, I see a lot of alarming trends inside Russia, especially in Siberia, which I represent in the Parliament. People start to ask questions: If we mine all the natural resources - if we have all the oil, all the gas, all the coal, all the gold, all the diamonds - why the hell do we need central Russia? They are just eating at our resources. Without Moscow having a response for this, it would face very nasty questions such as one that was asked during my recent reelection campaign - it actually became a slogan of my campaign - "Stop feeding Moscow."</span></p><p><strong><span style="line-height: 1.5em; color: #000000;">BI: This mindset is similar to that of the <a href="http://www.economist.com/blogs/easternapproaches/2014/09/russia-and-Tatars">Tatars</a>. How is it different?</span></strong></p><p><span style="line-height: 1.5em; color: #000000;">IP: <span>With Tatars, the situation is a little bit more complex. They are geographically very isolated so they need the rest of Russia. When they pump oil, they need pipelines to deliver it so they need those connections. We in Siberia don't need those connections. The only thing which actually sticks us together is the cultural similarities and the relatives that are on both sides of the Ural mountains.</span></span></p><p><strong><span style="color: #000000; line-height: 1.5em;">BI: Last question - if Putin were standing in front of you at this very moment, what would you say to him? The first words out of your mouth are...</span></strong></p><p><span style="line-height: 1.5em; color: #000000;">IP: </span><span style="line-height: 1.5em; color: #000000;">There is nothing I can say. "Goodbye, Mr. Putin," that's the only thing I can say. </span></p><p><span style="color: #000000; line-height: 1.5em;">We need to convince him that if he makes the decision to go, that we are ready to trade his personal security for peaceful resignation. That's very important because we're all afraid that he will stick to power to his deathbed and just kill a lot of people along the way. If he is willing to go, we shall buy him an island in the Caribbean or in the Pacific Ocean with nice girls -  like a separate country for him.</span></p><p><span style="line-height: 1.5em; color: #000000;">He's very much afraid of leaving. Because he is formally right now in his first term, so has another 8 years from now. Legally, he has created all the mechanisms for himself. He's a lawyer.</span></p>    <div class="margin-top">        <h3>NOW WATCH: <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/russia-facts-putin-world-controversy-2015-1">11 Facts That Show How Different Russia Is From The Rest Of The World</a></h3>        <div>            <div>        <div class="ooyala-video-player" data-video-autoplay="false" data-video-id="RtbDU1bDra7DfSubgs0WuD4Pg0DTxjxx" data-player-variable="ooyalapopvideo" id="ooyalaplayer_popvideo" style="width:1280px;height:720px"></div>        </div>        </div>            </div>

The Russian lawmaker kicked out of the country speaks out about Putin, Snowden, and a Russian collapse

<p><div class="image-container"><div class="image"><p class="source">derekskey via <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/derekskey/9159256442/in/photostream/">www.flickr.com</a> creative commons</p></div></div></p>
<p>ONE of the most perplexing questions of the early 21st century is this: how can the French, who invented joie de vivre, the three-tier cheese trolley and Dior's jaunty New Look, be so resolutely miserable? To outsiders, the world's favourite tourist destination embodies the triumph of pleasure over desk-slavery, slow food over fast, the life of the flâneur over that of the frenetic. Yet polls suggest that the French are more depressed than Ugandans or Uzbekistanis, and more pessimistic about their country's future than Albanians or Iraqis. A global barometer of hope and <keyword id="6358439" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="60" keywordseo="happiness">happiness</keyword> puts the French second to bottom of a 54-country world ranking, behind austerity-battered Italians, Greeks and Spaniards, and ahead only of Portugal.</p>
<p>Happiness is of course a slippery concept. Asked if they are happy, people everywhere are more than likely to say yes; far fewer say that they laugh much. Gallup, a pollster, has devised a global "positive experience index", based on whether respondents report that they laughed and smiled a lot or did something enjoyable the previous day. By such measures, <keyword id="6354785" type="COUNTRY" weightage="60" keywordseo="France">France</keyword> does better than the world average. But take out war-torn or poor countries, and measure the French against fellow rich nations, and they still turn out to be unhappier than their peers. The French report fewer "happy experiences" than those in America, Britain, Germany, Switzerland, Sweden, Canada, Norway, the Netherlands, Austria and Belgium. The land of the bon vivant is an unhappy outlier.</p>
<p>Claudia Senik, a French economist at the Paris School of Economics, calls this the "French unhappiness puzzle". In a 2013 study, she found that the French were not only unhappier than their level of wealth and unemployment would suggest, but also more discontented than French-speaking people in Belgium and Canada (so language is not the reason), and more miserable when they emigrated compared with non-French expatriates in the same place (so they take their gloom with them). "Unhappiness seems to be more than about life in France," Ms Senik concluded. "It is something about being French."</p>
<p>Naturally, Ms Senik's findings caused a stir in France, prompting Maureen Dowd, a New York Times writer who was visiting Paris at the time, to report that "joie de vivre has given way to gaze de navel". Le Monde ran three pages under the title "Liberté, Égalité, Morosité", in a bid to decode its fellow countrymen's "persistent melancholy". France, it turns out, has the highest suicide rate in western Europe after Belgium and Switzerland. An American psychiatric study showed that, among ten rich countries, the French were the most likely to have a "major depressive episode" at some point in their life. Even the French language seems to be particularly well stocked--morosité, tristesse, malheur, chagrin, malaise, ennui, mélancolie, anomie, désespoir--with negativity. Can there really be something about being French that makes for so much gloom?</p>
<h3>Fifty shades of noir</h3>
<p>Two periods in France's recent history have contributed most to the rich seam of misery in its culture--one after the revolution, the other after the second world war. In the quarter-century from the fall of the ancien régime in 1789 to 1814, France overthrew a monarchy, endured the Terror, and lost an empire. After this period the Romantic movement, from Baudelaire to Chopin, expressed a melancholy infused with nostalgia and ambivalence towards a society dominated by rationalist thought and bourgeois values.</p>
<p>In "René", a novel published in 1802, Chateaubriand introduced to the world the tortured French youth, whose "wretched, barren, and disenchanted" existence embodied what the writer called the mal du siècle. In his memoirs, Chateaubriand recognised that he had set more of a trend than he had bargained for:</p>
<h3>If René did not exist, I would not write it again...all we hear nowadays are pitiful and disjointed phrases; the only subject is gales and storms, and unknown ills moaned out to the clouds and to the night. There's not a fop who has just left college who hasn't dreamt he was the most unfortunate of men; there's not a milksop who hasn't exhausted all life has to offer by the age of sixteen; who hasn't believed himself tormented by his own genius; who, in the abyss of his thoughts, hasn't given himself over to the "wave of passions"; who hasn't struck his pale and dishevelled brow and astonished mankind with a sorrow whose name neither he, nor it, knows.</h3>
<p>Romantic miserabilism was experienced as a form of pleasure. "Melancholy", wrote Victor Hugo, "is the happiness of being sad." It was treated as a noble state, a higher aesthetic condition. "I do not pretend that joy cannot be allied with beauty," wrote Baudelaire in his diary. "But I do say that joy is one of its most vulgar ornaments; whereas melancholy is, as it were, its illustrious companion." Much of this tradition is firmly fixed in today's French mind. Hugo's poem "Melancholia" is required reading for French lycée students, as is Alfred de Musset's "La Nuit de Mai", whose narrator laments that "Nothing makes us so great as great sorrow."</p>
<p>The strange beauty of melancholy finds some echo in mid-20th-century France, which produced a second wave of miserabilism. Françoise Sagan's "Bonjour Tristesse", published in 1954, for instance, opens with the 17-year-old Cécile's lament:</p>
<h3>A strange melancholy pervades me to which I hesitate to give the grave and beautiful name of sorrow. The idea of sorrow has always appealed to me, but now I am almost ashamed of its complete egoism. I have known boredom, regret, and occasionally remorse, but never sorrow. Today it envelops me like a silken web, enervating and soft, and sets me apart from everybody else.</h3>
<p>Yet the ennui that marked this second period had less to do with nostalgia than nausea. In "L'Etranger", Albert Camus's protagonist, Mersault, is perhaps the world's best-known embodiment of anguish in the face of the unknowable meaning of existence, or the absurd. Post-war French theatre developed the absurd, through the plays of Camus, Jean Anouilh and the Franco-Romanian Eugène Ionescu. Samuel Beckett, an Irishman, wrote "Waiting for Godot" in French. On a chilly winter's evening in 1953 on Paris's left bank, two years before the play went on to unsettle English-speaking audiences, it was first staged at the 75-seat Théâtre de Babylone, and struck a chord with post-war Paris.</p>
<p>Neither Camus nor his contemporary, Jean-Paul Sartre, was ultimately a pessimist. But it is the torment of existentialism, rather than its conclusions, that captured the imagination. Indeed, the left-bank literary clique led by Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, which gravitated to the cafés of Saint-Germain-des-Près, adopted ennui as a way of life as well as a philosophy. When Sartre handed the original manuscript of "Nausea" to Gallimard, his publisher, he entitled his novel "Melancholia".</p>
<p>Perhaps the best exemplar of miserabilism among contemporary French fiction writers is Michel Houellebecq, the controversial Goncourt-prize-winning novelist, in such nihilist works as "Whatever" or "Atomised". His characters invariably lead empty, often sordid, always disillusioned lives. "In the end," writes Mr Houellebecq in "The Elementary Particles", "there's just the cold, the silence and the loneliness. In the end, there's only death."</p>
<p>There have, of course, been periods during which the gloom lifted. It was after the double shock of the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-71 and the bloody Paris Commune, after all, that the Impressionists took their tubes of paint and brushes outdoors, delighting in light and colour. Despite a measure of fin-de-siècle anxiety, the belle époque was a moment of breezy certainty. Gustave Eiffel unveiled his wrought-iron tower in 1889. By 1900 the City of Lights drew 51m visitors to its universal exhibition, under the theme of "Paris, capital of the civilised world", and Matisse, Derain and other fauves had started to capture exuberant colour and warmth on canvas. Yet miserabilism seems to have a greater hold on the French mind today.</p>
<h3>I doubt, therefore I am</h3>
<p>One reason could be the French appetite for brutal self-criticism. From Descartes onwards, doubt is the first philosophical reflex. "The rationalist tradition makes us sceptical; we exist through criticism," argues Monique Canto-Sperber, a philosopher and director of Paris Sciences et Lettres, an elite university. "We treat those too full of hope as naive." In "Candide, or The Optimist", published in 1759, Voltaire mocks the folly of looking on the bright side in the face of unimaginable horrors. "Optimism", says a disabused Candide in the novel, "is the madness of insisting that all is well when we are miserable." When a French magazine recently tried to decode today's national pessimism, it concluded: "It's Voltaire's fault". "We find it more chic and more spiritual to doubt everything."</p>
<p>Up to a point, this is an affectation of the elite. "It is in a certain Parisian milieu that there are intellectuals who are grumpy by trade," argues Jack Lang, the Socialist former culture minister: "There is a gap with the rest of French society." Yet France cherishes public intellectuals, so their influence spreads wide. It is a talking, thinking culture. Its films value dialogue over plot; its talk-shows are interminable. The French, wrote a helpful official guide for British servicemen heading to France for the 1944 liberation offensive, "enjoy an intellectual argument more than we do. You will often think that two Frenchmen are having a violent quarrel when they are simply arguing some abstract point."</p>
<p>The country treats its philosophers like national treasures, even celebrities, splashing photographs of them across the pages of glossy magazines. And it ensures that the canon of French thought is fed to the whole country. All pupils taking the school-leaving baccalauréat exam must study philosophy, and teenagers are examined on such cheery essay questions as "Is man condemned to self-delusion?" or "Do we have an obligation to seek truth?". So if French intellectuals are predominantly critical pessimists, miserabilism may in part be the consequence of holding them in such esteem. Were Americans to pay more attention to the writings of Noam Chomsky and Jared Diamond, perhaps they would be gloomy too.</p>
<p>This critical reflex reaches right into the classroom, generating a further source of negativity. In French schools, for example, the tradition is for teachers to grade harshly, and praise with excessive moderation. Under a nationwide system that awards marks out of 20, a pupil doing a dictée has points (or even half-points) deducted for every error; so a child swiftly ends up with zero. The idea is that all children can always do better. The result is a lack of what the French, borrowing English syntax, call "la positive attitude".</p>
<p>Fully 75% of French pupils worry that they will get bad grades in maths tests, according to an OECD study, nudging stressed-out South Korean levels (78%). A recent government-commissioned report on a small pilot experiment in some French secondary schools, where Cartesian grading had been shelved in favour of a more encouraging system, noted with some surprise that weaker pupils were absent from school less often, more confident in the classroom, and "less stressed when faced with failure".</p>
<p>If the French are life's critics, they are at the same time idealists, and these two make unhappy bedfellows. Thanks to the philosophers of the Enlightenment and the 1789 revolution, the concept of progress towards an ideal society has, despite periodic turmoil and bloodshed, been a powerful narrative in the French mind. The best embodiment of this is the French declaration of human rights. Unlike the American declaration of independence in 1776, which guaranteed the rights of all Americans, the French version 13 years later guaranteed the rights of all mankind.</p>
<p>To this day, the ambition to inspire the world with a secular republican ideal, backed by the spread of French culture and language, stirs political leaders. "France is only itself when in pursuit of an ideal," wrote Dominique de Villepin, a former prime minister, in a deliberate echo of Charles de Gaulle's reference to the country's "exceptional destiny". It is great stuff for myth-making, as De Gaulle demonstrated so masterfully after liberation from Nazi occupation. But when reality does not quite match up to ideals, self-criticism kicks in and misery results.</p>
<p>Left-wing French intellectuals never quite got over the failed revolutionary promise of the May '68 student uprising, nor their disillusion at the declining influence of French thought from the 1980s onwards. Others struggled to reconcile French values with the country's darker moments, notably under occupation. Today, "belief in a better tomorrow has come to an end," says Christophe Prochasson, a French historian. "There is a crisis of progress."</p>
<p>Put simply, the French know that they have enjoyed a fabulous way of life, and are depressed by the thought that neither the French model, nor Europe, seems able to provide the prosperity or the national grandeur it once did. The upshot is that "we are collectively animated by a sense of doom and decline," says Dominique Moïsi, of the French Institute of International Relations. "We have in mind this great nation of ours: the major power in Europe under Louis XIV and Napoleon I, the biggest allied standing army in the first world war. Now there's a sense of 'What happened to us?'."</p>
<h3>The pleasure of pouting</h3>
<p>France is not alone in contemplating its diminished status. Britain had a grand past too. But the post-colonial, post-industrial British do not share the French sense of national depression, partly because they never considered their empire to be part of an effort to export a culture or a model society. And, having accidentally given the world the English language, Britain feels relaxed about its global cultural influence. The contrasting decline of French, once the language of European diplomacy, high culture and polite conversation, is felt as a national wound.</p>
<p>Idealistic France's painful reckoning with decline is therefore quite different to the British approach of resigned muddling-through, argues Jean-Philippe Mathy, of the University of Illinois, in "Melancholy Politics". It is almost, says Mr Prochasson, the historian, a form of bereavement. "There is a very profound pessimism today due to the realisation that France is becoming a country like any other, and this is difficult."</p>
<p>Does it matter? Certainly, France's high suicide rate is a serious cause for concern. Dissatisfaction also makes the French a particularly fractious people to govern, ready as they are to contest, and protest, at the slightest excuse. Confidence too is elusive in a country given to pessimism, making it harder still for politicians to persuade the French to try new ways of doing things.</p>
<p>Yet pessimism has not stopped France from enjoying itself. French hedonism has survived miserabilism--or perhaps provided a refuge from it. Even in the immediate aftermath of the 1789 revolution, the country exhibited a "thirst for pleasure", as one contemporary newspaper report put it: "The stream of fashion, a succession of dinners, the luxury of their splendid furniture and their mistresses, are the objects that chiefly employ the thoughts of the young men of Paris." With firework displays, extravagant fashion, circuses and carousels, Paris at the time, for the rich at least, was all about enjoyment. During les années folles, upper-class American tourists took the steamer to Normandy and then the railway to Paris, drawn to France, writes Harvey Levenstein, a historian, as "a land that was free from American puritanism, where the pursuit of pleasure reigned supreme".</p>
<p>Nor has miserabilism discouraged the French preoccupation with beauty and taste. France does not wear its gloom like a dreary accessory. On the contrary, its culture delights in elegance, sensuality, quality and form: the exquisite hand-stitching on the haute-couture dress; the immaculately glazed tartes aux framboises lined up in the pâtisserie window. The aesthetics of daily life, the art de vivre, remains a source of both grand gestures and small stolen pleasures. It is no coincidence that the two biggest luxury-goods groups in the world are French.</p>
<p>Modern French culture may not have supplied great writers to rival Hugo or Molière, and Paris may lack the buzz of New York or London. But it is hard to argue that negativity has stifled French creativity. Would France have brought the world existentialism had Sartre been a cheerful fellow?</p>
<p>The critical impulse has promoted cultural innovation. Both cinema's New Wave and French literary theory were born of critical reconstruction of what came before. Some of France's most creative periods have followed bleak times: the flowering of painting, literature and science after its defeat in the Franco-Prussian war, or of the avant-garde in art and fashion after the horrors of the first world war. Christian Lacroix, a French designer, points out that war and revolution in France have been times of "creative reinventions, the moment new forms of luxury come into play".</p>
<p>Perhaps the French need dissatisfaction and thrive on doubt. "There is a certain pleasure taken in being unhappy: it's part of an intellectualism of French culture," says Ms Senik. "Malaise and ennui are to France what can-do is to America: a badge of honour," wrote Roger Cohen in the New York Times recently. Pessimism does not preclude pleasure. All that sitting around at pavement cafés, looking fashionably discontented, can be fun. Optimism is for fools; sophisticates know better. Bleak is chic--especially when opening another bottle of Saint-Emilion and reaching for the three-tier cheese trolley.</p>
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