Autumn really is the best season. The autumnal equinox took place a couple of weeks ago, marking the end of summer and the start of fall across the Northern Hemisphere. Now it is the season of harvests, festivals, migrations, winter preparations, and, of course, spectacular foliage. Across the North, people are beginning to feel a crisp chill in the evening air, leaves are splashing mountainsides with bright color, apples and pumpkins are being gathered, and animals are on the move. Collected here are some early images from this year, maybe more to follow in the weeks to come.
10 October 2018
The New York Review of Books: The Autocracy App
In Myanmar, hatred whipped up on Facebook Messenger has driven ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya. In India, false child abduction rumors on Facebook’s WhatsApp service have incited mobs to lynch innocent victims. In the Philippines, Turkey, and other receding democracies, gangs of “patriotic trolls” use Facebook to spread disinformation and terrorize opponents. And in the United States, the platform’s advertising tools remain conduits for subterranean propaganda.[...]
It’s not just external critics who see something fundamentally amiss at the company. People central to Facebook’s history have lately been expressing remorse over their contributions and warning others to keep their children away from it. Sean Parker, the company’s first president, acknowledged last year that Facebook was designed to cultivate addiction. He explained that the “like” button and other features had been created in response to the question, “How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?” Chamath Palihapitiya, a crucial figure in driving Facebook’s growth, said he feels “tremendous guilt” over his involvement in developing “tools that are ripping apart the social fabric of how society works.” Roger McNamee, an early investor and mentor to Zuckerberg, has become a full-time crusader for restraining a platform that he calls “tailor-made for abuse by bad actors.”[...]
As Facebook proved a better tool for autocrats than for revolutionaries, the protest machine became a surveillance and disinformation machine. In Cambodia, Hun Sen’s government has poured money into Facebook advertising to build up an inflated following, while an “experiment” the company performed in six small countries—moving news content out of the primary Newsfeed into a separate “Explore” section—made independent media sources all but invisible. In the Philippines, where the average user spends nearly four hours a day on social media, Rodrigo Duterte’s government has carried out a campaign of legal harassment against the brave news start-up Rappler—which is, of course, mainly distributed via Facebook.[...]
But the Microsoft precedent is not encouraging. After a federal judge found that Microsoft had abused its monopoly and ruled that it should be separated into two companies, the US Court of Appeals overturned the ruling on multiple grounds. The government has brought no comparably ambitious antitrust action against a major technology company in the two decades since. If the Justice Department were to become interested in breaking up Facebook, it would need the FTC to expand its definition of “consumer harm” to explicitly include violations of data privacy.
UnHerd: May should set her sights on the crony capitalists
Having just endured the party conference season, though, it’s clear to me that, beyond the headlines, an even more profound debate is gaining momentum, with much greater potential impact on the long-term living standards of millions of workers across the UK and beyond. It’s of relevance to the vast majority of countries on earth, in fact, for it’s a debate about the future of capitalism itself.[...]
A recent YouGov poll suggested around 60% of voters think the railways and Royal Mail should be renationalised. Over half want the water and energy companies back in public sector ownership. A ComRes survey earlier this year showed that young British adults now think capitalism is more dangerous than communism.[...]
The reality for many is that, across the West, stagnant wages and spiralling corporate profits are fuelling a sense that capitalism is now skewed, with the benefits accruing to an elite few at the expense of the many. And that’s allowing Corbyn to present, with some success, his programme of aggressive renationalisation, sweeping trade union powers and highly punitive taxation as “the new common sense of our time”. [...]
But many of the voters the Tories need to attract – young couples struggling to make ends meet, graduate professionals with no chance of buying a house – weren’t alive in 1976. To them, assertions from wealthy ministers that ‘capitalism is the key to prosperity’ sound offensive. Talk that ‘Labour always wrecks the economy’ or that Corbyn ‘placated the IRA’ fall on deaf ears.
RSA Replay: How to Build a More Equal and United Society | Eric Klinenberg
Eric Klinenberg is Director of the Institute of Public Knowledge at New York University. His pioneering research into the power of social infrastructure led to his appointment in 2013 as Research Director for President Obama's $1 billion programme to rebuild the region affected by Superstorm Sandy. At the RSA, through uplifting human stories and an illuminating tour through the science of social connection, he shows that properly designing and maintaining our ‘social infrastructure’ might be our single best strategy for a more equal and united society.
Social Europe: The Collapse Of European Social Democracy, Part 2
Instead, Social Democrats, perhaps reluctantly, embraced conservative parties’ populist appeals for low taxes on incomes, inheritances and, particularly, on corporates profits. Thomas Piketty has shown how far taxes on top incomes and wealth have been reduced over decades from rates over 90 percent on incomes in the USA, Germany, Britain and France in the 1950s to less than half of that today. There was also a pronounced shift to more regressive taxes on consumption. This impacted the poor most – traditional SD supporters. Industrial-scale tax avoidance and evasion enabled by hyper-globalisation went unaddressed effectively, angering supporters.[...]
Wages have fallen as profits soared over recent decades, hurting workers. The growing imbalance between capital and labour, shown in the rapid decline in labour’s share of national income (GDP) in many European countries, demonstrates unequivocally how workers have been losing out in the market economy for many decades. This has not gone unnoticed by workers, many of whom struggle to make ends meet, with some having to hold more than one job. It is a reason for rising inequality in the market. The skew in the balance between labour and capital in recent years has been due to these changes. [...]
However, increasingly, fractured politics has allowed this purpose to be diluted into many single issue agendas, impacting on the overarching collective identity of equal protection for all. Thus, identity politics has weakened the collective appeal of broad left parties. Had SD parties paid greater attention to rising inequality and protecting the collective safety net for all, they might have reduced the impact of this fracture in politics.
Jacobin Magazine: By Any Other Name
For Macedonians, the name dispute has always been central to political life. But what is perhaps not so widely discussed, even when the issue reaches international news, is Greece’s power as a member of the EU and NATO to veto Macedonia’s membership in these organizations. Many Macedonians who see membership in the West’s major international organizations as a path to prosperity thus see Greece as the major obstacle faced, notwithstanding austerity-hit Greece’s otherwise weak position within the EU order. Indeed, this issue has been exploited by right-wing parties and nationalist movements in both countries. [...]
Macedonian elections usually have relatively high turnout — in the last vote, some 66 percent. Yet if last Sunday’s referendum saw a decisive 94 percent victory for Yes, only 37 percent of voters actually turned out. As always, a part of the population was simply indifferent and didn’t vote, but what was noteworthy in this case was an effective boycott campaign, driven by multiple different forces. Most important was that a large part of the right-wing electorate didn’t vote, also thanks to a boycott campaign premised on the need to defend the country’s national identity. At the same time, a much smaller group of left-wing forces, such as those from the party Levica (The Left) opposed the deal because of their anti-imperialism and opposition to NATO. [...]
It was largely nationalist forces that drove the boycott campaign. Their strategy was to render the referendum illegitimate through low turnout, rather than any attempt to mobilize a “No” vote. Especially visible was the #Бојкотирам (“I boycott”) movement, which declared itself “an anonymous decentralized group without a leader” and equated Macedonian identity with the defense of its current name. Tellingly of its politics, its website also features an image of alt-right meme Pepe the Frog. The real size and influence of this movement is, however, debatable. Similarly, while international media made inevitable comments about “Russian interference” in the referendum — as displayed by the “I boycott” position advanced by Janko Bachev and his newly founded United Macedonia party, which has openly vaunted its pro-Russian stance — both the scale of the boycott and the longstanding nature of this dispute point to multiple internal reasons for the surprise vote.
Haaretz: Merkel and All the Men
I felt the need to take a picture of this aberration and post it on Instagram as a legacy of the past, but last Thursday, a photo of the scene at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem was not much different from the Beraud painting in Paris, as if 129 years had not elapsed. There they were, ramrod straight, standing next to one another in similar suits: 22 men surrounding Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the most powerful woman in the world, German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
The businessmen were invited to attend an exhibition on innovation and a roundtable discussion as representatives of the ground-breaking high-tech field. The men, like the Parisian intellectuals in the painting, represent progress. They too are totally blind to the fact that in practice, they are outmoded. The photo, which was meant to glorify and promote the crown jewel of Israel’s economy, unwittingly laid bare something else entirely – the banality of erasing women from the most important arena that there is, the centers of power. [...]
The Israeli Foreign Ministry’s apology in the face of growing protests on social media over the absence of women in high tech in the picture demonstrates the magnitude of the problem: “The roundtable at which Merkel participated was part of a series of events organized in cooperation with a number of entities, including the Israel Export Institute, the Innovation Authority, the Foreign Ministry and the Prime Minister’s Office,” the Foreign Ministry said. “The companies that were invited are leaders in innovation from Israel and Germany. … They selected and sent their representatives. In the course of the preparations, the shortcoming of the absence of women among the representatives was not identified.”
openDemocracy: 'Go Home?’ – five years on
It is five years this summer since the Home Office commissioned a poster van reading ‘In the country illegally? Go Home or Face arrest’ to drive through the streets of diverse areas of London, between 22 July and 22 August 2013. The vans episode was part of a wider campaign Operation Vaken. Responding to this as researchers, we kick-started a group research project that culminated in the publication of the book Go Home: The Politics of Immigration Controversies. [...]
Five years later, the vans are back in the news again. But this time, they’re being mentioned in relation to the ongoing Windrush scandal. The vans have become symbols of the cruelty and the whipping up of anti-immigrant sentiment which mark the hostile environment. The newspapers are filling up with the heart-breaking stories of Paulette Wilson, Anthony Bryan, Michael Braithwaite and others. They came to the UK as British citizens many years ago and have now found themselves on the wrong side of a system in which NHS staff, landlords, teachers and others are acting as proxy border agents. The term ‘hostile environment’ itself has now become toxic; the newly appointed Home Secretary Sajid Javid has replaced it with the euphemistic ‘compliant environment’. [...]
This shift happened very quickly; even as the news was breaking, PM Theresa May initially refused to discuss the situation of the Windrush generation with Caribbean diplomats. Is it because the hostile environment now touches a generation which was integral to the building of Britain’s post-war welfare state (and therefore more difficult to scapegoat as scroungers or job-stealers)? Is it because (to a limited extent) the Windrush has become memorialised as part of Britain’s official history – and related to this, Britain’s self-perception as fair and decent? Is it because taking away the rights of British citizens is unacceptable but taking away the rights of migrant workers, international students or refugees is perceived as a necessary evil to keep immigration under control? What is crucial is how much the shift in attitudes will be limited to compensation for the Windrush generation, or how much it will involve a wider critique of the hostile environment.[...]
Finally, the study we conducted revealed re/newed forms of community activism at play. People who had never been political or never marched, took to the streets and protested against the vans, the raids and the profiling being done both in London and throughout the UK. Such community-driven activism was a key element of the action against the Windrush scandal (for example, Wales Solidarity with the Windrush Generation and their Families, Bristol Solidarity with the Windrush Generation and their Families) and a UK Government petition for amnesty for anyone who was a minor that arrived in Britain between 1948 and 1971. The petition garnered 179,952 signatures, and the outcome of the subsequent debate was that “the Government is clear that an amnesty for this group is not required because these people do not require amnesty: they already have the right to remain here”.
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