The Guardian: 'A chain of stupidity': the Skripal case and the decline of Russia's spy agencies

Paradoxically, this low-level corruption made Russia one of the most open societies in the world. Corruption was the friend of investigative journalism, and the enemy of government–military secrets.[...]

The attacks ignored a more interesting truth: that spying was no longer the monopoly of nation states. “Now it belongs to anyone who has the brains, the spunk and the technological ability,” Jonathan Eyal of the Royal United Services Institute, a security and defence thinktank, told the New York Times, adding, “We are witnessing a blurring of distinctions.” [...]

Suvorov likened his old organisation’s failings to a nasty, cancer-like illness. It was eating up Russia’s entire body politic. This disease had affected spying, technology and rocket production, he told me. It explained the abysmal roads, the dying villages. The country was literally disintegrating. Suvorov used the word “raspad”: collapse or breakdown. The situation was akin to the Titanic, he said with the rich looking to flee in a lifeboat.

read the article or listen to the podcast

BBC4 Analysis: Behavioural Science and the Pandemic

There were two narratives that emerged in the week before we locked down on 23rd March that could go some way to explaining why the UK was relatively slow to lockdown. One was the idea of “herd immunity” - that the virus was always going to spread throughout the population to some extent, and that should be allowed to happen to build up immunity.

That theory may have been based on a misunderstanding of how this particular virus behaved.

The second narrative was based on the idea of “behavioural fatigue”. This centred around the notion that the public will only tolerate a lockdown for so long so it was crucial to wait for the right moment to initiate it. Go too soon, and you might find that people would not comply later on.

It turns out that this theory was also wrong. And based on a fundamental misunderstanding of human behaviour.

Despite photos of packed parks, crammed beaches and VE day conga lines, on the whole the British public complied beyond most people’s expectations.

So what informed the government’s decision making?In this programme we ask, what is “behavioural fatigue”, where did it come from, how much influence did it have on the UK’s late lockdown, and where does Nudge theory fit into the narrative?

listen to the podcast

99 Percent Invisible: Return of the Yokai

In the US, mascots are used to pump up crowds at sporting events, or for traumatizing generations of children at Chuck E. Cheese, but in Japan it’s different. There are mascots for towns, aquariums, dentists’ offices, even prisons. There are mascots in cities that tell people not to litter or remind them to be quiet on the train. Everything has a mascot and anything can be a mascot. As Chris Carlier adjusted to his new life in Tokyo, he started snapping photos of all these mascots he was coming across, and Carlier’s hobby has since morphed into a wildly popular twitter account called Mondo Mascots.

Usually, these costumed mascots are out interacting with the world, waving to tourists or opening supermarkets — but like the rest of us, they’ve recently had to spend a lot of time indoors. One mascot was making quarantine workout videos for people stuck at home; another posted photo after photo of himself just staring blankly into space. Around mid-March, there was something kind of odd and very meta happening on the Mondo Mascots twitter feed. Some of the more well-known mascots were adding all these new flourishes on top of the regular mascot costumes. They were all wearing long, flowing blue wigs, colorful fish scales, and a beak. It was like all these different mascots were channeling the same mythical character. It was a mythical character called Amabié: a 174-year-old creature that has recently become the unexpected hero of the COVID era in Japan. [...]

The first yokai stories were told in the 8th century, but you can see the traces of yokai that stem thousands of years back to Japan’s native religion of Shintoism. Shinto is so tightly woven into the fabric of Japanese society that it’s difficult to separate where the religion ends and Japanese culture begins. “Modern-day Japanese people [don’t] realize Shinto is our culture’s basis,” explains Izumi Hasegawa, head priest at Shinto Shrine of Shusse Inari in America. For Hasegawa, it is in fact “not a religion” but rather “more like a way of living — culture, tradition, custom,” a belief system that venerates millions of deities called kami that live all around us and impact daily life. Kami reside within everything … the trees and the wind, even your iPhone. “You have this belief system in which nearly anything can be a receptacle for a deity or a soul. And many of those kami are actually personifications,” says Matt Alt, “That world view … that belief system of polytheism and animism is the soil from which yokai emerged.”

read the article or listen to the podcast

Psyche: How to interpret historical analogies

Historical analogies can also be invaluable and enlightening, as long as we remain wary of those using them, and of their reasons. If we are conscientious about the past, we want to learn from it, pay respect to our predecessors, and derive proper lessons from how they might have dealt with their own challenges and hard times. One of the intuitive ways we react to a confusing, frightening present is to reach back into the history we know to find ways to render the current moment legible. All this is normal and natural. [...]

Historical analogies are not the same as historical comparisons. A comparison might be more direct or straightforward, between two events that are inherently similar. Natural disasters such as earthquakes can happen at varying moments in history and aren’t necessarily dependent on human activity. But they will interact differently with society given changing social circumstances, political leadership and economic development. In that sense, a hurricane ravaging a medieval landscape will be different from the exact same-sized and same-speed hurricane hitting a modern city. We will be comparing between the effects of, and response to, an otherwise similar pair of events. (Of course, we can also compare between the frequency and strength of hurricanes today and those of hurricanes in the past, establishing a link between natural disasters and anthropogenic global warming.) Likewise, when the COVID-19 pandemic spread around the world, the influenza pandemic of 1918 emerged as a tool to help us think through the challenge. The diseases are different, but the human body is pretty much the same, and pandemics, by their nature, have repetitive features. A comparison between the two health crises will focus on the changes in the world – and perhaps specifically in public health policy – that have taken place over the past century. [....]

So historical analogies, done in good faith, can make crucial points about the present and help to clarify where we stand on moral and political issues. The problem begins when we begin to substitute historical analogies for historical analysis – or, even more problematically, when we come to believe that history ‘repeats itself’. This sort of cliché has become a bane of our public discourse, especially regarding the sorry state of the US. [...]

We need to recognise the limitation of all analogising from the past. History does not repeat itself; and this means that everything that happens is new in some fundamental way. Analogies are good in so far as they are useful in helping us begin to think historically, rather than trying to formally define whether, for instance, Trump, or Bolsonaro, or Modi, or Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel, are fascists. If we came to the conclusion that these current-day wannabe autocrats are not fascists, would that mean that the imperative to seek out better leadership would become less urgent? If we conclude that they are fascists, would that make a real difference in terms of how people experience this era or what we can do? In all likelihood, the necessary political action remains the same, either way. Thinking historically is not about finding discrete past events that might resemble things happening today, but rather trying to understand how the world came to be what it is – and how it could be different.

read the article

UnHerd: How the Dutch invented our world

In recent years, however, bourgeois revolution has gone out of fashion and subjected to revisionist critique wishing to consign it to the dustbin of history. Part of what underlines this dismissiveness is a rather childish unwillingness to credit capitalism, and by extension, the bourgeoisie and liberalism, with any positive contribution to human development. The assumption is that because the bourgeoisie has been reactionary for so long, therefore it has never played a historically revolutionary role; because capitalism is now senile and decadent therefore it has never been historically progressive; because liberalism is now servile therefore it has never been emancipatory. None of which is true.[...]

For the likes of Goethe it was the struggle for liberty that made the Dutch revolt a subject of fascination, and his play in turn inspired Beethoven to compose Egmont. Friedrich Schiller, in his history of the Dutch revolt, extolled the “spirit of independence” of the Dutch people in their liberation struggle against the Habsburg Empire. [...]

The revolt was about religion but it was also about money, and the right of the bourgeois to make it. As Pepijn Brandon has argued, the revolt unconsciously, yet effectively, facilitated capitalist development, with Church lands confiscated and turned into large-scale commercial exploitation, and the political influence of the nobility and Catholic clergyman diminished. On top of this, the merchant class had way more control over state power where commercial interests usurped dynastic warfare.[...]

Because of this he was a firm defender of confessional toleration, the idea that state had no business concerning itself with the private beliefs of citizens no matter how heretical, unorthodox, crazy or immoral they seemed. Unlike his English contemporary John Locke (they were born just three months apart), Spinoza made no “special exceptions” for who did not deserve tolerance: Catholics, Protestants, Jews and atheists were all to be tolerated alike.

read the article