George Eaton in New Statesman:

On the evening of 28 October, as they absorbed the election of far-right Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, British leftists declared “socialism or barbarism”. The slogan was assumed by some to be a Corbynite coinage. But it was first popularised more than a century ago in war-ravaged Europe.

In 1915, writing under the pseudonym Junius to evade prosecution, German Marxist leader Rosa Luxemburg warned: “Bourgeois society stands at the crossroads, either transition to socialism or regression into barbarism.”

To Luxemburg’s dismay, rather than uniting in opposition to the First World War, Europe’s left-wing parties rallied behind their national governments. “Workers of the world unite in peacetime – but in war slit one another’s throats,” she observed acidly.

Luxemburg and co-leader Karl Liebknecht responded in 1916 by founding the revolutionary Spartacist League (named after Spartacus, the leader of the largest Roman slave rebellion), a breakaway from Germany’s Social Democratic Party.

More here.

Daniel Cossins in New Scientist:

The Incas left no doubt that theirs was a sophisticated, technologically savvy civilisation. At its height in the 15th century, it was the largest empire in the Americas, extending almost 5000 kilometres from modern-day Ecuador to Chile. These were the people who built Machu Picchu, a royal estate perched in the clouds, and an extensive network of paved roads complete with suspension bridges crafted from woven grass. But the paradox of the Incas is that despite all this sophistication they never learned to write.

Or did they? The Incas may not have bequeathed any written records, but they did have colourful knotted cords. Each of these devices was called a khipu (pronounced key-poo). We know these intricate cords to be an abacus-like system for recording numbers. However, there have also been teasing hints that they might encode long-lost stories, myths and songs too.

In a century of study, no one has managed to make these knots talk. But recent breakthroughs have begun to unpick this tangled mystery of the Andes, revealing the first signs of phonetic symbolism within the strands. Now two anthropologists are closing in on the Inca equivalent of the Rosetta stone. That could finally crack the code and transform our understanding of a civilisation whose history has so far been told only through the eyes of the Europeans who sought to eviscerate it.

More here.

Bennett McIntosh in Harvard Magazine:

Adam Zamoyski in Weekly Standard:

Men of action present a problem for decent modern democrats. For the very term “men of action” is a euphemism for men accomplished in war, and no public figure is more suspect these days than the warlike man. When Winston Churchill called Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821) “the greatest man of action born in Europe since Julius Caesar,” he meant to praise Napoleon in the highest terms, but for many, such praise is fraught with peril. After all, Julius Caesar, named dictator in perpetuity, placed the Roman Republic in mortal danger and died a tyrant’s death; the most famous of his assassins, Marcus Junius Brutus, is remembered as a paragon of republican virtue, though it proved impossible to restore the Republic after Caesar’s day.

Napoleon for his part extinguished all hope of a French republic by prudently measured gradations. Having won public adulation by heroic feats of generalship in Italy and Egypt, he knocked over the ruling Directory in the bloodless coup of 18 Brumaire in 1799 and as First Consul commanded power greater than that wielded by Louis XIV; he did what dictators often do and designated himself consul for life in 1802; then he took the obvious next step for a hero-worshipper of Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great and crowned himself emperor in 1804. And like Caesar and Alexander he ended badly, abdicating the throne in 1814 after disastrous military defeats, forced into exile on the Mediterranean islet of Elba, reclaiming imperial power a year later, only to meet decisive calamity at Waterloo and be condemned to the South Atlantic island fastness of Saint Helena, from which the sole escape was death, a mercy when at last it came, in 1821.

More here.

This evening I sat by an open window
and read till the light was gone and the book
was no more than a part of the darkness.

Saifedean Ammous in The Spectator:

Paul Krugman, blogger, fiat-currency enthusiast and winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics earlier this year justified his scepticism about cryptocurrencies in the New York Times. He asked readers to give him a clear answer to the question: what is the problem cryptocurrency solves? He wrote: ‘Governments have occasionally abused the privilege of creating fiat money, but for the most part governments and central banks exercise restraint.’ He added that, unlike bitcoin, ‘fiat currencies have underlying value because men with guns say they do. And this means that their value isn’t a bubble that can collapse if people lose faith.’

Case closed, apparently. What he omitted to mention was that bitcoin has been operating successfully for almost ten years now, with no confirmed cases of fraudulent transactions. Every day, its traded volumes run to billions of dollars. In fact, bitcoin’s increasing reputation for security and the growth it is still undergoing suggests it is not about to go away. Could it be the market knows something about bitcoin and central banks that Krugman does not?

More here.

George Dvorsky in Gizmodo:

It’s a huge day for archaeologists and anyone interested in the history of America’s first settlers. Findings from three new genetics studies—all released today—are presenting a fascinating, yet complex, picture of the first people in North and South America, and how they spread and diversified across two continents.

Our understanding of how the Americas were first settled used to be simple. Today, it’s not.

North America’s first migrants, we’ve been told, spilled into the continent at the tail end of the last Ice Age some 15,000 years ago, either by trekking along the West Coast and/or through an interior land route. Eventually, this population found itself south of a massive ice sheet covering North America from coast to coast. From here, scientists assumed that, as populations moved southward, some groups split off, never to meet again. Gradually, this pattern of southward migration and dispersal resulted in the peopling of the Americas.

But as the new research released today suggests, it’s considerably more complicated than that. Humans, as we’re all too aware, aren’t so predictable.

More here.

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

It’s fun to be in the exciting, chaotic, youthful days of the podcast, when anything goes and experimentation is the order of the day. So today’s show is something different: a solo effort, featuring just me talking without any guests to cramp my style. This won’t be the usual format, but I suspect it will happen from time to time. Feel free to chime in below on how often you think alternative formats should be part of the mix.

The topic today is “Why Is There Something Rather than Nothing?”, or equivalently “Why Does the Universe Exist at All?” Heady stuff, but we’re not going to back away from the challenge. What I have to say will roughly follow my recent paper on the subject, although in a more chatty and accessible style. It concerns ideas at the intersection of physics, philosophy, and theology, so tune in if you’re into that sort of thing.

More here.

Edward-Isaac Dovere in The Atlantic:

Tuesday brought wins for independent redistricting commissions that Schwarzenegger backed in three of the four states where they were on the ballot—Michigan, Missouri, and Colorado, with Utah still counting, but also trending toward yes. Now the former California governor has begun planning a summit for advocates, donors, and the people behind some of the successful campaigns to brainstorm and build to more wins.

It will be held at the Schwarzenegger Institute at the University of Southern California. Plans are being made to bring the group together within the next few months.

With Tuesday’s ballot questions, now nearly one-third of House districts will be drawn through independent redistricting according to a new report by the Schwarzenegger Institute, by commission or other methods. Schwarzenegger’s goal is to get that number to half by the end of 2020, and he already has his eyes on Virginia, among other states.

More here.

K.K. Rebecca Lai and Allison McCann in the New York Times:

In the 2016 presidential election, 55 percent of white women voted for Republicans. And this year, the group backed Democrats and Republicans evenly.

Historically, women, people of color and young voters have been more likely to cast ballots for Democrats, while men and wealthier voters have tended to favor Republicans. These demographic divisions held in 2018, but the last few decades of exit polls show that that has not always been the case.

The gender gap has remained relatively consistent since the 1980s, but it has been widening in recent years. Political scientists attribute this to women placing more of an emphasis on social welfare issues like health care and child care, which generally align with the Democratic Party, whereas men are more concerned with issues like taxes and national security.

More here.

Dan Sabbagh in The Guardian:

John McDonnell, the Labour shadow chancellor, is in discussions with the distinguished economist Lord Skidelsky about an independent inquiry into cutting the working week, possibly from the traditional five days to four.

The academic, who has a longstanding interest in the future of work, confirmed he was talking to the shadow chancellor about “the practical possibilities of reducing the working week”.

Skidelsky said he did not want to “be too exact” about his recommendations, although he added the idea of exploring ways of reducing the traditional five-day week to four was under consideration.

McDonnell has suggested the party could ​include a pledge to reduce the traditional working week by a day in its manifesto for the next election. Asked directly about this last month in a BBC interview, ​he said: “We will see how it goes.”

More here.

Art does not reproduce the visible, it makes visible.
                                                       –Paul Klee

With Two Camels and One Donkey

May we walk into our lives as into a watercolor,
grounded in sunlight, with two large ruminants and a baying ass.
May we go by foot, hot paving stones giving way to the Perfume Maker’s Souk,
cajoling two camels and the small-hoofed donkey.
May we improvise mosaics in the maize and indigo plazas,
with our crazy families, over acqueducts made famous by warring
Romans, and through decaying archways,
followed by two camels and one disagreeable donkey.
May we jam in the amphitheater and read aloud our odes to friends
who will love and disappoint and delight us in the melodies of friendship,
remembering to water two camels and one obstinate donkey.
In blowing sand that stings our faces, with recollection of our dead tenderly
wrapped and shaped like pyramids, may we sway
rhythmically on the backs of two camels and one moody donkey.
May we cherish the desert and embrace our memories of the sea,
knowing that one does not cancel out the other
but permits a cobalt-blue feather to grow in the mind.
May we gather in temporary shelters and break bread with others,
never allowing our envy to get out of hand and respecting the laws
of the lands we cross on two camels and one petulant donkey.
Thus, the painter invented this fanciful checkerboard grid,
this landscape of magic squares into which we may walk
with our lives and our deaths, with two camels and one recalcitrant donkey.

by Robin Becker
from Domain of Perfect Affection
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006

Sam Leith in The Guardian:

The fascination of what’s difficult,” wrote WB Yeats, “has dried the sap out of my veins … ” In the press coverage of this year’s Man Booker prize winner, Anna Burns’s Milkman, we’ve read a good many commentators presenting with sapless veins – but a dismaying lack of any sense that what’s difficult might be fascinating. “Odd”, “impenetrable”, “hard work”, “challenging” and “brain-kneading” have been some of the epithets chosen. They have not been meant, I think, as compliments. The chair of the judges, Kwame Anthony Appiah, perhaps unhelpfully, humblebragged that: “I spend my time reading articles in the Journal of Philosophy, so by my standards this is not too hard.” But he added that Milkman is “challenging […] the way a walk up Snowdon is challenging. It is definitely worth it because the view is terrific when you get to the top.”

That’s at least a useful starting point. Appiah defends the idea – which, nearly a century after modernism really kicked off, probably shouldn’t need defending – that ease of consumption isn’t the main criterion by which literary value should be assessed. We like to see sportsmen and women doing difficult things. We tend to recognise in music, film, television and the plastic arts that good stuff often asks for a bit of work from its audience. And we’re all on board with “difficult” material as long as it’s a literary classic – we read The Waste Land for our A-levels and we scratched our heads as we puzzled it out, and now we recognise that it is like it is because it has to be that way. So why is “difficult” a problem when it comes to new fiction?

More here.

Nellie Bowles in The New York Times:

The futurist philosopher Yuval Noah Harari worries about a lot. He worries that Silicon Valley is undermining democracy and ushering in a dystopian hellscape in which voting is obsolete. He worries that by creating powerful influence machines to control billions of minds, the big tech companies are destroying the idea of a sovereign individual with free will. He worries that because the technological revolution’s work requires so few laborers, Silicon Valley is creating a tiny ruling class and a teeming, furious “useless class.” But lately, Mr. Harari is anxious about something much more personal. If this is his harrowing warning, then why do Silicon Valley C.E.O.s love him so? “One possibility is that my message is not threatening to them, and so they embrace it?” a puzzled Mr. Harari said one afternoon in October. “For me, that’s more worrying. Maybe I’m missing something?”

…Part of the reason might be that Silicon Valley, at a certain level, is not optimistic on the future of democracy. The more of a mess Washington becomes, the more interested the tech world is in creating something else, and it might not look like elected representation. Rank-and-file coders have long been wary of regulation and curious about alternative forms of government. A separatist streak runs through the place: Venture capitalists periodically call for California to secede orshatter, or for the creation of corporate nation-states. And this summer, Mark Zuckerberg, who has recommended Mr. Harari to his book club, acknowledged a fixation with the autocrat Caesar Augustus. “Basically,” Mr. Zuckerberg told The New Yorker, “through a really harsh approach, he established 200 years of world peace.” Mr. Harari, thinking about all this, puts it this way: “Utopia and dystopia depends on your values.”

More here.

Daniel Zamora in Jacobin:

Following the sensational success of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century, with no less than 2.5 million copies of the book sold worldwide, inequality is now widely perceived, to quote Bernie Sanders, as “the great moral issue of our time.” Clearly the shift is part of a wider transformation of American and European politics in the wake the 2008 crash that has turned the “1%” into an object of increasing attention. Marx’s Capital is now a bestseller in the “free enterprise” section of the Kindle store, Jacobin is considered a respectable place to be published, and socialism no longer looks like a failed rock band trying to climb on stage when the “party” is already over. On the contrary, if we are to believe Gloria Steinem, a Bernie Sanders rally is now the “place to be,” even “for the girls.”

On closer scrutiny, however, it’s not entirely clear how well our current interest in inequality (especially income inequality) rhymes with Marx’s own theory, or the ideas that dominated social-policy debates in decades following the Second World War. In fact, one could even argue that our current focus on income and wealth inequality, while crucial to any progressive agenda, also misses some of the most important aspects of the nineteenth-century critique of capitalism. At that time, “income inequality” was an elusive and at best ancillary term. In fact, the “monetization” of inequality is actually a relatively recent way of seeing the world — and, aside from its obvious strengths, it is also a way of seeing that, as the historian Pedro Ramos Pinto noted, has considerably “narrowed” the way we think about social justice.

More here.

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