Again

I find myself noticing you again
eight years later,
you coming out of the earth, pale,
erect, shadow over men.
You can’t be buried.
You are Washington, White
House manicured lawn,
Navy band in starched bleach and crease.
Timid flowers all form neat rows before you,
lines cleaner than a border,
sharp as the mark you cut against the sky,
a man’s quill tip
engraving his name. Yes,
you must insist upon yourself,
white as a presidential slogan
stitched against a red, red rage.

Once I read all over the Roman Empire
were obelisks
stolen out of Africa. In America
they construct their own,
name them for a man who owned
Africans, built a white nation
(always insisting upon itself).
Here, man wants to make himself monument,
peak gleaming as a Klansman’s hood
rising into night,
an elevation he thought was always his,
ghastly return of his mind’s making,
a making: America
over and over again.

by Daria-Ann Martineau
from Split This Rock

Peter E. Gordon and Sam Moyn debate if and how the “fascism” label is appropriate for Orbán, Erdoğan, Modi, or Trump, over at the NY Review of Books. Gordon:

Among all the terms that are available to us for historical comparison today it is hard to see why “fascism” alone should be stamped as impermissible. No differently than other terms, fascism now belongs to our common archive of political memory. Exceeding its own epoch, it stands as a common name for a style of institutionalized cruelty and authoritarian rule that recurs with remarkable frequency, albeit in different guises. In the United States, it would no doubt take a different form. As the historian of European fascism Robert Paxton has observed, “the language and symbols of an authentic American fascism would ultimately have little to do with the original European models.” In an American fascism, he writes, one would see not swastikas but “Christian crosses” and “Stars and Stripes.”

The true signs of fascism’s resurgence, however, would not be merely the symbols it deploys in its propaganda but its treatment of those who are most vulnerable. This is why the spectacle of migrants in cages should alarm us all, and why we cannot take comfort in the thought that things are not as bad as they once were.

Moyn:

America’s Resistance after the election of Donald Trump turned to analogy to abnormalize him: the US teetered on the edge of fascism, and with a Hitler on the make now at the helm.

That comparison requires a careful ethic is the lesson three years on, for the sake of understanding and mobilization alike. It is surely fodder for some future ironist that, after our era of fearing Trump’s actions, he appears set in the current pandemic to go down in history for a worse sin of inaction. For all his abuses of the powers accorded the presidency in the prior generation, his failure to deploy them now seems more glaring. His hijinks in flouting the rule of law, though inexcusable, have not concealed the continuity of American governance, for good and for ill. (The Republicans have gotten their conservative judges and tax cuts, just as before.) William Barr is the reincarnation of Carl Schmitt, the evil genius of National Socialism, wrote Tamsin Shaw in these pages, except that our attorney general has done his worst by letting some louts out of their lies and pursuing causes with roots deep in American history. No analogy to Hitler or fascism is needed to explain these results.

David Runciman over at the Talking Politics’ History of Ideas podcast:

Frantz Fanon was a psychiatrist who both experienced and analysed the impact of colonial violence. In The Wretched of the Earth (1961) he developed an account of politics that sought to channel violent resistance to colonialism as a force for change. It is a deliberately shocking book. David explores what Fanon’s argument says about the possibility of moving beyond the power of the modern state.

Here.

Stephen Nash in Sapiens:

In October of last year, I found myself with my family in the heart of a sacred forest of the Mijikenda people of Kenya. One of the elders there told me that seven funerary statues had been stolen from his homestead in the preceding decades. He didn’t cry; he didn’t get angry. He just stared at the ground with a glazed look in his eyes. It was the look of a man who had come to terms with his loss but who had not forgotten the harm or gotten over the pain. It was overwhelming to hear his story, and I’ll never forget that moment.

Sadly, 30 similar statues had been held since 1990 at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science (DMNS), where I work. It had taken me more than a decade to get them shipped back to Kenya. Now I had the chance to visit them at the Fort Jesus Museum in Mombasa; it was amazing to see them again, so close to their home, where they belong.

This is the story of their decadelong journey.

Most people in modern society enjoy the right to decide what happens to their bodies, as well as those of their loved ones, when they die. As Chip Colwell, my former DMNS colleague and editor-in-chief of SAPIENS, noted so eloquently in his book Plundered Skulls and Stolen Spirits, this has not been the case for Indigenous populations under colonial rule, with tragic effects. The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) of 1990 helped to rectify this situation in the United States by providing a legal framework under which federally recognized tribes may formally request the return of their ancestors’ remains, sacred objects, and other materials. NAGPRA has no bearing on international repatriations, however.

More here.

Houman Barekat at The Guardian:

Of the many tens of thousands of Iranians who emigrated to the west after the 1979 revolution, the majority settled in California. Among them were Porochista Khakpour’s parents, who moved to the US with their young daughter in 1981. As employees of the Atomic Energy Organisation of Iran, they had enjoyed a relatively privileged life; in their new incarnation as refugees they lived a more modest existence, inhabiting “a tiny crummy suburban apartment” in a lower middle-class neighbourhood in Pasadena. Khakpour’s father, a nuclear physicist, took a teaching job at a university. “They had deep accents, slim savings, and a resistance to assimilation. Like many, they believed their stay in the United States was temporary.”

more here.

Tim Crane in the TLS:

The achievements of actual AI – that is, the kind of technology that makes your smartphone work – are incredible. These achievements have been made possible partly by developments in hardware (in particular the increased speed and miniaturization of microprocessors) and partly because of the access to vast amounts of data on the internet – both factors that neither Simon nor Dreyfus could have predicted. But it means that enthusiastic predictions for AI are still popular. Many believe that AI can produce not just the “smart” devices that already dominate our lives, but genuine thinking machines. No one says that such machines already exist, of course, but many philosophers and scientists claim that they are on the horizon.

To get there requires creating what researchers call “Artificial General Intelligence” (AGI). As opposed to a special-purpose capacity – like Deep Blue’s capacity to play chess – AGI is the general capacity to apply intelligence to an unlimited range of problems in the real world: something like the kind of intelligence we have. The philosopher David Chalmers has confidently claimed that “artificial general intelligence is possible … There are a lot of mountains we need to climb before we get to human-level AGI. That said, I think it’s going to be possible eventually, say in the 40-to-100-year time frame”. The philosophers John Basl and Eric Schwitzgebel are even more optimistic, claiming it is “likely that we will soon have AI approximately as cognitively sophisticated as mice or dogs”.

More here.

Christian Barry and Seth Lazar in Ethics and International Affairs:

Throughout most of the world, significant restrictions have been placed on freedoms to move about, to associate in public, and to be in many public spaces. These practices are often collectively referred to as “lockdown.” Few of us enjoy lockdown, and a small minority is furiously protesting against it. In the United States, which currently has many more COVID-19 infections than any other country in the world, some protestors have been gathering to call for these lockdowns to end, and for a return to work.¹ And in most places governments are indeed beginning to relax, to varying degrees, the very substantial restrictions that lockdown has involved.

For many, a first reaction to the protests was shock at how reckless they seemed, given the continued prevalence of the virus there.² There are clear and legitimate concerns about whether the relaxation of lockdown restrictions is premature in the Unites States and many other parts of the world. But the question such protestors and others are raising—how the often very significant costs that are being coercively imposed upon populations can be justified—is a sensible one that deserves a reasoned response. Without such a response, we will not be able to think clearly about the conditions under which relaxing these restrictions is justified, or about when, should things take a turn for the worse, they should be reinstated. Our aim in this brief essay is not to defend a particular policy or attitude toward lockdown measures in the United States or elsewhere, but to consider the scope and limits of different types of arguments that can be offered for them.

More here.

Edward Dougherty in American Affairs Journal:

Physicist Richard Feynman had the following advice for those interested in science: “So I hope you can accept Nature as She is—absurd.”¹ Here Feynman captures in stark terms the most basic insight of modern science: nature is not understandable in terms of ordinary physical concepts and is, therefore, absurd. The unintelligibility of nature has huge consequences when it comes to determining the validity of a scientific theory. On this question, Feynman also had a concise answer: “It is whether or not the theory gives predictions that agree with experiment. It is not a question of whether a theory is philosophically delightful, or easy to understand, or perfectly reasonable from the point of view of common sense.”² So put reasonableness and common sense aside when judging a scientific theory. Put your conceptual models and visualizations away. They might help you formulate a theory, or they might not. They might help to explain a theory, or they might obfuscate it. But they cannot validate it, nor can they give it meaning.

Erwin Schrödinger made a similar critique of the simplified models widely used to explain scientific concepts in terms of everyday experience, such as those used to illustrate atomic theory:

A completely satisfactory model of this type is not only practically inaccessible, but not even thinkable. Or, to be more precise, we can, of course, think it, but however we think it, it is wrong; not perhaps quite as meaningless as a “triangular circle,” but much more so than a “winged lion.”³

“Do the electrons really exist on these orbits within the atom?” Schrödinger asks rhetorically. His answer: “A decisive No, unless we prefer to say that the putting of the question itself has absolutely no meaning.”⁴

Feynman and Schrödinger were concerned about the extremely small scale, but what about the extremely large scale? A single human cell has more than twenty thousand genes. Therefore, assuming one protein per gene, the number of different non-modified proteins exceeds twenty thousand. Add to that the many more different proteins resulting from alternative splicing, single nucleotide polymorphisms, and posttranslational modification. No conceptual model is conceivable for the interactions among all of these genes and proteins, or for even a tiny portion of them, when one considers the complex biochemistry involved in regulation. What is the meaning of the intricate and massive pathway models generated by computer algorithms? Is this even a meaningful question to ask? And the human body contains on average an estimated thirty-seven trillion cells!

More here.

Barbara Sprunt in NPR:

President Trump told reporters Friday evening that he didn’t know the racially charged history behind the phrase “when the looting starts, the shooting starts.” Trump tweeted the phrase Friday morning in reference to the clashes between protesters and police in Minneapolis following George Floyd’s death. It dates back to the civil rights era and is known to have been invoked by a white police chief cracking down on protests and a segregationist politician.

In 1967, Miami police Chief Walter Headley used the phrase “when the looting starts, the shooting starts” during hearings about crime in the Florida city, invoking angry reactions from civil rights leaders, according to a news report at the time.

More here.

Sailing through Cassiopeia

The sky is round because the eye is round.
A high soprano singing from the fire.

Serpentine hieroglyphics of worm tracks
through the oak.

The clear lubricious wine
that seeps from her most secret space.

Her eyes telling me it’s time to come inside.
Moments of ecstasy on the lip of terror.

The tightrope walker lives by continuance;
the trapeze artist by letting go.

I dream I’m dreaming I wake up
still dreaming.

Learning to say avoirdupois
and never saying it again.

The crow and the quail sang a duet in the fog
though never quite together.

We miss our dead friends because we’ve lost our last chance
to make them change their minds.

My conclusions end in question marks.

Say “home entertainment” eighteen times,
real fast.

by Dan Gerber
from Sailing through Cassiopeia
Copper Canyon Press

Yohan John in Axis Praxis:

Emergence occurs when there is a conceptual discontinuity between two descriptions targeting the same phenomenon. This does not mean that emergence is a purely subjective phenomenon — only that scientific ‘double coverage’ may be a good place to look for emergent phenomena.

For example, in the case of starling murmuration, there is an aggregate description of individual birds, and a description of the flock as a unified entity. The latter phenomenon invites description in terms of concepts from fluid dynamics, but descriptions of individual birds, however detailed, typically do not.

In the case of phase transitions in physics, the description of one phase of matter, such as gas, does not fully map onto descriptions of the other phases. Surface tension, for example, is not defined for gases, since gases do not have surfaces. In the transition from gas to liquid, a qualitatively new attribute not only emerges, it becomes a defining feature of the post-transition system. From a different perspective we can say that it is the emergent qualitative property that enables us to determine that the transition has occurred in the first place.

More here.

Kimberly A. Prather, Chia C. Wang, and Robert T. Schooley in Science:

Respiratory infections occur through the transmission of virus-containing droplets (>5 to 10 μm) and aerosols (≤5 μm) exhaled from infected individuals during breathing, speaking, coughing, and sneezing. Traditional respiratory disease control measures are designed to reduce transmission by droplets produced in the sneezes and coughs of infected individuals. However, a large proportion of the spread of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) appears to be occurring through airborne transmission of aerosols produced by asymptomatic individuals during breathing and speaking (1–3). Aerosols can accumulate, remain infectious in indoor air for hours, and be easily inhaled deep into the lungs. For society to resume, measures designed to reduce aerosol transmission must be implemented, including universal masking and regular, widespread testing to identify and isolate infected asymptomatic individuals.

More here.

Anjum Altaf in Dawn:

The amazing thing about Faiz Ahmed Faiz is that you can never leave him behind. Witness how he emerged in the midst of the recent protests in India with ‘Hum Dekhenge’ being sung in half a dozen languages to the point where flummoxed authorities were forced to treat a man, dead for a good 35 years, as a threat to national security.

These days the title of one of his poems, ‘Yahan se Sheher ko Dekho’ (Look at the city from here) has gotten into my head and is driving me insane. That is because, if you think about it, the ‘here’ in the title can blow your world apart. What it is telling you is that the city looks different from ‘here’ than it does from ‘there.’ And, knowing that can forever change the way you look at your city.

I was recently part of a panel where the participants laid a lot of stress on Faiz as the poet par excellence of hope. Personally, I don’t relate to that as the lasting value of Faiz’s poetry; to me his major gift is that of awareness. Once again, the ‘here’ and ‘there’ have salience.

More here.

Colin Koopman at Aeon Magazine:

For his part, however, Foucault moved on, somewhat singularly among his generation. Rather than staying in the world of words, in the 1970s he shifted his philosophical attention to power, an idea that promises to help explain how words, or anything else for that matter, come to give things the order that they have. But Foucault’s lasting importance is not in his having found some new master-concept that can explain all the others. Power, in Foucault, is not another philosophical godhead. For Foucault’s most crucial claim about power is that we must refuse to treat it as philosophers have always treated their central concepts, namely as a unitary and homogenous thing that is so at home with itself that it can explain everything else.

more here.

Susan Pedersen at the LRB:

Selina Todd’s biography of Delaney does two things well. It helps us understand how someone the press insisted on calling a ‘Salford teenager’ was able to create this remarkable work – and it shows how hard the people who brought the play to stage and screen worked to shift the spotlight away from that intense mother-daughter dynamic. There was a script, too, for ‘new writers’ in the late 1950s and 1960s: they were to be young, authentic and, if possible, working class; they were to be masculine, rebellious and shocking. When, in April 1958, Delaney sent her play to Joan Littlewood, the director of the avant-garde Theatre Workshop in East London, she adopted a naive, Northern persona that was more than a little misleading. ‘A fortnight ago I didn’t know the theatre existed,’ she gushed to Littlewood – but then a friend had taken her to see a play and she had discovered ‘something that meant more to me than myself’. She now knew she wanted to write plays, and in two weeks had produced the enclosed ‘epic’. ‘Please can you help me? I’m willing enough to help myself.’ Christened plain ‘Sheila’, she signed the letter ‘Shelagh Delaney’, the name by which she would be known from then on.

more here.

Susan Glasser in The New Yorker:

On Sunday, on Tuesday, and again on Wednesday, President Donald Trump accused the TV talk-show host Joe Scarborough of murder. On Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, he attacked the integrity of America’s forthcoming “rigged” election. When he woke up on Wednesday, he alleged that the Obama Administration had “spied, in an unprecedented manner, on the Trump Campaign, and beyond, and even on the United States Senate.” By midnight Wednesday, a few hours after the number of U.S. deaths in the coronavirus pandemic officially exceeded a hundred thousand, the President of the United States retweeted a video that says, “the only good Democrat is a dead Democrat.”

This is not the first time when the tweets emanating from the man in the White House have featured baseless accusations of murder, vote fraud, and his predecessor’s “illegality and corruption.” It’s not even the first time this month. So many of the things that Trump does and says are inconceivable for an American President, and yet he does and says them anyway. The Trump era has been a seemingly endless series of such moments. From the start of his Administration, his tweets have been an open-source intelligence boon, a window directly into the President’s needy id, and a real-time guide to his obsessions and intentions. Misinformation, disinformation, and outright lies were always central to his politics. In recent months, however, his tweeting appears to have taken an even darker, more manic, and more mendacious turn, as Trump struggles to manage the convergence of a massive public-health crisis and a simultaneous economic collapse while running for reëlection. He is tweeting more frequently, and more frantically, as events have closed in on him. Trailing in the polls and desperate to change the subject from the coronavirus, mid-pandemic Trump has a Twitter feed that is meaner, angrier, and more partisan than ever before, as he amplifies conspiracy theories about the “deep state” and media enemies such as Scarborough while seeking to exacerbate divisions in an already divided country.

Strikingly, this dark turn with the President’s tweets comes as he is using his Twitter feed as an even more potent vehicle for telling his Republican followers what to do—and they are listening.

More here.