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Javier E

Opinion | There Is No Point in Hiding That We Threw Parades for War Criminals - The New... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ticker-tape-parades-names.html

monument criminal history policy revisionist

shared by Javier E on 31 Mar 23 - No Cached
  • This stretch of Broadway has in recent years gained the nickname “the Canyon of Heroes,” which makes the inclusion of Pétain and Laval feel wrong to many people, and that is understandable. But the actual tributes to Pétain and Laval were the parades, which we cannot take back. The names along the sidewalk don’t inherently celebrate anyone. Instead, they only hold us to account about whom we once considered heroes.
  • At the time of their parades, at least, Pétain and Laval had not yet revealed themselves to be traitors and war criminals. Pétain was still the “Lion of Verdun,” the general credited with saving France during the darkest moments of World War I. Laval was prime minister of a still unbowed France, soon to be named Time’s “Man of the Year” for his efforts to end the Great Depression.
  • Yet we have also knowingly thrown parades for white supremacists, dictators, kleptocrats, mass murderers — and, yes, fascists we already knew to be fascists. Air Marshal Italo Balbo was already infamous as one of the Blackshirts most responsible for bringing Italy under fascist rule when he was celebrated in New York in 1933 for leading a fleet of seaplanes across the Atlantic.
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  • Mayor Bill de Blasio’s advisory commission on city monuments recommended leaving the names in place. The group’s report warned that “removal of the vestiges of past decisions risks leading to cultural amnesia.” It suggested keeping the markers “while re-contextualizing them in place to continue the public dialogue.
  • The commission got it right. One idea for providing that context could be plaques posted at eye level along the parade route, referring people to, say, the Downtown Alliance’s website, which tells us why we honored these individuals — and why we might regret having done so. In this way, we can tell the truth rather than hide it.
Javier E

A Hamline Adjunct Showed a Painting of the Prophet Muhammad. She Lost Her Job. - The Ne... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ty-islam-prophet-muhammad.html

politics history culture policy muslim Mohammed image campus free speech education

shared by Javier E on 08 Jan 23 - No Cached
  • University officials and administrators all declined interviews. But Dr. Miller, the school’s president, defended the decision in a statement.“To look upon an image of the Prophet Muhammad, for many Muslims, is against their faith,” Dr. Miller’s statement said, adding, “It was important that our Muslim students, as well as all other students, feel safe, supported and respected both in and out of our classrooms.”
  • In a December interview with the school newspaper, the student who complained to the administration, Aram Wedatalla, described being blindsided by the image.
  • There are, however, a range of beliefs. Some Muslims distinguish between respectful depictions and mocking caricatures, while others do not subscribe to the restriction at all.
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  • The painting shown in Dr. López Prater’s class is in one of the earliest Islamic illustrated histories of the world, “A Compendium of Chronicles,” written during the 14th century by Rashid-al-Din (1247-1318).Shown regularly in art history classes, the painting shows a winged and crowned Angel Gabriel pointing at the Prophet Muhammad and delivering to him the first Quranic revelation. Muslims believe that the Quran comprises the words of Allah dictated to the Prophet Muhammad through the Angel Gabriel.
  • The image is “a masterpiece of Persian manuscript painting,” said Christiane Gruber, a professor of Islamic art at the University of Michigan. It is housed at the University of Edinburgh; similar paintings have been on display at places like the Metropolitan Museum of Art. And a sculpture of the prophet is at the Supreme Court.Dr. Gruber said that showing Islamic art and depictions of the Prophet Muhammad have become more common in academia, because of a push to “decolonize the canon” — that is, expand curriculum beyond a Western model.
  • Dr. Gruber, who wrote the essay in New Lines Magazine defending Dr. López Prater, said that studying Islamic art without the Compendium of Chronicles image “would be like not teaching Michaelangelo’s David.”
  • Yet, most Muslims believe that visual representations of Muhammad should not be viewed, even if the Quran does not explicitly prohibit them. The prohibition stems from the belief that an image of Muhammad could lead to worshiping the prophet rather than the god he served.
  • The administration, he said, “closed down conversation when they should have opened it up.”
  • Omid Safi, a professor of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Duke University, said he regularly shows images of the Prophet Muhammad in class and without Dr. López Prater’s opt-out mechanisms. He explains to his students that these images were works of devotion created by pious artists at the behest of devout rulers.“That’s the part I want my students to grapple with,” Dr. Safi said. “How does something that comes from the very middle of the tradition end up being received later on as something marginal or forbidden?”
  • Dr. López Prater, a self-described art nerd, said she knew about the potential for conflict on Oct. 6, when she began her online lecture with 30 or so students.She said she spent a few minutes explaining why she was showing the image, how different religions have depicted the divine and how standards change over time.“I do not want to present the art of Islam as something that is monolithic,” she said in an interview, adding that she had been shown the image as a graduate student. She also showed a second image, from the 16th century, which depicted Muhammad wearing a veil.
  • Four days after the class, Dr. López Prater was summoned to a video meeting with the dean of the college of liberal arts, Marcela Kostihova.
  • After the class ended, Ms. Wedatalla, a business major and president of the university’s Muslim Student Association, stuck around to voice her discomfort.Immediately afterward, Dr. López Prater sent an email to her department head, Allison Baker, about the encounter; she thought that Ms. Wedatalla might complain.Ms. Baker, the chair of the digital and studio art department, responded to the email four minutes later.“It sounded like you did everything right,” Ms. Baker said. “I believe in academic freedom so you have my support.”
  • As Dr. López Prater predicted, Ms. Wedatalla reached out to administrators. Dr. López Prater, with Ms. Baker’s help, wrote an apology, explaining that sometimes “diversity involves bringing contradicting, uncomfortable and coexisting truths into conversation with each other.”
  • Ms. Wedatalla declined an interview request, and did not explain why she had not raised concerns before the image was shown. But in an email statement, she said images of Prophet Muhammad should never be displayed, and that Dr. López Prater gave a trigger warning precisely because she knew such images were offensive to many Muslims. The lecture was so disturbing, she said, that she could no longer see herself in that course.
  • Dr. López Prater said that no one in class raised concerns, and there was no disrespectful commentary.
  • Dr. Kostihova compared showing the image to using a racial epithet for Black people, according to Dr. López Prater.“It was very clear to me that she had not talked to any art historians,” Dr. López Prater said.
  • A couple of weeks later, the university rescinded its offer to teach next semester.
  • Dr. López Prater said she was ready to move on. She had teaching jobs at other schools. But on Nov. 7, David Everett, the vice president for inclusive excellence, sent an email to all university employees, saying that certain actions taken in an online class were “undeniably inconsiderate, disrespectful and Islamophobic.”
  • Dr. López Prater, who had only begun teaching at Hamline in the fall, said she felt like a bucket of ice water had been dumped over her head, but the shock soon gave way to “blistering anger at being characterized in those terms by somebody who I have never even met or spoken with.” She reached out to Dr. Gruber, who ended up writing the essay and starting the petition.
  • At the Dec. 8 forum, which was attended by several dozen students, faculty and administrators, Ms. Wedatalla described, often through tears, how she felt seeing the image.“Who do I call at 8 a.m.,” she asked, when “you see someone disrespecting and offending your religion?”Other Muslim students on the panel, all Black women, also spoke tearfully about struggling to fit in at Hamline. Students of color in recent years had protested what they called racist incidents; the university, they said, paid lip service to diversity and did not support students with institutional resources.
Javier E

Opinion | Joe Biden Puts Donald Trump In His Place - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...e-biden-donald-trump-2024.html

biden trump democracy campaign

shared by Javier E on 08 Jan 24 - No Cached
  • He also performed a service by keeping the preservation of American democracy central to his campaign. He has faced plenty of second-guessing for this choice. Democracy is a big, amorphous concept like climate change, the critics say. Regular people struggle to understand it as concretely as they do, say, crime or the economy.
  • But as Mr. Biden explained, “Without democracy, no progress is possible.” It’s all connected, he said.
  • “Democracy means having the freedom to speak your mind, to be who you are, to be who you want to be,” he said. “Democracy is about being able to bring about peaceful change. Democracy — democracy is how we’ve opened the doors of opportunity wider and wider with each successive generation, notwithstanding our mistakes. But if democracy falls, we’ll lose that freedom.”
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  • The 2024 election will not be the usual battle between parties, platforms and policies. It is a battle between those who fundamentally respect and abide by the ground rules of democracy and those who do not.
  • To underline his case most forcefully, Mr. Biden didn’t need to use his own words. He could rely on the words of his opponent: revenge, retribution, fight like hell, terminate the Constitution, suckers and losers, vermin, poisoning the blood of our country, dictator on Day 1, American carnage. There is no subtext here; it’s all text. As Mr. Biden put it, “We all know who Donald Trump is.”
  • And yet, apparently, we need to keep reminding ourselves. Otherwise, we fall into the trap of normalization that Mr. Trump laid from the start.
  • Today he can call for the execution of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, or tell the Biden administration to “rot in hell,” or promote a video claiming he is literally a gift from God, and it gets less attention in both mainstream and social media than Mr. Biden tripping over a sandbag.
  • How did we end up here? Mr. Biden offered one compelling explanation: complacency. “We’ve been blessed so long with a strong, stable democracy, it’s easy to forget why so many before us risked their lives and strengthened democracy,
  • In that sense, democracy is like vaccines. Few people today have firsthand memories of the horrors of diseases that were rampant before vaccines largely eradicated them, which makes it easier for vaccine hesitancy to take root
  • Similarly, when a country has no history of living under a dictatorship, it can be easier to lose sight of what it means to live in a representative democracy, and to be caught flat-footed when a real authoritarian comes knocking.
Javier E

Review: 'The Free World' by Louis Menand - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...618713

free world intellectual artistic cultural history US european book review

shared by Javier E on 07 May 24 - No Cached
  • ouis Menand’s big new book on art, literature, music, and thought from 1945 to 1965 instills the conviction that the 20th century is well and truly over
  • For those of us who lived through any portion of this period and its immediate aftermath, the book is a rather amazing compendium of the scholarly research, revision, and demythologizing that have been accomplished in recent decades.
  • Interweaving post-1945 art history, literary history, and intellectual history, Menand provides a familiar outline; the picture he presents is one of cultural triumph backed by American wealth and aggressive foreign policy.
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  • guided by a fascination with the wayward paths to fame, he half-unwittingly sows doubt about the justice of the American rise to artistic leadership in the postwar era. In his erudite account, artistic success owes little to vision and purpose, more to self-promotion, but most to unanticipated adoption by bigger systems with other aims, principally oriented toward money, political advantage, or commercial churn
  • For the greatness and inevitability of artistic consecration, Menand substitutes the arbitrary confluences of forces at any given moment.
  • The curriculum runs chapter by chapter through George Kennan, George Orwell, Jean-Paul Sartre, Hannah Arendt, Jackson Pollock, Lionel Trilling, Allen Ginsberg, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Robert Rauschenberg and John Cage, Elvis and the Beatles, Isaiah Berlin, James Baldwin, Jack Kerouac, Andy Warhol, Susan Sontag, and Pauline Kael. Each biography opens a door to a school or trend of work
  • Menand’s is not a “great man” view of history, because no one seems particularly great. One gets a feeling for Sartre as a person, a limited knowledge of how Sartre made Being and Nothingness, and a vivid sense of how the book made Sartre a celebrity. Then one learns how a troupe of others came along and rode his success like a sled.
  • Menand zooms in and out between individual egomaniacs and the milieus that facilitated their ascent and profited from their publicity.
  • group biographies, in miniature, of the existentialists, the Beats, the action painters, the Black Mountain School, the British Invasion, the pop artists, and many coteries more—are enchanting singly but demoralizing as they pile up
  • All of these enterprises look like hives of social insects, not selfless quests for truth or beauty. Menand is a world-class entomologist: He can name every indistinguishable drone, knows who had an oversize mandible, who lost a leg, who carried the best crumbs.
  • From this vantage, the monuments really are just anthills.
  • Menand is truly one of the great explainers. He quotes approvingly a lesson taken by Lionel Trilling from his editor Elliot Cohen: “No idea was so difficult and complex but that it could be expressed in a way that would make it understood by anyone to whom it might conceivably be of interest.”
  • The underlying theory of the book rests on a picture of what makes for “cultural winners,” works and ideas that Menand defines as
  • He is accurate, he is insightful, and he is not a dumber-downer
  • Menand’s account of each is an abbreviated tour de force. His explanations work at all levels: interpretation for scholars, review for general readers, introductions for neophytes. Where another writer would take 20 pages to tell us why someone or something mattered historically, Menand does it in two.
  • goods or styles that maintain market share through “generational” taste shifts—that is, through all the “the king is dead; long live the king” moments that mark the phases of cultural history for people living through it.
  • Menand’s recountings are less concerned with the changing meanings of individual works than with their successive adoptions and co-optations, in defiance of depth and meaning. It is a process of “winning” often based on cults of personality, indifference to complex origins, and the fortune or misfortune of timing
  • Menand is notably excellent on how commercial, regulatory, and technological changes determined which kinds of artwork made it to the public. His analysis helps demystify trends in commercial forms like film and pop music, especially when they otherwise seemed to run against the grain of pure profit
  • Often Menand’s point seems to be that the culture’s reigning talkers and salespeople and debaters need to conjure figures to venerate and attack (in ceaseless alternation) for short-range purposes of attention and competition. Any given work—1984, say, or Bonnie and Clyde—isn’t much of anything until it becomes a counter in other people’s games.
  • The central question of this period in culture might be whether U.S. artists lived up to expectations
  • In 1945, Europe was in ruins. America was rich and productive and dictated the terms of the postwar economic and political order. Certainly the U.S. had the power to pretend to cultural glory, too. But was it a pretense, or did Americans really continue and exceed the prewar triumphs of European modernism?
  • Most histories of the arts after 1945 assume that the greatest American successes deserved their fame.
  • The thrust of many of Menand’s retellings is that “in the business of cultural exchange, misprision is often the key to transmission.” Fame comes through misreadings, fantasies, unintended resonances, charisma, and publicity.
  • Menand’s book bequeaths the sense that the last laugh may truly have been on the self-seriousness of a whole historical period, one that treated its most publicized and successful arts figures far too generously, giving them too much credit for depth and vision, while missing the cynical forces by which they’d been buoyed up and marketed
  • “Foreign film” in America in the ’50s and ’60s—when independent art cinemas emerged, showing imports such as work by Ingmar Bergman and the French New Wave—proves to have been energized by a successful federal-government antitrust action against the monopolistic Hollywood studios
  • The idea of a “culture industry”
  • is used unironically by Menand to name the vastly scaled-up production and consumption of all artistic experience. “The culture industries, as they expanded, absorbed and commercialized independent and offbeat culture-makers, and the university, as it expanded, swallowed up the worlds of creative writing and dissident political opinion.”
  • With his eye on this process, we miss out on artists and thinkers who dug deep and stayed home, who produced as hermits or eccentrics or introverted students of their art
  • Where did rock ’n’ roll come from?” Menand wonders. He answers that it was “the by-product of a number of unrelated developments in the American music business” that redirected sales to teenagers, and also the result of new radio-station competition, the partial racial desegregation of the music charts, and the arrival of 200-disc jukeboxes
  • I can imagine The Free World leaving my hypothetical college senior, denizen of the bleak attention economy of the 21st century, feeling liberated to discover that culture was no better—no more committed to a quest for what is true, noble, lasting, and beautiful—in the world of the Baby Boomers and beaming grandparents.
  • The book is so masterful, and exhibits such brilliant writing and exhaustive research, that I wonder whether Menand could truly have intended where his history of the postwar era landed me. I learned so much, and ended up caring so much les
Javier E

The Phantasms of Judith Butler - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...677874

trans gender debate critical

shared by Javier E on 28 Mar 24 - No Cached
  • The central idea of Who’s Afraid of Gender? is that fascism is gaining strength around the world, and that its weapon is what Butler calls the “phantasm of gender,” which they describe as a confused and irrational bundle of fears that displaces real dangers onto imaginary ones.
  • Similarly, Trump’s Christian-right supporters see this adjudicated rapist as a bulwark against sexual libertinism, but he also has a following among young men who admire him as libertine in chief and among people of every stripe who think he’ll somehow make them richer.
  • Butler is obviously correct that the authoritarian right sets itself against feminism and modern sexual rights and freedom.
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  • But is the gender phantasm as crucial to the global far right as Butler claims?
  • Butler has little to say about the appeal of nationalism and community, insistence on ethnic purity, opposition to immigration, anxiety over economic and social stresses, fear of middle-class-status loss, hatred of “elites.”
  • why Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán is so popular, it would be less his invocation of the gender phantasm and more his ruthless determination to keep immigrants out, especially Muslim ones, along with his delivery of massive social services to families in an attempt to raise the birth rate
  • The chapter of Who’s Afraid of Gender? that is most relevant for American and British readers is probably the one about the women, many of them British, whom opponents call “TERFs” (trans-exclusionary radical feminists), but who call themselves “gender-critical feminists.”
  • But is obsession with “gender” really the primary motive behind current right-wing movements? And why is it so hard to trust that the noise around “gender” might actually be indicative of people’s real feelings, and not just the demagogue-fomented distraction Butler asser
  • Instead of proving that “gender” is a crucial part of what motivates popular support for right-wing authoritarianism, Butler simply asserts that it is, and then ties it all up with a bow called “fascism.”
  • ascism is a word that Butler admits is not perfect but then goes on to use repeatedly. I’m sure I’ve used it myself as a shorthand when I’m writing quickly, but it’s a bit manipulative. As used by Butler and much of the left, it covers way too many different issues and suggests that if you aren’t on board with the Butlerian worldview on every single one of them, a brown shirt must surely be hanging in your closet.
  • As they define it—“fascist passions or political trends are those which seek to strip people of the basic rights they require to live”—most societies for most of history have been fascist, including, for long stretches, our own
  • Instead of facing up to the problems of, for example, war, declining living standards, environmental damage, and climate change, right-wing leaders whip up hysteria about threats to patriarchy, traditional families, and heterosexuality.
  • They discuss only two authors at any length, the philosopher Kathleen Stock and J. K. Rowling. Butler does not engage with their writing in any detail—they do not quote even one sentence from Stock’s Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism, a serious book that has been much discussed, or indeed from any other gender-crit work, except for some writing from Rowling, including her essay in which she describes domestic violence at the hands of her first husband, an accusation he admits to in part.
  • They dismiss, with that invocation of a “phantasm,” apprehension about the presence of trans women in women’s single-sex spaces, (as well as, gender-crits would add, biological men falsely claiming to be trans in order to gain access to same), concerns for biologically female athletes who feel cheated out of scholarships and trophies, and the slight a biological woman might experience by being referred to as a “menstruator.”
  • Butler wants to dismiss gender-crits as fascist-adjacent: Indeed, in an interview, they compare Stock and Rowling to Putin and the pope.
  • It does seem odd that Butler, for whom everything about the body is socially produced, would be so uninterested in exploring the ways that trans identity is itself socially produced, at least in part—by, for example, homophobia and misogyny and the hypersexualization of young girls, by social media and online life, by the increasing popularity of cosmetic surgery, by the libertarian-individualist presumption that you can be whatever you want.
  • what is authenticity
  • In every other context, Butler works to demolish the idea of the eternal human—everything is contingent—except for when it comes to being transgender. There, the individual, and only the individual, knows themself.
  • I can't tell you how many left and liberal people I know who keep quiet about their doubts because they fear being ostracized professionally or socially. Nobody wants to be accused of putting trans people's lives in danger, and, after all, don't we all want, as the slogan goes, to “Be Kind”?
  • The trouble is that, in the long run, the demand for self-suppression fuels reaction. Polls show declining support for various trans demands for acceptance . People don’t like being forced by social pressure to deny what they think of as the reality of sex and gender.
  • They cite the civil-rights activist and singer Bernice Johnson Reagon’s call for “difficult coalitions” but forget that coalitions necessarily involve compromise and choosing your battles, not just accusing people of sharing the views of fascists
  • What if instead of trying to suppress the questioning of skeptics, we admit we don’t have many answers? What if, instead, we had a conversation? After all, isn’t that what philosophy is all about?
Javier E

The New Luddites Aren't Backing Down - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...677327

technology luddite crisis

shared by Javier E on 03 Feb 24 - No Cached
  • “Anyone who is critical of the tech industry always has someone yell at them ‘Luddite! Luddite!’ and I was no exception,” she told me. It was meant as an insult, but Crabapple embraced the term. Like many others, she came to self-identify as part of a new generation of Luddites. “Tech is not supposed to be a master tool to colonize every aspect of our being. We need to reevaluate how it serves us.”
  • on some key fronts, the Luddites are winning.
  • The government mobilized what was then the largest-ever domestic military occupation of England to crush the uprising—the Luddites had won the approval of the working class, and were celebrated in popular songs and poems—and then passed a law that made machine-breaking a capital offense. They painted Luddites as “deluded” and backward.
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  • ver since, Luddite has been a derogatory word—shorthand for one who blindly hates or doesn’t understand technology.
  • Now, with nearly half of Americans worried about how AI will affect jobs, Luddism has blossomed. The new Luddites—a growing contingent of workers, critics, academics, organizers, and writers—say that too much power has been concentrated in the hands of the tech titans, that tech is too often used to help corporations slash pay and squeeze workers, and that certain technologies must not merely be criticized but resisted outright.
  • what I’ve seen over the past 10 years—the rise of gig-app companies that have left workers precarious and even impoverished; the punishing, gamified productivity regimes put in place by giants such as Amazon; the conquering of public life by private tech platforms and the explosion of screen addiction; and the new epidemic of AI plagiarism—has left me sympathizing with tech’s discontents.
  • I consider myself a Luddite not because I want to halt progress or reject technology itself. But I believe, as the original Luddites argued in a particularly influential letter threatening the industrialists, that we must consider whether a technology is “hurtful to commonality”—whether it causes many to suffer for the benefit of a few—and oppose it when necessary.
  • “It’s not a primitivism: We don’t reject all technology, but we reject the technology that is foisted on us,” Jathan Sadowski, a social scientist at Monash University, in Australia, told me. He’s a co-host, with the journalist Ed Ongweso Jr., of This Machine Kills, an explicitly pro-Luddite podcast.
  • The science-fiction author Cory Doctorow has declared all of sci-fi a Luddite literature, writing that “Luddism and science fiction concern themselves with the same questions: not merely what the technology does, but who it does it for and who it does it to.
  • The New York Times has profiled a hip cadre of self-proclaimed “‘Luddite’ teens.” As the headline explained, they “don’t want your likes.”
  • By drawing a red line against letting studios control AI, the WGA essentially waged the first proxy battle between human workers and AI. It drew attention to the fight, resonated with the public, and, after a 148-day strike, helped the guild attain a contract that banned studios from dictating the use of AI.
Javier E

Daniel Dennett's last interview: 'AI could signal the end of human civilisation' | The ... - 0 views

www.spectator.co.uk/...-the-end-of-human-civilisation

ai philosopher threat risks

shared by Javier E on 28 Apr 24 - No Cached
  • If there isn’t an inner me experiencing my thoughts, feelings and the things I see and hear, what is going on
  • ‘What’s happening in the brain is there are many competing streams of content running in competition and they’re fighting for influence. The one that temporarily wins is king of the mountain, that’s what we can remember, what we can talk about, what we can report and what plays a dominant role in guiding our behaviour – those are the contents of consciousness.’
  • Those acquainted with the workings of large language models, the technology behind ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini, will recognise a similarity in Dennett’s description of consciousness and the architecture of generative AI: parallel processing streams producing outputs that compete for salience.
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  • Dennett’s central mission was to demystify consciousness andbring it within the realm of science  So why do we find it so intuitive to think of ourselves as an inner being, an occupant in our bodies? ‘It’s a sort of metaphor. I like to say it’s a user illusion,’
  • Imagining an inner person allows us to communicate our motivations to other human beings and in turn communicate them to ourselves
  • While language allows us to articulate our inner lives, it also divides cultures, right down to the way we process information. Dennett explains it using the example of our perception of colour: ‘Different cultures have different ways of dividing up colour,’ he said. ‘There are a lot of experiments that show that what colours you can distinguish depends a lot on what culture you grew up in.’
  • westerners process people’s faces differently to non-westerners. The very movement patterns of our eyeballs are dictated by culture.
  • ‘I think that some of the multiculturalism, some of the ardent defences of multiculturalism, are deeply misguided and regressive and I think postmodernism has actually harmed people in many nations
  • Recognising these cultural differences didn’t lead Dennett into moral relativism. ‘I am relieved not to have to confront some of the virtue-signalling and some of the doctrinaire attitudes that are now running rampant on college campuses,
  • Take the most obvious cases: the treatment of women in the Islamic world; the horrific reactions to homosexuality in many parts of the world that aren’t western. I think that there are clear reasons for preferring different cultural practices over others.
  • If we don’t create, endorse and establish some new rules and laws about how to think about this, we’re going to lose the capacity for human trust and that could be the end of civilisation.’
Javier E

I tried out an Apple Vision Pro. It frightened me | Arwa Mahdawi | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...le-vision-pro-it-frightened-me

AI immersive passthrough culture crisis politics

shared by Javier E on 16 Feb 24 - No Cached
  • Despite all the marketed use cases, the most impressive aspect of it is the immersive video
  • Watching a movie, however, feels like you’ve been transported into the content.
  • that raises serious questions about how we perceive the world and what we consider reality. Big tech companies are desperate to rush this technology out but it’s not clear how much they’ve been worrying about the consequences.
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  • it is clear that its widespread adoption is a matter of when, not if. There is no debate that we are moving towards a world where “real life” and digital technology seamlessly blur
  • Over the years there have been multiple reports of people being harassed and even “raped” in the metaverse: an experience that feels scarily real because of how immersive virtual reality is. As the lines between real life and the digital world blur to a point that they are almost indistinguishable, will there be a meaningful difference between online assault and an attack in real life?
  • more broadly, spatial computing is going to alter what we consider reality
  • Researchers from Stanford and Michigan University recently undertook a study on the Vision Pro and other “passthrough” headsets (that’s the technical term for the feature which brings VR content into your real-world surrounding so you see what’s around you while using the device) and emerged with some stark warnings about how this tech might rewire our brains and “interfere with social connection”.
  • These headsets essentially give us all our private worlds and rewrite the idea of a shared reality. The cameras through which you see the world can edit your environment – you can walk to the shops wearing it, for example, and it might delete all the homeless people from your view and make the sky brighter.
  • “What we’re about to experience is, using these headsets in public, common ground disappears,”
  • “People will be in the same physical place, experiencing simultaneous, visually different versions of the world. We’re going to lose common ground.”
  • It’s not just the fact that our perception of reality might be altered that’s scary: it’s the fact that a small number of companies will have so much control over how we see the world. Think about how much influence big tech already has when it comes to content we see, and then multiply that a million times over. You think deepfakes are scary? Wait until they seem even more realistic.
  • We’re seeing a global rise of authoritarianism. If we’re not careful this sort of technology is going to massively accelerate it.
  • Being able to suck people into an alternate universe, numb them with entertainment, and dictate how they see reality? That’s an authoritarian’s dream. We’re entering an age where people can be mollified and manipulated like never before
Javier E

Republicans begin to target Putin 'apologists' in their midst - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...t-putin-apologists-their-midst

gop option trump support

shared by Javier E on 17 Feb 24 - No Cached
  • The thing about the Republican Party is that it’s not so much that it likes Putin or even thinks he’s an okay guy. Polling last year showed fewer than 1 in 10 Republicans had a favorable view of Putin or trusted him to do the right thing on the world stage, and Republicans said 76 percent to 16 percent that Putin is a war criminal. These are not in line with Carlson’s professed worldview.
  • Another poll I keep coming back to comes from Vanderbilt University last year. Even a year into Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, it showed a majority of MAGA Republicans (52 percent) said Putin was a better president than Joe Biden.
  • Shortly after it was revealed in late 2016 that Russia interfered in the 2016 election to help Trump, an Economist/YouGov poll showed a sharp increase in favorable GOP views of Putin. Suddenly, 37 percent had a favorable view, and 47 percent had an unfavorable one. Just 14 percent had a “very” unfavorable view of him.
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  • Early 2017 Gallup data echoed this. It showed 32 percent of Republicans suddenly liked the man who had just interfered in an American election.
  • But a significant and influential segment of the party has demonstrated a tendency toward a brand of moral relativism and even authoritarianism that creates an opening for giving Putin a pass.
  • Maybe these Republicans just disliked Biden that much, or maybe they saw something admirable in Putin’s strongman mystique (a sentiment Trump has spent years cultivating). It certainly wouldn’t be the only evidence of Trump supporters flirting with the merits of authoritarianism.
  • Regardless, the data show how, when these loud voices on the right project softness on Putin or his invasion of Ukraine, there’s a willingness to hear that out — even if the base doesn’t actually like Putin. Influential voices on the right have spent years creating a permission structure for shrugging at things like Navalny’s death (see: Jamal Khashoggi).
  • there’s been little in the way of a desire to fight back against these noisy and influential forces — in part because that would entail going against the most powerful Republican and the onetime most influential conservative commentator.
Javier E

Opinion | Jan. 6, America's Rupture and the Strange, Forgotten Power of Oblivion - The ... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...emory-memorial-forgetting.html

oblivion forgetting public accountability responsibility memory

shared by Javier E on 17 Jun 24 - No Cached
  • This is not the first time our nation has survived a profound internal rupture, but it may be the first time in which the political ringleaders of the revolt may very well escape much accountability while hundreds of their followers serve jail time.
  • In previous times of national crisis, the same spirit of mercy that Mr. Biden conjured generally applied to lower-level offenders, while those who had committed the worst crimes were the first to be arrested and tried for their treasonous acts.
  • As a legal mechanism, oblivion promised the return to a past that still had a future, in which the battles of old would not predetermine those still to come. It did not always achieve its lofty aspirations, nor was it appropriate for all conflicts. But the ideals it grasped for had an enduring appeal.
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  • After the Civil War, a series of amnesties were passed, eventually encompassing almost all Confederate soldiers.
  • The complicit were so great in number that identifying and trying every one of them would come at significant cost, but more important, no law could sufficiently condemn what they had done, and no criminal procedure could adequately consecrate the memory of their wrongs.
  • the “act of oblivion,” an ancient, imperfect legal and moral mechanism for bringing an end to episodes of political violence. These acts were invoked when forgiveness was impossible, yet when pragmatism demanded a certain strain of forgetting — a forgetting that instead of erasing unforgivable transgressions, paradoxically memorialized them in the minds of all who had survived their assault
  • Rather than relying upon the courts to deliver impossible and unattainable forms of reckoning, oblivion provided opportunities for the extralegal recognition of political and moral wrongs, and reminded its subjects of the desire for, and necessity of, coexistence.
  • For centuries, legislative “acts of oblivion” were declared in times when betrayal, war and tyranny had usurped and undermined the very foundations of law; when a household or nation had been torn apart, its citizens pitted against one another; when identifying, investigating, trying and sentencing every single guilty party threatened to redouble the harm
  • Under the oblivions of old, the ringleaders of riots, insurrections and tyrannical reigns were prosecuted for their crimes and in many cases were forced out of the cities and states they had once claimed to rule. Treasonous leaders were prohibited from holding public office
  • I wondered what it would mean to revive the old idea of oblivion in our age of seemingly unending memory.
  • Oblivion demanded accountability for those who bore primary responsibility for political rupture and often required material compensation and restitution for the harms don
  • consecrating the facts of what had occurred while refusing to allow the misfortunes of the past to dictate the future.
  • over the course of the 20th century, as the cultural tide gradually turned toward an embrace of remembrance and recrimination, oblivion fell out of favor, and out of collective memory.
  • The oldest act of oblivion is usually dated to 403 B.C., when the Athenians, having survived the bloody reign of the Thirty Tyrants, swore to never remember the wrongs of a war within the family, a civil war that had divided Athens.
  • The 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, the supposed origin point of our world of sovereign states, promised that all the violence, hostility, damage and expenses that had been incurred “on the one side, and the other … shall be bury’d in eternal Oblivion.”
  • In 1660, the Indemnity and Oblivion Act restored the British monarchy after the English Civil War
  • To remember the power of oblivion is not to naïvely wish away the wrongs of the recent past, but rather quite the opposite: By marking certain transgressions as unforgivable and unforgettable, it recognizes the depth of the loss while also opening a path toward political pragmatism
  • the Continental Congress passed a resolution recommending that states treat loyalists with leniency, “to receive such returning penitents with compassion and mercy, and to forgive and bury in oblivion their past failings and transgressions.” Punishments for loyalists were, according to the scholar Mugambi Jouet, “particularly mild” for the era.
  • Over the past several decades, our society has become oversaturated with memory. In our legal system, a single, low-level crime can ruin an individual’s life forever, people are forced to serve sentences for acts that are no longer illegal, and even a sealed conviction or an arrest with no charge can jeopardize job, housing and volunteer opportunities.
  • This virtual culture of incessant, uncompromising remembrance and recrimination has seeped from our screens, affecting the kinds of conversations we are willing to have in public, and with whom.
  • Every day, we depend on our devices to store every photograph, every video, every file. We store all these things because we have learned a bit too well that it is important to remember, to archive, to keep receipts and screenshots. To create a faithful, digitized log not only of our own lives but also of those around us
  • we have been very good students of memory. So good that we have, I think, forgotten what all our memory is for — that it can guide us to choose justice over vengeance
  • Revisiting the forgotten idea of oblivion would give us permission to reconsider our unthinking overdependence on memory and perhaps to begin to let go of all the data, digital and otherwise, that we do not need
  • our personal and political memories, which, left to fester for too long, can corrode and transform, causing us to lose sight of their original force and feeling.
  • Gripped too tightly, memory can become a vengeful and violent force.
  • The unique power of oblivion is that it does not forgive the crimes committed on one side or the other, but rather consecrates and memorializes the profound gravity of the wrongs. It demands accountability and refuses absolution, yet it rejects the project of perpetual punishment.
  • Historically, appeals to oblivion offered political communities the prospect of rethinking the present, presenting a rare opportunity to re-evaluate and confront societal divisions.
Javier E

The Normalization of the Exception - Homepage Christian Lammert - 0 views

www.christianlammert.com/...normalization-of-the-exception

polarization both-sides US evaluation right-wing left politics history culture

shared by Javier E on 17 Jul 24 - No Cached
  • There's now a disturbingly quick acceptance of the argument that "both sides are to blame." It was and remains the Republicans and Trump who have labeled the media as enemies of the people, politicians and refugees as vermin, and have spoken of bloodshed should Trump lose again in the next election. This discourse sharply contrasts with that of Democratic elites and Biden, who critique President Trump based on his policies (see Project 2025), labeling him a potential dictator and a threat to democracy. This critique remains within the bounds of normal political discourse and does not dehumanize political opponents or other demographic groups, as Trump's rhetoric frequently does. Such rhetoric has become "normal" and mainstream within the Republican Party but remains either non-existent or exceptionally rare among Democrats. This clearly indicates an asymmetric radicalization of our political discourse.
  • The ideological positioning of the two parties also reflects this asymmetry. Empirical analyses by notable U.S. political scientists show that the Republicans have moved significantly further to the right ideologically compared to the leftward shift of the Democrats. In certain segments, the ideological positions of MAGA representatives in Congress no longer fit within this spectrum, having departed from democratic norms.
  • Republicans have successfully shifted the discourse to place equal blame on both sides for polarization and radicalization, but this narrative does not reflect reality and must be addressed. It is the right-wing political spectrum and its associated media network that questions fundamental pillars of democracy and the rule of law. Similar challenges are not found within the left-wing political spectrum
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  • What the Republicans denounce as Marxist or socialist would be considered moderate social democracy in Germany. Since the 1980s and 1990s, with figures like Pat Buchanan and Newt Gingrich, political radicalization has been a deliberate strategy to mobilize their voter base. Right-wing media significantly amplify this strategy. Without understanding this context, meaningful solutions to the problem cannot be found
  • Currently, it is the right that is mounting a fundamental assault on the system of checks and balances in the United States. They seek to greatly enhance the powers of the executive branch through the presidency, drastically reduce the size of the administration while ensuring loyalty to the president, expand presidential influence over the judiciary, and eliminate the independence of law enforcement and security agencies. These goals run counter to longstanding U.S. political traditions and the ideas of the Founding Fathers.
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