by Yohan J. John

There's no real downside to engaging with pop culture. If you happen to get into the latest craze, you can participate in collective joy. If it doesn't quite move you, you can join in with the 'haters' and engage in a different but no less enjoyable communal experience. Either way, you can be part of the Conversation, analyzing the meaning of the mass experience from as many perspectives as possible. So it was in the spirit of social participation that I decided to start playing Pokémon GO. I wanted to see what all the hullabaloo was about.

In the US, Pokémon GO now has more users than Twitter. And it only took them a few weeks to achieve this. Part of the draw of Pokémon seems to be nostalgia. The original game was introduced by Nintendo for the Game Boy in 1995. Since then it has morphed into a media empire, spanning anime, trading cards, toys and all manner of swag. The basic concept behind the game is quite simple: each player (or “Pokémon Trainer”) travels around a virtual world looking for Pokémon — cute “pocket monsters” with whimsical names like “Pikachu”, “Meowth” and “Bulbasaur”. The trainer captures a Pokémon by chucking a magical ball at it — it seems to work a bit like that spectre-snatching toaster from Ghostbusters. Various in-game resources must be used to 'level-up' the trainers and 'evolve' the Pokémon. The Pokémon trainers then compete in vicarious battles, pitting their Pokémon against each other.

No doubt nostalgia (or retromania) is a powerful cultural force these days, but I suspect that it was only the initial impetus for Pokémon GO's popularity. After all, many of the current players are kids who are too young to remember the early Pokémon games and TV shows (plus curious adults like me who were a little too old for them when they first came out). I suspect that Pokémon GO works because its gameplay combines some of the most powerful elements in modern gaming in a package that requires little or no skill.

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by Elise Hempel

There's an innocent-looking little white ornamental tree in my neighbor's front yard which blocks your view when you're trying to turn from C Street onto Polk. You must crouch at the wheel and peer through the small open space beneath its lovely overhang to see another car coming from the left. Because this sweet little tree had already caused one accident and one near-accident, and because the tree's owner isn't friendly and approachable enough to tell her that her tree is a hazard, I decided recently to call the police.
Here, in condensed form, is the conversation between me and the male officer:

Me: Hi. I'm not sure I'm calling the right place, but there's a tree in my neighbor's yard – a little white ornamental tree – that blocks our view when we're trying to make a turn onto Polk Street. We're on C Street. There's already been one accident, and just now another one almost happened….

Officer: I know the tree you're talking about. I live in the neighborhood. I've never had a problem with it.

Me: Well, I can't see around it, and neither can my boyfriend. There's already been an accident, and a guy on a motorcycle almost got hit just now….

Officer: Are you in a car or an SUV when you're trying to turn?

Me: A car, but it doesn't matter. My boyfriend drives a truck and can't see around the tree. You can't see around it when you're walking either.

Officer: I've never had a problem with it, Ma'am, but I'll send an officer out to determine if it's a hazard.

Me: I'm telling you: It is a hazard. You can't see around it. We're afraid to turn there, and I'm afraid there'll be more accidents….

Officer (in anger): Ma'am! I said I'll send someone out to make that determination!

And then the click of the phone as he hung up on me. At first came puzzlement and disbelief, and then an anger that soon turned to a familiar sick feeling in my stomach. And then, even though I had started the day in a good mood, I was suddenly in tears at the kitchen window. I had imagined, before I made that call, that I would get a thank you from the police – thanks for letting us know, for being a good citizen, for helping us keep our streets safe. But instead I had been dismissed – almost before my first sentence was out of my mouth, almost immediately. I felt terrible, and now, so quickly and easily, full of self-doubt. What had I done wrong? Had I pushed too hard? Had I interrupted him and not been aware of it? Should I have been more quiet and polite?

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by Max Sirak

Today, we're going to talk about opposites.

We're all smart here, right? I mean, this isn't a site for dumb people. The banner at the top of every 3qd page says: Science, Arts, Literature, Politics, Gossip, and Philosophy. Even a casual scroll down the posts of any given day lets the reader know this is a place for ideas. And, I'm not ashamed to admit, there have been times when I've clicked on an article and ended up in over my head. It's cool. It happens.

But, I digress. Opposites. I'm sure all of us can agree opposites need each other to survive. Superheroes needs villains. Who would Batman be without his panoply of wrong doers? A rich dude with a bunch of toys. Who would Superman be without Lex Luther? A nerdy reporter, I guess.

You can also see this in other places. “Up” implies “down.” “Left” balances “right.” “Light” creates “dark.” Essentially, as soon as we begin describing what something is, we, by nature, draw lines around what it is not. If all the stuff over here is “good,” then everything else over there is “not-good.”

Simple, yeah?

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India is Blinding Young Kashmiri Protestors…
The Guardian UK 18 July 2016

“They asked for it,”
a family friend tweets,
“#AccheDin are here again.”

Go fuck yourself
I want to shout back, our blindness
an affront to our clear seeing,

remembering the last time
I saw this dear friend, not virtually,
but at the Oberoi where her rose-

tinted cat eye designer glasses sat
on her nose like an army
tank deployed by Delhi in Kashmir,

chunky, stolid, demanding notice.
Should I feed her books about Hindu
rulers and Muslims subjects

in South Asia’s northernmost region
to nurse her #MannKiBaat and
#CowRaksha? Will she still praise

the pump action pellet gun
which is really a 12-gauge shotgun,
“crowd dispersal techniques”

India uses in its integral part?
But my friend will just take off
her glasses and shut her eyes.

by Rafiq Kathwari, whose debut collection, In Another Country, is available here.

by Maniza Naqvi

The job entitled and wealthy are all set to win the election in November. And keep things exactly the same. Fool us again. Shame on us. The way things are run, it makes no difference who becomes President. It doesn't matter. And, either of them would oil the machinery churning out Gold Star families.

Mr. Trump voices banning Muslims. Mrs. Clinton voted bombing them. Mr. Trump questions why nuclear weapons are built. Mrs. Clinton doesn't. Mr. Trump would build a wall against migrants from Mexico. Mrs. Clinton was part of the Government that deported more migrants than any time before in the history of this country. Mrs. Clinton supports the wall built in Palestine. Mr. Trump opposed the war in Iraq. Mrs. Clinton voted for it. Words are cheap. Deeds mean death. And to think they will be voted in by people who have suffered most by these deeds, in this country.

Makes no difference who becomes President. Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton. Except that Hillary Clinton has more experience selling weapons and war. And all Trump does is talk about building stuff and he plagiarizes and distills the last fifteen years of State sanctioned and widely shilled hate speech. Yes he does. He simply repeats and champions the narrative and words already out there endorsing hate and selling of those wars. All he does is to shout out loudly all that's already been said, to make the case for endless war. He says it all unvarnished without nuance from podiums for a Presidential campaign. No, neither of these choices are Russia's fault. And yes, Bernie Sanders, by not choosing the path he pointed towards, and heading an Independent party, has missed a historic opportunity. No matter, because he has awakened millions of young people and they will not accept his choice or follow his lead to back away from this path. They will most probably vote for the Green Party candidate, Jill Stein.

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by J. M. Tyree

“Facts just twist the truth around…” -Talking Heads

During the run-up to the referendum on Britain’s relationship with the European Union, I noticed a persistent commercial for SlimFast weight-loss shakes being broadcast on the non-BBC channels. A sultry voice suggested: “Have a go, ladies, and see what you can do.” That’s pretty much what the angry and aging voters of England and Wales decided for themselves and the rest of Britain. The tagline of the commercial and the product slogan – “Works for Me” – struck me as remarkable. SlimFast wasn’t guaranteeing that their product worked, or that it worked in any specific, quantifiable, medically verifiable way. But the idea that it “Works for Me” suggested that it might work for you. In fact, the product might or might not work at all, but the company could always say that they never said it did, exactly. Brexit was not as advertised, not As Seen on TV.

This curiously philosophical commercial popped to mind when I watched a series of interviews with the residents of Stoke-on-Trent, a heavily Labour area that went 70% for Brexit. One pottery producer said that production might need to be cut due to economic uncertainty and reduced demand in light of Brexit. But an angry-looking woman retorted to the BBC’s cameras that the media should come back in twelve months and see how much better everything would be after Brexit. “I can’t wait for it to happen,” I think she said. (But if things were going so swimmingly, what was she so angry about?) Brexit might not work – not actually work, not in reality. Most experts predict a recession, potentially a bad one. (The “so-called experts” were cast into a somewhat similar position to a doctor or trained nutritionist advocating that there might be other ways to slim down.) But the real historical consequences don’t matter, because we’re living in a post-truth era of SlimFast politics. Ladies, Brexit “Works for Me.” As Katharine Viner, the Editor of The Guardian, put it in her Brexit Op-Ed, “How Technology Disrupted the Truth,” “When ‘facts don’t work’ and voters don’t trust the media, everyone believes in their own ‘truth’ – and the results, as we have just seen, can be devastating.”

It’s tempting to call this phenomenon The Americanization of Facts, although in truth it’s a global feature of enbubbled media, characteristic of Russia Today television broadcasts as much as the British tabloids and the Fox News Channel. Americans might be tempted to roll their eyes at the seeming shock of British liberals about this situation – been there, done that, here we go again. The problem goes beyond garden-variety bias or even propaganda. Instead, we conform to a consumerist conception of truth as something that we select from a menu of choices. The inside-out thinking of Madison Avenue and the logic of climate-change denial has become basic to our era’s entire zeitgeist.

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by Holly A. Case

James Baldwin

Dost Mektupları (Letters of a Friend) is a collection of correspondence between James Baldwin and the Turkish actor Engin Cezzar (pronounced Jezzar). Although they were written in English with a spattering of French (Baldwin) and Shakespearean English (Cezzar), the letters have only been published in Turkish. This may seem odd, but if you know much about Baldwin, one of the things you probably know is that the estate has mostly forbidden publication of his correspondence, and denied biographers permission to cite directly from his letters.

What this means is that in Letters of a Friend, readers of Turkish can glimpse a side of Baldwin that few have seen: Baldwin in his own words to a friend. Except that Baldwin's words are in Turkish, and Baldwin didn't know Turkish…

Bear in mind that excerpts from the letters cited hereafter have been translated from English into Turkish by a translator, and then back again from Turkish to English by me. I have not seen the texts in English. My translations may therefore bear only an impressionistic resemblance to the original.

The title of Baldwin's first novel is Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953). In Letters of a Friend, this title appears in Turkish several times. On page 16, it's rendered as Git Onu Dağlara Söyle, which translates literally as Go Sing It to the Mountains. The word for “tell” and “sing” are the same in Turkish, which seems appropriate, given that Baldwin's title is also the name of a well-known song. A footnote tells us this is the title under which the book was translated in Turkey, but I can't find it anywhere. On pages 43 and 54, the title is given as Çık Dağ Başına Orada Anlat, which translates as Go Out and Tell It There on a Mountaintop, which is closer to the injunction in the original, if still somewhat awkward.

Part of the problem is that “Go Tell It on the Mountain,” which is the title of an African-American spiritual composed the year the Civil War ended (1865), does not quite ring with the same soulful ecstasy in Turkish, even when it is correctly translated. All of the cultural resonance of the phrase—the pain and sorrow of enslavement, the hope of freedom, Protestantism with a rhythm profoundly unlike the Lutheran populist pounding of “A Mighty Fortress is Our God”—is absent from the Turkish.

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by Thomas R Wells

Liberalism is a centuries old political project of taming the power of the state so that it works for the ruled not the rulers. Can it survive the security state midwifed by global terrorism? Only if we take back responsibility for managing the dark political emotions of fear and anger that terrorists seek to conjure.

How do we resist the security state?

First, by challenging its effectiveness. PRISM and the other opaquely named universal surveillance programmes seem to have been approximately zero use in predicting terrorist attacks before they happen; last year the TSA failed to detect 67 out of 70 weapons and explosives carried by mystery shoppers. Security expert Bruce Schneier characterises the counter-terrorism security measures that increasingly dominate our experience of public spaces as mostly theatrical, designed to “make people feel more secure without doing anything to actually improve their security”. (And actually they can't even manage that.)

Second, by challenging the cost-effectiveness of the security state even if it worked as it is supposed to. The loss of our privacy is not a small price to pay for preventing terrorism and saving lives. Firstly because we should be consistent. If we wouldn't give up privacy rights to reduce minor risks of death in other contexts (like installing government cameras in every bathroom to save people from bathtub slips), what rational reason do we have for giving up all our privacy to the government to reduce the risk of terrorism from almost nothing to possibly slightly less? Secondly because privacy is not an ornament but the heart of liberalism. In a liberal society the people should be mysterious and the government should be transparent; the more these are reversed the further we go towards despotism.

But there is a further problem with the security state besides its ineffectiveness and inefficiency: It is a fundamentally incoherent project. Its justification is to provide citizens with freedom from fear, yet in order for the security state to gain the powers and money to do this it must relentlessly terrify the public with claims about how real and significant the terrorist threat is! Thus, the security state is constitutively unable to achieve what it is supposed to do, and itself becomes a greater source of public fear about terrorism than terrorists themselves could hope to be.

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by Carl Pierer

Perception lies at the heart of our everyday life. Both Merleau-Ponty and Wittgenstein have derived radical philosophical results from paying close attention to the structures of our perception. This essay attempts to illustrate a deep affinity between the two thinkers: not only do both discover a common dualistic ontology underlying their opponents' view, but they also face similar difficulties in trying to overcome this dualism. While Merleau-Ponty's project in the Phenomenology of Perception remains unfinished, it is Wittgenstein's radical conception of the philosophical project that allows him to truly subvert the dualism.

Merleau-Ponty's analysis uncovers aspects of perception that are inherently paradoxical for empiricism and intellectualism: “Thus there is a paradox of immanence and transcendence in perception. Immanence, because the perceived object cannot be foreign to him who perceives; transcendence, because it always contains something more than what is actually given.” (Merleau-Ponty 1964, p. 16)

Empiricism claims that all knowledge is derived from experience. Experience is grounded in the sphere of transcendence: the external world, things in themselves, objects. For empiricism, there is a direct input from this sphere, an atomic ‘sensation', and the richness of perception is constituted of such atomic ‘sensations'. However, as Merleau-Ponty shows, this ignores the fact that perception is always already meaningful: “To perceive is not to experience a multitude of impressions that bring along with them some memories capable of completing them, it is to see an immanent sense bursting forth from a constellation of givens without which no call to memory is possible.” (Merleau-Ponty 2014, p.23)

In this way, immanence, i.e. interiority, consciousness, and subjectivity, becomes an issue for empiricism: if the perceived object is not to some extent familiar in advance, in other words, not already meaningful for us, there is no point at which the richness and meaning of perception could be constituted. This thought is developed and motivated in great detail in the early chapters of the Phenomenology.

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by Richard King

“The King is dead! Long live the King!” Thus did the English aristocracy mark the death of a monarch, with words that at once acknowledge change and insist on continuity – on the idea that divinely sanctioned kingship not only survives the King's demise but also alights immediately on the next in line, on the dead monarch's heir. It would be difficult to conceive of a more effective way of perpetuating and shoring up class power. One king carks it, another takes his place, or is deemed to have done so by God Himself …

Today's elites lack such brazenness, but they are no less convinced of their right to rule. For they too posses the uncanny ability to declare themselves existentially challenged and at the same time move to consolidate their position. Faced with pressure from without, or below, the old habits of mind reassert themselves: by some weird magic or historical instinct the establishment is able to transcend defeat even as it acknowledges it: “The establishment is dead! Long live the establishment!”

Take the case of post-referendum Britain. After the shock of the Brexit vote and David Cameron's resignation, everyone from the grandees of the major parties to the opinion writers in the mainstream press seemed to be noisily convinced of the following three things: one, that Brexit was yet more evidence of how disconnected the political establishment now is from that amorphous constituency “the people”; two, that this fissure in the political soil heralded some major ideological earthquake, and subsequent tectonic realignment, to which the major parties would have to respond if they didn't want to be cast into history's dustbin; and, three, that the leader of the Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn – the man who, in transforming Labour into something like a mass social movement, had taken on, and is still taking on, the very establishment deemed to be in crisis – should resign his leadership immediately.

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by Leanne Ogasawara

Pinochet. Chavez. Trump? After decades of suffering under populist autocrats, Latin Americans have a message for the Gringos: Welcome to our world.

So begins a great article in Politico by Ben Wofford.

So many times over the past several years, I have wondered how America managed to turn into a bonafide banana republic in little over two decades.

How had it happened?

With surging inequality at levels approaching Latin America,infrastructure is no longer obviously first world and the divide between elite and the rest in terms of education, health and overall prospects is simple stunning…. what happened to the American dream, right?

So given this state of affairs, I suppose it shouldn't be so shocking to see a “strongman” rise up. It is the cult of his personality and that of his family, along with the populist promise of “taking on the elite” based on nothing whatsoever than the mere fact that he says, “believe me.”

As Wofford writes:

Scholars, writers and public officials across the continent report that Trump is viewed with horror and fascination by many Latin Americans. They emphasized that Trump has caudillo qualities they way Pinochet had medals: Cult of personality, rage against the elite, unbridled machismo, an acerbic disregard for the rules—coupled with an apparent willingness to break them at nearly any cost.

Wow, they even have a word for it down there: caudillo.

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by Chris Bacas

(Midnight in Moscow, Chapter 1 is here.)

En route from Petersburg, adrenaline and second-hand nicotine kept me awake at first. Eventually, I slept through the cabin heat and sparking wheels; waking up in Moscow weak, achy and slightly dizzy. Everything finally caught up with me. For that day, we planned on Red Square, Kremlin and a home-cooked meal. His tomb closed, Lenin was in for regular maintenance: change of embalming fluid and new fan belt.

We made a stop at my colleagues' apartment. He had business there and a lesson for me. A neighbor of his survived the Nazi blockade. Now bed-ridden, she would tell me the story. One of her children let us in. A TV quietly hummed with peppy pop music, expertly sung and mostly minor-key. My friend sat nearby in the darkened apartment. I pulled a chair next to the couch bed. She greeted me warmly despite obvious pain. Slowly, with somber translation, she told how scores of people dropped over daily and lay where they fell. Exhausted crews cleared their bodies. Her husband, athletic and lean, went quickly. Parents fed children all their rations until the inevitable end. Grass, bugs, pine needles and bark were staples. In the twilight parlor, tchotchkes and framed photos blurring, the velocity of life slowed and upended. Blankets tucked chin high, her voice corkscrewed into me; a warmer echo of the Petersburg sleeping car. It cut furrows into the puny real-estate of my experience. The agony of a vast nation and unknown people is a mirage. Its' contours and colors shimmer and fade in pace with our false distance. One moment made that span an arm's length. In the hallway, roasted meat, pine-scented cleaners and dusty carpet smells hung thick. We said goodbyes and thanks, while she told my host her time was nearly up.

At dinner, the food was fantastic and hospitality warm. In a Russian meal, the starters: salads, beans, soup and sautés are so tasty, it takes tremendous effort to save room for the main courses. The Russian method of vodka-drinking requires great strength: glasses hold 2-3 ounces and get refilled for toasting many times. I tried kvass, a rye-flavored soda. It delighted me, after growing up with “Pennsylvania Dutch Birch Beer”. I ended the meal happy, stuffed and fully delirious with flu.

Back at my colleagues' apartment, his tenant offered to treat my condition. We went upstairs to a neighbors' for the prescription. One placed tumblers on the table and peeled a few inch-thick garlic cloves. He poured full glasses of hot-pepper vodka and encouraged me to eat the garlic. I chewed up the biggest clove, my mouth and nose burning. We raised the tumblers.

“Nazdarovya!”

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by Ram Manikkalingam

I am sitting in Colombo, Sri Lanka. We are at peace and are enjoying real democracy after more than three decades of civil war and almost five years of creeping authoritarian rule under the previous president. I spend half my time in Amsterdam, just a two-hour train ride to Brussels and a couple more to Paris – sites of so many attacks recently. It is surreal that Europe, the continent I went to, to avoid being targeted by terrorism in my country, is now becoming less and less safe while Sri Lanka has become an island of peace and democracy. While the cost of how we did it can be debated, and continues to be, there is no denying that we ended up in a good place for all of us in Sri Lanka, and the world too.

Meanwhile, (with perhaps a small degree of schadenfreude) I watch Europe become tense, turn in on itself, exclude communities, become subject to attacks, impose emergency law, and break apart with Brexit. I ask myself what is really going on in Europe. While we may draw a direct line from the invasion of Iraq to the attacks against civilians in Paris and Brussels, that alone is insufficient to explain why young men in Brussels and Paris will travel thousands of miles away to join a movement with which they have little social, cultural or political affinity. And it simply does not even begin to explain Brexit, Scottish nationalism, or Marie Le Pen. Maybe, just maybe, it might be more useful to start in Europe and ask how have things changed in the past decade since I have been living there. What do I see now that I did not see before? And how would I describe the politics of Europe to someone who had never been there, not experienced it, and needed to understand it better?

For all its progress and enlightenment, Europe is still a continent of Tribes – Big Tribes, Small Tribes and New Tribes. Big Tribes have their own state. Within this state they feel dominant (or at least feel that they ought to be). These Big Tribes may be as big as the English and French or as small as the Dutch and Danes. What they have in common is they live under their own political roof. Then we have the Small Tribes. These are invariably the Tribes that live within the borders of a state the Big Tribes dominate. These Tribes range from the Scots and the Northern Irish, to the Basques, the Tyroleans and the Corsicans. They yearn for a political roof that is closer to them. Or at least they reject the political roof that has been built on top of them by others who are more powerful then they. And finally you have the New Tribes. These are Tribes related to Europe’s colonial project. Some arrived during colonialism, others after colonialism ended, and still others continue to enter today. This Tribe is viewed as foreign by the Big Tribes. But they are, or at least feel they are, as European as the other two Tribes. Let me unpack each of these Tribes a little further.

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