"Don’t be evil." It’s an iconic phrase that was written into Google’s code of conduct during the early days of the company. It conveyed a utopian vision for technology that would make the world better, safer and more prosperous. But twenty years later, has big tech lived up to its founding principles or has it lost its soul? Rana Foroohar, Global Business Columnist at The Financial Times and Global Economic Analyst at CNN, documents the bigger implications for how tech companies now operate. In her conversation with World Affairs CEO, Philip Yun, Foroohar looks at the extent to which the FAANGs (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google) threaten democracies, livelihoods and our thinking.
28 February 2020
New Statesman: The paradox of an atheist soul
When exploring the idea of the soul Cottingham says nothing of Buddhism, or any non-Western religion. He considers briefly a modern version of the denial of self- hood, which questions the idea that we should aim for narrative unity in our lives. Any such defence of the “episodic” or “happy-go-lucky” life, he tells us, “seems open to a swift and devastating rebuttal: lives of this episodic kind are possible only because others who are not leading happy-go-lucky lives are sustaining the stable relationships that make their easy-come-easy-go attitude possible”. He goes on to observe that advocates of the “episodic” life “tend to be drawn in the end to abandon the very idea of a self persisting over time… Yet the more we think about this, the more it starts to look like a fantasy of evasion.” [...]
The life of Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) was both. He writes in his autobiography that when he looked back he found not a single person but something more like a club whose members changed over time. The solitary, rationalistic and rather puritanical self of Russell’s late Victorian youth was not the self that flirted with mysticism as he fell unhappily out of love with his first wife. Nor was it the self that emerged from a spell in prison for pacifist resistance against the First World War, after which his interests shifted from mathematics and logic to politics, and he travelled to Lenin’s Russia and war-torn China. Still less was it the self that married three more times and had countless affairs. Reflecting on his life, Russell found no enduring selfhood. [...]
Even within the Western tradition, as Tom Holland showed in Dominion: the Making of the Western Mind, there are enormous moral gulfs. The Iliad knows nothing of forgiveness, nor does Aristotle’s Ethics of humility. Self-sacrifice figures nowhere in the Epicurean pursuit of tranquil pleasure, nor does concern for the downtrodden and forgotten in Stoicism. Our revulsion at the gladiatorial games of ancient Rome does not come from any inbuilt repugnance at the spectacle of human suffering and violent death. There is no sign that those who watched the games felt any such revulsion. Nor is there much evidence from that era that slavery was felt to be inherently wrong. The repugnance we feel for these practices is an inheritance from Jewish and Christian ideas of human dignity and equality.
openDemocracy: In Uzbekistan, homosexuality is illegal. Here's what LGBT life is like there
This is where it got difficult. Most of the people I met refused to talk about their lives, even on condition of complete anonymity. The main reasons were distrust and fear of the consequences. Uzbekistan is one of the few remaining countries where sex between men is still criminalised, and can be punished by a three to five year prison sentence. There are no accessible statistics on how many investigations have been opened. But in the course of conversations and interviews it’s become obvious that this criminalisation is widely used to blackmail and threaten people. [...]
LGBT people living in the Uzbek capital Tashkent have it a little easier: life here is more diverse, you can get lost in the crowd. Some people don’t hide their orientation (although they don’t advertise it) – it’s just not talked about. In both the capital and outside, however, there is a total distrust of strangers and need for extreme care in the choice of partners and friends. Despite many attempts, I was only able to talk to Tashkent residents and one activist now living outside the country. [...]
I feel that there are practically no LGBT communities in either Uzbekistan or Russia. I mean the kind of community where people are friends and do things together. There is activism, of course, but that doesn’t particularly unite people – it’s each person for themselves. Gay men don’t live together as communities – no one wants to do that and basically nobody cares. There are several reasons for that, but the main thing is fear – no one wants to end up in court.
The Atlantic: Coronavirus Could Break Iranian Society
Zeynep Tufekci has written about the advantages and disadvantages of authoritarianism in dealing with a disaster like this. China can lock down a city, quarantining tens of millions at a time, and it can marshal its top experts, allowing them to wage a campaign against the disease with the absolute authority of a caesar. But it can’t avail itself of the benefits of public trust, including transparent and honest accounts of the disease and its toll. In Iran, it appears that the government has all the disadvantages of an unfree society, and none of the compensating advantages. Watch this incredible video, at once comic and horrifying, of a top Iranian health official, Iraj Harirchi, assuring the public that the situation is being addressed, while sweating and coughing on colleagues and his audience because he has contracted the coronavirus: [...]
At some point, incompetence and evil become indistinguishable. I feel like we have passed this point several times in the past few years, and Iran’s leadership in particular keeps passing it over and over, like a Formula 1 car doing laps. Last month’s accidental downing of a civilian airliner exposed one form of fatal incompetence, followed by an abortive effort to cover it up. Iranians are understandably primed to wonder whether this disaster is similar, a tragedy of malign incompetence that is expanding beyond the government’s ability to contain. [...]
But any amount of waiting can be stressful, even in a place much more competently run than Iran. Earlier this month, I visited Hong Kong. Everyone wore masks. In public, no one crowded into my personal space on buses or in narrow pedestrian alleys. Shopkeepers came outside every quarter hour or so to wipe down the doorknobs and door buzzers of their shops, in case the last customer had left a viral particle. The burden of containing the coronavirus felt collective, and heavy. Hong Kong has a strong sense of identity and group responsibility, which has up until now kept it sane. I could take just a few days of it. Only in the middle of the night, when I knew I would encounter no one up close, did I feel comfortable—and not like some kind of norm-violating monster—walking around with my face exposed to the air.
Wired: Iran’s coronavirus outbreak makes no sense. What’s really going on?
But it is Iran that is concerning public health experts the most. According to the latest reports from the Iranian health ministry, the country has seen 16 confirmed deaths from Covid-19 and 95 confirmed cases. That death rate – of around 17 per cent – is “really quite high based on the China experience, and for early in the course of the epidemic is substantially high,” says Paul Hunter, professor in medicine at the University of East Anglia. So what’s going on? [...]
Some believe the Iranian government is deliberately trying to downplay the severity of the infection in the country. That seems to be supported by reports that broke on February 25 claiming Iranian police arrested 24 people, and temporarily detained another 118, for being “rumour-mongers” about the spread of coronavirus in Iran. The head of Iran’s cyber police force told the state’s official news agency that the police would block online posts that “contain rumours or fake news meant to disturb the public and increase concern in society”. [...]
He doesn’t believe that the main issue is Iran is covering up the spread of the coronavirus. “My view of the world is more cock-up than conspiracy,” he says. But the alternative could be more worrying. “I don’t think Iran has the capacity to identify all the contacts and cases that are likely to have been effective.”
Spiegel: Right-Wing Extremists Could Win Big in Slovak Election
The other parties in the Slovak parliament, to be sure, have made clear that they do not intend to form a coalition with Kotleba under any circumstances. But whether they will remain true to their word is by no means certain. The political landscape is fissured and the liberal camp is divided: If the far-right does as well as polls suggest it could in next week's election, democracy in Slovakia could soon follow the same path as Poland and Hungary. And this despite the fact that Slovakia has long been considered an example of successful integration with the West. Slovakia's roughly 5 million citizens have for years achieved annual economic growth of at least 3 percent and the country enjoys full employment. Carmakers like Mercedes, Kia, VW and Renault are the largest employers. Slovakia adopted the euro in 2005. [...]
Ideological differences have prevented the formation of a united, democratic bloc in the center -- one that could siphon off support from SMER on the left and fend off the demagogue Kotleba on the right. The political center, though, is frayed, and the egos of the party leaders has made any kind of rapprochement difficult. [...]
In 2017, he even handed out checks to poor families worth exactly 1,488 euros ($1,610). The number is a popular code among white supremacists: The number 14 is shorthand for the "14 Words" slogan popularized by the American neo-Nazi David Lane, while 88 stands for "Heil Hitler," as H is the eighth letter in the alphabet. The message that Kotleba sends to voters is that they can feel comfortable identifying with their nationalist history. And that includes the Slovak government, which during World War II was long controlled by Hitler. The clerical-fascist regime of the dictator Jozef Tiso eliminated members of the opposition and helped deport Slovak Jews, most of whom were sent to Auschwitz.
The Conversation: We groom dogs in our own image: the cuter they are, the harder we fall
One argument is pets piggyback on this tendency, with their cuteness inspiring us to care for them. Certainly, we often treat pets like children and consider them to be members of the family. [...]
To increase cuteness, researchers made the dog’s eyes larger, the jowls smaller, or increased the space between the eyes. To make the dog more human-like, they applied colour to the dog’s irises, or gave the dog a visible smile. People typically preferred the dogs with cuter or more human-like traits. [...]
A cautionary note to end on, then, is we must keep animal welfare top of mind. It’s fine to make over a dog who enjoys it, but let’s not cause dogs stress just for the sake of entertainment.
The Guardian: Paraguay still haunted by cataclysmic war that nearly wiped it off the map
The six-year War of the Triple Alliance (1864-1870), in which Paraguay confronted the combined forces of Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay, had inflicted apocalyptic damage on the landlocked nation.
Roughly two-thirds of Paraguay’s population perished during the conflict, including around 90% of its men. Brazil and Argentina would go on to annex enormous swaths of Paraguayan territory. [...]
The war also left a lasting impact above ground. After the conflict, tracts of public land were sold off to foreign companies to pay off war debt imposed on Paraguay, said Ernesto BenÃtez, a leader in the small-scale farmers’ movement. [...]
Paraguay still has the highest inequality of land ownership in the world – about 85% of agricultural land is held by just 2.5% of owners – and small-scale farmer and indigenous groups face widespread landlessness. At least 14% of Paraguayan land is in the hands of Brazilian farmers, a group that wields enormous economic and political power. [...]
As cases of sexual abuse proliferate, 584 girls between the ages of 10 and 14 were recorded to have given birth in 2018. However, these official figures are criticised for offering an incomplete picture. Elsewhere, recent emblematic cases of sexual harassment towards women in public institutions have been dismissed as “courtship”.
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