Another Life

Women spend the afternoon squatting on the porch,
picking lice from each other’s hair.
They spend the evening feeding the little ones,
lulling them to sleep in the glow of the bottle lamp.
The rest of the night
they offer their back to be slapped and kicked by the men of the house
or sprawl half-naked on the hard wooden cot.
Crows and women greet the dawn together,
the women blowing into the oven to start the fire,
tapping on the back of the winnowing tray with five fingers
and, with two, picking out the stones.
Half their lives women pick stones from the rice.
All their lives stones pile up in their hearts,
no one there to touch them even with two fingers.

by Taslima Nasrin

~~~~~~~~

—Taslima Nasrin, an award-winning writer, physician, secular humanist and human rights activist, is known for her powerful writings on women oppression and unflinching criticism of religion, despite forced exile and multiple fatwas calling for her death.

Maurice Glasman in New Statesman:

Yuval Noah Harari in The New York Times:

Many people believe that truth conveys power. If some leaders, religions or ideologies misrepresent reality, they will eventually lose to more clearsighted rivals. Hence sticking with the truth is the best strategy for gaining power. Unfortunately, this is just a comforting myth. In fact, truth and power have a far more complicated relationship, because in human society, power means two very different things. On the one hand, power means having the ability to manipulate objective realities: to hunt animals, to construct bridges, to cure diseases, to build atom bombs. This kind of power is closely tied to truth. If you believe a false physical theory, you won’t be able to build an atom bomb.

On the other hand, power also means having the ability to manipulate human beliefs, thereby getting lots of people to cooperate effectively. Building atom bombs requires not just a good understanding of physics, but also the coordinated labor of millions of humans. Planet Earth was conquered by Homo sapiens rather than by chimpanzees or elephants, because we are the only mammals that can cooperate in very large numbers. And large-scale cooperation depends on believing common stories. But these stories need not be true. You can unite millions of people by making them believe in completely fictional stories about God, about race or about economics.

The dual nature of power and truth results in the curious fact that we humans know many more truths than any other animal, but we also believe in much more nonsense. We are both the smartest and the most gullible inhabitants of planet Earth. Rabbits don’t know that E=MC² , that the universe is about 13.8 billion years old and that DNA is made of cytosine, guanine, adenine and thymine. On the other hand, rabbits don’t believe in the mythological fantasies and ideological absurdities that have mesmerized countless humans for thousands of years. No rabbit would have been willing to crash an airplane into the World Trade Center in the hope of being rewarded with 72 virgin rabbits in the afterlife.

More here.

Over at the Boston Review, Henry Farrell and Bruce Schneier have the lead piece in a forum on the issue of information and democracy, with responses by Riana Pfefferkorn, Joseph Nye, Anna Grzymala-Busse, Allison Berke, Jason Healey, and Astra Taylor:

Today, we live in darker times. Authoritarians are using these same technologies to bolster their rule. Even worse, the Internet seems to be undermining democracy by allowing targeted disinformation, turning public debate into a petri dish for bots and propagandists, and spreading general despair. A new consensus is emerging that democracy is less a resilient political system than a free-fire zone in a broader information war.

This despairing, technologically determinist response is premature. The Arab Spring wasn’t the twilight of dictatorship, yes, but today isn’t the twilight of democracy, either. Still, we agree that to the extent democracy has revealed systemic weaknesses, we should be working overtime to repair them.

To pursue this project of repair, we need a better understanding of democracy’s resiliency in the face of information attacks. Building that understanding is harder than it might seem. Our theories have mostly assumed that democracies are better off when there is less control over information. The central assumption, which owes much to John Stuart Mill and Louis Brandeis, is that the answer to bad speech is more and better speech.

We need new frameworks to understand the limits of this optimistic view.

More here.

Alexander Billet in Jacobin:

 Since the death of front-man Joe Strummer in 2002, the Clash have ascended into rock-and-roll mythos. No fewer than thirty books have been released on the band or on Strummer. Some of them are wonderful. Others are shallow and sloppy hagiographies. Their music has been used to hawk everything from boots to smartphones. Centrists in progressive clothing like Beto O’Rourke receive high praise for quoting “The Clampdown”to Ted Cruz. Separating what’s commodity and spectacle from the band’s actual contribution is getting harder.

The latest in the growing list of biographical material is “Stay Free: The Story of the Clash.” Produced by Spotify in collaboration with the BBC and narrated by Public Enemy’s Chuck D, it’s the first podcast dedicated to the band’s history. It is an excellent piece of work, both in terms of substance and style. Social and cultural context play a prominent role in telling the story of the band’s evolution. Strikes, riots, movements, political explosions and implosions clearly inform their philosophy and musical practices as global capitalism reconstitutes itself in the 1970s and 1980s.

All of which highlight the significance of the Clash’s musical experiments: the ever-expanding incorporation of reggae, hip-hop, and funk into their punk palette; their insistence on selling double and even triple albums at single album prices, much to the chagrin of their record label.

More here.

Adam Shatz in The New York Review of Books:

Orientalism in the age of Trump has no interest in promoting democracy or other “Western values” because these values are no longer believed, or they’re regarded as an inconvenient obstacle to the exercise of power. This new Orientalism speaks in the language of deals and, more often, that of force and repression. It keeps Arab despots in power and angry young men of Arab origin in prison.

Unlike the Orientalism that Said analyzed, it does not require experts like Bernard Lewis and the late Fouad Ajami, a Lebanese scholar who became Dick Cheney’s favorite “native informant.” Say what you will about Ajami and Lewis, they were writers and intellectuals. Today’s Orientalist is more likely to be a number-cruncher who studies police reports on terrorist suspects and calculates degrees of radicalization.

The older style of Orientalism—though it has not entirely died out—is less useful to those in power because it is based on deep historical and literary learning of a kind that is anathema to an American president who does not have the patience for books and who is ruled by his impulses. The Internet and social media have stripped those once regarded as experts of much of their authority, and has in turn empowered non-experts, those who parade anti-intellectualism as a virtue and even as a strength. The consequences of this critique of expertise have proved to be at best ambiguous, since it can lend itself to ignorance, intolerance, and irrationality, rather than provide a basis for the counter-hegemonic knowledge that Said envisioned.

More here.

Pratap Bhanu Mehta in Indian Express:

All our normal categories of political analysis and statistical jugglery come to nought when they are faced with Narendra Modi. This is because, he more than any politician in modern history, has grasped three things. First, he is the purest distillation of the idea of politics. For him political reality is not given, it is created; while other parties twiddle thumbs trying to get sociological arithmetic right, he goes about the task of producing a total identification with his persona. And he deploys undefeatable energy to do so. Second, he has fully grasped the potential of a dangerous idea in democracy: That even evil that has a whiff of a larger cause about it has the power to move more than civility that is tainted with pettiness. And third, and most importantly, he has crafted a way of being everywhere: He managed to colonise our imaginations, our fantasies, hopes and fears, to the point where even resistance to him seemed to be entirely in his thrall. Has there been any other figure in the annals of democratic politics who makes you think about him almost every second of your existence? He can literally make himself the object of attention every second of public discourse. Many leaders win because the public does not see an alternative. Modi won because he made an alternative unthinkable.

It is difficult to argue with the claim that the opposition did not, in any way merit victory. In these times, civility is a rare commodity and the Congress can be granted that. It is also easy to blame control of institutions, media and money for the BJP’s electoral firepower. Some of that is true, but to attribute the BJP’s victory to that would be to deny political reality. Even in a moment of grave national crisis, the Opposition’s inability to come together was above all, evidence of their pettiness and myopia. Even when the Congress knew that the battering ram Modi was using against the Congress was that Congress was dynastic and corrupt, Congress could not change the face of its leadership. Modi relentlessly campaigned that all of India’s other parties — from SP and BSP, to the Congress — are corrupt family enterprises. He was the scimitar, slashing away at the old order, which was still holding India back

Modi deserves his victory. But this is also a moment of dread for Indian democracy.

More here.

Lincoln Caplan in Harvard Magazine:

IN THE SPRING of 1864, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. was fighting in the Civil War as a Union Army captain. He had enlisted three years earlier, soon after the war began, when he was 20 and in his last term at Harvard College, in the class of 1861. As an infantry officer in Virginia, he had received a near-fatal wound at Ball’s Bluff in his first battle, where he was shot through the chest in a Union raid that backfired. He had proved his valor by rejoining his men after he was shot, defying an order to have his wound tended. At Antietam a year later, where he was briefly left for dead on the bloodiest day in U.S. Army history, a bullet ripped through his neck. At Chancellorsville, in another eight months, an iron ball from cannon shot badly wounded him in the heel. Near there in winter, “Holmes lay in the hospital tent too weak even to stand as he suffered the agonies of bloody diarrhea,” Stephen Budiansky, M.S. ’79, writes in a new biography of Holmes: “The disease killed more men than enemy bullets over the course of the Civil War.”

That spring, generals Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee met on the battlefield for the first time. Grant, the newly appointed commander of the Union Army, had shifted its main target from Richmond, the capital of the Confederacy, to Lee and his roving Army of Northern Virginia. The Battle of the Wilderness was the opening fight. In fierce encounters over two days, of 119,000 Union soldiers, one of seven died or was injured; one-sixth of Lee’s 65,000 troops were casualties. Holmes filled a new role as an officer on horseback in the Wilderness. As Budiansky recounts, he faced “the most intense and nightmarish episode of the entire war for him, nine weeks of nonstop moving, fighting, and killing that would often find him falling asleep in the saddle from sheer fatigue, escaping death by inches, and witnessing carnage on a close-up scale that eclipsed even his own previous experiences.”

It is impossible to imagine a current Supreme Court justice being forged in such circumstances—with the survival of the nation, as well as of the multitudes fighting, so uncertain.

More here.

Dave Itzkoff in The New York Times:

There’s a revealing moment early in “Funny Man,” Patrick McGilligan’s comprehensive biography of Mel Brooks, the relentless, redoubtable comedian and filmmaker. It’s not so much an anecdote as a recitation of a musical number from Brooks’s formative days as an entertainer — an Al Jolson-esque ditty that he performed in the Army and later on the borscht belt circuit before it became an enduring part of his repertoire. Its lyrics run as follows:

Here I am, I’m Melvin Brooks!

I’ve come to stop the show.

Just a ham who’s minus looks

But in your heart I’ll grow!

I’ll tell you gags, I’ll sing you songs

(Just happy little snappy songs that roll along)

Out of my mind. Won’t you be kind?

And please love Melvin Brooks!

This isn’t enough to fill a book and yet it tells you almost everything you need to know about Brooks, whose singular career encompasses genuine classics like “The Producers,” “Blazing Saddles” and “Young Frankenstein,” as well as irresistible schlock like “Spaceballs” and “History of the World, Part I.”

To get where he has gotten — to have secured a place in the comedy pantheon and to have won the show-business quadruple crown known as the EGOT (Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, Tony) — Brooks, of course, had to be funny and inventive. He had to have a fierce conviction in his own abilities, an unwavering determination to be in front of a crowd and a caustic wit to wield against enemies, or turn on himself when necessary. But he had an obvious neediness, too, as most comedians do — a part of himself that craves approval and bristles at the mildest rejection. The end result is a dynamic that compelled Brooks, even in success, to keep throwing everything he had at his audiences, sometimes to his own detriment.

More here.

Elevator Music

A tune with no more substance than the air,
performed on underwater instruments,
is proper to this short lift from the earth.
It hovers as we draw into ourselves
and turn our reverent eyes toward the lights
that count us to our various destinies.
We’re all in this together, the song says,
and later we’ll descend. The melody
is like a name we don’t recall just now
that still keeps on insisting it is there.

by Henry Taylor
from Poetry 180
Random House, 2003

Quassim Cassam at the Institute of Art and Ideas:

Conspiracy theorists get a seriously bad press. Gullible, irresponsible, paranoid, stupid. These are some of the politer labels applied to them, usually by establishment figures who aren’t averse to promoting their own conspiracy theories when it suits them. President George W. Bush denounced outrageous conspiracy theories about 9/11 while his own administration was busy promoting the outrageous conspiracy theory that Iraq was behind 9/11.

If the abuse isn’t bad enough, conspiracy theorists now have the dubious honour of being studied by psychologists. The psychology of conspiracy theories is a thing, and the news for conspiracy theorists isn’t good. A recent study describes their theories as ‘corrosive to societal and individual well-being’. Conspiracy theorists, the study reveals, are more likely to be male, unmarried, less educated, have lower household incomes and see themselves as having low social standing. They have lower levels of physical and psychological well-being and are more likely to meet the criteria for having a psychiatric disorder.

In case you’re starting to feel a sorry for conspiracy theorists (or for yourself if you are one), perhaps it’s worth remembering that they aren’t exactly shrinking violets. They are vociferous defenders of their theories and scornful of their opponents. Anyone who has been on the receiving end of the wrath of conspiracy theorists will know that it can be a bruising experience.

More here.

From Wikipedia:

Murray Gell-Mann (/ˈmʌri ˈɡɛl ˈmæn/; September 15, 1929 – May 24, 2019) was an American physicist who received the 1969 Nobel Prize in physics for his work on the theory of elementary particles. Until his death, he was the Robert Andrews Millikan Professor of Theoretical Physics Emeritus at the California Institute of Technology, a distinguished fellow and co-founder of the Santa Fe Institute, a professor of physics at the University of New Mexico, and the Presidential Professor of Physics and Medicine at the University of Southern California.

More here.

Graeme Wood in The Atlantic:

Last week, the prime minister of New Zealand and president of France presented the Christchurch Call—a pledge to “eliminate terrorist and violent extremist content online.” Eighteen countries and all major tech companies signed up, but Donald Trump’s administration issued a statement declining to join them. Critics of the administration imputed the darkest of motives: It must oppose the pledge because it wants to make the world safe for violent extremists, perhaps especially the right-wing zealots who applauded the massacre of 51 people in Christchurch, New Zealand, itself two months ago.

You can read the Christchurch Call here. I defy you to find anything objectionable about it. It does not vilify particular religious or political beliefs; it mentions freedom of expression multiple times; it recognizes that terrorists will not disappear just because their Facebook accounts do or because their parents find out that they’ve been up to no good. Even the White House noted that “we support [its] overall goals,” and declined to say why the United States did not sign on. The office that issued the statement, the Office of Science and Technology Policy, referred me to the National Security Council, which did not offer any defense either.

So let me offer a defense for them.

More here.

Jonah Blank at The Atlantic:

The term Hindutva can be (sort of) translated as “Hindu-ness,” and that gets (sort of) at what it’s all about: Hinduism not a theology, but an identity. The movement’s intellectual father, Veer Savarkar, wrote its foundational text (helpfully titled Hindutva) a century ago. At the time, the notion of a unified faith or doctrine, let alone a shared identity, would have left most Hindus simply confused: Identity was determined by a person’s family, village, caste. The very term Hindu is merely a loanword (most likely from Persian), referring to “the people who live across the Indus River.” Until the 20th century, most Hindus had never felt the need to describe themselves in any comprehensive way.

It was the colonial experience that created Hindutva: Why, Savarkar and his comrades wondered, had India been dominated for centuries by a relatively small number of Muslim Mughals and Christian British? Was monotheism simply better suited for ruling? If so, what did that mean for a faith with more deities than days in the year?

more here.

Philip Ball at The New Statesman:

All the same, some of the confusion and apathy in the aftermath of the explosion of Reactor Four was due to an inability to comprehend the enormity of what had happened: that the reactor and the hall housing it had literally been blown apart, its pieces scattered still glowing across the site and the fiery inner core exposed to the atmosphere. There is a sense in these accounts of the truly unearthly: Higginbotham mentions the “shimmering pillar of ethereal blue-white light, reaching straight up into the night sky, disappearing into infinity” as the intense radiation streaming from the reactor ionised the air itself. Senior figures wandered around the site in a daze, muttering about routine malfunctions even as they kicked aside immensely radioactive debris from the reactor core. Radiation levels at the site were so far off the scale that they defied belief and comprehension. Meanwhile, in Pripyat life went on as normal for a day and a half, children playing in the warm spring sunshine. A film taken of those events is marred by ghostly flashes and white streaks: ambient radiation burning itself into the celluloid.

more here.

Christopher de Bellaigue in The Guardian:

In 1534 an Ottoman delegation was in Paris to discuss a plan to unite France and Turkey against their shared enemy, the Habsburg empire. That François I should lavish courtesies on infidel diplomats was bitterly resented by French Lutherans, who were being persecuted after the “affair of the placards”: a scandalous denunciation of the Catholic mass had been discovered pinned to the door of the royal bedchamber; the Turkish visitors were escorted past pyres that would be fed by Protestant heretics. A decade later the Franco-Ottoman alliance was so fixed a part of the European scene that François allowed a Turkish fleet under Hayreddin Pasha to winter in Toulon, the Mediterranean port having been emptied of its Christian inhabitants. The church bells were silenced and cantatas in the cathedral gave way to the call to prayer.“Looking at Toulon,” remarked an eyewitness after the Ottoman sailors had settled in, “you would say that it was Istanbul, with great public order and justice.”

Much of Europe affected to be scandalised by the alliance of France’s “very Christian king” with Sultan Suleyman I, the “Magnificent”, whose aim was to make Muslim Turkey the continent’s superpower. But as Noel Malcolm explains in Useful Enemies, the alliance was only the most overt of the accommodations that Europeans made after the Ottomans first exploded into the Balkans in 1362.

More here.

Jamil Zaki in Nautilus:

You wake up on a bus, surrounded by all your remaining ossessions. A few fellow passengers slump on pale blue seats around you, their heads resting against the windows. You turn and see a father holding his son. Almost everyone is asleep. But one man, with a salt-and-pepper beard and khaki vest, stands near the back of the bus, staring at you. You feel uneasy and glance at the driver, wondering if he would help you if you needed it. When you turn back around, the bearded man has moved toward you and is now just a few feet away. You jolt, fearing for your safety, but then remind yourself there’s nothing to worry about. You take off the Oculus helmet and find yourself back in the real world, in Jeremy Bailenson’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab at Stanford University.

For more and more people in Silicon Valley, a long and dangerous bus ride isn’t a simulation; it’s reality. Santa Clara County—home to Facebook and Google—contains the nation’s second highest concentration of affluence. The soaring cost of living here has displaced all but the wealthiest. In Palo Alto, the nation’s tech epicenter, the number of homeless people has increased by a staggering 26 percent in the past two years, with higher concentrations of children and families among them. They turn to shelters, campers, and, in harder times, bus line 22.

Just a mile from Stanford’s bucolic campus, the 22 departs Palo Alto for San Jose, and shuttles between the two cities all night. Silicon Valley’s homeless have taken to it for safety and shelter so often and in such numbers that it’s been dubbed Hotel 22. Dozens of people shuffle on past midnight, in an orderly, exhausted procession. They take the 90-minute ride from one end of its route to the other, get off, and then get right back on. Drivers on line 22 know the drill. After leaving the first station, one announces over the bus’s intercom, “No lying down, no putting your feet on the seats … Be respectful to the next people getting on because they’re going to work. Let’s have a nice safe ride; let’s do it right. Anybody wants to act up, well, you know the consequences.”

More here.

There is No Word

There isn’t a word for walking out of the grocery store
with a gallon jug of milk in a plastic sack
that should have been bagged in double layers

—so that before you are even out the door
you feel the weight of the jug dragging
the bag down, stretching the thin

plastic handles longer and longer
and you know it’s only a matter of  time until
the bottom suddenly splits.

There is no single, unimpeachable word
for that vague sensation of something
moving away from you

as it exceeds its elastic capacity
—which is too bad, because that is the word
I would like to use to describe standing on the street

chatting with an old friend
as the awareness grows in me that he is
no longer a friend, but only an acquaintance,

a person with whom I never made the effort—
until this moment, when as we say goodbye
I think we share a feeling of relief,

a recognition that we have reached
the end of a pretense,
though to tell the truth

what I already am thinking about
is my gratitude for language—
how it will stretch just so much and no farther;

how there are some holes it will not cover up;
how it will move, if not inside, then
around the circumference of almost anything—

how, over the years, it has given me
back all the hours and days, all the
plodding love and faith, all the

misunderstandings and secrets
I have willingly poured into it.

Tony Hoagland

Michael Hirsh in Foreign Policy:

But now that the backlash against Democratic centrism has made itself felt at the hands of an angry middle class— many of whom voted for Trump—and the party has tacked leftward in his direction, Stiglitz finds himself in the unusual position of urging caution. Stiglitz is worried that if Democrats shift too far left, they’ll be smeared as “socialists” and lose the 2020 presidential election—in which he believes the very institutions of Western civilization hang in the balance. For the famed economist, it is a consummate irony to be defending markets at all, since for years Stiglitz’s critics have faulted him for depending too much on government solutions.

Stiglitz spoke with Foreign Policy on the publication of his latest book, People, Power, and Profits: Progressive Capitalism for an Age of Discontent.

More here.