Salvini Ascendant

Matteo Pucciarelli in New Left Review:

Italy has a new strongman—for many, a new saviour. The effective head of the government in Rome is not the titular Premier, Giuseppe Conte, nor the winner of the last election, Five Stars leader Luigi Di Maio. It is the Minister of the Interior, Matteo Salvini. As if overnight, a hitherto obscure municipal councillor from Milan, long-time militant in the separatist Northern League, has become the most powerful figure in the country. In just five years, a party that was a dilapidated political relic, with 3–4 per cent support in the polls, has become, in his hands, the pivot of Italian—and perhaps European—politics. There is a sense, however, in which the story of this astonishing transformation begins a long way off, not in time but space—in the wars and vast economic disparities that have driven millions of Africans and Asians across the Mediterranean in search of work, freedom and a little well-being, towards an affluent Europe that is ever more ageing, unequal and rancorous.

An otherwise normal February day in 2016 in a holding camp on the Greek-Macedonian border, in the middle of that year’s migrant emergency, offers a sense of this landscape. The hamlet of Idomeni lies among low hills, the jagged Balkans in the distance. Here, the double barbed wire of the government in Skopje attracts less attention than Orbán’s rolls of the same in Hungary, though—matter for guilt for some, merit for others—landing a single country with the consequences of a modern exodus. It is nearly supper-time, and seen from a distance the Greek camp, which holds about ten thousand refugees, is quiet, as if swallowed up in the darkness. But as you get closer, there is a souk and some children dancing to Syrian music.

More here.

Is virtue ethics making a comeback, 2,400 years after Aristotle?

Joe Humphreys in The Irish Times:

A defining feature of the evolution of western ethics has been the displacement of the language of virtue for that of utility and rights. While virtue theory – the construction of a moral framework around the ideal of “the good life” and related character traits – dates back to Ancient Greece, it has been commonly associated with religion. And this helps to explains why it has fallen out of fashion since the Enlightenment.

But are there signs of that movement being reversed?

There is a danger here of exaggeration – a scientist spots two birds and calls it a pair; a journalist spots two birds and calls it a trend – but if you’ll indulge me for a moment, you can see the case for virtue theory asserting itself in response to our greatest challenges.

On issues like economic injustice, the migration crisis and climate change, many thinkers are coming to the view that the dominant methods of ethical reasoning are failing. Calculating right and wrong by measuring inputs and outputs has brought us piecemeal “solutions” like carbon trading, refugee quotas and tax harmonisation and, while these may be welcome in their own right, there is general consensus that they fall far short of what’s required.

More here.

The Making of the Military-Intellectual Complex

Dan Bessner in The New Republic:

[I]n the NSC’s first years of existence, President Harry Truman “mostly avoided” its meetings. It was only after the Korean War’s outbreak in June 1950 that the NSC began to emerge as a major player in U.S. foreign policymaking. The conflict, which militarized and globalized the Cold War, convinced the president that he needed to use the NSC to better harmonize his ever-more-complex foreign policy. Truman started to chair more NSC meetings; ensured the council met at least once a week; and, most importantly, “demanded that his decisions on Korea and other issues be channeled through—and coordinated by” the NSC. Truman thus initiated a trend toward centralization of foreign policymaking in the White House that would increasingly characterize American decision-making.

President John F. Kennedy further concentrated power around his person. At the recommendation of Richard Neustadt, a Columbia University political scientist who specialized in the American presidency, Kennedy made “NSC staffers not servants of the larger National Security Council but instead a ‘tight group of very able general utility assistants’ to the president himself.” Kennedy, in the words of one State Department official, essentially established a “foreign office in microcosm” headquartered in the White House. Unfortunately, it turned out that empowered NSCs staffers were not always particularly wise. To take just one example, it was an NSC staffer who convinced Kennedy to support the 1963 coup against Ngô Đình Diệm, the president of South Vietnam, which set the stage for deeper American involvement in the Vietnamese civil war.

More here.

AI Uses Images and Omics to Decode Cancer

Amber Dance in The Scientist:

It’s the question on every cancer patient’s mind: How long have I got? Genomicist Michael Snyder wishes he had answers. For now, all physicians can do is lump patients with similar cancers into large groups and guess that they’ll have the same drug responses or prognoses as others in the group. But their methods of assigning people to these groups are coarse and imperfect, and often based on data collected by human eyeballs. “When pathologists read images, only sixty percent of the time do they agree,” says Snyder, director of the Center for Genomics and Personalized Medicine at Stanford University. In 2013, he and then–graduate student Kun-Hsing Yu wondered if artificial intelligence could provide more-accurate predictions. Yu fed histology images into a machine learning algorithm, along with pathologist-determined diagnoses, training it to distinguish lung cancer from normal tissue, and two different types of lung cancer from each other. Then he fed in survival data for those slides, letting the system learn how that information correlated with the images. Finally, he added in new slides that the model hadn’t seen before, and asked the all-important longevity question.

The computer could predict who would live for shorter or longer than average survival times for those particular cancers—something pathologists struggle to do.1 “It worked surprisingly well,” says Yu, now an instructor at Harvard Medical School. But Snyder and Yu thought they could do more. Snyder’s lab works on -omics, too, so they decided to offer the computer not just the slides, but also tumor transcriptomes. With these data combined, the model predicted patient survival even better than images or transcriptomes alone, with more than 80 percent accuracy.2

More here.