The Guardian Longreads: How the news took over reality – podcast

In recent years, there has been enormous concern about the time we spend on our web-connected devices and what that might be doing to our brains. But a related psychological shift has gone largely unremarked: the way that, for a certain segment of the population, the news has come to fill up more and more time – and, more subtly, to occupy centre stage in our subjective sense of reality, so that the world of national politics and international crises can feel more important, even more truly real, than the concrete immediacy of our families, neighbourhoods and workplaces. It’s not simply that we spend too many hours glued to screens. It’s that for some of us, at least, they have altered our way of being in the world such that the news is no longer one aspect of the backdrop to our lives, but the main drama. The way that journalists and television producers have always experienced the news is now the way millions of others experience it, too. [...]

One crucial difference is that raging on Facebook, or sharing posts or voting in online polls, feels like doing something – an intervention that might, in however minuscule a way, change the outcome of the story. This sense of agency may largely be an illusion – one that serves the interests of the social media platforms to which it helps addict us – but it is undeniably powerful. And it extends even to those who themselves never comment or post. The sheer fact of being able to click, in accordance with your interests, through a bottomless supply of updates, commentary, jokes and analysis, feels like a form of participation in the news, utterly unlike passively consuming the same headlines repeated through the day on CNN or the BBC. [...]

What if participation in politics is a virtue in the same way that, for example, staying fit is a virtue? A person who visits the gym occasionally is doing something good; if she goes regularly, she’s being really good. But if she spends every free moment at the gym, so that her friendships and work are starved of attention, she is doing something pathological. That is because physical fitness is a largely instrumental virtue. It is good because it enables you to do other things, so if you do it to the exclusion of all else, you have missed the point. If you do it so strenuously you injure yourself, you have missed the point in a different way: now you can’t pursue fitness well, either. There is a case to be made that our fixation with the news might work the same way. By according political news such centrality in our mental landscapes, we may be squeezing out the very things politics was supposed to facilitate, and simultaneously doing injury to democratic politics itself. [...]

After Trump’s election victory, he recalls, numerous US publications ran articles giving advice for handling political arguments over Thanksgiving, concluding that, if civil political discussion with your Trump-voting uncle threatened to become too stressful, you should probably just stay home. Yet this, Talisse points out, is to accept the unspoken premise that, when all is said and done, political commitments are more important than family life. And that’s upside-down: one primary purpose of democratic politics is precisely to help guarantee the universal enjoyment of things such as a family life. At Thanksgiving with your Trumpist uncle, the point is not to seek agreement or compromise, but to grasp that we are not fully defined by our political allegiances – and that, as Talisse puts it, “in order to treat each other as political equals, we must see each other as something more than citizens”.

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The Philosophical Salon: Žižek – Making use of religion? No thanks!

THE core philosophical question is not “how can we break through the veil of illusions and reach true reality?” but exactly the opposite one: “why do illusions arise within reality?” It is a sign of Lacan’s philosophical preoccupation (and of his fateful limitation) that he also remained stuck in the quagmire of this question. After decades of struggle to penetrate through the Imaginary/Symbolic cobweb of fictions to the pure Real, he conceded defeat. Adrian Johnston[1] brought out the intricacies and ambiguities of the “pessimist” turn which occurs at the very end of Lacan’s teaching and which culminates in his new formula of the end of psychoanalytic treatment as identification with a symptom, not its dissolution: [...]

There is a fourth solution, though: the Real is not external, outside the Imaginary/Symbolic texture of fictions; it is the immanent impossibility of this texture. Illusions circulate around an impossible Real which has no substantial status outside the texture of illusions. In other words, the Real is not a hard inaccessible core of reality around which symbolic/imaginary fictions float protecting us from the direct touch of the Real; the Real is a purely virtual (and in this sense fictitious) point of reference around which we construct difference versions of reality. Once we fully endorse this notion of the Real, we no longer need the cynical recourse to the cobweb of illusions to sustain our desire: the tension that defines desire is already operative in the “pure” Real which is not pure chaos outside the Symbolic but the immanent impossibility of the Symbolic. This is why Lacan’s notion of the Borromean knot that inextricably links the three dimension of the Real, the Symbolic, and the Imaginary cannot be the ultimate answer to the question of how reality is structured: the Symbolic and the Imaginary are not parts of the ultimate ontological reality. The question to be addressed here is how the pre-human Real “in itself” has to be structured so that the Symbolic and the Imaginary can arise in it. [...]

Why does Neo not propose exiting from the Matrix altogether and entering the ordinary reality in which we are miserable creatures living on the destroyed surface of the earth? Because, as he learned from Morpheus, this miserable reality is not the Real. The matrix is, of course, a metaphor for what Lacan called the “big Other,” the virtual symbolic order, the network that structures reality for us. This dimension of the “big Other” is that of the constitutive alienation of the subject in the symbolic order. The big Other pulls the strings; the subject doesn’t speak, he “is spoken” by the symbolic structure. The paradox, the “infinite judgement” of The Matrix, is the co-dependence of the two aspects: the total artificiality (the constructed nature) of reality and the triumphant return of the body in the sense of the ballet-like quality of fights with slow motions and defiance of the laws of ordinary physical reality.

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Politico: How to Make Sense of the Shocking New MLK Documents

The most shocking claim Garrow relates is that King was present in a hotel room when a friend of his, Baltimore pastor Logan Kearse, raped a woman who resisted participating in unspecified sexual acts. The FBI agent who surveilled the room asserted that King “looked on, laughed and offered advice.” Other allegations include that King’s philandering—long known to be extensive—was even more rampant than historians knew; that King took part in group sex; that King may have fathered a child with one of his mistresses; and—less pruriently—that King continued taking money from his onetime ally Stanley Levison, a Communist Party member, even after he was supposed to have broken off ties. [...]

The reports are full of erotic details and include revealing handwritten marginalia. But to the uninitiated, the written reports that Garrow cites are hard to interpret. They can’t be checked against the original surveillance tapes, which remain sealed, according to a judge’s order, until 2027. It’s hard to tell from a glance who precisely authored them, for what purpose they were drafted or what information they’re based on. It is Garrow’s decades of expertise in reviewing and analyzing FBI materials about King that gives these startling revelations their weight. Garrow has explained that while not all FBI claims are to be believed, these sorts of summaries of surveillance intercepts are unlikely to have been fabricated or manipulated. [...]

An equally untenable judgment, however, comes from the Washington Post’s “Retropolis” blog, which declares Garrow’s article to be “irresponsible.” The thrust of the article is to insinuate that the FBI reports aren’t worth the paper they’re written on, and so Garrow shouldn’t have published them. But while the Post piece quotes some respected historians (including friends of mine) rightly noting that the FBI documents may not be entirely reliable—not least because of Hoover’s vendetta against King—it avoids the obvious, if painful, corollary that they may well be accurate to a significant degree. We should at least allow the possibility that the accusations are true. [...]

Second, the piece strengthens the picture of the bureau as inordinately fixated on sex, whether out of the prurience of its director and agents or out of a misbegotten assumption that engaging in what the reports call “unnatural acts” (seemingly oral sex) somehow indicates “degeneracy and depravity.” Alas, this tendency to take private sexual behavior as an indicator of virtue remains all too prevalent today. Historians of sexuality will continue to consider FBI surveillance as a “site of contest,” as we academics like to say, over sexual behavior and norms.

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Vox: The race to save endangered foods

We’re letting foods we’ve eaten for thousands of years disappear from farmers’ fields, and from our plates. Saving them isn’t just a matter of cultural preservation. In the next 30 years, we’re going to need to learn how to feed more people on a hotter planet, and the more genetic varieties we lose, the harder it’ll be to adapt.

To learn more about the foods facing extinction in the US and around the world, check out the Ark of Taste, a project of Slow Food USA.

Journalist Mark Shapiro’s book, Seeds of Resistance, goes into much more detail about the risk that genetic homogeneity poses to our food supply. He also profiles some of the efforts, many led by indigenous communities, to preserve older seed varieties.

For more on seed relabeling, check out the Farmers Business Network’s 2018 Seed Relabeling Report.

The chart on declining global yields for corn, wheat, and rice comes from an article in the academic journal Disasters and Climate Change Economics from agricultural economists Mekbib G. Haile, Tesfamicheal Wossen, Kindie Tesfaye, and Joachim von Braun. Their prediction model takes into account both climate change and price volatility, which is why their estimates are higher than those of some other researchers.

Special thanks to Marie Haga of Global Crop Diversity Trust, and Marleni Ramírez of Bioversity International for sharing their knowledge with me. 

The Conversation: SNP surge in European elections has major implications for a second independence referendum

Unlike most of the rest of the UK, where the upstart Brexit Party topped the poll, in Scotland the SNP finished first yet again. The party took more than 38% of the vote, picking up half of Scotland’s six seats in the European Parliament.

This is quite a remarkable success for a party that has been in power in Scotland since 2007 and has finished top in every election since 2011. [...]

For the SNP, Scotland voting differently from the rest of the UK feeds into the narrative that Scotland is just politically different and should make its own decisions. [...]

The Conservative anti-independence message to an extent prevented the party from having an even worse election. They are likely to remain the main unionist party, particular as their leader Ruth Davidson has a very high profile, rivalling only the SNP’s Nicola Sturgeon, and is also relatively popular too. [...]

Meanwhile, the Brexit Party did finish a distant second with around 14% in Scotland but this does not place them to do well in the next Holyrood election. UKIP won a seat at the 2014 EU elections in Scotland and gained less than 2% two years later at the Holyrood elections.

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The Guardian: 'It’s a miracle': Helsinki's radical solution to homelessness

“We had to get rid of the night shelters and short-term hostels we still had back then. They had a very long history in Finland, and everyone could see they were not getting people out of homelessness. We decided to reverse the assumptions.” [...]

“We decided to make the housing unconditional,” says Kaakinen. “To say, look, you don’t need to solve your problems before you get a home. Instead, a home should be the secure foundation that makes it easier to solve your problems.” [...]

Housing First’s early goal was to create 2,500 new homes. It has created 3,500. Since its launch in 2008, the number of long-term homeless people in Finland has fallen by more than 35%. Rough sleeping has been all but eradicated in Helsinki, where only one 50-bed night shelter remains, and where winter temperatures can plunge to -20C. [...]

But Housing First is not just about housing. “Services have been crucial,” says Helsinki’s mayor, Jan Vapaavuori, who was housing minister when the original scheme was launched. “Many long-term homeless people have addictions, mental health issues, medical conditions that need ongoing care. The support has to be there.” [...]

In each new district, the city maintains a strict housing mix to limit social segregation: 25% social housing, 30% subsidised purchase, and 45% private sector. Helsinki also insists on no visible external differences between private and public housing stock, and sets no maximum income ceiling on its social housing tenants.

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Bloomberg: Russia After Vladimir Putin

The Free Russia Foundation, a Washington-based think tank chaired by former Assistant Secretary of State David Kramer, has just published a 170-page report what the country might look like in 2030. The authors include some of the most insightful anti-Putin commentators today: political analyst Alexander Morozov, media expert Vasily Gatov, economists Vladimir Milov and Vladislav Inozemtsev, social anthropologist Denis Sokolov and energy expert Ilya Zaslavskiy. [...]

Russia will increasingly come under China’s sway. The alliance between the two countries will strengthen, with Russia supplying more raw materials and China industrial goods. The two countries’ extensive military cooperation may be bolstered by their increasing alignment against the U.S. In the most likely scenario discussed in the report, Russia will become a Chinese satellite, boosting its military power and gradually allowing its domestic market to be subsumed. Both Western sanctions and the U.S. confrontation with Beijing make this outcome likelier, despite the domestic unpopularity of such an alliance.

No high-cost military adventures, but watch Belarus and Kazakhstan. None of the authors expect Russia to make any militarily aggressive moves against the Baltic states, but Belarus could be an attractive, and domestically popular, target if Putin wanted to stay in power beyond 2024 as head of a unified state. Separately, the slow leadership succession in Kazakhstan is likely to pose a threat. If the neighboring state chooses to align itself more closely with China or Turkey, it would strip Russia of one of its vaunted security buffers. Thus the report's authors see Belarus and Kazakhstan as more likely targets for Russian meddling than any other country, if only because they are uncertain about Moscow’s true military strength and the potential domestic popularity of armed aggression. Recent victories in Ukraine and Syria were against only weak adversaries. The military remains underfunded, and any losses would likely be extremely unpopular.

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The Guardian: Latest data shows steep rises in CO2 for seventh year

Scientists have warned for more than a decade that concentrations of more than 450ppm risk triggering extreme weather events and temperature rises as high as 2C, beyond which the effects of global heating are likely to become catastrophic and irreversible.

May is the most significant month for global carbon dioxide concentrations because it is the peak value for the year, before the growth of vegetation in the northern hemisphere starts to absorb the gas from the air. The seasonal peak and fall can be seen in the Keeling curve, named after Charles Keeling, who started the observations on Mauna Loa because of its isolation in the Pacific Ocean.[...]

As recently as the 1990s, the average annual growth rate was about 1.5ppm, but in the past decade that has accelerated to 2.2ppm, and is now even higher. This brings the threshold of 450ppm closer sooner than had been anticipated. Concentrations of the gas have increased every year, reflecting our burning of fossil fuels.

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The Guardian: What are our universities for? Taxpayers have a right to know

The other change is welcome, a shift of emphasis from higher to further education, towards so-called technical colleges. The crushing of Britain’s skills-oriented college sector over the past decade – down by 16% – has been a scandal. The Office for National Statistics claims that a third of all graduates – including scientists – are not in “graduate level” jobs, while many skills are in acutely short supply. There are a mere 10,000 degree-grade apprenticeships in Britain each year, against 300,000 university places. This is absurd. Somehow the binary structure of post-school education must be restored. [...]

The question of whether a university is a scholarly retreat, a national investment, or a finishing school for the aspiring rich has never been answered. When, a century ago, universities were tiny establishment kindergartens, it did not matter much. Doctors, lawyers, bankers and architects got by well enough without them. Now that they divide society down the middle, in terms of who goes, taxpayers are entitled to challenge their value. Likewise students, burdened with debt, will ask whether an unmarketable degree is really worth idling away three years of their youth or enduring exam-related stress.

Spending money on higher education is like spending it on defence. You suspect half of it is wasted, but you cannot tell which half. No causal relationship has been proved between graduates – even science ones – and national wealth. A good university is still the nearest a secular society gets to a sacred institution. That is why I prefer traditionalists such as historian Stefan Collini, who see universities as intrinsic goods, devoted to “inculcating the spirit of the humanities”, and infusing society with their occasional wisdom. While perhaps immeasurable, this value should at least be articulated, and Collini does that.

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