Raphael Minder in The New York Times:

MADRID — Jaime Colsa owns a transport company that delivers ordinary consumer goods — computers, food, drinks. The contents of his trucks aren’t eye-catching, but his vehicles certainly are, adorned with paintings showing cartoonlike faces, dogs, brightly colored geometric patterns, spirals and landscapes. These trucks that crisscross Spain have been painted by artists as part of the Truck Art Project. Financed by Mr. Colsa, the project aims in part to bring street art back to its roots. “Thanks to people like Banksy, this kind of art has made its way into the gallery,” Mr. Colsa, 45, said here recently. “But I thought it would be interesting and challenging to do the opposite — to get artists out of the gallery or the museum and actually back on the street.”

Banksy is not among the participants, but many of Mr. Colsa’s truck painters, most of whom are Spanish, started out as street artists, though by now they have also exhibited in major galleries and museums. Abraham Lacalle, whose work has been shown at the Reina Sofía Museum here, painted what he called a truck’s “explosion,” inspired by thoughts of what could happen to the merchandise transported inside. Two years after completing his painting, Mr. Lacalle said in a phone interview that it was strange to see how trucks and vans had more recently also become associated with terrorism, after attacks in Nice, Berlin, London and, earlier this month, Barcelona. “I painted with some sense of humor, imagining what could happen to the content of a truck in movement,” he said. “Nobody was then thinking about trucks as a tool of terrorism, so a work that was meant to be fun could now unintentionally appear pretty provocative.”

More here.

Peter Singer in Project Syndicate:

Let’s grant that the antifa activists are right about the irrationality of hard-core racist fanatics. It remains true that in the United States, and other countries where elections are the path to power, the far right can achieve its goals only by winning over middle-of-the-road voters. Even if many of these voters are also not completely rational – few people are – they are not likely to be won over to the anti-racist cause by seeing footage of anti-racists hitting racists with clubs or throwing urine-filled water bottles.

Such images convey, more than anything else, the idea that anti-racists are hooligans looking for a fight. Dignified nonviolent resistance and disciplined civil disobedience are more conducive to demonstrating a sincere ethical commitment to a better, non-racist society than clubbing people and hurling piss at them.

Violent resistance is particularly dangerous in the US because some states allow anyone to carry a firearm. In Charlottesville, a large number of white supremacists paraded through the streets dressed in camouflage and carrying semi-automatic assault rifles. If the antifa activists are going to match the racists in violence, will it be possible to hold the line at clubs? How long will it be before the deadly weapons now openly on display are also used?

More here.

Chad Orzel in Forbes:

As someone who has written a book about quantum physics and is at work on another, I get asked a fair number of questions about quantum phenomena. These are often portrayed as a kind of magic, but if you spend enough time thinking about the subject, it's very clearly not magic. Quantum phenomena are weird, certainly, because they confound everyday intuition, but they follow very naturally from the application of fairly simple rules. Knowing more about it doesn't make the subject any less amazing, but the weirdness recedes a bit.

The physics of thermodynamics, on the other hand, follows the opposite trajectory, at least initially. That is, when I find myself thinking more about what's going on in a process like boiling, knowing a little bit about the underlying physics makes it seem more magical. Even more so because there's minimal quantum content, just unimaginably vast numbers of particles interacting in a mostly classical way.

On a bulk level, boiling is just a manifestation of a phase transition in water: as you heat a container of water, eventually you reach a point where the water switches from liquid to gas.

More here.

Belen Fernandez at Al Jazeera:

This year, the inhabitants of debt-ridden Puerto Rico marked a dubious anniversary: one entire century of United States citizenship.

The island was charitably commandeered by the US in 1898 following the Spanish-American War, but the conferral of citizenship didn't take place until 1917 when, The Economist has noted, the move "conveniently allowed 20,000 [Puerto Ricans] to be drafted into service in the first world war the following year".

In addition to the luxury of being eligible to fight and die in every US war since, Puerto Ricans have enjoyed numerous other perks as Americans do.

In the 1940s and 50s, for example, there was a pretty cool law prescribing 10 years of jail time for anyone who said, sang, or whistledanything that could be construed as being against the US government.

Add to that a lengthy campaign of forced sterilisation of Puerto Rican women, the conversion of the Puerto Rican island of Vieques into a US military base and navy bombing range, and the suffocation of the local economy for the benefit of US corporate financial interests, and you wonder how Puerto Rico could possibly be better off independent.

More here.

David Cole in the NY Review of Books:

People who oppose the protection of racist speech make several arguments, all ultimately resting on a claim that speech rights conflict with equality, and that equality should prevail in the balance.^* They contend that the “marketplace of ideas” assumes a mythical level playing field. If some speakers drown out or silence others, the marketplace cannot function in the interests of all. They argue that the history of mob and state violence targeting African-Americans makes racist speech directed at them especially indefensible. Tolerating such speech reinforces harms that this nation has done to African-Americans from slavery through Jim Crow to today’s de facto segregation, implicit bias, and structural discrimination. And still others argue that while it might have made sense to tolerate Nazis marching in Skokie in 1978, now, when white supremacists have a friend in the president himself, the power and influence they wield justify a different approach.

There is truth in each of these propositions. The United States is a profoundly unequal society. Our nation’s historical mistreatment of African-Americans has been shameful and the scourge of racism persists to this day. Racist speech causes real harm. It can inspire violence and intimidate people from freely exercising their own rights. There is no doubt that Donald Trump’s appeals to white resentment and his reluctance to condemn white supremacists after Charlottesville have emboldened many racists. But at least in the public arena, none of these unfortunate truths supports authorizing the state to suppress speech that advocates ideas antithetical to egalitarian values.

More here.

David Hugh Smith in The Christian Science Monitor:

Davide Castelvecchi in Nature:

Astrophysicists may have detected gravitational waves last week from the collision of two neutron stars in a distant galaxy — and telescopes trained on the same region might also have spotted the event.

Rumours to that effect are spreading fast online, much to researchers’ excitement. Such a detection could mark a new era of astronomy: one in which phenomena are both seen by conventional telescopes and ‘heard’ as vibrations in the fabric of space-time. “It would be an incredible advance in our understanding,” says Stuart Shapiro, an astrophysicist at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign.

Scientists who work with gravitational-wave detectors won’t comment on the gossip because the data is still under analysis. Public records show that telescopes around the world have been looking at the same galaxy since last week, but astronomers caution that they could have been picking up signals from an unrelated source.

As researchers hunt for signals in their data, Nature explains what is known so far, and the possible implications of any discovery.

More here. [Thanks to Farrukh Azfar.]

Leighton Woodhouse:

Yesterday, at the anti-Alt-Right rally in Berkeley, I watched groups of masked Antifa members in Black Bloc formation swarm individuals who were apparently antagonizing them, and pummel them with their fists, feet, and flagpoles. When the victims tried to escape, they were run down, and in at least one case, cut off by the Antifa mob and beaten down some more. In the incidents I witnessed, about 5 or 6 Antifa members at a time participated in the attacks, while perhaps 100 others stood behind them, forming an impenetrable wall that blocked bystanders from intervening, or documenting the violence on camera. Those people would also help chase the victims when they fled.

In one case, as a crowd of non-Black Bloc protesters yelled at the assailants to let their victim go, an Antifa activist yelled, “He’s a Nazi!” over and over again, justifying the assault. Then, abruptly, maybe after realizing that the victim was not, in fact, a white nationalist, he changed his mantra. “He doesn’t have to be a Nazi!” he now shouted. The suggestion was that even if the victim wasn’t a fascist, he still deserved to be beaten. For what was unclear. Maybe because he supported Trump? Or he objected to Antifa’s tactics? Or refused to do something they ordered him to do? Who knew? The only thing those of us watching from a few yards away could tell was that a man, by himself, was on the ground, with a bloodied face, covering his head with his arms, being kicked and punched by a group of masked people, who were shielded by dozens of their comrades. My guess is that a lot of the Antifa people in the crowd who were passively assisting in the violence, including the guy yelling that he was a Nazi, didn’t know anything more than that, either.

More here.

Anil K Seth in Aeon:

In my work at the Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science at the University of Sussex in Brighton, I collaborate with cognitive scientists, neuroscientists, psychiatrists, brain imagers, virtual reality wizards and mathematicians – and philosophers too – trying to do just this. And together with other laboratories, we are gaining exciting new insights into consciousness – insights that are making real differences in medicine, and that in turn raise new intellectual and ethical challenges. In my own research, a new picture is taking shape in which conscious experience is seen as deeply grounded in how brains and bodies work together to maintain physiological integrity – to stay alive. In this story, we are conscious ‘beast-machines’, and I hope to show you why.

Let’s begin with David Chalmers’s influential distinction, inherited from Descartes, between the ‘easy problem’ and the ‘hard problem’. The ‘easy problem’ is to understand how the brain (and body) gives rise to perception, cognition, learning and behaviour. The ‘hard’ problem is to understand why and how any of this should be associated with consciousness at all: why aren’t we just robots, or philosophical zombies, without any inner universe? It’s tempting to think that solving the easy problem (whatever this might mean) would get us nowhere in solving the hard problem, leaving the brain basis of consciousness a total mystery.

But there is an alternative, which I like to call the real problem: how to account for the various properties of consciousness in terms of biological mechanisms; without pretending it doesn’t exist (easy problem) and without worrying too much about explaining its existence in the first place (hard problem).

More here.

Lee Fang and Leighton Akio Woodhouse in The Intercept:

In recent years, however, 4chan’s trolling campaigns have merged with larger political debates about multiculturalism and diversity. The Gamergate controversy, which tapped into the rich vein of misogyny running through 4chan and included aggressive harassment of women online, provided near unlimited fodder for conspiracy-tinged outrage directed at feminists and advocates of progressive identity politics.

4chan users have relished any opportunity to troll what author Angela Nagle has termed “Tumblr-liberalism,” an emerging online discourse on the left that Nagle notes has reached an “absurd apotheosis with a politics based on the minutiae and gradations of rapidly proliferating identities.” This emerging discourse, which Nagle documents in her new book on the online culture wars, “Kill All Normies,” centers on a culture of mass online callouts, public humiliation, and other efforts to penalize anyone deemed in violation of constantly shifting norms of sensitivity around identity.

In one salient example of the absurdities of this style of liberal discourse, Nagle points to an “antiracist” writer who reacted to the death of a child killed by an alligator to ridicule the “white male entitlement” of his parents.

Some on the political right have seized on such attempts to reflexively mock white people by embracing a newly assertive and aggrieved white identity. For sites such as 4chan, which exists to blow past boundaries, the opportunity to present white identity politics was quickly taken to its logical extreme.

More here.

Brian Hioe in New Bloom Magazine:

FOR SOMEONE WHO has himself professed discomfort with Leninism and has sought to see in Bogdanov a lost possibility of the Russian Revolution that might have led to less authoritarian outcomes for the USSR, it is bizarre to watch Wark justify Wang’s statist views, apologism for contemporary Chinese imperialism and capitalism, and self-orientalizing Chinese nationalism. If Wark finds the eventual course that the history of the USSR took to be so repulsive, why does he not feel the same about China? Namely, Wark allows himself to be caught up in the Orientalist exoticization about 20th century Chinese history that Wang advances, something altogether too seductive to many western leftists, and fails to apply the same intellectual criticality to China which he does to the Soviet Union, apparently with the view that the Soviet Union can be critically censured because it was a “western” nation (Although of course, views of Russia as “Eastern”, “Oriental”, or “Asian” nation were commonplace in the early 20th century, this is no longer the case, with Russia more usually framed as part of Europe in contemporary political discourse).

As Wark states in his gloss on Wang’s intellectual thought, “Both the achievements and the failures of the Chinese Communist Party are on an unprecedented scale. And yet, given that much of the fate of global capitalism now rests in the hands of the Chinese Communist Party, China’s twentieth century cannot be left out of the formation of concepts for thinking and acting in and against these times.” For Wang, this means that the Chinese Communist Party should be affirmed rather than abandoned, particularly as a form of resistance against neoliberalism after Deng era economic reforms which introduced the free market into China, and led to the current economic inequalities which run rampant in China today. Consequently, the party-state must control capital, as a way of subjugating the excesses of capitalism.

But Wang defends against the claim that party rule is merely dictatorial, with the claim that the “mass line,” an innovation of Maoism, allows the party-state mechanism to serve as the means of realizing the people’s will. As Wark states, “The mass line means: all for the masses, all by the masses, from the masses to the masses. The mass line may have connections in Confucian tradition. Attention to rites and music (liyi) and not just statutory measures (zhidu) help create and maintain a kind of regulatory order, what Wang calls supra-representation.” Wang also draws analogy between the party and the Gramscian notion of the party as the modern prince.

More here.

Richard Marshall interviews Bas van Fraassen in 3:AM Magazine:

3:AM: A naïve realist might assume that science is about finding out what the world is really like and that its theories are either true or false. But you have this idea of ‘empirical adequacy’ that doesn’t take that view, don’t you? Can you first say something about the anti-realism you presented in The Scientific Image so that we get an idea of where you’re thinking is coming from?

BvF: Scientific activity is an important and ubiquitous cultural phenomenon, and has its own criteria of success in practice. Philosophers differ, however, on what those criteria are.

Roughly speaking, scientific realists take the basic criterion to be ontological, they take the ultimate aim to be the construction of true theories, accurate representations, not just of what appears in our measurement outcomes but of what is going on ‘behind the phenomena’. On this view to accept a scientific theory as completely successful would involve belief that everything it postulates is real and everything it says about that is true. This is how it stood in the seventies, since then that first fine careless rapture has been qualified in terms of approximation, asymptotic approach, similarity, and at the extreme end, belief only in significant structure with agnosticism as to a material carrier of this structure, if any. But the basic ideology remains intact: science is all about discovering the true blueprint of the universe.

Empiricists in the philosophy of science take the basic criterion of success in science to be empirical, with the ultimate aim of empirically adequate theories, accurate representation of what is accessible to human observation and manipulation. Theories and the search for explanation are important, but instrumentally, as roads toward greater empirical knowledge. Empiricism is not skepticism, nor anti-realism in any general sense, it is just anti-scientific-realism. Empiricism as it is now can be combined with a ‘common sense realism’ that sees no difficulties in our reference to trees, rocks, persons, lasers, electron microscopes, interferometers, radio telescopes …. or, in their own way, optical phenomena such as rainbows and images produced by microscopes, to give some examples.

Constructive empiricism, the position I advocate, is an empiricism of this sort, a view about what science is that sees overall truth, or truth about what is not observable, as irrelevant to the basic operative criterion of success in the sciences.

More here.

Lee Jones in The Current Moment:

The most striking aspect of the left’s hysteria over Charlottesville is its failure to understand that it won the US culture wars, not the right. By any reasonable measure, American attitudes have become steadily more liberal over time. A summary of opinion polling since the 1970s shows a “sweeping, fundamental change in norms regarding race”, with steady declines on practically every key measure of racism. Surveys on attitudes towards women reveal an identical decline in sexism. More belatedly, a similar transformation happened in attitudes towards LGBT people. Two-thirds of Americans now support gay marriage, up from just 40 percent in 2009, suggesting that campaigners for equal rights now find themselves kicking at a largely open door. The membership of vile organisations like the Ku Klux Klan has collapsed, from a peak of three to six million in the 1920s to around 6,000 today. Only 10 percent of the US public admit to supporting the “alt right” (only 4 percent “strongly”, while 83 percent say it is “unacceptable to hold neo-Nazi or white supremacist views”. Too high and not high enough, one might say. But the fact is that the far-right is a lunatic fringe.

The rise of the “alt-right” does not signify some grave reversal of this trend, requiring massive societal mobilisation to counter it, but a rather sad, ineffectual backlash from the side that has already lost. The fact that the “Unite the Right” rally managed to draw only 500 protestors from across the entire US (population: 323 million) speaks volumes. A “free speech rally” in Boston a few days later drew only about 100 attendees, whereas the counter-protestors numbered around 40,000, with smaller counter-protests in many other US cities. The situation is identical in Britain, where far-right rallies typically draw crowds of one or two dozen, dwarfed by “antifa” counter-protestors (and the police). Trump’s mealy-mouthed, inconsistent criticisms of “both sides” are profoundly out of step with wider social attitudes, reflected in his total isolation even amongst Republican leaders and military chiefs.

More here.