BBC4 In Our Time: Persepolis

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the role of the great 'City of the Persians' founded by Darius I as the ceremonial capital of the Achaemenid Empire that stretched from the Indus Valley to Egypt and the coast of the Black Sea. It was known as the richest city under the sun and was a centre at which the Empire's subject peoples paid tribute to a succession of Achaemenid leaders, until the arrival of Alexander III of Macedon who destroyed it by fire supposedly in revenge for the burning of the Acropolis in Athens.

The image above is a detail from a relief at the Apadana, the huge audience hall, and shows a lion attacking a bull.

With

Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones Professor of Ancient History at Cardiff University

Vesta Sarkhosh Curtis Curator of Middle Eastern Coins at the British Museum

Lindsay Allen Lecturer in Greek and Near Eastern History at King's College London  

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Aeon: What if ET is an AI?

One possibility is that this machine is super-capable, exceeding our human capacity for cognitive or analytical tasks. Such an AI might be exceedingly hard to understand, either in terms of its underlying motivation or because of practical barriers of communication bandwidth. For this device, talking to us might be like talking to an infant. Or trying to discuss the collected works of Shakespeare using pictographs. An alien system optimised for processing vast data streams might not even be able to downgrade its pace enough to notice that we’re trying to talk, whether we use technology or not. [...]

Encountering an alien AI would not only point to our own possible future, but also prompt a curious shift in our worldview. When Nicolaus Copernicus proposed in the 1500s that the Earth was not central in any way to the Universe, he set in motion the development of a critical scientific idea: that there is nothing cosmically special or significant about us. But meeting an ET-AI could turn that realisation on its head: if the only intelligence we meet is machine in nature, then we would be special, after all. [...]

But a recognisable encounter with even one savant machine would indeed change everything. It would tell us that the galaxy is awash with intelligence, and could suggest that our future might be one of a vestigial, fading biological presence. Most of all, this discovery would tell us that we might currently be the only natural minds consciously aware of these facts. That’s because the biology that could produce AI explorers would likely evolve or go extinct on timescales far shorter than the persistence of these interstellar machines, and we already live in a galaxy that is 10 billion years old.

Finding an AI-ET could unlock our own cosmic exploration by lighting a path forward. It might also offer insight into the nature of its creators, those ancestral intelligences, presumably in biological form. Exactly what this investigative process would look like is extremely hard to imagine. Even a single savant AI might not come in one physical package but rather a swarm of tinier components incredibly hard to digest. However, let’s assume that by interrogation or literal disassembly we eventually solve the mystery of the AI-ET’s origins. We might find evidence of an organic species like us – or we might discover only machines all the way down.

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Political Critique: World Paranoia and the post-modern right

We argue that the paranoia expressed by post-modern conservatives is the symptom of a collective anxiety in an increasingly global society. The paranoia expressed by post-modern conservatives is often directed against a nefarious alliance bent on their destruction, an amorphous enemy against which they have no recourse.  The character of post-modern right wing paranoia is such that the world of “others,” which includes everyone from elites to terrorists, is conspiring to dismantle the paranoiac’s world. This world of cultural tradition, stability, and order—and the identity at home within it—must be defended at all costs. [...]

On one hand, the foreign other can be regarded as an invader who must be destroyed, yet the root of this fear goes deeper than mere unfamiliarity.  The real problem is that the foreign “invader” threatens to reveal that our “big other,” the watchful guarantor of our mores and traditions, is a local construction. For example, being confronted with Muslims who accept the validity of their religion on “faith,” threatens to expose the fundamental contingency of the Christian worldview. How might we reject the argument of Muslims, who accept the validity of their religion on “faith,” and yet maintain that our Christian values are unassailably true if they’re based on similarly contingent commitments? If we choose not to face such a reality—which would require no less than a reordering of the world itself—we may instead signify “the Muslim” as an antagonist from which nothing can be learned and against which “we” must defend ourselves at all costs. The paranoiac worldview of post-modern conservatives is a reactionary defense against all things “other” due to the profound anxiety caused by the possibility that the world might be more complex than their psychic construction.

To maintain the coherence of their worldview, post-modern conservatives transform the foreign/cosmopolitan/wealthy “others” into a unified enemy. The enemy, somehow, emerges from their rhetoric as a bizarre alliance of refugees with the global elite, opposing political parties, and cosmopolitan celebrities, the purpose of which is to infiltrate, steal from, disenfranchise, or terrorize “us.”  Many liberal critics correctly show that the logic of post-modern conservative positions is contradictory, yet itself a symptom rooted in something immune to logic and far more valuable: to wit the coherence of the world and one’s identity therein.

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Political Critique: Different languages and symbols but still our common fight

Elżbieta Korolczuk: I think it’s partially a polarisation of the political scene, where you have these very strong emotions, where you have changes in almost every area of social and political life, and that makes some people feel that this is the right moment to go out into the streets and, let’s say, openly support fascist views. But at the same time there is also a strong opposition towards these kinds of ideas. As for women, for quite a long time we were told that the situation would get better, that we were getting there, you know, we would become civilised and more gender equal. But then last year there was a moment when we felt “no, this is not going to happen”. What was actually taking place was an attack on women’s rights, on women’s political rights, but also on their bodies. [...]

Inna Shevchenko: Right, I think it is important to see the international dimension, the fact that the feminist movement became so international, also in our case, or at least in the case of these two movements. When Femen went international for us personally it was a big surprise, we didn’t aim to build an international movement. For us it was a personal and local fight, as we were addressing our personal problems as Ukrainian women in Ukraine.  Then we saw that women from Spain, from France, from Brazil, from Tunisia, from Turkey were writing to us and saying “I have different issues in my country, but your tactic speaks to me because my body is also victimised, objectified. As a woman I’m not safe in this society, I also want to join. I want to have Femen in Turkey, I want to have Femen in Spain”. So this was a form of approval, it was proof that women’s rights are a global issue, because there is a global attack on women’s rights, it is a global world-wide attack on women and that is why the fight of women becomes global, a worldwide defence of common goals, common aims, with all the diversity – which is beautiful indeed – and differences. We are very different, and sometimes we have very different goals, but we are also united by one idea, united by one aim, and this is something we share. So with regard to solidarity and the transnational movements we are seeing today, I think we have proof that there are so many issues that we share as human beings, that we have more things in common than differences between us. What we share is actually more, and the question of solidarity and united fights, transnational fights and transnational politics, makes much more sense when we think of ourselves as equal human beings, when we think about the fundamental human rights we all want – the same rights, not rights for women in the Middle East different from those for women in America. No, we are equal human beings in different parts of the world and we share so much that having a transnational fight makes much more sense.  

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Politico: EU faces Poland test

Forget worries about exacerbating an East-West rift or splitting the bloc just when it needs unity to deal with Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin and Theresa May. If Polish strongman Jarosław Kaczyński is allowed to get away with replacing an independent judiciary with judges hand-picked for political loyalty, the EU’s claims to be a democratic watchdog and not just a glorified free-trade area will look hollow. [...]

“The Polish case is a test whether it is possible to create a Soviet-style justice system, where the control of courts, prosecutors and judges lies with the executive and a single party, in an EU member state,” Piotr Buras of the Stefan Batory Foundation, a Polish civil society organization, and Gerald Knaus of the European Stability Initiative think tank wrIte in a joint paper. “It remains to be seen whether this can be corrected before it fatally undermines the idea of the EU as a community based on law and common values,” they add. [...]

Barring a last-minute intervention by EU ministers or the European Court of Justice, the government will go ahead with the enforced early retirement of up to 40 percent of the Supreme Court on July 3 under a law that entered into force in April. Among those whose necks are on the block is Małgorzata Gersdorf, the first president of the Supreme Court, whose eviction in the middle of a six-year term would violate the Polish constitution. Some 70 out of 120 Supreme Court justices would then be new appointees.  [...]

Because of its own history, it’s hard for Germany to read the riot act to the Poles over the rule of law. It would gift Kaczyński a chance to turn a principled dispute over judicial independence into a political battle and accuse Berlin of “bullying.” Chancellor Angela Merkel has wisely let the Commission take the lead so far, lending discreet support to Vice President Frans Timmermans, the Dutch social democrat who holds the toxic Polish file in Brussels. He needs her public support now.

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Haaretz: What We German Jews Hear When the U.S. Ambassador Says He Wants to 'Empower' Toxic Populists

Nine months into the new parliament’s four-year term, the MPs sent to Berlin by the Alternative für Deutschland have proven just as disruptive as previously feared: Just last weekend, the AfD caucus’s parliamentary leader Alexander Gauland, speaking at a conference of the party’s youth organization, aggressively proclaimed that, "Hitler and the Nazis are but a speck of bird sh*t in more than 1,000 years of successful German history."

Later at the same convention, the delegates jointly performed all three stanzas of the German national anthem, including the notorious lines closely identified with the Nazi period: "Deutschland, Deutschland über alles." [...]

The AfD, alas, is anything but a friend of the Jews: While the party makes a point of embracing Israel and portraying itself as a bulwark against anti-Semitic Muslims, it not only fails to address its own indigenous Jew-hatred - as evidenced by Gauland’s egregious Nazi relativism - but also directly attacks pillars of the Jewish faith, through intermittent calls to outlaw circumcision and ban ritual slaughter. The AfD is a self-declared "ally" that does not solve any of our - very real - problems but only creates a number of new ones. [...]

In a time when hatred of Israel on the left and among Muslim and Arab immigrants joins forces with traditional right-wing and populist Jew-hatred, civic protest against anti-Semitism matters more than ever. 

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Al Jazeera: Living in an infomercial: Berliners attempt advertising ban

"When we fill public space with advertising we are basically saying private companies can have it for their purposes and to try and manipulate people into buying things. That's something that we think should not happen," he tells Al Jazeera. 

The campaign wants to see an end to large-scale adverts, with a ban on digital adverts or displays in public spaces, and a ban on all marketing near schools, kindergartens and universities. The law would allow for non-commercial messaging, such as information about events and charitable causes, but these would also be restricted to designated areas and ceąrtain heights. Promotion for commercial products would only be allowed in the place of service, for example at the shop or restaurant of the advertiser. [...]

"We want a city that is worth living in. A city where public space has not become a commodity and is not just a projection surface for the advertising campaigns of huge companies. We want public space to be a space for everyone where people meet, where people exchange, where they participate and where they don't feel like they are inside a TV advertisement."[...]

The petition was officially launched on January 16 and the campaign group have exactly six months from that date to collect at least 20,000 signatures. If they reach this mark, the Bundesrat - the German senate - will have to debate the law and decide either to reject or accept it. If rejected, the campaign group will need to acquire further signatures to push the issue to a referendum next year.

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Al Jazeera: The Soros obsession: Why far-right conspiracy theories prevail

Alexander Reid Ross, author of Against the Fascist Creep, explained that "Soros conspiracies have always been a marker for the radical right as opposition to mainstream conservatism".

Explaining that such theories found currency among some leftists in the past, Ross noted that Soros has been blamed for economic crises, the tanking of currencies worldwide and backing an uprising against Serbia's former ultra-nationalist ruler Slobodan Milosevic, who was toppled in 2001. [...]

"In a way, he fits the perfect sort of historic epistemological category in the national socialist tradition," Reid Ross told Al Jazeera. [...]

According to Reid Ross, this rhetoric became prevalent among the far right during the era of the Tea Party, the ultra-conservative movement that sprung up in the wake of Barack Obama's 2008 election.

In 2010, the once popular right-wing Fox News commentator Glenn Beck aired a now infamous series deeming Soros as "the puppet master" pulling the strings behind global political developments.  

Pushing the conspiracy that Soros was complicit in the Holocaust, Beck said he had bankrolled civil society and liberal organisations as part of a plot to "form a shadow government, using humanitarian aid as a cover".

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