Vox Sentences: Australia is basically turning into a real-life Game of Thrones

So there's a new prime minister in Australia now; the EU desperately needed a refugee plan and didn't make one; and even President Obama thinks liberal college students are too sensitive.

Vox Sentences is written by Dylan Matthews and Dara Lind.

TOP NEWS

Australia's "leadership spill," explained

Getty / Stefan Posties

• Malcolm Turnbull will be sworn in as prime minister tomorrow (today, in Australian) after deposing Tony Abbott in an intra-party vote over the weekend.

  [ABC Australia]

• Turnbull made his move to take over the Liberal Party (Australia's conservative party) after rumors circulated that Abbott was going to sack some of his cabinet members, and polls indicated that the Liberals are going to do badly in an upcoming regional election in Western Australia.

  [BBC / Wendy Frew]

• This is the third time in the last half-decade an Australian PM has been deposed from within his own party. In 2010, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd of the left-leaning Labor Party was deposed by Julia Gillard; then in 2013, Rudd took the party — and the prime ministership — back from Gillard.

  [ABC Australia]

• In Australia, this ia called a "leadership spill. CSIS' Ernest Z. Bower memorably explains why it's a "spill": "the act of eviscerating one’s rival, allowing their internal organs to spill out in front of peers: a vicious, highly public dismissal."

  [CSIS / Ernest Z. Bower]

• Turnbull is positioning himself as an evidence-based, soundbite-averse politician. The Guardian promises (warns?): "Everyone who wanted evidence-based policy and proper debate is about to get what they wished for."

  [The Guardian / Lenore Taylor]

• One place that could matter: climate change. Abbott was nearly a climate-change denier; Turnbull is a much bigger hawk. For the moment, though, Turnbull's not going to change Australia's climate policy.

  [Slate / Joshua Keating]

• Which makes sense, because the last time Turnbull was head of the Liberals in 2009, he endorsed cap-and-trade and was subsequently spilled out of leadership himself. By Tony Abbott.

  [ABC Australia]

• The timing is fairly good for Turnbull, since Labor is currently struggling over whether its current leader should stay at the head of the party — though after Rudd spilled Gillard out of leadership in revenge for her spilling him out, he changed the rules to make it harder for the Labour Party to switch leaders.

  [CSIS / Ernest Z. Bower]

Europe struggles to hang together on refugees

AFP / John Thys

• The European Union held an emergency summit to address its refugee crisis today in Brussels.

  [Vox / Amanda Taub]

• Disastrously, it totally failed to come up with a unified plan that will actually solve or alleviate the problem.

  [Vox / Amanda Taub and Annett Meiritz]

• The biggest losers from this are the refugees themselves. The second-biggest is Germany, which desperately needed to stop being the only place taking in refugees. Germany briefly closed its border with Austria over the weekend because it was so overwhelmed.

  [BBC]

• Germany has only gotten a fraction of the 800,000 refugees it promised to take in. But Angela Merkel is getting a lot of domestic pressure for being so generous when other countries aren't.

  [Vox / Annett Meiritz and Dara Lind]

• Hungary, meanwhile, is doubling down on its attempt to prevent anyone from entering to begin with — today, it debuted a razor-wire-topped train car it will use to prevent people from crossing train tracks into the country.

  [AP]

• Hungary already has a razor-wire-based border fence, which has not worked to prevent people from entering because these are desperate people by definition.

  [AFP / Geza Molnar]

• The Hungarian prime minister claims he doesn't want refugees mistreated. But between the camerawoman who kicked a refugee last week and this video of Hungarians throwing sandwiches at refugees, Hungary is not acquitting itself well.

  [Vox / Zack Beauchamp]

What's behind the "new political correctness"

• Even President Obama thinks that "political correctness" on college campuses has gone too far. He went off-script at an education speech in Iowa to chide students who want to be "coddled."

  [Vox / Libby Nelson]

• Expect Obama's remarks to fuel opponents of campus culture, who have taken to arguing that students' insistence on sensitivity is hurting their own intellectual growth and mental health.

  [The Atlantic / Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt]

• These pundits (most notably Jonathan Haidt) have recently been hyping an academic paper from last year, which purports to show that college campuses are evolving from a modern "dignity culture" into a "victimhood culture."

  [The Righteous Mind / Jonathan Haidt]

• The paper focuses on "microaggressions" — often unintentional, non-confrontational statements or actions that still end up reinforcing stereotypes about marginalized groups. (Jenee Desmond-Harris explained microaggressions for Vox earlier this year.)

  [Vox / Jenee Desmond-Harris]

• Of course, these microaggressions aren't just inventions of college students — in its way, being asked to "press 1 for English" is a microaggression of its own.

  [The Atlantic / Conor Friedersdorf]

• At The Science of Us, Jesse Singal makes a largely compelling case that sensitivity to microaggressions isn't new. He makes a less compelling case that people aren't increasingly resorting to the authorities to handle interpersonal slights.

  [Science of Us / Jesse Singal]

• That focus matters, when it comes to college campuses, because — as Libby Nelson writes about trigger warnings — "political correctness" is often just students accepting that they're customers of their colleges, and assuming that the customer is always right.

  [Vox / Libby Nelson]

• Fredrik deBoer sees this as tremendously awkward: campus activists are (to paraphrase Audre Lorde) use the master's tools to dismantle the master's house.

  [New York Times Magazine / Fredrik deBoer]

MISCELLANEOUS

Have we reached peak TV? [Vox / Todd VanDerWerff]

• The UK's National Endowment for Science and Technology is offering $12 million to anyone who can develop a cheap way to test bacteria for resistance to antibiotics.

  [National Geographic / Maryn McKenna]

• L'shanah tovah! Mark Oppenheimer's 2013 essay on "Judaism as a native language" is one of the best articulations I (Dara) have seen about contemporary Jewish life.

  [Tablet / Mark Oppenheimer]

• A provocation: Private policing works at Burning Man, because the "police" are part of and respect the community.

  [The Mitrailleuse / Mark Lutter]

• The subtext of this essay on the Internet's personal-essay boom: young women writers are being encouraged to write about themselves for professional exposure, then judged for it and taken less seriously.

  [Slate / Laura Bennett]

VERBATIM

"The best advice for sabotage is the tip that appears on page 31, item 12, section C: 'Act stupid.'" [Vox / Phil Edwards]

• "The history of gin in England reads something like the history of high-fructose corn syrup in the United States: bad policy designed to enrich agricultural interests wreaks havoc on the health of the urban poor, who can then be castigated for the error of their ways."

  [The Toast / Siobhan Phillips]

• "among more than thirty-five cases on record of pedophilia associated with neurological disorders, only two had been arrested and charged with criminal behavior."

  [New York Review of Books / Oliver Sacks]

• "the main event is when these 'devils' run down the street jumping over the rows of babies like Olympic hurdlers."

  [Atlas Obscura / Joshua Foer]

WATCH THIS

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dz81uzu5Eiw

• 6 signs your dentist might be ripping you off

  [YouTube / Joseph Stromberg]

CORRECTION: This post originally referred to Australia's Labour Party. As it turns out, although Australians spell the word labour, they spell the party Labor. The author apologizes for Australia.

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