Michel Foucault - Laurie Taylor presents a special programme on the life and work of the iconoclastic French philosopher and theorist. He's joined by Professor Stephen Shapiro, Professor Vikki Bell and Professor Lois McNay. Revised repeat.
10 July 2019
Today in Focus: Is a new generation taking over the Democratic party?
Kamala Harris was the big winner of the first round of Democratic party debates in the US. This week, her poll numbers surged and so did donations to her campaign. But as Lauren Gambino in Washington notes, it was bad news for the frontrunners as Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders faltered. Also today: Daniel Boffey on the new cast of characters taking over the EU’s top jobs.
The race for the Democratic party’s presidential nomination is intensifying after two rounds of televised debates in which the candidates squared up to each other on major issues and their past records. The big winner was the California senator Kamala Harris, who denounced the record of the frontrunner, Joe Biden, on race.
The Guardian’s Lauren Gambino joins Anushka Asthana to look across the diverse field of potential presidential nominees and the debates that highlighted the generational and ideological divides in the party.
Will the Democrats coalesce around a centrist such as Biden, a former vice-president? Or could they opt for the more radical figure of Bernie Sanders, four years after he lost out to Hillary Clinton? Or will the torch pass to a new generation?
Reuters: 'They want to kill you': Anger at Syrians erupts in Istanbul
Their store and other Syrian properties were targeted in the Kucukcekmece district of western Istanbul on the night of Saturday June 29, one of the occasional bouts of violence which Syrians say erupt against them in Turkey’s largest city.
Such large-scale clashes are rare, with only one other big attack happening this year, also in western Istanbul, in February. Small incidents are more frequently shared by Syrians on social media, and some fear tensions are on the rise. [...]
Turkey hosts more than 3.6 million Syrians, the largest population of Syrians displaced by the 8-year civil war, and Istanbul province alone has over half a million, according to Turkey’s interior ministry. [...]
That has led President Tayyip Erdogan’s government, which opened its borders to Syrians when the conflict first erupted in 2011, to increasingly highlight the number of Syrians it says have returned to northern Syrian areas now controlled by Turkish troops and their Syrian rebel allies.
Erdogan’s political opponents have criticized him for allowing in so many refugees, and even the new opposition mayor of Istanbul - who campaigned on a ticket of inclusiveness - has said Turks are suffering because of the Syrian influx.
VICE: AI Trained on Old Scientific Papers Makes Discoveries Humans Missed
In a study published in Nature on July 3, researchers from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory used an algorithm called Word2Vec sift through scientific papers for connections humans had missed. Their algorithm then spit out predictions for possible thermoelectric materials, which convert heat to energy and are used in many heating and cooling applications. [...]
“The way that this Word2vec algorithm works is that you train a neural network model to remove each word and predict what the words next to it will be,” Jain said. “By training a neural network on a word, you get representations of words that can actually confer knowledge.” [...]
This new application of machine learning goes beyond materials science. Because it’s not trained on a specific scientific dataset, you could easily apply it to other disciplines, retraining it on literature of whatever subject you wanted. Vahe Tshitoyan, the lead author on the study, says other researchers have already reached out, wanting to learn more.
The New Yorker: Why Donald Trump Suddenly Decided to Talk About the Environment
By all accounts, it was the President’s pollsters who insisted on this strange talk, because they are desperately afraid that they are losing those independents (particularly women) who have come to fear the physical future that climate change is imposing. What does it mean, after all, to boast that we have the “cleanest air” ever, when wildfire smoke now obscures swaths of sky for large portions of the year? What does it mean to say the water is cleaner than it was in 1970, when water now drops from the sky in such volumes that insurance companies have begun to declare cellars “uninsurable?”[...]
This is good not because it means that Trump will act—he won’t. It’s good because it means that if we move past Trumpism there’s at least a somewhat greater chance that the larger political system will move, too. But, at this point, it’s also hard to believe that political action will be swift enough or comprehensive enough to make a decisive difference. After all, the Obama Administration, which sincerely believed that climate change was real, succeeded only in replacing some coal-fired power generation with natural gas, which in turn succeeded only in replacing heat-trapping carbon dioxide emissions with heat-trapping methane emissions. (It’s not clear that total greenhouse-gas emissions budged at all during the Obama years.) If the G.O.P. maintains any political traction at all in the next dispensation, it will be hard to pass legislation like the Green New Deal, which represents precisely the scale of commitment needed to catch up with the out-of-control physics of global warming. If the Trump follies have lowered the bar to the point where a return to Obama-era politics is all that’s politically possible, then significantly slowing the rise of the planet’s temperature by federal action will remain difficult.
So it’s profoundly important that activists keep the pressure on other power centers, too: on state and local governments, and on the financial institutions that keep the fossil-fuel industry afloat. To use an unfortunately apropos metaphor, all that pressure will eventually force a hole in the dam. The political flop sweat that Trump was trying to mop up on Monday is a sure small sign of the coming deluge.
The Guardian: Grieve: proroguing parliament would be end of democracy in UK
Speaking on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme, Grieve said the amendment calls for “regular motions before parliament in September and particularly October”. If passed, it would prevent the parliamentary session being prorogued, or abruptly ended, in the lead-up to the 31 October departure date.
“If you decide that parliament is an inconvenience, when in fact it is the place where democratic legitimacy lies in our constitution, and therefore it’s acceptable to get rid of it for a period because it might otherwise [stop] you from doing something that parliament would prevent, then it’s the end of democracy.”[...]
Grieve was backed by the Conservative former foreign secretary William Hague, who told Today: “I think it’s very important that parliament is able to give its opinion. It ought to be unthinkable that we could leave the EU by a manoeuvre, by a procedural ruse of some kind.
The Huffington Post: Fox News Cuts Into Trump Speech To Deliver A Brutal Real-Time Fact Check
Trump on Monday attempted to tout his administration’s environmental record, but Fox News host Shepard Smith interrupted to say those policies have been “widely criticized by environmentalists and academics.”
The Fox News host cited a New York Times report that found that more than 80 environmental rules and regulations have been repealed and/or rolled back, including multiple regulations regarding drilling, air pollution and wildlife. [...]
Though Trump has frequently touted the glowing coverage he’s received from Fox News hosts such as Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson and is known to be a fan of the “Fox & Friends” morning show, he has lately complained about some of the network’s other figures, including Smith.
euronews: Pope bombarded with insults after tweeting to pray for migrants
Users were quick to react to the tweet with some asking the pope to think instead of earthquake victims or of Vincent Lambert, the quadriplegic Frenchman whose parents recently accepted to end life support.
Some said the Pope should spend more time talking about Jesus and other religious topics.[...]
The same day, the front page of Italy's daily la Repubblica newspaper ran the headline: "Catholics at a crossroads: the Pope or Salvini."
The newspaper interviewed the Jesuit Father Sorge who compared Italy's new security decree, which includes provisions that clamp down on migrant entry to Italy, with racial laws of the Fascist regime in the country in 1938.
Haaretz: Intermarriage Among Diaspora Jews Is 'Like a Second Holocaust,' Israel's Education Minister Says
Israel's education minister has likened intermarriage among diaspora Jews, and particularly North American Jews, to the Holocaust in a recent cabinet meeting. A spokesman for Education Minister Rafi Peretz confirmed Tuesday that Peretz said that "assimilation is like a second Holocaust."[...]
Last year, Agriculture Minister Uri Ariel, member of the National Union – one of the member parties to the Union of Right-Wing Parties, sent a letter to employees at his ministry discussing the "assimilation Holocaust." According to Ariel, "During the Holocaust, we've lost about six million Jews. Without at all comparing the two, we're losing a part of our people to assimilation."
Fellow National Union member Eli Ben Dahan said in 2014, while he was deputy minister for religious affairs, that intermarriage are "a silent Holocaust. We must remember that the Jewish people, unfortunately, has gone through a Holocaust. It has been diminishing over the past century … In Europe we have as much as 80 percent intermarriages; in the United States it's 66 percent. It's horrible."
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