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“You Can See The Robot Age Everywhere But In The Labor Statistics”

September 1, 2017 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

“The future is speeding at us, and it’s almost abusive how deeply cynical both sides are,” the Republican political consultant Rick Wilson recently said, speaking of the response from his party and the Democrats to manufacturing and automation. Specifically, he was referring to how the Trump Administration has promised a return to glory for plants and mines and the Democrats belief that every worker formerly on the assembly line can be upskilled into a software engineer. I doubt most conservatives beyond Trump believe the former and it’s dubious the majority of Democrats believe the latter. Those ideas, however, have been prominent in the last year.

· · ·

The idea that robotics will displace many American workers is true now as it has been for at least a century. As long as there have been machines, really, they’ve always gradually taken over some work as new opportunities were created. The question is whether we’re on the verge of an AI boom that will speed this transition beyond management. Such rapid progress would mean we’re becoming wealthy in the aggregate, but distribution would likely be a huge problem. That’s why so many in the tech field have suggested a Universal Basic Income, something for everyone, not just a reverse tax credit to boost the less fortunate from poverty. But while this work-less future is possible, it seems far from plausible. 

· · ·

Currently there’s wide agreement on all sides that production numbers don’t show a radical expansion of technology displacing workers and boosting output. The only caution is that advances are sometimes overpromised, then ridiculed and then they deliver in a massive way. Not so with cold fusion, but that certainly was the case with computers and the Internet.

In 1985, the lively New York Times reporter Erik Sandberg-Diment sarcastically eulogized the laptop, laughing at what Silicon Valley had believed could be the future. The opening:

“WHATEVER happened to the laptop computer? Two years ago, on my flight to Las Vegas for Comdex, the annual microcomputer trade show, every second or third passenger pulled out a portable, ostensibly to work, but more likely to demonstrate an ability to keep up with the latest fad. Last year, only a couple of these computers could be seen on the fold-down trays. This year, every one of them had been replaced by the more traditional mixed drink or beer.

Was the laptop dream an illusion, then?

Imagine his humbling just two decades later when the Feynman’s “Plenty of Room at the Bottom” theory was proven correct and the iPhone was introduced.

· · ·

“Robots will show up in China just in time,” Daniel Kahneman has said. In order to sustain its giant population, China will need robotics on a mass scale. It’s neighbor Japan will probably require automation on a much grander scale despite a much smaller population. An ardently anti-immigrant country with a graying citizenry, Japan is among the states that could be asking an inverse question: What will happen if robots don’t take all the jobs?

· · ·

My best guess is that there will always be work to do in the future, but sometimes not enough. Not every job needs to disappear to destabilize society in a serious way, just enough. If entire industries vanish into the zeros and ones in too fast a fashion the way video stores across America were decimated by Netflix’s 3,500 employees and endless algorithms (and, yes, I define algorithms as robots), that can leave sectors in the dust. Many of those positions at first will be lousy jobs (e.g., truck driver), but that doesn’t mean those already settled into such careers will have an easy time of it. AI may not be an avalanche that crushes us all, but it could be a continuous series of small earthquakes.

Two excerpts on opposite sides of the argument follow.

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An exchange about a potential AI revolution from a Reddit AMA by Life 3.0 author Max Tegmark:

Question:

Do you believe AI will take over the majority of “menial” jobs within the working world, and if so how will we as people adjust to support those who would have been employed within those positions?

Max Tegmark:

Not only menial jobs, but also many jobs that require lots of training for us humans, such as analyzing radiology images to determine whether patients have cancer. To safeguard your career, go for jobs that machines are bad at – involving people, unpredictability and creativity. Avoid careers about to get automated away, involving repetitive or structured actions in a predictable setting. Telemarketers, warehouse workers, cashiers, train operators, bakers or line cooks. Drivers of trucks, buses, taxis and Uber/Lyft cars are likely to follow soon. There are many more professions (including paralegals, credit analysts, loan officers, bookkeepers and tax accountants) that, although they aren’t on the endangered list for full extinction, are getting most of their tasks automated and therefore demand much fewer humans. I give more detailed job advice in Chapter 3 of my new book. If machines becomes able to do all our jobs in a few decades, that doesn’t have to spell doom and gloom as is commonly assumed. It could give everyone who wanted a life of leisure and play if we as a society share the vast new wealth produced by machines in a way such that nobody gets worse off. The’ll be plenty enough resources to do this, but whether there’s the political will is another matter, and currently I feel that things are moving in the opposite direction in the US and most western countries, with the large groups of people getting steadily poorer in real terms – creating anger which helps explain the victories of Trump & Brexit.•

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From Nicholas Carr’s latest Rough Type rebuttal to the idea that the robots are coming for us:

You can see the robot age everywhere but in the labor statistics, I wrote a few months ago, channeling Robert Solow. The popular and often alarming predictions of a looming unemployment crisis, one that would stem from rapid advances in robotics, artificial intelligence, and other computer automation technologies, have become increasingly hard to square with the economy’s rebound to near full employment. If computers were going to devastate jobs on a broad scale, one would think there’d be signs of it by now. We have, after all, been seeing remarkable gains in computing and software for many decades, while the broadband internet has been working its putative magic for more than twenty years. And it’s not like a shortage of corporate cash is curtailing investment in technology. Profits have been robust and capital cheap.

Still, even as jobs rebounded from the depths of the Great Recession, overall wage growth has appeared sluggish, at times stagnant. It has seemed possible that the weakness in wages might be the canary in the automated coal mine, an early indication of a coming surge in technological unemployment. If humans are increasingly competing for jobs against automatons, of both the hardware and software variety, that might explain workers’ inability to reap wage gains from a tightening labor market — and it might presage a broad shift of work from people to machines. At some point, if automation continued to put downward pressure on pay, workers would simply give up trying to compete with technology. The robots would win.

But even here, there’s growing reason to doubt the conventional wisdom.•

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“We Have Seen Donald Trump Send Out Signals To The Vigilantes”

August 30, 2017 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

Donald Trump explicitly deputized his supporters during the campaign to commit violence in his name, promising to pay their legal fees. As many of his past contractors could have warned them, even with a signed contract this vow wasn’t worth much. Nobody got too caught up in the fine print on the march to Election Day, however, as nearly 63 million Americans looked the other way, pretending a vicious, white-nationalist campaign wasn’t what was occurring. Perhaps some were fooled. Most were not.

Seemingly beholden to the Kremlin, Trump recently stumbled upon some perfectly Putin-like thugs when the absolute worst of the Goy Division descended upon Charlottesville to preach hate and commit a murder. He’s since doubled down on his support of these racist miscreants and others who reenacted Kristallnacht, claiming “many sides” deserve blame, further normalizing the aberrant behavior of his goon squad and encouraging them to further brutish intimidation.

Soon thereafter, Trump pardoned Joe Arpaio, the country’s most obvious symbol of bigoted lawlessness, and authorized state and local police forces to load up on military-grade weapons, which he may believe will provide him with a second unit to take down resistance by force. Whether these departments actually allow themselves to be used in this fascistic manner is questionable at best, but these are clearly the actions of an aspiring autocrat, one who believes he will soon need to protect his power with force. The orange supremacist hopes to provoke a Constitutional crisis and political unrest, then use these conflicts of his own making to rationalize even greater savagery to quell them.

· · ·

In “Trump’s Hoodlums,” Masha Gessen’s latest New York Review of Books piece about our imperiled democracy, she writes that the President, now surrounded by generals-cum-babysitters who run the Administration like a “large family-owned business after the patriarch has developed dementia,” has begun to place his trust in hooligans, militias and extrajudicial actions. The opening: 

Turn on Russian television any day of the week and you are certain to stumble upon a show in which a group of people who appear to be regular citizens (that is, they have no uniforms or government-issued documents) stage a raid of one sort or another. They barge into a store or a restaurant, for example, and demand to see employees’ identity documents, the storage area, or the cooking facilities. Without fail, they find violations of laws or regulations: the staff, natives of Central Asia, don’t have work permits! The store stocks vodka bottles with no alcohol-tax stamps affixed to them! The cook doesn’t cover her hair! At the end of the show, the raiders often pass their tearful, terrified victims to uniformed law enforcement officers, who sometimes appear less than enthusiastic about the task being handed to them.

These raiders have no official titles or legal powers. What directs their actions are the militant rhetoric and the promise of broad impunity that emanate from the Kremlin—and, of course, the glory and recognition of being on television. YouTube and RuTube contain a trove of other vigilante videos, including of self-appointed vice squads who beat up gay men or suspected drug dealers on camera.

Sometimes these vigilantes get in trouble with the law: occasionally a murderer of gay men is caught and jailed, and once in a while a vigilante-gang leader is reined in, though his partners in crime continue to roam free. But in general, the arrangement is low-risk for the perpetrators and convenient for the Kremlin. Vigilantes work fast. Russian law enforcement is not exactly subject to a lot of institutional constraints, but it can be sluggish, and it carries out violence in a dragged-out, bureaucratic way. The vigilantes, on the other hand, make a spectacle of their work, creating the sort of generalized dread on which autocracies thrive. At the same time, vigilantes, who work in small clumps, do not pose the sort of threat to the autocrat that powerful institutions of state sometimes can.

Putin did not invent vigilantes, of course: autocrats frequently rely on delegating violence to extralegal actors or, as in the case of Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines, on the willingness of law enforcement officers to carry out extralegal violence in exchange for the promise of impunity. Duterte has made this promise explicit; more often, incitement to violence contains a tacit guarantee of protection.

Over the last two weeks, we have seen Donald Trump send out both kinds of signals to the vigilantes of his own choosing.•

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“It’s Tough Enough To Create A Nation In Space”

August 30, 2017 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

Paying taxes is deeply repellent to many Americans who profit daily from what these collected monies make possible. Corporations particularly find this process galling. Paul Ryan visited Boeing in Washington State a week ago to give full-throated disapproval of the 35% corporate tax rate. Of course, the airplane manufacturer pays closer to 5%. Apple’s payout is often essentially negligible. The average effective corporate tax rate in the U.S. is roughly 27% thanks to myriad loopholes.

The House Speaker, the Oval Office and usually warring factions of Republicans all agree the number needs to be lowered to between 15-20%. Experience shows this reduction won’t create new jobs, just enrich the already wealthy. When Americans wonder where all the money went and why we can’t build infrastructure without ballooning the deficit — which exists largely because of Dubya’s tax cuts for the wealthy in 2001 — the answer rests mostly in congressional offices and corporate suites.

· · ·

One of the main bugaboos plaguing Russian businessman and scientist Igor Ashurbeyli’s proposed Asgardia: The Space Nation (as opposed to Asgardia: The Thing That Guards My Ass) is the issue of taxes, though that’s hardly the only obstacle. His vision is one of “Space Arks” orbiting the Earth and being home to a “democratic utopia,” a nation-state beyond the rules of Earth that works to protect the mothership.

Hundreds of thousands folks from a variety of nations have already applied for citizenship (damn foreigners!), though, as you might expect, there are some details to be worked out even beyond preventing everyone from dying in a container in the stratosphere. As Charles Rollet explains in a Wall Street Journal article, the entrepreneur has decided taxes will be voluntary, perhaps not the easiest way to build a new civilization.

The opening:

It’s tough enough to create a nation in space. There’s the Earth-orbiting colony to plan, the provisioning to figure out and the technical challenge of launching thousands of people.

On top of that, you have to make folks get along before they even rocket up there.

The scale of the human task is dawning on Russian businessman and scientist Igor Ashurbeyli, who last year drew headlines with his plan for a peaceful democratic utopia dubbed Asgardia above the stratosphere.

More than 300,000 people from 217 countries and territories signed up online to be Asgardians—among them starry-eyed dreamers, sci-fi fans and political idealists—and 110,000 of them are now officially citizens.

While Dr. Ashurbeyli’s lofty plan involves launching “Space Arks” into lower Earth orbit by 2025, he has found himself caught up in earthly debates among his people about pesky details such as the space nation’s constitution and potential taxes.

Not to mention its prospective shortage of women.

Among problems facing Asgardia, “the biggest is self-organization,” said Dr. Ashurbeyli, 53, “because no one has ever tried organizing…what is today 100,000 citizens from 200 countries who don’t know each other and live in different places on Earth.”

Dr. Ashurbeyli, based in Moscow, has few details about how Asgardia, named after Asgard, the godly realm of Norse mythology, would be built, launched and run. Specifics are to be decided by the nation’s parliament.•

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“We Are Hanging By Our Teeth To The Rule Of Law”

August 29, 2017 in Books, Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

Louise Mensch would make an amazing fictional character, but she’s unfortunately an actual person.

I’ve believed from the start that some unaffiliated person with Intelligence Community connections and a Twitter account could aid in unraveling the issue of Russian collusion, which the mainstream American media failed to address during the campaign. Perhaps a reporter squeezed from a post covering the FBI or a foreign intelligence agency in this time of media company die-offs and consolidations could provide a loose strand or two? Maybe the Woodwards or Bernsteins of this era could come from outside of institutions like the Washington Post?

Possible, but it certainly wasn’t going to be Mensch, who seems to be just as much a bewildering Philip K. Dick creation as John McAfee, a fugitive from, among other things, common sense. Claude Taylor, Mensch’s sometimes cohort who added a dollop of gravitas to the online operation by virtue of having worked in a low-level job for the Clinton Administration, doesn’t seem nearly as off-kilter, though he too is overmatched in trying to crack the code. 

In a Guardian article published on Monday, Jon Swaine reported that allegations of Trump being involved with an underage sex ring via his defunct modeling agency had been passed to the duo not by a Mark Felt but by a hoaxer who felt they were marks. It was Derp Throat. From Swaine:

The hoaxer, who fed the information to Taylor by email, said she acted out of frustration over the “dissemination of fake news” by Taylor and Mensch. Their false stories about Trump have included a claim that he was already being replaced as president by Senator Orrin Hatch in a process kept secret from the American public.

“Taylor asked no questions to verify my identity, did no vetting whatsoever, sought no confirmation from a second source – but instead asked leading questions to support his various theories, asking me to verify them,” the source said in an email.•

Just because the experts failed us in the run-up to the election doesn’t mean the amateurs are a better bet now.

· · ·

What’s most perplexing about false narratives being sold, whether for personal gain or simply because of good intentions run amok, is that the noose appears to be genuinely tightening around Trump in regards the Kremlin investigation and other legal matters. WaPo and the New York Times have one-upped each other the past few days by publishing damning articles newly linking Trump’s camp to veteran face-stabber Felix Sater, a Brooklyn-born “legitimate businessman” with ties to Russia’s upper class and underworld. Equally important is that Trump’s most recent provocations (the Arpaio pardon, drawing moral equivalence between white supremacists and those who protest them, allowing local police forces to arm themselves with military weaponry) seem aimed at enabling an authoritarian power grab should Mueller produce evidence of collusion, financial crimes or other seriously illegal behaviors. These two factors may meet headlong before long.

Two excerpts follow.

____________________________________

From Sarah Lyall’s NYT conversation with British spy novelists John le Carré and Ben Macintyre:

Question:

Do you think the Russians really have something on Trump?

Ben Macintyre:

I can tell you what the veterans of the S.I.S. [the British Secret Intelligence Service, or MI6] think, which is yes, kompromat was done on him. Of course, kompromat is done on everyone. So they end up, the theory goes, with this compromising bit of material and then they begin to release parts of it. They set up an ex-MI6 guy, Chris Steele, who is a patsy, effectively, and they feed him some stuff that’s true, and some stuff that isn’t true, and some stuff that is demonstrably wrong. Which means that Trump can then stand up and deny it, while knowing that the essence of it is true. And then he has a stone in his shoe for the rest of his administration.

It’s important to remember that Putin is a K.G.B.-trained officer, and he thinks in the traditional K.G.B. way.

John le Carré:

The mentality that is operating in Russia now is absolutely, as far as Putin is concerned, no different to the mentality that drove the most exotic conspiracies during the Cold War. It worked then, it works now. As far as Trump, I would suspect they have it, because they’ve denied it. If they have it and they’ve set Trump up, they’d say, “Oh no, we haven’t got anything.” But to Trump they’re saying, “Aren’t we being kind to you?”

Ben Macintyre:

And today you get this wonderful Russian lawyer woman [Natalia Veselnitskaya, who was in the pre-election meeting at Trump Tower with Donald Trump Jr.] who is straight out of one of our books, a character that is possibly connected to the Russian state. Who knows? They exist somewhere in that foggy, deniable hinterland. It’s called maskirovka — little masquerade — where you create so much confusion and uncertainty and mystery that no one knows what the truth is.

John le Carré:

For Putin, it’s a kind of little piece of background music to keep things going. The smoking gun might or might not be the documents exchanged about the Trump Tower in Moscow [which Trump is said to have been planning to build]. Then there’s the really seedy stuff in the Caucasus. There are bits of scandal which, if added up, might suggest he went to Russia for money. And that would then fit in with the fact that he isn’t half as, a tenth as rich as he pretends to be.•

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The opening question from Chauncey DeVega’s latest Salon Q&A with historian Timothy Snyder:

Question:

We talked several months ago about Trump’s election and the state of American democracy. Much has happened since our first conversation. How is the country doing?

Timothy Snyder:

I think the most predictable thing, because it does not have to do with legislation, was the moral effect that his presence would have.

This works three ways. It works by what Trump does and says. For example, the outrageous things he says about the press and his obsession with violence. It also works by the things he doesn’t say and the things he doesn’t condemn. “On the one hand and on the other hand” is a way to destroy values and virtues, because if the leader of the country does not have a firm opinion about good and evil then it becomes very hard for other people to have firm opinions about good and evil.

People who have opinions which are in fact absolutely evil are supported by this kind of relativism. With the attempted terrorist attacks, defacing the Holocaust Memorials, and defacing the Lincoln Memorial — which just happened, by the way — you are looking at the demoralization of a society.

The second big trend is that we are hanging by our teeth to the rule of law. That was my judgment at the beginning of his presidency and it is still my judgment now. The rule of law is what gives us a chance to rebuild the system after this is  all done.•

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Old Print Article: Madame Tussaud, Doyenne Of The Decapitated

August 28, 2017 in Old Print Articles, Photography, Politics | Permalink

When creating the wax faces that would make her world famous, Marie Tussaud did not work from memory. She reportedly was often aided in her work by decapitated heads.

When the Internet recently blew up over the relative pallor of the Beyoncé figure at Madame Tussauds New York, I reflected on the gruesome origins of the now-placid institution that caters to tourists in many major cities. The artist began her brilliant career in 1877, when she fashioned a likeness of Voltaire, but it was during the French Revolution when she nearly lost her life and created the work that would later allow her to gain great notoriety.

During the Reign of Terror, Tussaud was among the many targeted to literally lose their heads. Having lived in Versailles for many years while in the employ of the king and queen, she was imprisoned for being loyal to the crown and had her skull shaved in preparation for a visit to the guillotine. Freed from this terrible end by powerful friends, she utilized the wax art taught to her by her uncle to make the death mask into a political prop and, ultimately, a pop culture item. Among her grisly, lifelike creations of the executed were the sculpted crowns of her former employers King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette (third photo), which she reputedly created from their freshly severed heads which were hurriedly delivered to her studio. So the story goes, anyhow.

In the new century she moved to London with her work and established a museum that became a sensation, aided by a Punch magazine piece that dubbed it a “chamber of horrors” because she had begun creating life-size dioramas of ghastly crime and accident scenes. Her legacy continues nearly 170 years after her death, though now Tussauds artists work from photographs or have celebrities, heads still attached, pose for them.

A Brooklyn Daily Eagle article on June 22, 1912 recalled her strange life and career.

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“Local Officials Have Largely Snubbed Stricter Building Regulations”

August 27, 2017 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

This spectral photo of residents inside a Galveston assisted-living facility soaking calmly in the deep waters of Harvey is among the more haunting images to come out of Texas during this hellacious weather onslaught, the kind of “once-in-a-century” storm that is now occurring several times a decade in America alone. It looks like a Beckett play being performed on the Titanic, which is also a description that can be applied more broadly to this vertiginous moment in history, a time of woe for both political and climatic reasons.

Certainly global warming has played an outsize role in supersizing natural disasters, but Houston was particularly prone to devastation for a couple of other reasons: 1) It’s home to the greatest concentration of petrochemicals in the country, and 2) The city has been under-regulated and overbuilt, with paved streets now sprawled over prairies that formerly absorbed tons of excess water. 

Despite frequently serving important purposes, zoning and building regulations are oft-cursed bête noires to Libertarians and other laissez faire economists and politicos. From a 2014 Time article that encouraged the rest of America to follow Texas’ lead in instituting more lenient zoning laws:

Among the policies [Tyler] Cowen proposes as we move into this future: cheaper education (to allow workers to upgrade their skills), looser building and zoning regulations (to radically reduce the price of housing across America), and a loosening of occupational licensing at the state and local level (to open up many more low-skill jobs).•

Certainly there are building codes and zoning rules driven by greed rather than merit, but the unintended consequences that follow rampant deregulation can be deadly. Houston now knows this all too well.

· · ·

From “Boomtown, Floodtown,” a December 2016 piece by Neena Satija, Kiah Collier and Al Shaw of ProPublica and the Texas Tribune, which predicted Houston would have a problem:

The area’s history is punctuated by such major back-to-back storms, but many residents say they are becoming morefrequentand severe, and scientists agree.

“More people die here than anywhere else from floods,” said Sam Brody, a Texas A&M University at Galveston researcher who specializes in natural hazards mitigation. “More property per capita is lost here. And the problem’s getting worse.”

Why?

Scientists, other experts and federal officials say Houston’s explosive growth is largely to blame. As millions have flocked to the metropolitan area in recent decades, local officials have largely snubbed stricter building regulations, allowing developers to pave over crucial acres of prairie land that once absorbed huge amounts of rainwater. That has led to an excess of floodwater during storms that chokes the city’s vast bayou network, drainage systems and two huge federally owned reservoirs, endangering many nearby homes — including Virginia Hammond’s.

On top of that, scientists say climate change is causing torrential rainfall to happen more often, meaning storms that used to be considered “once-in-a-lifetime” events are happening with greater frequency. Rare storms that have only a miniscule chance of occurring in any given year have repeatedly battered the city in the past 15 years. And a significant portion of buildings that flooded in the same time frame were not located in the “100-year” floodplain — the area considered to have a 1 percent chance of flooding in any given year — catching residents who are not required to carry flood insurance off guard.•

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“Things Can Go Badly Even When Parents Get Exactly What They Want”

August 25, 2017 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson may or may not be compromised by the deep bond he formed with Vladimir Putin while Exxon CEO, but at the very least, he seems to be challenged by basic common sense. When he spoke on the White House sending several thousand more troops to wage a war with the Taliban in Afghanistan, he offered this perplexing quote about future battles between the U.S. and our nemesis: “We may not win one, but neither will you.”

Promising a stalemate with the Taliban essentially guarantees them a win since they live there and we don’t. Eventually, you would think, we’ll leave. That’s not exactly thinking 20 moves ahead. The economist Tyler Cowen, a brilliant person who’s read as many books as anyone, sized up the Secretary of State this way in April: “I think there’s a good chance Rex Tillerson turns out to be quite good.” Missed by that much.

The Secretary of State has weakened America’s position on the world stage at every turn, even allowing his concern about “angering Moscow” to guide our policy. Max Boot put it as bluntly as possible in his new Foreign Policy piece, writing that Tillerson “should do the country a favor and resign.”

How can someone so smart not only misjudge a sleepy CEO who seems poorly equipped for the job, but also pull his punches when discussing the repeatedly gormless and hypocritical politics of Libertarian billionaire Peter Thiel? In the latter case, there may be something of a friendship the economist wants to protect (another dubious decision), but it also has to do with the nature of intelligence. IQ isn’t everything, may be no more than half the thing. Plenty of people not nearly as well-read as Cowen have long had Thiel and Tillerson pegged for what they are. They possess something lacked by him, James Baker, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, David Gelernter and other highly educated people, all of whom have come up small during this gigantic moment.

· · ·

In a smart Bloomberg View column, Cowen addresses his misgivings about genetic engineering being used to create “designer babies,” something that may not happen in our lifetimes in any profound way but will probably progress significantly this century. CRISPR has remarkable promise to eradicate diseases in the womb, but it also may ultimately permit parents to choose eye color, height, gender, sexual orientation and IQ. This opens a Pandora’s box of problems.

One would be the possibility that a country could try to speed ahead of the rest of the world by radically boosting intelligence in its population. That would result in a dangerous new “arms race.” It may seem we’re rushing toward a brighter future, but as I said in the opening, intelligence isn’t the only thing that matters when developing a great society.

Cowen’s opening:

There’s a lot of innovation going on in China these days, but perhaps not all of it is good. Chinese fertility centers are going well beyond American practices, using genetic diagnosis to influence how children conceived through in vitro fertilization will turn out. On one hand, the potential for improving human health is enormous. On the other hand, I am uneasy at the prospect of the power this gives parents. I don’t trust people to take so much control over the future of human nature.

Sometimes you hear it argued that the complex nature of genes will prevent major feats of genetic engineering. That may be selling short future advances in Big Data and biomedicine, but even minor changes in genetic diagnosis and selection could have significant effects. Maybe you can’t choose to have a child who will be happy, but you might be able to lower the chance of your kid having depression or social anxiety by some small amount. Over the course of generations, that will exert great influence over the nature of the human experience.

One risk, of course, is that parents will opt for some apparently desirable qualities in their children, and then the experiment will backfire, due to unforeseen genetic connections. Maybe we’ll get happier kids, but they will be less creative, or less driven, or they might care less about others. Those are valid concerns, especially in these early days of genetic engineering. But I have a deeper worry, namely that things can go badly even when parents get exactly what they want.

If you could directly alter your kids’ genetic profile, what would you want? It’s hard to know how the social debate would turn out after years of back and forth, but I was dismayed to read one recent research paper by psychologists Rachel M. Latham and Sophie von Stumm. The descriptive title of that work, based on survey evidence, is “Mothers want extraversion over conscientiousness or intelligence for their children.” Upon reflection, maybe that isn’t so surprising, because parents presumably want children who are fun to spend time with.

Would a more extroverted human race be desirable, all things considered? I genuinely don’t know, but at the very least I am concerned.•

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Old Print Article: John Wilkes Booth Receives A Second Burial

August 24, 2017 in Old Print Articles, Photography, Politics | Permalink

Sometime after January 2008, an entertainer became obsessed with the President of the United States, determined to prove him invalid and unworthy, to destroy the legacy of someone far grander than himself. Politics was part of the impetus, but the mania seemed to have a far deeper source. A similar scenario played out more than 140 years earlier with far more lethal results when another entertainer, John Wilkes Booth, was overcome by a determination to kidnap or kill Abraham Lincoln, even directing angry dialogue at the President when he happened to attend a play in which his future assassin performed. “He does look pretty sharp at me, doesn’t he?” the President acknowledged. The thespian was a Confederate sympathizer, but his wild rage for Lincoln was driven by something beyond the question of abolition.

In the aftermath of the 1865 balcony tragedy, Booth fled and was slain by the gun of Union soldier Boston Corbett and interred in D.C. after an autopsy and the removal of several vertebrae and the fatal bullet. The body was subsequently relocated to a warehouse at the Washington Arsenal. Four years after he met with justice, the actor’s corpse was emancipated from government oversight and was allowed to be reburied in Baltimore by his family. A Brooklyn Daily Eagle reporter happened to be visiting with President Johnson in the White House when the transfer was made, allowing him to be eyewitness to the grim process and the state of the remains, which he said retained much of the departed’s “manly beauty.” An article in an 1877 edition of the paper recalled the undertaking.

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“Politics Emerges In The ‘Realm Of Possiblity’ That Societies Construct For Themselves”

August 23, 2017 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

In the 1990 wake of Donald Trump’s scandalous divorce and financial cratering, Liz Smith, who used the hideous hotelier for cheap, titillating content long before cable news did, wrote off his lifelong dream of acquiring the White House: “It appears Donald Trump will never be President. He can be a lot of other important things, but not the chief executive of the U.S., unless, of course, the next few generations of Americans produced are mutants with very brief memories.”

Judge for yourself if nearly 63 million of your fellow citizens fall into that unfortunate category, but Trump achieved his goal, even if it was a hostile takeover, with not only Russian interference and FBI incompetence aiding our fall from grace and into the gutter, but seismic changes in technology, media, politics and entertainment enabling the whole sordid mess.

Before a Trump presidency could became a reality, the scenario of a deeply bigoted, braggadocious, misogynistic, ignorant, money-laundering sociopath and low-brow entertainer ascending to the highest office in the land had to seem possible. That it did to so many speaks to the crumbling of our norms. 

· · ·

In “Why There Won’t Be a German Trump,” a Spiegel essay by Dirk Kurbjuweit, the writer argues that his country’s different mindset and its rigid party control over candidates negates the political “freak factor,” making it almost impossible for a lone wolf who’s crazy as a loon to succeed at the highest level. That’s likely true for now, though given enough time, anything is possible. An excerpt:

Politics emerges in the “realm of possiblity” that societies construct for themselves. What do people imagine? What kinds of leaders do they think are possible? The realm of possibility is a product of real experiences as well as that of visions, fantasies, stories and dreams. What’s crucial is the height of the wall separating reality and dreams. If it is high, the potential space is small — and vice versa.

An American film called Miss Sloane, a portrait of an ice-cold lobbyist in Washington, is currently showing in German theaters. It’s a powerful movie that will leave viewers with the impression that its depiction is, in principle, an accurate one. That the fight for majorities is carried out ruthlessly, often with lies used as weapons. The reality under Trump is being compared to “House of Cards,” a series about a brutal politician who manipulates his way into the White House.

Ronald Reagan was an actor before he became a politician. Jesse Ventura was a professional wrestler, which is to say a showbiz star, before he became the governor of Minnesota. Arnold Schwarzenegger was an actor before he became the governor of California and now he is once again an actor. Donald Trump was the lead character in a reality show before he became president. These men moved from a pseudo reality into a political reality. The American wall is low, if it exists at all — the worlds of reality and dreams flow into one another. The Hollywood dream factory is part of the truth, but it is an invented one. President Trump is the product of an enormous realm of possibility.•

There are also political lies in Germany, but not such an intense interdependence between fictional narratives and reality. Here, realism is a long-scorned and underdeveloped art form. Politics is considered too boring to produce grand narratives, a fact that keeps Germany’s realm of possibility relatively small. Someone like Trump isn’t imaginable because we haven’t seen anything like him in a movie or on a TV screen. And then there’s the fact that grand narratives, whether real or not, arise out of megalomania — something that has been viewed with intense skepticism in Germany since 1945, with good reason.

Germany has a different concept of reality than the U.S., a clear separation between the spheres of dreams and politics, a high wall that makes political reality a bit more reliable and more serious.•

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“Gawker Began As A Crusade To Save Journalism”

August 22, 2017 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

I miss Gawker, for the most part.

The evil billionaire Peter Thiel, a “genius” who was absolutely certain there were WMDS in Iraq and that Trump would be a great President, took the site away from us. Of course, he had help. When you spend your last year or so of existence as Gawker did by (allegedly) outing a magazine executive who isn’t harming anyone, risking your very existence to show a few seconds from a Hulk Hogan sex tape (I’d rather stare wide-eyed at an eclipse) and willfully making disturbing comments before a courtroom that will decide your future, you likely have entered into a fatal state of institutional delusion. This isn’t a defense of Thiel — you know how I feel about him — but to say that as much as I enjoyed Gawker sticking small pins into bloated bags of gas over the years, it often seemed as concerned with its survival as Rob Ford in a crack house.

The company’s main contribution to the culture was providing a platform for talented young writers who could go on and do better work at better publications. In that way, it will keep enriching us for a long time to come. In his Washington Post editorial “Gawker Has Been Gone For A Year. We’ve Never Needed It More Than Now,” Michael J. Socolow argues the snarky site would be a precious commodity during our Trumpocalypse. Eh. That seems more than a little grandiose.

I wish Gawker still existed, but righteous snark pours nonstop from truly brilliant and witty minds on Twitter, and the “critical autonomy” the WaPo writer lauds the outlet for was often misspent. I doubt the site would have delivered anything near as important as Elle Reeve’s brilliant Vice coverage of the Charlottesvile white supremacist rallies. What effect would Nick Denton’s pirate ship have had on improving our politics during this desperate time? A negligible one, most likely.

From Socolow:

Now that Gawker’s buried, we might consider what we lost when that mischievous and irresponsible purveyor of gossip was shuttered. Gawker was not simply an influential Web outlet; its proudly independent sensibility and critical autonomy remain rare in today’s corporate media sphere. But to consider Gawker simply a minnow in a sea of whales is to miss its true value. Gawker might have been foolhardy, reckless and ultimately self-destructive, but it was also, above all, courageous. With the hindsight of Donald Trump’s ascendancy to the presidency, we should all recognize that courage in the media is needed now more than ever.

Gawker is mostly defined as a guilty pleasure, an exercise in prurience by bored Web surfers and their millennial progeny. Yet its impact on American media remains undeniable. It launched the careers of an excellent set of young journalists, and it demonstrated a rare independence from corporate pressure, celebrity handlers and political operatives. Its stylistic form — directly addressing its readers like friends engaged in conversation — offers an instructive lesson for all media outlets seeking loyalty from readers. Gawker didn’t disdain its commenters: It teased them, argued with them, and kept them interested and coming back. Denton and his cadre of young, underpaid editors understood effective Web journalism.

But to place Gawker only in the context of the Web era is to miss its historical significance. Like PM (New York’s experimental newspaper in the 1940s), or the Berkeley Barb and other alternative press outlets in the 1960s, Gawker began as a crusade to save journalism. Like its alternative predecessors, Gawker challenged the processed wire copy and objective norms of standardized news content with pieces that could be opinionated, sensationalistic, and occasionally bizarre. Readers would be lured in with narcissistic displays, participatory journalism, and styles of address that could range from the nihilistic to the euphoric. There’s a reason it was named “Gawker.”•

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“Armed Forces May Find Giving Them More Independence—Including To Kill—Irresistible”

August 22, 2017 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

Was looking at the wonderful The Browser earlier today, and the quote of the day was from William Carlos Williams: “That which is possible is inevitable.” So true, especially when that sentiment is applied to technology. That doesn’t mean all hope is lost and we should just idly allow the creeping — and sometimes leaping — advances of tech to roll over us, but it does speak to the competition among corporations and states that often moves forward agendas for reasons that have nothing to do with common sense or public good. 

It’s dubious we’ll come to some global consensus on inviolate rules governing genetic modifications of life forms or autonomous weapons systems. Of the two, there’s more hope for the latter than the former, considering the costs involved, though neither seems particularly promising. It won’t take a great deal of resources soon enough to rework the genome, with terrorist organizations as well as educational institutions in the game. Eventually, even startups in garages and “lone gunmen” will be able to create and destroy in this manner. This field will be, in time, decentralized.

Killer robots, conversely, aren’t going to be fast, cheap and out of control for the foreseeable future, though that doesn’t mean they won’t be developed. In fact, it’s plausible they will, even if the barrier of entry is much higher. There are currently reasons for America, China, Russia and other players to shy away from these weapons that guide themselves, but all it will take is for one major competitor to blink for everyone to rush into the future. And all sides have to keep gradually moving toward such capacity in the meantime in order to respond rapidly should a competing nation jump across the divide. Ultimately, everyone will probably blink.

“Once this Pandora’s box is opened, it will be hard to close,” advised an open letter from leading AI and robotics experts to the UN, encouraging the intergovernmental body to urgently address the matter of autonomous weapons. That’s certainly accurate, though the box opening seems more likely than a total ban succeeding.

· · ·

From “Sorry, Banning ‘Killer Robots’ Just Isn’t Practical,” a smart Wired piece by Tom Simonite, which speaks to how the nebulous definition of “autonomous weapons” will aid in their development:

LATE SUNDAY, 116 entrepreneurs, including Elon Musk, released a letter to the United Nations warning of the dangerous “Pandora’s Box” presented by weapons that make their own decisions about when to kill. Publications including The Guardian and The Washington Post ran headlines saying Musk and his cosigners had called for a “ban” on “killer robots.”

Those headlines were misleading. The letter doesn’t explicitly call for a ban, although one of the organizers has suggested it does. Rather, it offers technical advice to a UN committee on autonomous weapons formed in December. The group’s warning that autonomous machines “can be weapons of terror” makes sense. But trying to ban them outright is probably a waste of time.

That’s not because it’s impossible to ban weapons technologies. Some 192 nations have signed the Chemical Weapons Convention that bans chemical weapons, for example. An international agreement blocking use of laser weapons intended to cause permanent blindness is holding up nicely.

Weapons systems that make their own decisions are a very different, and much broader, category. The line between weapons controlled by humans and those that fire autonomously is blurry, and many nations—including the US—have begun the process of crossing it. Moreover, technologies such as robotic aircraft and ground vehicles have proved so useful that armed forces may find giving them more independence—including to kill—irresistible.•

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“Cruelty Is Often Expressed In Entertainment”

August 21, 2017 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

Always loved the Wallace Shawn plays Aunt Dan and Lemon and Marie and Bruce, but I wasn’t a huge fan of The Designated Mourner when it was first performed in 1998. I must say, it’s aged rather well, what with a fascist game-show host in the White House and every form of dysfunction passing for entertainment on television. What’s not often said about this supposedly golden age of TV is that it has no shortage of doltish, cruel content, people acting out the damage deep inside them for the amusement of others. Isn’t it odd that a seemingly inordinate amount of these “performers” die at a young age and nobody seems surprised? The parade of dysfunction and viciousness that Howard Stern rode to wealth and fame was co-opted by mainstream outlets just as the shock jock was largely shedding his worst impulses thanks to years of intensive therapy. 

Donald Trump, a veteran of Stern and Reality TV, didn’t invent anything new–he just took the sadistic show on the road, on the trail. What was stated repeatedly during the election season was that Trump was so much more entertaining than his competitors. He filled a void within the nation, though he did it with hate and trash.

· · ·

In a New York Review of Books piece published at the time of Mourner, Fintan O’Toole best described Shawn’s odd dual existence as mainstream comic curmudgeon and apocalyptic playwright: “The other Wallace Shawn, the playwright, is a dark figure glowering on the margins of American consumer culture, muttering about blood and sex and torture. The two aspects of his public persona seem absurdly incompatible, almost as if Samuel Beckett had made regular guest appearances on The Brady Bunch or The Lone Ranger.”

That essay came up during Adam Shatz’s London Review of Books podcast interview with Shawn. An excerpt:

Question:

Fintan O’Toole, in an essay that I thought was very perceptive about your work in the New York Review, wrote that in your plays darkness is inextricable from the popular entertainment – that wrapped up in the smooth consolations of prime time is a core of utter cruelty. I’m wondering, what do you think explains this relationship between entertainment and cruelty?

Wallace Shawn:

Well, cruelty is often expressed in entertainment …

Question:

Spectacle.

Wallace Shawn:

… obviously, the most famous being the Romans, who openly had people being killed in front of an audience.

Question:

Or lynching in the States, as well.

Wallace Shawn:

Yes. And, of course, public executions, which are still common in many countries. I mean, human beings have, one might say, in infinite well of sadism somewhere inside them, and our, you know, challenge is to try to prevent that from having everyone annihilate everyone else. But obviously there’s a tremendous amount of vicarious killing, beating and insulting that forms a large part of film and television entertainment. I mean, you know, you have to … you have to work hard to find popular pieces of entertainment – I mean, of television or films – that don’t contain those elements. But it’s … you know, when I was, I suppose … maybe nine or so, and my brother was five, we had a little Super 8 movie camera, and we made little films – and we were not very rough boys, to put it mildly, but we had guns and fist-fights, and our father tried to encourage us to make up a story that had no violence in it, and I think he gave us a head-start, you know, some suggestions on how to go about it.

Question:

This isn’t a violent story, but you do talk, in one of your essays, in a very affecting scene where you’re riding in a cab with your dad – I think you’re about ten years old – and you see some awkward, miserable-looking kid, and you start laughing at him, and your father breaks down in tears.

Wallace Shawn:

Well, he was a sensitive guy. And I don’t know if there’s any ten-year-old who is very sensitive – maybe there are. He was … yeah, it was a funny-looking, overweight kid who would have been, you know, bullied in school, and I didn’t know him, but I was indirectly bullying him just by laughing at his appearance. And, you know, that was a powerful lesson from my father, which, you know, one has to … I have to re-learn it all the time – certainly, as a short actor, I’m offered … well, I’m no longer offered many parts, because I’m declining in my popularity, but I … I have been, over the years, offered an enormous number of parts where my character, the short guy, is being bullied, and it’s supposed to be funny – and then, at a certain point, I sort of realised that was what it was, and started turning those down – along with the parts with the bullied short guy realises that he, too, can be a bully.

Question:

And turns his aggression against the other?

Wallace Shawn:

Exactly – maybe with a gun, or maybe through some clever tactic such as kicking him in the testicles, whatever.

Question:

One of the things that makes your work striking and disturbing, your plays, is that you often describe the dark allure and the pleasure that people take in cruelty, and I think, for that reason, the plays are not accusatory or pious, because you’re writing about the seductions of amorality – and the seduction of amorality is a big theme, certainly, in The Designated Mourner. Do you think that this pleasure in cruelty and aggression is a big part of Trump’s appeal? You spoke about him earlier as ‘the boot’.

Wallace Shawn:

Well, I think he certainly has concluded that that is the side of him that has made him president. I personally found his speech the other day to the policemen at the Police Academy, where he said, Don’t be too nice, one of the more horrifying moments in his presidency. I think that the pleasure that people take in cruelty, or what you would call sadism, is a very under-discussed motive for a tremendous amount of what goes on in the world – not just in our country. I mean, people take at face value the verbal explanation for why someone is being beaten up or shot, or hundreds of people being beaten up or shot, or people are being are being tortured. There are a million explanations, as there have been for every war that’s ever been fought, going back to the beginning of humanity. These … you know, there are different explanations – the explanation that is ignored is the one that isn’t put into words: the human love of cruelty, the desire to kill, the desire to torment other humans – that’s not included. I mean, the Americans say, We are fighting for freedom and democracy, and the Isis people say, We’re fighting for God, and … I mean, there have been a million explanations. But there is … an irrational desire to hurt or kill other people that is, for reasons we don’t fully understand, sometimes quiet inside humans and sometimes comes to the fore.•

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“We Are In Need Of Another Round Of Deep Institutional Renewal: A Third Republic”

August 20, 2017 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

Donald Trump finally divined a means of removing media focus from the Russia espionage scandal that threatens to push him from power and perhaps into a waiting cell. The catch: Changing the subject was enabled by the orange supremacist acknowledging in his most frank manner yet that he’s a white-nationalist sympathizer, one who believes there were “very fine people” among the Nazis who descended on Charlottesville and that the sculpted symbols of slavery are “beautiful.” It was shocking enough to even back-burner a potential nuclear war with North Korea, which was all the rage before the latest rage.

The Simon Cowell-ish strongman’s reprieve from media scrutiny in regards to Putin, financial crime and other illicit matters will only last for so long. A stunning proclamation of support for the “good ones” lined up with a mob chanting “Jews will not replace us!” may mean pundits redirected their attention in the short term, but the same can’t be said for Robert Mueller or the Attorneys General combing through documents and records. The investigation may prove a disappointment–or it might be a waterloo.

· · ·

Trump ending in disgrace—residing in an even deeper gutter than the one he now calls home—would be good for the country, but it won’t cure what ails us. Our President is the most odious symptom of our malady but not the malady itself. Our ills are born of decades of anti-government propaganda, the fostering of white resentment by media outlets, wealth inequality, money consuming our political institutions, gerrymandering, the NRA, the pernicious aspects of social media, a steady diet of pseudo-events delivered by Reality TV, etc.

There’s something else that’s a deal-breaker: ideology. While the majority of the country isn’t enamored with a Make America White Again philosophy, a large minority is, and they’re not likely to abandon their reawakening should Trump fall. The dividing line seems to be those who wish to recreate the past and those who want to head into the future.

· · ·

The reason Thomas Friedman’s “Golden Arches Effect” was doomed from the moment it was written was because potentially warring states aren’t always driven by rational forces like money. Sometimes it’s personal. That same dynamic is what allows for conflicts within a state. That doesn’t mean America is headed for Civil War 2.0, but it is at the very least possible that Charlottesville may be prelude to an extended period of violent acts committed by domestic terrorists. There’s no easy way to repair what has rent us apart, something that’s valued differently than cash. We just disagree.

· · ·

In “It’s Time to Found a New Republic,” a Foreign Policy essay by Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson, the authors remind that America remade itself politically during the Gilded Age, when a technological boom last created yawning wealth inequality, and argue that we should once again take bold measures to reinvent our governance. They make some good suggestions as to what we can do to counteract negligible corporate income taxes in a globalized age, lagging productivity and other matters that prevent shared prosperity, but there’s no mention that many among us simply don’t want to share. An excerpt:

Today, faced with serious economic and political dysfunction, we are in need of another round of deep institutional renewal: a Third Republic.

The conditions that brought about the first transformation of American society are strikingly similar to those we see today. At the root of the problems confronting the United States by 1900 was a wave of innovation that sped up growth. The direct benefits of these new technologies accrued to a few, while many others became more uncertain about their economic future.

Early in the 21st century, we have reached a similar phase; the latest technology enables the offshoring of many of the manufacturing jobs that had previously been the mainstay of the middle class, or automates them out of existence. And we witness newly extreme concentrations of economic power, which are again making our politics less genuinely democratic.

There are differences too, of course. The modification of the American republic early in the 20th century would not have been feasible, for instance, without the Civil War, which tore down slavery. Still, there are lessons to be learned.

The prime driver of reform at the end of the 19th century was the progressive movement, itself a reaction to the accelerating technological change and the rise of oligarchs. If America as we know it — or, even better, a renewed, reinvigorated version of it — is to survive for yet another century, it will have to replicate the progressives’ achievements. The first task will be to understand the degree of improvisation which accounted for those successes.•

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“He Is The Human Pseudo-Event”

August 16, 2017 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

Yesterday’s insane, impromptu press conference by Donald Trump in the lobby of a gold, gaudy building he named for himself, was in TV trope terms “the reveal,” that moment when the Ku Klux Kardashian openly admitted his allegiance to hate groups. He’s never been shy about his bigotry, but this time he fully pulled the death from inside his belly and laid it in an open casket for the whole world to view. That is was all done within earshot of a crumpling John Kelly, a square-jawed man of Apollonian abilities who was somehow supposed to steady the chaos, makes clear that the new Chief of Staff is engaged in an unwinnable war, an Afghanistan of the mind. 

The bizarre scene reminded of the many failings of American society that brought us to this point, in which Trump is merely the ugliest imaginable result of our decay but not its cause. It also brings to mind a passage from Daniel Boorstin’s The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America:

Our age has produced a new kind of eminence. This is as characteristic of our culture and our century as was the divinity of Greek gods in the sixth century B.C. or the chivalry of knights and courtly lovers in the middle ages. It has not yet driven heroism, sainthood, or martyrdom completely out of our consciousness. But with every decade it overshadows them more. All older forms of greatness now survive only in the shadow of this new form. This new kind of eminence is “celebrity.”

The word “celebrity” (from the Latin cekbritas for “multitude” or “fame” and “celeber” meaning “frequented,” “populous,” or “famous”) originally meant not a person but a condition — as the Oxford English Dictionary says, “the condition of being much talked about; famousness, notoriety.” In this sense its use dates from at least the early seventeenth century. Even then it had a weaker meaning than “fame” or “renown.” Matthew Arnold, for example, remarked in the nineteenth century that while the philosopher Spinoza’s followers had “celebrity,” Spinoza himself had “fame.” …

His qualities — or rather his lack of qualities — illustrate our peculiar problems. He is neither good nor bad, great nor petty. He is the human pseudo-event.•

Trump certainly runs afoul of the “neither good or bad” rule, neutral he is not, but Boorstin wrote his book in 1961, long before the Murdoch family spent two decades screaming “fire!” in a crowded theater, not in any way representing a conservative political viewpoint but instead packaging and selling white resentment and fake news. James and Lachlan are supposedly different from their dad, but they’ve shown the willingness to peddle Seth Rich conspiracies and describe Joe Arpaio as “colorful” rather than criminal. There are many other causes of our cultural rot–ceaseless deification of celebrity, Reality TV, the decentralization of media–but without the Murdochs, there would be no Trumps–at least not in the White House.

· · ·

In the Financial Times, Edward Luce asserts that America isn’t likely done administering self-inflicted wounds. The columnist explains why he believes the GOP family has been slow to act on its Nazi-friendly father, and I will offer one more possibility: Trump’s inner circle may not be peculiar in the upper reaches of the party for being dirty with Kremlin money. His ouster may accelerate a broader fall.

From Luce:

With some honourable exceptions, such as John McCain, the Arizona senator, Republicans are not ready to stand up to the president. Even Mr Ryan, whose condemnation of white supremacism was unequivocal, refrained from criticising Mr Trump directly. Others rushed to his defence. “President Trump once again denounced hate today,” tweeted Kayleigh McEnany, spokesman for the Republican National Committee. “The GOP stands behind his message of love and inclusiveness!” By even-handedly condemning the “alt-right” and the “alt-left”, Mr Trump was upholding American values, you see. In addition to bad apples, the far right included some “very fine people”, said the president.

Republicans are paralysed on two counts. First, the party cannot disown what Mr Trump is doing without repudiating themselves. His victory was the logical outcome of the party’s “southern strategy”, which dates from the late 1960s. The goal has been to siphon off southern whites from the Democratic party. Most Republicans have preferred to keep their tactics genteel. The signal of choice has been the dog whistle rather than the megaphone. Thus, in one form or another, most Republican states are reforming their voter registration systems. The fact that such laws disproportionately shrink the non-white electorate is an accidental byproduct of a colour-blind crackdown. Even without proof of widespread fraud, voter suppression has plausible deniability. Over the years, the same has applied to various wars on crime, drugs and welfare fraud, which were never discriminatory by design. Mr Trump has simply taken that approach into the open. He is the Republican party’s Frankenstein. The age of plausible deniability is over.

The second Republican problem is fear. Because of gerrymandering, most Republicans — and Democrats — are more vulnerable to a challenge from within their ranks than to defeat by the other party. As the saying goes, American politicians choose their voters, rather than the other way round. Unfortunately that gives the swing vote to the most committed elements of each party’s base. Though Mr Trump’s approval ratings are lower than for any president in history, he still has the backing of most Republican voters. Any elected Republican who opposes Mr Trump can be sure of merciless reprisal. It is a rare politician who would invite vilification from their own side.

Where will this end? The realistic answer is that Republicans will hide under a rock until they suffer a stinging defeat in next year’s midterm elections. But a defeat in 2018 is far from assured. Even then, it would have to be on a grand scale to reverse America’s deep forces of polarisation. Mr Trump will probably serve out his term.

The more worrying answer is that US democracy is heading towards a form of civil breakdown.•

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“American Magnanimity And Conciliation Should Prevail, But Not At The Expense Of Principle”

August 15, 2017 in Excerpts, Old Print Articles, Politics | Permalink

The reason Confederate statues stand in America are twofold.

Those erected in the aftermath of the Civil War were permitted, even endorsed, by Union politicians and periodicals as a means of appeasing the vanquished in a conflict that killed more Americans than any war before or since. It was, of course, bizarre reasoning, as the statuary became more than just participation trophies for traitors but also served as vestiges of slavery, states’ rights and supremacy for the conquered to cling to.

The more recent Confederate monuments in the U.S. are clearly meant to communicate white dominance. It’s questionable at best that they would have been allowed to exist at all were it not for the many similar tributes already dotting the nation. The original sin made possible the many even darker ones to follow.

Two excerpts follow.

· · ·

From “Some Thoughts on Public Memory” by Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo:

What is little discussed today is that the North and the South made a tacit bargain in the years after the Civil War to valorize Southern generals as a way to salve the sting of Southern defeat and provide a cultural and political basis for uniting the country with more than military force. That meant the abandonment of free blacks in the South after the mid-1870s. It is important to see this not only as the abandonment of the ex-slaves of the South. It is difficult, but necessary, to pull away the subsequent history to realize that it was entirely possible in the aftermath of the Civil War that the US would be condemned to perpetual warfare, insurrection and foreign intervention. But if the opposite, the United States that went on to become a global superpower, is what was gained it was gained at a terrible price and a price paid more or less solely by black citizens.

However one judges that past, knowing its full history leaves no reason or rationale for continue the valorization of Lee. He was a traitor and a traitor in a terrible cause. That is his only mark on American history. Whether he was a personally gentle man, nice to his pets or a good field general hardly matters.

Even this though leaves the full squalidness of Lee’s legacy not quite told. There is the Lee of the Civil War and then the mythic Lee of later decades. Today the battle over Lee’s legacy is mainly played out over the various statues depicting Lee which still stand across the South. The notional focus of this weekend’s tragic events in Charlottesville was a protest over plans to remove a Lee statue. But those statues don’t date to the Civil War or the years just after the Civil War. In most cases, they date to decades later.•

· · ·

A 1909 Brooklyn Daily Eagle letter to the editor from a Union veteran:

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“We Are Likely To See Them Want To Do Bigger Things”

August 15, 2017 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

Rupert Murdoch is receiving plaudits for reportedly urging Donald Trump to dismiss Steve Bannon from his Senior Adviser role. That speaks to how despised the depraved white nationalist is because the Fox News founder deserves no congratulations, not after he and his family have for more than two decades paved the way for Trump, Bannon, Miller and Gorka, continually stoking the fears and resentment of many Caucasians in the country, selling a race war with the same alacrity they use to hawk gold coins. Cliven Bundy and Birthers have been the heroes of this 24/7 cable drama and black Presidents and Santa Clauses the villains.

The Murdochs could successfully trade in hate for the same reason Trump was able to peddle his ugly Make America White Again campaign: Throughout our history, there have always been many receptive ears in the U.S. just waiting to be told that what ails them is a black or brown person. From George Washington to George Wallace to George Zimmerman, we’ve never had a single true system of justice in the nation because most haven’t wanted one.

While the worst among us have always existed and, to some extent, always will, it was Trump’s words that unloosed such demons. While institutional racism was clearly in effect, the militia-level hatemongers usually had to watch their step, cowed somewhat by social shaming that attended such crude and open bigotry. But While President Obama appealed to the best in Americans (even on those occasions when it didn’t seem to be present), Trump encouraged the worst impulses, not only for his own political gain, as is often pointed out, but because he truly shares the views of white nationalists. 

As Edward Luce of the Financial Times began warning in the summer of 2015, even if Trump should fall — and he will, if far too late — the hatred he’s rallied will not so easily recede. Saturday’s violence in Virginia by a rabid welter of hoods, swastikas and torches received a response from the highest office in the land with dog whistles, not a commanding rebuke, which will only further abet their mindset. Charlottesville, I’m afraid, is likely prelude.

Two excerpts follow.

· · ·

From Audie Cornish’s NPR interview with New Yorker writer Jelani Cobb:

Question:

You’ve said that what happened in Virginia was not the culminating battle of this conflict between racial supremacists and civic society, but you call it a tragic preface to more of the same. What do you mean by that?

Jelani Cobb:

I think that these forces feel victorious. When we saw them marching in large numbers, and then the following day, in a kind of regimented form, in the city of Charlottesville. What comes out of that is a feeling of invulnerability, and having come out of the woodwork and having seen others of like minds, would they then be content to going back to making racial humor on the Internet? I don’t think that will happen. We are likely to see them want to do bigger things, more spectacular things, things to inject themselves even further into American consciousness, and they now likely feel like they’re in a position to do that.•

· · ·

From Brennan Gilmore’s essay at Politico:

What we witnessed Saturday was the terrifying but logical outcome of our escalating, toxic politics of hate. I’ve seen it happen before. Serving in the Central African Republic in 2012, I saw political leaders use hatred and “othering” as instruments to gain political power. As a result, within months, Christians and Muslims, peaceful neighbors for decades, turned against each other. I saw the same thing happen when I served in Burundi, where Hutus and Tutsis made giant strides toward reconciliation after a horrifying history of mass atrocities, only to be manipulated, divided and turned against one another yet again.

America is not Africa. But watching this past election cycle in the U.S., my stomach churned as I saw some of these themes repeating themselves. Looking back now, I can see it was leading toward a cycle of conflict that, once started, is hard to break.

Many Americans like to think that this kind of thing can’t happen here—that American exceptionalism immunizes us from the virulent racism and tribalism that tear apart other countries far, far away. But we’re more susceptible than we’d like to think. …

Some may say that what happened in Charlottesville was not a big deal because it was a relatively small-scale event. And that’s true: Of all the race-based terrorist attacks in recent history, it was neither the largest nor did it produce the highest casualty count. After witnessing Nazis, self-declared militias and “private security forces” carrying assault rifles alongside state and local police (thanks to Virginia’s permissive gun laws), I can honestly say it could have been tragically worse.

But just because the white supremacists numbered in the hundreds, not the thousands, doesn’t mean the movement can’t quickly spiral out of control.•

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“It Poses ‘Vastly More Risk’ Than The Apparent Nuclear Capabilities Of North Korea Does”

August 14, 2017 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

“Elon Musk is a 21st-century genius — you have to listen to what he says,” asserted Richard Dawkins in a recent Scientific American interview, as one brilliant person with often baffling stances paid homage to another. The “21st-century” part is particularly interesting, as it seems to confer upon Musk a new type of knowledge beyond questioning. Musk, however, needs very much to be questioned.

Someone who teach himself rocketry as the SpaceX founder did is certainly very smart in a many ways, but it might really be better for America if we stopped looking to billionaires for the answers to our problems. Perhaps the very existence of billionaires is the problem? 

Musk has many perplexing opinions that run the gamut from politics to existential risks to space travel. Walter Isaacson has lauded him as a new Benjamin Franklin, but there’s no way the Founding Father would have cozied up to a fledgling fascist like Trump, believing he could somehow control a person more combustible than a rocket. Franklin knew that we all have to hang together against tyranny or we would all hang separately.

The plans Musk has for his rockets also are increasingly erratic and questionable. As he jumps his timeline for launches from this year to that one, there’s some question of whether humans should be traveling to Mars at all, especially in the near future. Why not use relatively cheap robotics to massively explore and develop the universe over the next several decades rather than rushing humans into an incredibly inhospitable environment?

Musk’s answer is that we are sitting ducks for an existential threat, either of our own making or a natural one. That’s true and always will be. Since going on a Bostrom bender a few years back, the entrepreneur’s main fear seems to be that Artificial Intelligence will be the doom of human beings. This dark future is possible in the longer term but no sure thing, and as I sit here typing this today climate change is a far greater threat. There’s no doubt Musk’s work with the Powerwall and EVs may help us avoid some of this human-made scourge — that is his greatest contribution to society, for sure — but his outsize concern about AI is distracting. Threats from machine intelligence should be a priority but not nearly the top priority.

Something very sinister is quietly baked into the Nick Bostrom view of Homo sapiens becoming extinct which Musk adheres to, which is the idea that climate change and nuclear holocaust, say, would still leave some humans to soldier on, even if hundreds of millions or billions are killed off. That’s why something that could theoretically end the entire species–like AI–is given precedence over more pressing matters. That’s insane and immoral.

The opening of a Samuel Gibbs Guardian article:

Elon Musk has warned again about the dangers of artificial intelligence, saying that it poses “vastly more risk” than the apparent nuclear capabilities of North Korea does.

The Tesla and SpaceX chief executive took to Twitter to once again reiterate the need for concern around the development of AI, following the victory of Musk-led AI development over professional players of the Dota 2 online multiplayer battle game.

This is not the first time Musk has stated that AI could potentially be one of the most dangerous international developments. He said in October 2014 that he considered it humanity’s “biggest existential threat”, a view he has repeated several times while making investments in AI startups and organisations, including OpenAI, to “keep an eye on what’s going on”.

Musk again called for regulation, previously doing so directly to US governors at their annual national meeting in Providence, Rhode Island.

Musk’s tweets coincide with the testing of an AI designed by OpenAI to play the multiplayer online battle arena (Moba) game Dota 2, which successfully managed to win all its 1-v-1 games at the International Dota 2 championships against many of the world’s best players competing for a $24.8m (£19m) prize fund.

The AI displayed the ability to predict where human players would deploy forces and improvise on the spot, in a game where sheer speed of operation does not correlate with victory, meaning the AI was simply better, not just faster than the best human players.•

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Old Print Article: Julius Streicher Captured In The Aftermath Of WWII (1946)

August 14, 2017 in Old Print Articles, Photography, Politics | Permalink

According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the miscreant who publishes the Daily Stormer, the neo-Nazi website that spent the past day mocking Heather Heyer after she was tragically murdered by a white supremacist in Charlottesville, was known to smack his head on sidewalks and walls during his youth. It shows.

His site’s namesake, Der Stürmer, was published beginning in 1924 by Julius Streicher, a man so repellent that even other Nazis found him embarrassing. The newspaper was used to defame Jewish people in general and many Jews specifically, fanning the flames of intolerance into a full-blown conflagration. 

In the aftermath of the war, Nazis of note were rounded up by American G.I.s. For a few dozen who were brilliant in rocketry (most notably, Wernher von Braun), they had their ugly pasts whitewashed, were relocated to Alabama to begin in earnest the nascent U.S. space program and eventually were lauded as national heroes. Upon von Braun’s death in 1977, President Jimmy Carter called him a “man of bold vision” and said that “we will continue to profit from his example.” Few things can be more maddeningly unfair.

The rest met with a more appropriate end, Streicher included. The hatemonger was an experienced painter, so he decided to try to recreate himself as an artist unfamiliar with this Third Reich thing. He ended up hanging from the business end of a noose after he was captured by Nazi hunter Henry G. Plitt, a Jewish soldier who was among the first Americans to parachute into Normandy. An article about the mission to bring Streicher to justice from the January 11, 1946 Brooklyn Daily Eagle. 

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“The Wild Card This Time Is Not North Korea, But Donald Trump”

August 11, 2017 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

Harry S. Conman spent part of his day dangerously baiting Kim Jong-un, a guy who murdered his own half-brother with a nerve agent, saying of his North Korean counterpart that “if he utters one threat, in the form of an overt threat…he will truly regret it and he will regret it fast.” Either Trump’s bluffing and will be in a weakened position when his bluff is called, or he means it and lots of people will die horrible deaths and not just in North Korea.

Three notes of hope that we may avoid Armageddon: 1) Trump is a cowardly bullshit artist, 2) The coterie of generals in his midst may overrule him even if that’s not Constitutional, and 3) Kim Jong-un, despite the fratricide, may not be nearly as crazy as he’s made out to be. Evil beyond belief, for sure, but perhaps very calculated and focused on his personal survival. Let’s hope.

In a Reddit Ask Me Anything now underway, Washington Post North Korea reporter Anna Fifield is answering questions about the fraught situation. A few early exchanges follow.

________________________________

Question:

How much NK talk is normal saber-rattling? 

Anna Fifield:

A lot of this is normal April/August saber-rattling.

The wild card this time is not North Korea, but Donald Trump. Trump is acting in ways that are different from his predecessors — look at the repeated threats on twitter in the last few days — and the North Koreans are not quite sure what to make of it.

The chances of misinterpretation/accidental conflict are significant — and much more likely than a deliberate start to a war from either side.

One important thing to note: North Korea has said it will retaliate IF the United States strikes it. It’s not threatening to go first. And the U.S. would probably only strike (a pre-emptive strike) if it saw an imminent threat to the nation or its allies.

So deterrence remains the best option for everyone.

________________________________

Question:

If North Korea collapses what would happen to there current nuclear arsenal?

Anna Fifield:

That’s a great question and we simply do not know the answer. A lot would depend on how it collapsed. An outside invasion would be very different from, say, a military coup. If there was a coup from within, we could expect the generals to retain control of the nuclear weapons. But imagine if there was a sudden collapse and we saw nuclear scientists taking off over the Chinese border with suitcases full of fissile material. Scary stuff.

________________________________

Question:

How likely is Kim Jong Un to accept a deal where he hands over power in North Korea in exchange for exile, a guarantee of no harm or prosecution, and a life of luxury for himself and his generals in China?

Anna Fifield:

Well, no one is offering him that kind of deal — that we know of. I think Kim knows that his life would be much worse if he were not the leader of his own totalitarian state, regardless of whether he’s living in a gated compound in Beijing or if he’s in a worse situation.

Kim’s number one priority — the whole reason for the nuclear weapons, the personality cult, the brutal system — is staying in power. And he’ll do anything to hold onto it, as we saw with the way he got rid of his uncle and half brother.

________________________________

Question:

If KJU goes what will replace the regime?

Anna Fifield:

We have no idea. A military junta like in Myanmar? Gradual economic reform without political change like in China? An American administrator like in Iraq? Re-unification with South Korea? We have no idea how this regime would come to and end and what would come next.

What I would note though is that we are in a historically abnormal situation. Korea was one for thousands of years, so the division of the last seven decades is a blip in history and almost all Koreans, North or South, pine for the day when they’re one again. It constantly amazes me how similar North Koreans and South Koreans remain today, despite more than 70 years of enforced separation.

This is a tragedy. One people divided by an arbitrary line.•

________________________________

Question:

Why hasn’t North Korea suffered from the same internal strife that usually plagues regimes like this? Coups, ambitious generals — the Kim dynasty seems to be effectively immune to it. Is the dynasty’s hold over its population so absolute that even during times of mass starvation the military or other political factions will be unable to even attempt to seize power from Kim?

Anna Fifield:

The North Korean regime keeps such a tight grip on the population that people are afraid to question or criticize the regime to anyone except their closest family members — and sometimes not even to them.

If you criticize Kim Jong Un or suggest that he’s unfit for the job in any way, you could be banished to the countryside if you’re an elite in Pyongyang; you could be executed by anti-aircraft gunfire, as Kim had done to several top officials, including his own uncle; or you could be sent to a re-education or labor camp, forced to dig holes or break rocks for hours and hours a day, with nothing more than a bowl of thin soup made from salt and corn for your meals. Sometimes whole families are punished for one person’s actions.

All this has served as a good incentive for people to keep their mouths shut and their heads down. Plus, outside Pyongyang, most people are too busy trying to feed their families to think about political activity.

People who become disillusioned enough with the regime to act usually defect rather than rebel.•

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A Brief Note From 1951 About A Silent Prayer

August 9, 2017 in Old Print Articles, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

From the August 6, 1951 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

“It Turned Out That In Putin’s Russia, There Are No Good Guys”

August 9, 2017 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

Not familiar enough with the proprietors of Radio Poland to accept at face value its story promising that a government commission is soon to report that “traces of an explosion” were found on the left wing of the country’s presidential plane that crashed and killed all 96 people on board, including Lech Kaczynski, in Russia seven years ago, but it wouldn’t shock me if it were true.

The inference to be taken is that Putin’s Kremlin murdered President Kaczynski as a means of destabilizing Poland, which, belatedly, has occurred, with Andrzej Duda trying to curb democracy as protesters attempt to do the same to him. When the scope of Putin’s crimes are eventually known, the body count won’t, of course, rival Stalin’s, but the depth of his evil will likely stun casual observers.

When working to upend America, the democracy that has done most to thwart him, Putin used vast sums of money stolen through kleptocracy, U.S. social media platforms and a chaos agent named Donald Trump to enact a relatively bloodless coup. 

· · ·

From “Businessman Paints Terrifying And Complex Picture Of Putin’s Russia,” Miles Parks’ NPR story about William Browder, who lobbied for the Magnitsky Act after witnessing Putin’s terror at an unsafe distance:

Browder’s story — how he ended up living in London, after almost a decade of vast success as a businessman in Moscow, is arguably a case study in how Putin’s government works: a system of intermediary influential businessmen who aren’t directly employed by the Russian government, but who benefit financially from Putin’s regime.
 
Browder founded and ran one of the largest investment firms in Russia, Hermitage Capital Management, from 1996-2005. When he and his lawyer Sergei Magnitsky discovered a massive corruption scheme, they went to the authorities.

“And we waited for the good guys to get the bad guys,” he told the Senate Judiciary Committee. “It turned out that in Putin’s Russia, there are no good guys.”

After making their complaint, Browder was accused of tax evasion; he alleges the $230 million he thought his business was paying in taxes to the Russian Treasury was misappropriated and funneled to those in power, at once making him a criminal and making Putin’s circle richer.

He was denied access back into the country after an international trip, but Magnitsky wasn’t so lucky. Browder told the senators the Russian lawyer was detained by the authorities, denied medical treatment for pancreatitis while he was jailed, and then allegedly beaten to death in 2009 while chained to a prison cell bed.

Putin has continuously denied the allegations regarding Magnitsky.

“Investigators concluded that there was no malicious intent, or criminal negligence in Magnitsky’s death. It was just a tragedy,” Putin said in 2013, in an interview with a Russian television station. “One might think no deaths occur in U.S. prisons.”

Human rights groups, however, have agreed with Browder’s telling of events.

After advocacy by Browder, in 2012, Congress passed the Magnitsky Act. The law targets Russian human rights abusers by freezing their American assets and banning them from entering the U.S. The bill was named after the deceased Russian lawyer who had fought corruption in the country alongside Browder.•

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“When Did America Become Untethered From Reality?”

August 9, 2017 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

Donald Trump will end in disgrace, not primarily because he’s an ignorant con artist wholly unfit to be President, but because he has stashed in his closet a mausoleum full of skeletons pertaining to his personal life, business career and Russia. His family’s laundry is dirty despite all the laundering he’s done. Trump ultimately falls, as do his cohort of disgraceful henchmen, half-wits and horseshitters. This sordid episode doesn’t conclude in book deals all around but in most of the players being booked.

That won’t, however, save America. Our problems run deeper and wider than Trump, who’s the culmination of our social collapse, not the source. Russia’s machinations and James Comey’s boneheaded move may have put the QVC quisling over the top, but there’s really no rationalizing nearly 63 million citizens pulling the lever for a completely unqualified and indecent anti-politician. We’ve been heading for this disaster for generations, our break from reality a long time coming.

In an excellent Atlantic essay, Kurt Andersen, who has a history with Trump, writes that he began to notice our ugly divorce from reality during the Dubya Era “truthiness,” precisely in 2004. It’s interesting the writer chose the year he did, because that was when The Apprentice debuted, and a deeply immoral and largely failed businessman was awarded the role of Manhattan’s greatest builder despite not being able to get a loan of clean money to open a tent in Central Park.

But our fall from grace has more distant origins. Our drift started with Reagan unwinding the Fairness Doctrine, the rise of cable news, the emergence of Reality TV and the decentralization of the media, when the gatekeepers of legacy journalism were obliterated, when anyone could suddenly pose as an expert on vaccinations or trade pacts. The Internet made it possible to legitimize our most dubious fears and worst impulses.

We have more information than ever before, and it’s been put to worrisome use, as “lone gunmen” and multi-billion dollar corporations alike began to commodify conspiracy theories, from Ancient Aliens to Pizzagate to Seth Rich. The sideshow that has always existed in the U.S. was relocated to the center ring, as Chuck Barris’ suspicion about America’s dark side proved truer than even he could have predicted. 

As much as anything, performance became essential to success, convincingly playing a Doctor, Survivor or a populist Presidential candidate was more important than truth. Life became neither quite real nor fake, just a sort of purgatory. It’s a variation of who we actually are–a vulgarization.

· · ·

It’s a new abnormal that’s been creeping over this relatively wealthy though often dissatisfied nation for decades. Here’s the transcript of a scene from 1981’s My Dinner with Andre, in which Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory discuss how performance had become introduced in a significant way into quotidian life, and that was way before Facebook gave the word “friends” scare quotes and prior to Kardashians, online identities and selfies:

Andre Gregory:

That was one of the reasons why Grotowski gave up the theater. He just felt that people in their lives now were performing so well, that performing in the theater was sort of superfluous, and in a way, obscene. Isn’t it amazing how often a doctor will live up to our expectation of how a doctor should look? You see a terrorist on television and he looks just like a terrorist. I mean, we live in a world in which fathers, single people or artists kind of live up to someone’s fantasy of how a father or single person or an artist should look and behave. They all act like that know exactly how they ought to conduct themselves at every single moment, and they all seem totally self-confident. But privately people are very mixed up about themselves. They don’t know what they should be doing with their lives. They’re reading all these self-help books.

Wallace Shawn:

God, I mean those books are so touching because they show how desperately curious we all are to know how all the others of us are really getting on in life, even though by performing all these roles in life we’re just hiding the reality of ourselves from everybody else. I mean, we live in such ludicrous ignorance of each other. I mean, we usually don’t know the things we’d like to know even about our supposedly closest friends. I mean, I mean, suppose you’re going through some kind of hell in your own life, well, you would love to know if your friends have experienced similar things, but we just don’t dare to ask each other. 

Andre Gregory:

No, it would be like asking your friend to drop his role.

Wallace Shawn:

I mean, we just put no value at all on perceiving reality. On the contrary, this incredible emphasis we now put on our careers automatically makes perceiving reality a very low priority, because if your life is organized around trying to be successful in a career, well, it just doesn’t matter what you perceive or what you experience. You can really sort of shut your mind off for years ahead in a way. You can turn on the automatic pilot.•

· · ·

The opening of Andersen’s article, in which he argues that Sixties individualism and Digital Age fantasy conspired to lay us low:

When did America become untethered from reality?

I first noticed our national lurch toward fantasy in 2004, after President George W. Bush’s political mastermind, Karl Rove, came up with the remarkable phrase reality-based community. People in “the reality-based community,” he told a reporter, “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality … That’s not the way the world really works anymore.” A year later, The Colbert Report went on the air. In the first few minutes of the first episode, Stephen Colbert, playing his right-wing-populist commentator character, performed a feature called “The Word.” His first selection: truthiness. “Now, I’m sure some of the ‘word police,’ the ‘wordinistas’ over at Webster’s, are gonna say, ‘Hey, that’s not a word!’ Well, anybody who knows me knows that I’m no fan of dictionaries or reference books. They’re elitist. Constantly telling us what is or isn’t true. Or what did or didn’t happen. Who’s Britannica to tell me the Panama Canal was finished in 1914? If I wanna say it happened in 1941, that’s my right. I don’t trust books—they’re all fact, no heart … Face it, folks, we are a divided nation … divided between those who think with their head and those who know with their heart … Because that’s where the truth comes from, ladies and gentlemen—the gut.”

Whoa, yes, I thought: exactly. America had changed since I was young, when truthiness and reality-based community wouldn’t have made any sense as jokes. For all the fun, and all the many salutary effects of the 1960s—the main decade of my childhood—I saw that those years had also been the big-bang moment for truthiness. And if the ’60s amounted to a national nervous breakdown, we are probably mistaken to consider ourselves over it.

Each of us is on a spectrum somewhere between the poles of rational and irrational. We all have hunches we can’t prove and superstitions that make no sense. Some of my best friends are very religious, and others believe in dubious conspiracy theories. What’s problematic is going overboard—letting the subjective entirely override the objective; thinking and acting as if opinions and feelings are just as true as facts. The American experiment, the original embodiment of the great Enlightenment idea of intellectual freedom, whereby every individual is welcome to believe anything she wishes, has metastasized out of control. From the start, our ultra-individualism was attached to epic dreams, sometimes epic fantasies—every American one of God’s chosen people building a custom-made utopia, all of us free to reinvent ourselves by imagination and will. In America nowadays, those more exciting parts of the Enlightenment idea have swamped the sober, rational, empirical parts. Little by little for centuries, then more and more and faster and faster during the past half century, we Americans have given ourselves over to all kinds of magical thinking, anything-goes relativism, and belief in fanciful explanation—small and large fantasies that console or thrill or terrify us. And most of us haven’t realized how far-reaching our strange new normal has become.•

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“His Skills And Experience Have Put Him In A Rare Position To Remedy So Much Of What Ails Us”

August 8, 2017 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

There’s no doubt Mark Zuckerberg is a top-shelf CEO, even if the product he’s selling is dubious, an advertising scheme that connects hatemongers as surely as old lovers, can aid in toppling democracies as well as autocracies and is willing to quietly conduct “social experiments” on its customers, who are used as an endless source of free content to publish and private information to repurpose. No matter how much the Facebook founder claims to be repairing the ill effects of his company, he’s really just doubling down on its core tenets, which seem as likely as not to be antithetical to healthy societies.

In a Nick Bilton Vanity Fair “Hive” piece, the writer analyzes Zuckerberg’s many recent moves which make it seem like he’s readying himself for a White House run. (My own thoughts on the same can be read here.) As with all Bilton pieces, there’s interesting insight, though I do think one line in his conclusion borders on ludicrous.

Bilton writes that Zuckerberg’s “skills and experience have put him in a rare position to remedy so much of what ails us.” That would be a fairly ridiculous statement regardless of who we were talking about. Bill Gates is legitimately eradicating diseases and no one believes he can counteract “so much of what ails us.” No one would believe that about a President of the United States, even on those happy occasions when we have a sane and intelligent one who doesn’t believe he can run the world stage the way Gotti ran Queens.

It can’t be that Bilton believes Zuckerberg is capable of healing the country’s major problems just because he’s a bright and wealthy person because there are many far smarter and some modestly richer. It has to be the CEO’s management abilities and Facebook itself which elicited this judgement, but the former has been used to mixed results at best as far as civic life is concerned and the latter may permanently be more a negative than a positive. 

Considering Bilton acknowledges elsewhere in the article that Zuckerberg is clueless about his fellow citizens, his “remedy” line just sounds like more Silicon Valley idol worship, something best approached lightly in this moment of Theranos, Juicero, Kalanick, Damore and Thiel.

From Bilton:

I have my own theory as to what’s going on here. Over the years, I’ve spent some time with Zuckerberg, and I always got the feeling that he truly believed there wasn’t a problem that technology couldn’t solve. He felt deeply, and likely still does, that he was using Facebook to connect people, and that those connections were making the world a better place.

Lately, however, it appears that he has realized that there is another darker side to all of this technology. That the opioid epidemic has grown because of the Internet, that sites like Twitter enable people to spew hatred and lie without repercussions, and—most importantly—that his very own Web site was used by Russian hackers and idiot bros in the Midwest to share fake news stories that helped give us President Trump.

Zuckerberg may have ascended to prominence as a brilliant technologist, but he has turned Facebook into a behemoth because he is also a generationally gifted chief executive, someone who tends to think 20 steps ahead. In fact, I’ve never met a C.E.O. who can do this with such adroitness. I’m sure that the possibility of public office has crossed Zuckerberg’s mind, but probably for a reason that none of us have thought of, and it may also be 19 steps down the line. I don’t think he’s going to be on the ballot for 2020, but I do think he has left the option open to run for office one day. Maybe it won’t be the highest office in the land, too, but rather mayor of Palo Alto, or governor of California. Or maybe Zuckerberg just wants to join the local community board near his house. But, nevertheless, I think he’s got a larger plan in mind that we mere mortals just don’t understand: there isn’t a world in which Zuckerberg would amend the S-1 with that update, fully aware that his every move is scrutinized by investors, with zero intention of ever using an ounce of latitude afforded by the amendment.

But there’s something else I’ve come to believe about Zuckerberg over the past several months. As his surrogates have said to me, he partially wants to do this tour of America to show he’s just like us, and in touch with how Facebook (and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative) can affect people. Unfortunately, though, I think his expedition has had the opposite effect, and highlighted just how out of touch Zuckerberg really is with the rest of the country. While he can plan 20 moves ahead, he can’t seem to understand that cavorting around the country with a professional photographer, snapping disingenuous images of him milking cows, touring shrimp boats in the Bayou, and having dinner with a lovely family in Ohio, seems aloof or, worse, patronizing. I have some advice for Zuckerberg: fire your photographer. If you want to post a picture of yourself at dinner in Ohio, take a selfie like everyone else on the planet.•

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“There Was No War Or Natural Disaster. Just Ruinous Mismanagement.”

August 8, 2017 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

Julian Assange was always a dubious character, but he probably didn’t begin his Wikileaks career as a Putin puppet. That’s what he’s become during this decade, however, helping the Kremlin tilt the 2016 U.S. Presidential election with coordinated leaks and serving in the post-election period as a defender of Donald Trump, as the Commander-in-Chief attempts to gradually degrade liberty and instill authoritarianism in America. 

Assange’s most recent gambit was to warn of mass violence in the U.S.–encourage it, actually–by promising that the disaster unfolding in Venezuela would be replicated here should Trump be ousted from office for any number of nefarious acts that may be uncovered by Robert Mueller or other investigative officials. The analogy is dishonest since Venezuela’s decline is the result of gross mismanagement, not any political conflict. But large-scale civil unrest in America would be an ideal outcome for the Kremlin, which longs to destabilize the most powerful democracies.

Venezuela is going through a crazy-dangerous moment, for sure, and while the U.S. has a markedly different history and traditions, we could certainly will slide further toward such a nightmare if Trump and Assange get their way.

· · ·

The opening of Hannah Dreier’s harrowing AP report of her last days covering Venezuela’s fresh hell:

CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) — The first thing the muscled-up men did was take my cellphone. They had stopped me on the street as I left an interview in the hometown of the late President Hugo Chavez and wrangled me into a black SUV.

Heart pounding in the back seat with the men and two women, I watched the low cinderblock homes zoom by and tried to remember the anti-kidnapping class I’d taken in preparation for moving to Venezuela. The advice had been to try to humanize yourself.

“What should we do with her?” the driver asked. The man next to me pulled his own head up by the hair and made a slitting gesture across his throat.

What might a humanizing reaction to that be?

I had thought that being a foreign reporter protected me from the growing chaos in Venezuela. But with the country unraveling so fast, I was about to learn there was no way to remain insulated.

I came to Caracas as a correspondent for The Associated Press in 2014, just in time to witness the country’s accelerating descent into a humanitarian catastrophe.

Venezuela had been a rising nation, buoyed by the world’s largest oil reserves, but by the time I arrived, even high global oil prices couldn’t keep shortages and rapid inflation at bay.

Life in Caracas was still often marked by optimism and ambition. My friends were buying apartments and cars and making lofty plans for their careers. On weekends, we’d go to pristine Caribbean beaches and drink imported whiskey at nightclubs that stayed open until dawn. There was still so much affordable food that one of my first stories was about a growing obesity epidemic.

Over the course of three years, I said good-bye to most of those friends, as well as regular long-distance phone service and six international airline carriers. I got used to carrying bricks of rapidly devaluing cash in tote bags to pay for meals. We still drove to the beach, but began hurrying back early to get off the highway before bandits came out. Stoplights became purely ornamental because of the risk of carjackings.

There was no war or natural disaster. Just ruinous mismanagement that turned the collapse of prices for the country’s oil in 2015 into a national catastrophe.

As things got worse, the socialist administration leaned on anti-imperialist rhetoric. The day I was put into the black SUV in Chavez’s hometown of Barinas coincided with a government-stoked wave of anti-American sentiment. The Drug Enforcement Administration had just jailed the first lady’s nephews in New York on drug trafficking charges, and graffiti saying “Gringo, go home” went up around the country overnight. An image of then-President Barack Obama with Mickey Mouse ears appeared on the AP office building.

I was trying to make small talk with the men who had grabbed me when we pulled past a high, barbed wire-topped wall, and I glimpsed the logo of the secret police. Flooded with relief, I realized I hadn’t been kidnapped, just detained.

Inside, the men trained a camera on me for an interrogation. One said that I would end up like the American journalist who had recently been beheaded in Syria. Another said if I gave him a kiss I could go free.

The man who had been driving said they would be keeping me until the DEA agreed on a swap for the first lady’s nephews. He accused me of helping sabotage the economy. “How much does the U.S. pay you to be their spy?” he asked.

The government of President Nicolas Maduro blames the U.S. and right-wing business interests for the economic collapse, but most economists say it actually stems from government-imposed price and currency distortions. There often seemed to be a direct line between economic policy and daily hardship. One week, the administration declared that eggs would now be sold for no more than 30 cents a carton. The next week, eggs had disappeared from supermarkets, and still have not come back.•

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Old Print Article: Interplanetary Wars And Synthetic Weather In The Atomic Age (1945)

August 7, 2017 in Old Print Articles, Photography, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

Yesterday was the 72nd anniversary of the United States dropping the “Little Boy” atom bomb on Hiroshima, and Wednesday will be the same for “Fat Man” razing Nagasaki, a horrifying turn of events that was best captured by John Hersey in a feat of journalism that might still rank as the greatest non-fiction writing ever.

Just imagine standing in Harry S. Truman’s shoes and being told a million people will die if the war continues but these newly developed bolts of Thor, which could abbreviate the fighting, would unleash destruction heretofore unknown to humankind.

At the time, so much about the weapon was a mystery to all but a few involved in its creation. The day after Hiroshima, rumors printed in newspapers suggested the bomb was the size of a golf ball or weighed 25 pounds (actual weight: 9,700 lbs.). You would think these questions and the devastation itself would be enough to occupy writers for years, but by September of the same year, some scribes were speculating about what else the Atomic Age would bring. Synthetic weather and interplanetary trade were named as potential upsides, with the latter potentially leading to fresh warfare with the inhabitants of Saturn.

An article from the September 17, 1945 Brooklyn Daily Eagle.

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