Nautilus Magazine: Let’s Rethink Space

This kind of behavior reflects what scientists call “locality,” which means that everything has a place. You can always point to an object and say, “Here it is.” The world we experience possesses all the qualities of locality. We have a strong sense of place and of the relations among places. Locality grounds our sense of self, our confidence that our thoughts and feelings are our own. With all due respect to John Donne, every man is an island, entire of himself. We are insulated from one another by seas of space, and we should be grateful for it. [...]

To make sense of nonlocality, the first step is to invert our usual understanding of space. Physicists and philosophers can define space as the fact that the natural world has a very specific structure to it. Instead of saying that space brings order to the world, you can say that the world is ordered and space is a convenient notion for describing that order. We perceive that things affect one another in a certain way and, from that, we assign them locations in space. This structure has two important aspects. First, the influences that act on us are hierarchical. Some things affect us more than other things do, and from this variation we infer their distance. A weak effect means far apart; a strong effect implies proximity. The philosopher David Albert calls this definition of distance “interactive distance.” “What it means that the lion is close to me is that it might hurt me,” he says. This is the opposite of our usual mode of thinking. Rather than cry, “Watch out, the lion is close, it might pounce!” we exclaim, “Uh-oh, the lion might pounce on me; I guess it must be close.”

The second aspect of the spatial structure is that diverse influences are mutually consistent. If a rhinoceros is also able to hurt me, it must be close, too. And if both a lion and a rhino are able to hurt me, then the lion and rhino should also be able to hurt each other. (Indeed, my survival depends on it.) From this patterning of influences, we extract space. If the threat posed by predators couldn’t be expressed in terms of spatial distance, space would cease to be meaningful. A less morbid example is triangulation. The signal bars on your mobile phone indicate the strength of the phone’s connection to a cell tower and therefore your distance from that tower. In an emergency, the phone company can locate your phone by measuring your signal at several towers and using triangulation or the related technique of trilateration. The fact that the measurements converge on a single location is what it means for you to have a location.

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The Guardian: The Holocene hangover: it is time for humanity to make fundamental changes

Now the science fiction dream of leaving the planet behind appears to be coming true. One of the most striking effects of climate change — often remarked upon by writers — is its power to unsettle our basic understanding of the modern world. Our planet is changing into a strange and unstable new environment, in a process seemingly outside technological control. The fossil fuels that once promised mastery over nature have turned out to be tools of destruction, disturbing the basic biogeochemical processes that make our world habitable. Even the recent past is no longer what we thought it was. Scientists are telling us that the whole territory of modern history, from the end of World War II to the present, forms the threshold to a new geological epoch.

Our new planet is emerging quickly. The global climate is only one of nine earth system processes under threat. Land use is changing rapidly thanks to urbanization, agriculture, and population pressure. The rate of biodiversity loss is increasing in many ecosystems. Acidification is affecting marine biodiversity as well as the capacity of oceans to absorb carbon dioxide. The supply of fresh water in many regions is deteriorating. Aerosol loading and ozone depletion threaten the stability of the earth system’s atmosphere. Industrial agriculture has perturbed the global nitrogen and phosphorus cycles. Finally, chemical pollution may pose a risk not just at the local or regional level but also worldwide. Indeed, the planet’s biosphere bears so many marks of anthropogenic influence that it no longer possible to uphold the age-old distinction between the realm of wilderness and the world of human habitation. [...]

A dark picture of the present moment emerges in the Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh’s recent book The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. The title captures his scathing diagnosis of the condition of literature and culture in the age of the Anthropocene. Why is it, he asks, that the literary world has responded to climate change with almost complete silence? How can we explain the fact that writers of fiction have overwhelmingly failed to grapple with the ongoing planetary crisis in their works? For Ghosh, this silence is part of a broader pattern of indifference and misrepresentation. Contemporary arts and literature are characterized by “modes of concealment that [prevent] people from recognizing the realities of their plight.” By failing to engage with climate change, artists and writers are contributing to an impoverished sense of the world, right at the moment when art and literature are most needed to galvanize a grassroots movement in favor of climate justice and carbon mitigation. Ghosh himself grapples with this question not in a work of fiction but in a wide-ranging essay about the relation of literature to science, history, and politics. The arc of the argument carries him from the birth of the novel to the industrialization of Asia, from the environmental politics of the military security state to, in a move that might surprise some observers, an examination of how organized religion might take the lead in promoting future mitigation efforts.

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Quartz: The rise of Poland’s far right has important lessons for Americans who hope Donald Trump is just a one-term president

By “great,” Kaczynski meant patriotic, traditional, Catholic, pro-life, able to stand it’s ground against the European Union, and deeply anti-Russian. But first and foremost, Kaczynski’s great Poland entailed ridding the government of “corrupt” elites, among which Kopacz was a prominent figure.

This probably sounds familiar to US readers. President-elect Donald Trump has talked a big game about his plans to “drain the swamp” in DC. He’s said the establishment in Washington is made up of criminals and that he would “lock them up. A year before Trump, Kaczynski promised the same thing called his own political opponents criminals, and also promised to throw them in jail.

Kopacz, along with the rest of the Civic Platform’s leadership and the Polish liberal media, never really saw Kaczynski coming. [...]

In the US, Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton coined the term “deplorables” to describe the half of the Trump supporters she saw as “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic—you name it.” In Poland, liberals likewise bemoaned a group they called “Poland B,” the Law and Justice party crowd, who they saw as uneducated and rural, living barely above the threshold of poverty, struggling from one paycheck to another—in contrast with “Poland A,” living in big cities, drinking café lattes, and participating in the global exchange of culture and finance. Poland B was also deeply religious, xenophobic, homophobic, and racist. At least, that’s how the mainstream media depicted those people. [...]

In June 1989, Adam Michnik, one of the architects of the Round Table Agreement, explained the rationale behind it in an interview for a Belgrade, Serbia-based weekly NIN. He said that Communists, as owners of or shareholders in all those corporations, would be personally interested in the success of the newborn democracy, rather than in its demise. The argument sounded quite reasonable at the time. But 27 years later, it’s become painfully clear that capitalism only made some rich: Poland’s GDP per capita has doubled since 1989, making the country the sixth-largest economy in the European Union—but 6.2 million people still live in relative poverty.

And so “Poland B” began to wonder why they fought so hard for a country where they now struggle to get a job at a post office, while leaders and bureaucrats of the former regime that deployed tanks to keep them in check back in the 80s were now driving Porsches and sipping Martinis. [...]

I agree with Traub that the same sociopolitical mechanism was behind Law and Justice in Poland, Brexit in the UK, and Donald Trump in the US. But I disagree with Traub’s explanation. He traces it back to the 2007-08 financial crisis “which shook the faith of many working-class and middle-class voters in the wisdom of liberal elites.” I think it was about dignity.

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Vox: Comparing the alt-right to Nazism may be hyperbolic — but it's not ridiculous

As for the question you posed, it's quite clear that you can always find willing executioners. You can mobilize people to commit mass murder, even if those people are themselves not highly ideological. This is the unfortunate lesson of history. [...]

Both yes and no. One on the hand, neither Europe nor the United States has anything like the economic catastrophe of 1929-’33. In Germany in 1932, for example, 25 to 30 percent of the population was unemployed. In the United States today, while there are pockets of devastation, you don't see comparable numbers. It's slightly worse in Europe, however, where you have a nagging 10 percent unemployment in several regions. So Europe today is certainly closer to the Europe of 1932 than the United States, which I think is in a very different economic situation.

Remember also that the great looming menace in the early and midcentury period wasn't Islamic jihadism but the Bolshevik Revolution. In both cases, though, there was a country or a movement around which horrific scenarios could be imagined, and so there was a dire threat that seemingly justified any means to deal with it. [...]

Look, there are plenty of alarming parallels here. Consider what Hitler was offering his coalition of discontents. He was going to end political gridlock, which we have thanks in large part to a Republican Congress that ensured Obama couldn't do a thing. We've had not the kind of economic collapse that Germany suffered, but we've had pockets of it. We've had sustained economic stress and an uneven distribution of prosperity. The people on the wrong end of this clearly gravitated toward Trump.

There's also this sense of cultural decadence, the feeling that the old traditional values are being eroded and therefore we have to make America great again. This is the brilliance of Trump's slogan — it's a perfect conduit for nostalgia.

Lastly, Trump, like Hitler, taps into this sense of humiliation on the global stage. This notion that we're "losing" and everyone's taking advantage of us is very powerful. It's mostly bullshit when you look closely at the facts, but that doesn't matter. The appeal is potent.

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Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell: A New History for Humanity – The Human Era

It is time to reframe how we think about our past.

We need a new year 0 for humanity. But which one should we choose and why? 

The Guardian: This time it’s Saudi Arabia: even when Boris Johnson gets it right, he’s wrong

It’s true that in January a UN panel concluded that 119 airstrikes potentially broke international human rights law. And it’s true that among the millions displaced, Yemeni children are among the chief sufferers. But when he is sticking to his official brief, rather than winging it, Johnson continues to maintain that Britain and Saudi Arabia are close allies acting in concert, and that a legal and moral “threshold” has not been crossed by Saudi actions in Yemen. Johnson’s talk of a Sunni-Shia political divide that abuses Islam, and an absence of enlightened regional leaders willing to overcome it, is another truism. In recent years a more assertive Iran, run by a Shia Muslim theocracy, has mounted multiple challenges to Sunni Muslim Saudi Arabia’s role as guardian and leader of the Islamic world.

But Britain has taken sides in this fight. It has broadly gone along with US and Israeli efforts to isolate and weaken Tehran, especially since 9/11, using as a lever Iran’s unproven pursuit of nuclear weapons. At the same time, it is one of Saudi Arabia’s biggest arms suppliers.

Britain continues, in effect, to turn a blind eye to Saudi’s human rights abuses, its appalling record of judicial executions, and its repression and jailing of human rights campaigners in its Bahrain satrap. On persistent allegations, vehemently denied by Riyadh, that wealthy Saudi individuals have funded Islamic State and al-Qaida, now and in the past, Britain keeps silent. Last month, after two parliamentary committees recommended the suspension of arms sales to Riyadh, Johnson’s Foreign Office pooh-poohed their advice. Johnson previously opposed a Labour move to halt arms sales, saying it would eliminate British influence with the Saudis “at a stroke”. Ironically, Johnson’s clumsily truthful, insulting comments in Rome may achieve exactly this result.

So what does Johnson now propose should happen? Britain’s relationship with the Saudi regime has long been toxic, corrupting and unhealthy. Those who support it, including all governments in recent times, argue the alliance is of strategic value. David Cameron claimed last year that Saudi intelligence cooperation helped prevent terrorist attacks in Britain.

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The Washington Post: In secular France, Catholic conservatism makes a comeback

For many French voters, François Fillon is more than a leading contender for president in next year’s elections: He is viewed as a crusader in the throes of a holy war.

When Fillon handily won both rounds of France’s conservative primaries last month, he campaigned mostly on a genteel conservatism of economic reforms and strengthened national security. But in a country that firmly defines itself as “secular” in its constitution, Fillon’s unexpected victory represented an astonishing prospect: the political reawakening of Catholic France, after decades of slumber. [...]

Although France is renowned for strict prohibitions on religious displays in public spaces — notably on certain types of veils worn by many Muslim women — it is also a country of some 45,000 Catholic churches and one whose public holidays are almost exclusively Christian in origin. France does not keep statistics on race or religion, but a vast majority of its citizens are believed to be either practicing Catholics or agnostics from Catholic backgrounds. [...]

“These voters consider themselves as legitimate defenders,” said Denis Pelletier, a historian who specializes in Catholicism. “They are defending France. There is economic liberalism there, but mostly there are traditional family values, authority and a sense of the moral order.”

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The Conversation: What changes when Pope Francis grants all priests the authority to forgive abortions

As a Catholic academic who studies the diversity of global Catholicism, I believe the pope’s actions are significant: The pope is ratifying a practice that is already in place in much of the Catholic world; he is also broadening the possibilities for Catholic priests to show care for the laity under their charge. [...]

But as a crime, procured abortion carries with it the penalty of “latae sententiae excommunication”: that is, automatic expulsion from the Catholic Church. Only sins that are also crimes incur automatic excommunication, although one can be excommunicated through a formal process for other reasons – something that is very rarely done nowadays.

The fact that procuring an abortion is both a sin and a crime places those wanting to confess in a peculiar bind: They cannot be absolved of the sin without confessing before a priest. However, since they have been automatically excommunicated, they are denied access to the absolution of sins granted in the confessional. [...]

On one level, Pope Francis is extending a practice that has now become common in many places and making it universal throughout the Catholic Church: not all Catholic dioceses or bishops allow their priests to lift excommunication along with absolving the sin of procured abortion. As the 2009 Brazilian case makes clear, that authority is not in place in many dioceses.

But on another level, Pope Francis’s act is encouraging priests to be more sensitive to context of their parishioners’ lives, as in the case of the nine-year-old girl, and to rely less upon legalistic formulas and definitions when it comes to dealing with the complex realities of human life.

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The New York Times: The Failure of a Neo-Ottoman Foreign Policy

Mr. Erdogan, the country’s leader for 14 years, is the one chiefly responsible for putting the Ottoman Empire at the center of Turkey’s collective imagination. The Ottoman sultans doubled as the caliphs of the Muslim world, which is not lost on the supporters of Mr. Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party, or A.K.P. The chairman of the A.K.P.’s youth wing recently declared Mr. Erdogan “president of all the world’s Muslims.” Yusuf al-Qaradawi, a prominent Qatar-based cleric associated with the Muslim Brotherhood, similarly regards Turkey’s president as “the hope of all Muslims and of Islam.”

These ambitions seem to have an especially pronounced effect on Turkey’s Middle East policy. After Syria’s civil war began in 2011, Ankara sought to replace the regime of President Bashar al-Assad with Islamist allies. To that end, it sponsored armed groups that would do its bidding in Syria, groups named for Ottoman rulers like the Sultan Murad Brigade and the Sultan Mehmed the Conqueror Brigade. [...]

But the reality on the ground may not comport with Mr. Erdogan’s visions. There is little reason to believe that he can recreate the prestige and the expanse of the Ottoman Empire in a 21st-century world. [...]

Even the deputy prime minister for economic affairs recently admitted that Turkey is going through “its toughest period since the end of the First World War,” when the Ottoman Empire collapsed. The Turkish people cannot be lulled to sleep forever with fictions of an Ottoman revival. Soon, they will have to wake up and face the unpleasant reality.

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