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The fundamentals of Western politics are under threat. So what’s next?
The fundamentals of Western politics are under threat. So what’s next?
“Democracy is no longer the only game in town.” In this short sentence, David Runciman states the most important political fact of our time. When Winston Churchill wrote in 1947 that “democracy is the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time”, he did so in a context in which the alternatives were Nazism and fascism, which had recently been defeated, and the Soviet Union, which was consolidating its tyrannical hold over half of Europe. Seventy years later, it is no longer obvious that democracy is always the least bad form of government. Runciman explains:
Churchill was only half right. Democracy remains the least worst option for many of us, for now. But it is not the least worst option for everyone… The 21st century is likely to see Western democracy confronted by a rival political system that will vary from place to place and will occasionally stretch to include the edges of our politics. The temptations are real, even if the alternative is unrealistic for most Western societies.
The uncertainties surrounding democracy have two dimensions, one domestic and the other global. Internally democracies are faced by varieties of what is loosely described as populism – the rejection of established political elites and their policies. Externally democracy is confronted by the fact that dictatorship may be accepted and supported as legitimate by large majorities in countries where it prevails.
Democracy has overcome both of these challenges in the past. In the US, following a financial crash in 1893, William Jennings Bryan captured the Democratic Party and stood three times as its presidential candidate with a populist message and campaign methods very like Donald Trump’s. Bypassing mainstream media, Jennings used local news outlets and pamphlets to cast professional politicians – including his own party’s – as the enemy. His campaigns failed, and the next Democrat to reach the White House, in 1913, was a former president of Princeton, Woodrow Wilson. In interwar Europe fascism and Nazism commanded large majorities in many countries, not least among the continent’s middle classes. That did not prevent stable democracies developing in western Europe after the Second World War. So why is the present crisis of democracy different from any in the past?
Runciman points to three fundamental differences. First, political violence is less of a threat in democracies; lurking on the fringes of politics, it lacks the capacity to overthrow governments. Second, threats of disaster paralyse rather than galvanise politics. We have become used to the nightmarish prospect of nuclear war, so that even when it seems imminent – as it did to some people during the recent Korean crisis – it has little or no effect on the democratic status quo. The danger of catastrophic climate change has had a similar lack of impact. As Runciman puts it, “Entropy replaces explosive change as the default condition of politics.” Third, information technology has transformed the conditions in which democracy operates. The media environment is a battle-ground fought over by forces elected governments neither control nor fully understand. …
‘Sometimes dancing, sometimes furious’: a girl shot dead in Gaza
Wesal Sheikh Khalil was an ordinary teenager confronting an extraordinary political situation.
A woman waves a Palestinian flag during a protest at al-Bureij refugee camp, where Wesal lived, near the Gaza-Israel border.
The family of Wesal Sheikh Khalil say that in a matter of weeks the teenager experienced a complete transformation, from a hop-scotching child to an adolescent infuriated by injustice in Gaza.
“You are cowards,” she screamed at her aunts when they refused to join protests at the border, where health officials say Israeli forces have killed more than 110 and shot thousands since demonstrations began in late March.
Her immediate family, impoverished even by the coastal enclave’s dire standards, had been unengaged in politics. Wesal and her 11-year-old brother were the only ones who trekked weekly to the perimeter, into the surging crowds and the black smoke of burning tyres. Their siblings tried to stop them, but they would sneak out.
“She kept saying: ‘You have to go. You have to go,’” recalled one aunt, Ahlam, 30. “She was the most dedicated of all of us.”
Wesal, 14, was shot dead on Monday, one of more than 60 people killed as Israeli snipers fired on protesters. The teenager has left behind a family who are grieving, but who also feel purpose in their loss.
“Now she is dead, I’m ready,” said another aunt, Anwar. “After what she did, we are not afraid.” …
The Onion’s Brutal Israel Commentary Goes Beyond Satire
The country’s leading humor publication has taken a stance on the Israel-Palestine conflict in a way that most “real” newspapers haven’t.
click to embiggen
On Monday, as the United States celebrated moving its Israeli embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, thousands of Palestinian protesters were shot by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) at the border fence separating Israel and Gaza. At least 60 Palestinians died as a result, and the seemingly never-ending conflict between Israel and Palestine was once again at the top of the international news. On May 16, the front page of the New York Times displayed a poignant image of the Gaza landscape, the sky a striking yellow with blue smoke surrounding the border fence. Beneath, the headline read, “Israelis Reflect: ‘I Hope at Least That Each Bullet Was Justified.’”
Supporters of Palestinians were outraged. “Even as #Palestinians are massacred NYTimes finds a way to humanize the #Israelis,” James J. Zogby, the founder of the Arab American Institute, wrote on Twitter. “Completely disgusting,” commented Jacobin’s Alex Press. “The NYT soft on the criminal Israeli shooters and has no heart for Palestinian victims in Gaza,” another Twitter user remarked.
Meanwhile, on The Onion, the nation’s other paper of record, this was the headline:
“IDF Soldier Recounts Harrowing, Heroic War Story Of Killing 8-Month-Old Child.”
This was a shockingly brutal joke, but it fits with the satirical website’s tone when it comes to Israel. In April, The Onion published “Teen On Birthright Trip Hadn’t Expected To See So Many Dead Palestinians.” On May 10, as the conflict between Israel and Iran heated up, the paper wrote a story headlined “Netanyahu Begins Calling For Israeli Return To Ancient Homeland Of Iran,” presumably a follow up to its May 1 article, “Netanyahu Provides Stunning New Evidence That Iranians Planned Sacking Of Babylon In 539 B.C.”
For the left, which is often frustrated by the pro-Israel tone of mainstream media coverage of the region, The Onion’s stance feels like a small win. “The Onion’s scathing, relentless mockery of Israeli propaganda reflects a radical shift in US political discourse,” journalist Glenn Greenwald of the Intercept explained in an email. “Even as recently as ten years ago, it was only a small fringe willing to denounce Israeli aggression, militarism and increasing devotion to apartheid.”
Noah Kulwin, a senior editor at Jewish Currents (who formerly worked at VICE News), had a more terse response when I messaged him: “It’s funny,” he said. …
It’s the Guns
The outrage after Parkland set off a moral reckoning and awakening—there’s a simple explanation for school shootings.
Americans of high-school age are 82 times more likely to die from a gun homicide than 15- to 19-year-olds in the rest of the developed world.
This stark discrepancy is often treated as a baffling fact, requiring some counterintuitive explanation. After today’s massacre in Texas, the state’s lieutenant governor, Dan Patrick, suggested that the problem may be that high schools have too many doors. “Had there been one single entrance possibly for every student, maybe [the shooter] would have been stopped.”
At other moments, we’re told that the problem is that we need to do a better job guessing which troubled teens may prove murderous at some point in the future, or dealing with the excesses of masculinity, or possibly the crisis of meaning and identity in the secularizing modern world. As always, though, there is a simpler and more powerful explanation of why there has been no similar school shooting in Germany since 2009; or in Canada since 2016; none in the United Kingdom since 1996—while conversely, more young Americans have died in school shootings in 2018 than in all the nation’s combat operations all over the world.*
The answer is almost insultingly simple and has the virtue only of being true: It’s the guns.
The Parkland shooting earlier this year seemed at last to ignite a public movement in response to these terrible crimes. Yet even the cumulative impact of slaughter after slaughter has not softened the harsh divide of the American gun impasse. …
7 Products That Bizarrely Use War As A Marketing Tool
War. What is it good for? Absolutely marketing. From Wario to Warren Buffet, people can’t get enough war, and companies know that there’s a certain subset of customers who will 100 percent invest in products that make them feel like patriotic members of Seal Team 6 when they wipe their asses or poach their eggs. All you need to do is stretch credulity a little bit to tie your product into the theme. Super easy, right?
7. “Gun Oil” Brand Lube Is For … Combat Masturbation?
Get it? Cuz it shoots! Do you get it?
You have a lot of choices in the world of personal lubricants, from things like KY Jelly to my old standby, a handful of margarine. But there’s also a popular brand called Gun Oil, because dicks and guns look alike and they both shoot and heh. Also, this is the product description on Amazon: “During Operation Desert Storm, Marines jacked off with actual military-issue gun oil while hunkered down in the trenches of Kuwaiti battlefields. A group of those marines has developed a high-tech, condom-safe formula for smooth, rapid-fire action.” I don’t know how true that is, but after reading it, come on. Of course it’s true. Some dude was jerking off with gun oil in a war zone, came home, and thought, “Jesus, I need to recreate my desert war zone jack-off experiences! And I need several of my friends to do it with me, because the description was plural!”
You’d think soldiers would want to minimize things reminiscent of their wartime experiences back home, but maybe if the jerking off is really good, it’s like a safe space memory. I don’t know. In any event, this is the most combat-intensive jack lube on the market by far. …
How a champion boxer got caught in Britain’s immigration dragnet
A little-known Home Office scheme designed to deport more ‘foreign criminals’ has left Kelvin Bilal Fawaz – and many others like him – living in an endless limbo.
The opening ceremony of the London Olympics, on 27 July 2012, should have been a moment of triumph for Kelvin Bilal Fawaz. The talented young boxer had recently been crowned the amateur light middleweight champion of England, and he was meant to be marching with the athletes of Team GB as they paraded into the Olympic Stadium.
Fawaz was born in Nigeria, and trafficked to Britain as a child – where he was rescued by the state and raised in care. Now he was a champion, ready to represent his country, with a lucrative professional career ahead of him. But there was one problem: he wasn’t a British citizen. In fact, it wasn’t clear if he had permission to stay in the UK at all. As a child, he had been given temporary leave to remain until just before he turned 18 – but he had to apply to extend this as an adult, and by 2012, at the age of 24, he was still waiting for a response. Like the rest of us, he watched the Games on television.
Since then, Fawaz has lost almost everything: his nascent career, his marriage, and ultimately, his liberty. Now 29, he has lived his entire adult life in the UK without valid immigration status, which means he has no right to work and is liable to be detained and deported at a moment’s notice. During the past decade, he has applied and appealed for extended leave to remain; he has applied for a spousal visa; he has even asked to be registered as stateless person. All these requests have been turned down by the Home Office, which considers his presence in the UK undesirable.
The Windrush scandal has brought attention to the “hostile environment” policy introduced by Theresa May in 2012 to drive unwanted immigrants from the UK. But Fawaz has become ensnared in a lesser-known policy – another Home Office scheme designed to remove immigrants, purportedly by targeting the most dangerous foreign criminals. …
DEGREE OF DIFFICULTY: Prepare to spend a while; it’s The Long Read.
The Amish can teach us how to take power back from Google and Facebook
FREE WILL
The Amish see technology as a choice, and not an inevitability.
After years designing gadgets and services to monopolize our attention and extract our data, tech giants face a mounting backlash. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, long under fire for “programming people’s brains,” will testify before the European parliament next week about his company’s use of data. Not long after, transformative new European privacy rules go into effect that will give EU consumers far more visibility into what companies know about them.
Now tech CEOs insist they want to be part of the solution. On Tuesday, Facebook-owned Instagram confirmed a feature that will let users track their time spent on the platform. A week earlier, Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced a Digital Wellbeing initiative geared at helping people moderate their use of Google’s products and services by suggesting breaks from YouTube or batching notifications. He cited the concept of “JOMO,” or joy of missing out.
There’s nothing wrong with tech giants discovering (or appearing to discover) their scruples. But it’s worth remembering that the choice to use technology is ours too, and we can choose differently. Just ask the Amish.
Before accepting any new innovation, “the Amish use us as an experiment,” says Jameson Wetmore, an engineer turned social researcher at Arizona State University. “They watch what happens to people in the outside world and decide if that technology is something they want to adopt for themselves.” Unlike Silicon Valley, the Amish recognize that there’s no such thing as value-free technologies. …
‘I felt exposed online’: how to disappear from the internet
Worried about what’s out there about you? You’re not alone. But is it even possible to become a digital ghost?
Poof! All gone. ‘In a world where almost any action leaves some kind of digital footprint, there is no clear path back to the realm of the unknown.’
Early one morning last year, before the birds were up, Tio Bucard, his wife and children skittered down the path from their home in a tiny French village towards a black SUV, its engine running. As Bucard drove to the local airport, he checked his rear-view mirror every few moments to see that he was still being followed by Frank Ahearn, a 54-year-old American with a peppery beard and wraparound sunglasses. Bucard (not his real name) had met Ahearn for the first time only the day before, in the lobby of a Monaco hotel close to Bucard’s office. Now he had entrusted his family’s safety to this former drug addict from the Bronx. Bucard pulled into the airport’s long-term car park. Then he and the family transferred into Ahearn’s hired SUV. As they pulled on to the motorway, Ahearn joked whether, while the family was in hiding, he could look after Bucard’s £5,000 watch, a Bentley Flying B No 3.
The watch was a reminder of more plentiful times. Bucard, who raised capital for a private equity firm, had recently found himself on the wrong end of a bad deal. Problems gathered and the firm began to default on payments. One of the slighted investors had, as Bucard puts it, “a shady past” and angry phone calls soon blackened into threats of physical violence. Fearing for his and his family’s safety, Bucard typed the phrase “how to disappear” into Google. Halfway down the first page of results, he saw Ahearn’s name. A former New York skip tracer – a private investigator who finds people who have “skipped” town – turned professional “disappearer”, Ahearn offers a range of freelance services, everything from helping to restore your privacy on the internet to driving your family across Europe and into a new life.
“My idea was to go away for three to four months,” Bucard tells me. “Just until I could raise the funds to pay back my investors.” Not wanting to cause alarm, Bucard told his children they were taking an extended vacation. The day before they fled, Ahearn rented an Airbnb in a far-flung city in his name. When the family arrived at the safe house, Ahearn bought new mobile phones and laptops, then schooled the family on the rules of their new life: do use untraceable text-messaging services; don’t use public email servers; do pay in cash; don’t use Facebook. After a few days, Ahearn left the Bucards in their temporary accommodation and returned to his home in Madrid, where he lives with his girlfriend. In his wallet, he carried Bucard’s credit card.
When he landed in Spain, Ahearn tried to imagine what a man of Bucard’s wealth might indulge in while on holiday. Then he began a riot of spending: fine clothes, meals out, a king’s ransom of trinkets. “I had a blast with his plastic,” he says. “And that, my friend, is how to leave a trail of super-cool disinformation.” …
Video Goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
North Korea threatens to pull out of historic peace talks with the U.S. in the wake of a provocative American military exercise and antagonistic rhetoric from John Bolton.
ABC News anchor Dan Harris reflects on the challenges faced by the media in the Trump era and discusses his book “Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics.”
THANKS to Comedy Central and The Daily Show with Trevor Noah for making this program available on YouTube.
There’s no such thing as a stupid question. Unless you’re the President of the United States asking about the difference between HPV and HIV.
THANKS to CBS and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert for making this program available on YouTube.
Bill recaps the top stories of the week, including Trump’s shady China deal, the latest from the Mueller investigation, and, of course, the royal wedding.
Bill shares a few fun facts about attorney and Trump “fixer” Michael Cohen.
Bill disputes the notion that nobody is “above the law,” and worries about Donald Trump’s desire to be “president for life.”
THANKS to HBO and Real Time with Bill Maher for making this program available on YouTube.
CAUTION: Some language may not be appropriate for work or children.
Here’s me commentary on some dodgy driving.
CAUTION: Some language may not be appropriate for work or children.
Mozza and I critically analyse an argument.
ねこが何で食べ物と認識しているのか疑問が残る動画。With what do cats recognize it as a food?
Max likes his toys to be on the floor or in buckets. He is not a normal bird.
FINALLY . . .
Utopia Lost: The Case for Radical Technological Optimism
The American Pavilion designed by Buckminster Fuller for the 1967 World’s Fair on fire in 1976.
“Count, little Count, you may go dancing, but I’ll play the tune.”
— The Marriage of Figaro
Introduction
How do we defeat Donald Trump and drain the “rising tide” of far-right nationalism in both the US and Europe?
This essay is an attempt to answer to that question.
Left and Right cite the same two causes for the growth of far-right populism: globalization (a polite synonym for global capitalism) and automation.
However, these are not particularly new features of the world. In fact, most historians would agree they are the two main themes of the past two hundred fifty years — the very things that define the “modern” era!
By tracing the headwaters of capitalism and automation we will be able to understand Trump as the product of a larger historical force — indeed, one that has been well documented by historians, since a global far-right populist wave has already occurred once in history. Though Trump is generally regarded as a confusing aberration, we will see how in fact he is a very natural culmination of the central story of US politics.
So far, the Left’s response to Trump (like Hillary Clinton’s losing strategy) has been a set of negative rejections rather than a unified positive alternative vision. We protest that Trump hides his taxes, mistreats women, is incompetent, sympathizes with criminal autocracies, does not believe in science — all valid things to object to!
But none of this gets at the heart of Trump’s appeal. In fact, no one is better at highlighting all of these flaws than Trump himself! Confusingly, his success partly relies on how he advertises these shortcomings. Why? Because, as I pointed out in my last piece, Trump’s transgressive, messy incompetence represents a “wrecking ball,” the possibility that he will wipe away the unjust and seemingly intractable power structure of “elites” to change the system in radical ways. …
DEGREE OF DIFFICULTY: Prepare to spend a while; Medium advises it’s a 56 minute read.
Ed. More tomorrow? Probably. Possibly. Maybe. Not?