The Guardian: Why we stopped trusting elites

A modern liberal society is a complex web of trust relations, held together by reports, accounts, records and testimonies. Such systems have always faced political risks and threats. The template of modern expertise can be traced back to the second half of the 17th century, when scientists and merchants first established techniques for recording and sharing facts and figures. These were soon adopted by governments, for purposes of tax collection and rudimentary public finance. But from the start, strict codes of conduct had to be established to ensure that officials and experts were not seeking personal gain or glory (for instance through exaggerating their scientific discoveries), and were bound by strict norms of honesty. [...]

At the same time, and even more corrosively, when elected representatives come to be viewed as “insider liars”, it turns out that other professions whose job it is to report the truth – journalists, experts, officials – also suffer a slump in trust. Indeed, the distinctions between all these fact-peddlers start to look irrelevant in the eyes of those who’ve given up on the establishment altogether. It is this type of all-encompassing disbelief that creates the opportunity for rightwing populism in particular. Trump voters are more than twice as likely to distrust the media as those who voted for Clinton in 2016, according to the annual Edelman Trust Barometer, which adds that the four countries currently suffering the most “extreme trust losses” are Italy, Brazil, South Africa and the US. [...]

“We didn’t really learn anything from WikiLeaks we didn’t already presume to be true,” the philosopher Slavoj Žižek observed in 2014. “But it is one thing to know it in general and another to get concrete data.” The nature of all these scandals suggests the emergence of a new form of “facts”, in the shape of a leaked archive – one that, crucially, does not depend on trusting the secondhand report of a journalist or official. These revelations are powerful and consequential precisely because they appear to directly confirm our fears and suspicions. Resentment towards “liberal elites” would no doubt brew even in the absence of supporting evidence. But when that evidence arises, things become far angrier, even when the data – such as Hillary Clinton’s emails – isn’t actually very shocking. [...]

But what is emerging now is what the social theorist Michel Foucault would have called a new “regime of truth” – a different way of organising knowledge and trust in society. The advent of experts and government administrators in the 17th century created the platform for a distinctive liberal solution to this problem, which rested on the assumption that knowledge would reside in public records, newspapers, government files and journals. But once the integrity of these people and these instruments is cast into doubt, an opportunity arises for a new class of political figures and technologies to demand trust instead.

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openDemocracy: In the fight against austerity, human rights is not the answer

This disparity is due in part to the indeterminacy of socioeconomic rights. To talk meaningfully about a right to an ‘adequate standard of living’ requires an ability to adjudicate that right. By comparison assessing whether a right to freedom from torture or freedom of speech has been breached presents a straightforward proposition. This allows politicians charged with implementing these rights considerable definitional discretion. [...]

That these rights are afforded less significance is no accident. As Samuel Moyn has argued, human rights’ commitment to individual freedom coincides with neoliberalism's commitment to the market, property rights and suspicion of the state.

This coincidence conspires to circumscribe the class of acceptable claims leaving those claims that challenge existing economic relations strictly off-limits. When Raquel Rolnik, the UN’s special rapporteur on housing, called on the Government to rethink the ‘bedroom tax’, arguing that it eroded the right to adequate housing, the then housing minister Kris Hopkins labelled her report a “misleading Marxist diatribe.” [...]

Nevertheless the prominence of rights as a progressive discourse is in danger of crowding out other political possibilities. When compared with socioeconomic rights, the alleged apoliticism of civil and political rights naturalise and protect distributions of property and power. Any future role for rights must reckon with the unintended consequences of their claims to universalism.

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The Atlantic: It’s Time to Drop the ‘LGBT’ From ‘LGBTQ’

Kameny especially prized, among his many accomplishments, his slogan “Gay is good!”—a proud claim that homosexuals are heterosexuals’ moral as well as legal equals. He wasn’t excluding anyone by using the word gay. He didn’t mean that gay is good but lesbian, bisexual, and transgender are not. He believed he was fighting for the values that define all Americans—the values he had fought for in combat during World War II. Gay rights, to him, meant American rights. Human rights. [...]

In the past couple of years, however, I have come to believe, at long last, that Kameny was right. The alphabet-soup designation for sexual minorities has become a synecdoche for the excesses of identity politics—excesses that have helped empower the likes of Donald Trump. It’s time to retire the term and find a replacement. I propose a single letter: Q. [...]

And so the unwieldy four-letter acronym reigned. It had its advantages. It signaled factional inclusion to those inside the movement, and factional solidarity to those outside the movement. In that sense, it was good politics and good symbolism. But it wasn’t stable. Factionalism rarely is. As activists and theorists sought to cover every base, they recognized asexuality and intersexuality and various other identities by coining LGBTQIAA+, LGBTTIQQ2SA, and other telescoping designations. Lately LGBTQ seems to have become the norm, on the assumption that Q, for queer, can stand in for all the rest.

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Aeon: The mysterious ‘something’ behind the accelerating expansion of the Universe

Dark energy is the term that scientists have given to the mysterious ‘something’ deemed responsible for the accelerating expansion of the Universe. However, unlike gravity, which pulls things together, physicists and cosmologists still can’t explain what dark energy really is or how it does what it does, despite the fact that it theoretically makes up a substantial part of everything. In this upbeat animation, Pedro Ferreira, professor of astrophysics at the University of Oxford, points to the scenarios that his field faces – the ‘incredibly exciting’ one and the ‘doomsday’ one – perhaps taking solace in knowing that there are only two.

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Al Jazeera: How Britain stole $45 trillion from India

New research by the renowned economist Utsa Patnaik - just published by Columbia University Press - deals a crushing blow to this narrative. Drawing on nearly two centuries of detailed data on tax and trade, Patnaik calculated that Britain drained a total of nearly $45 trillion from India during the period 1765 to 1938. [...]

Here's how it worked. The East India Company began collecting taxes in India, and then cleverly used a portion of those revenues (about a third) to fund the purchase of Indian goods for British use. In other words, instead of paying for Indian goods out of their own pocket, British traders acquired them for free, "buying" from peasants and weavers using money that had just been taken from them.[...]

This corrupt system meant that even while India was running an impressive trade surplus with the rest of the world - a surplus that lasted for three decades in the early 20th century - it showed up as a deficit in the national accounts because the real income from India's exports was appropriated in its entirety by Britain.

Some point to this fictional "deficit" as evidence that India was a liability to Britain. But exactly the opposite is true. Britain intercepted enormous quantities of income that rightly belonged to Indian producers. India was the goose that laid the golden egg. Meanwhile, the "deficit" meant that India had no option but to borrow from Britain to finance its imports. So the entire Indian population was forced into completely unnecessary debt to their colonial overlords, further cementing British control.[...]

Patnaik identifies four distinct economic periods in colonial India from 1765 to 1938, calculates the extraction for each, and then compounds at a modest rate of interest (about 5 percent, which is lower than the market rate) from the middle of each period to the present. Adding it all up, she finds that the total drain amounts to $44.6 trillion. This figure is conservative, she says, and does not include the debts that Britain imposed on India during the Raj.

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Politico: Why Trump can’t kill the electric car

WASHINGTON — The electric vehicle revolution, after years of hype that outpaced reality, finally seems to be taking off in the United States. The best five months for plug-in sales in American history have been the past five months. Tesla’s Model 3 has been one of America’s top five selling passenger cars this fall, surging ahead of fossil-fueled mainstays like the Ford Fusion and Nissan Sentra. The U.S. put its 1 millionth electric vehicle on the road in September, not a large chunk of the nation’s 260 million vehicles, but not too shabby considering production started only in 2010. [...]

So far, Trump’s incendiary rhetoric and fossil-fuel-friendly policies have failed to even slow down America’s transition to a clean-energy economy. For example, the president has repeatedly vowed to revive the coal industry, by pushing to weaken air pollution rules and putting a coal lobbyist in charge of the Environmental Protection Agency, but utilities have continued to shut down dirty and uneconomical coal plants. U.S. coal consumption has dropped to its lowest level since 1979, while zero-emission wind and solar power are booming; they now account for 10 percent of U.S. generating capacity, up from about 1 percent a decade ago. [...]

Then again, this fight isn’t really about climate policy or transportation policy or even Trump’s pique at a company that made him look bad. EVs have become yet another battleground in America’s ubiquitous culture wars, targeted by many Republicans as eco-elitist Obamamobiles. Even before Trump took aim at the tax credit, GOP Senator John Barrasso of Wyoming had introduced a bill that would not only kill it but also would slap new federal fees on EV owners. At the same time, Democratic Rep. Peter Welch of Vermont has filed a pro-EV bill that would remove the 200,000-car threshold and extend the credit for 10 years. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has said he’ll demand that any bipartisan infrastructure bill include permanent tax credits for EVs, while climate-conscious Democrats like incoming Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are pushing a “Green New Deal” that would bolster government support for EVs.

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Political Critique: European Others

Being European without being white and Christian does not only put one in a strange place, but also in a strange temporality: Europeans who lack one or both of these qualities tend to be read as having just arrived or even as still being elsewhere – if not physically, then at least culturally. In European discourse (legally, culturally, socially, economically, academically…) the term ‘migrant’ describes someone who moves across borders, but also includes all racialized European communities, which are reframed as non-European through their ascribed permanent status as migrating (from somewhere that is not Europe). This status is transmitted across generations and thus increasingly decoupled from the actual event of migration, shifting the meaning of ‘migrant’ from a term indicating movement to one indicating a static, hereditary state. In other words, movement into Europeanness is impossible as long as racialized difference is still visible.

Racialized populations are thus positioned within a spatial and temporal paradox: they are permanently frozen in the moment of arrival – and the further away the actual moment/movement of migration, the stronger the paradox, i.e. the ‘queer­ness’ of their presence in space and time. The current so-called third generation of post-war labour and post-colonial migrants is perceived to be more alien and out of place and time in Europe than their grandparents, the first generation of actual migrants, exactly because they are (made) impossible as an internal presence within (and by) the ideology of normalized colour-blindness that places ‘race’ and thus racialized populations necessarily outside of Europe. [...]

Instead they are framed as an attempt at silencing necessary critiques of migrant communities and their supposed innate sexism, anti-Semitism, and homophobia (the prominence of discourses around ‘migrant extremism’ notwithstanding, there is an equally prominent assumption that it is taboo to criticise these communities). And indeed, at first glance it might seem as if Europe exists outside of the US American (post)racial temporality. While the latter is built on a narrative of having successfully overcome intolerance and discrimination, the myth of European colour-blindness claims that Europe never was ‘racial’ (anti-Semitism is still often analysed as both an exception to this and as clearly separable from racism). That is, despite the origin of the concept of race in Europe and the explicitly race-based policies of both its fascist regimes and its colonial empires, the dominant assumption is that this history had no impact on the continent and its internal structures.

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CityLab: A New Way of Seeing 200 Years of American Immigration

Here, the metaphorical mighty tree is the United States, and if you follow the metaphor to its logical conclusion, it has been made thicker and stronger by the waves of immigrants who have arrived over the decades. Each colored “cell” represents 100 immigrants; over time, the algorithm deposits them in concentric rings, with each ring marking a decade. The older ones encase the core, and newer ones wrap around surface. The colors and the direction of growth represent the origins of the immigrants. The yellow cells depicting immigrants from Latin America, for example, are layered by the computer algorithm towards the bottom of the circle—signaling that they come countries south of the U.S.; those from Asia grow outwards towards the left. (Cruz noted that while the trajectories of Native American and enslaved populations are also of course integral to the story of the country, but this dataset did not include information on these groups.) [...]

For example, the tree trunk swells after the 1965 Immigration Act, which replaced previous policies that intentionally excluded immigrants from Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and parts of Europe. That legislation helped shape the demographics of the country for decades afterward: The cells start getting more colorful, and the rings thicken more towards the west and south. [...]

Perhaps Cruz doesn’t explicitly intend for it, but one effect of this approach is that it makes the viewer see that immigration’s role in the country’s demographics is something natural and organic—a response to various environmental conditions, like the dry and rainy seasons that alternately limit and encourage the growth of a tree. It also reveals that, while immigration is not the only part of the historical process that fed America’s growth, it is essential. The U.S. is a nation of immigrants, right down the very core.

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statista: The Steady Rise Of U.S. Gun Deaths

According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, nearly 40,000 people died in shootings across the United States, the highest number in 20 years. The data takes into account deaths classified as unintentional, suicide, homicide, undetermined and legal intervention/operations of war.

That trend was driven by a steady rise in suicides involving firearms The U.S. now has 12 deaths per 100,000 people due to guns compared to 0.2 per 100,000 people in Japan, 0.3 in the UK and 0.9 in Germany.

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