Coincidences can feel like magic. When we realize that a co-worker shares our birthday or run into a college roommate while on vacation, it can give us a surge of delight. Today, we revisit a favorite episode about these moments of serendipity. Mathematician Joseph Mazur explains why coincidences aren't as unlikely as we think they are, and psychologist Nicholas Epley tells us why we can't help but find meaning in them anyway.
20 September 2021
New Statesman: The rise of the new Toryism
In the multiparty electoral systems of Europe, formerly dominant conservative parties have yielded ground to the right. Everywhere politics is trying to deal with what Tony Judt called “one long scream of resentment” and everywhere the pivotal question is immigration. The reverberations began in February 2000 when Jorg Haider’s far-right Freedom Party of Austria entered the government. Its nasty rallying cry has become sadly common: to be against Überfremdung (over-foreignisation). Today, the National Front has replaced the Republicans as the repository of the right in France.[...]
The Conservative Party is not far behind. Go back to the 1951 UK general election, won by Winston Churchill. If at the time you had known the income and the occupational status of a voter, you would have been able to predict who they voted for. By 2019 the predictive power of social class had disappeared entirely. Somewhere hidden in his surface clowning, Boris Johnson has absorbed this point and responded to it. To anyone schooled in the more doctrinal left, the British Conservative Party can seem versatile to the point of emptiness. It is a party that has gone from a split over free trade in 1846 to late-Victorian imperial preference, to tariff protectionism under Stanley Baldwin, to rampant free-market capitalism under Margaret Thatcher, to a departure from the single market she helped to create. [...]
Johnson’s brand of conservatism might be best understood as an English Gaullism. Serge Bernstein’s definition of Gaullism – neither left nor right, affirming sovereignty over the nostrums of class, a strong state and exceptionalism in foreign policy – sounds much like Johnson’s peculiar adaptation of conservatism. The closest to the usual tradition you can get is to say he is responding to circumstances that, as Edmund Burke wrote in Reflections on the Revolution in France, “give in reality to every political principle its distinguishing colour and discriminating effect”.
The Guardian: How the US created a world of endless war
Obama had run as a kind of anti-war candidate in his fairytale 2008 campaign, and when it turned out that he was a hard-bitten pragmatist, in this and other areas, many of his supporters were surprised. Obama expanded the “war on terror” to an awesome extent, while making it sustainable for a domestic audience in a way his predecessor never did – in part because Obama understood the political uses of transforming American warfare in a humane direction. [...]
No dove, Donald Trump nevertheless capitalised on the perception that mainstream politicians were committed to endless wars. And he won. The arc of the moral universe ran through the humanisation of interminable conflict. But it bent toward an ogre. More and more humane forms of fighting abroad had now brought disaster at home, too. Then Trump went on to repeat the very same pirouette from anti-war candidate to endless war president that Obama had performed. And now Joe Biden risks doing the same.[...]
By the end of Obama’s time in office, drones had struck almost 10 times more than under his predecessor’s watch, with many thousands dead. The air force now trained more drone operators than aircraft pilots, and the bases and infrastructure of drone activity had been extended deep into the African continent, not merely across the Middle East and south Asia. Meanwhile, light-footprint Special Forces operated in or moved through 138 nations – or 70% of all countries in the world – in Obama’s last year in office. Actual fighting took place in at least 13, and targeted killing in some of those. [...]
But a funny thing happened on the way to the feared restoration of brutal older forms of war that Trump personally favoured. The executive order to reinstitute torture was never issued, in part because secretary of defense James Mattis found torture unconscionable. And Trump’s proposals were met by the howls of leading Republicans, such as Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell. The CIA itself pushed back, reflecting a period of institutional self-correction parallel to the one the military had undergone after Vietnam – even if neither held anyone accountable for past crime.
Philosophy Tube: Social Constructs
What are social constructs, and why do some people get so upset about them?
Social Europe: The Catalan pardons: what do they mean?
The talk of the town across Spanish media for the past week has been the pardoning of the Catalan political prisoners jailed following the unofficial referendum on independence in October 2017. Despite heavy opposition from Spain’s Supreme Court and the conservative opposition party, the Partido Popular (PP), the socialist prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, confirmed the pardons at Barcelona’s Liceu Theatre, striving to promote concord rather than revenge.[...]
Opposition to the pardons has come from two very different standpoints. The PP, the far-right Vox and the Spanish-nationalist Ciudadanos—as well as the Spanish Supreme Court— claim that the political prisoners should not have been pardoned: their actions were unconstitutional, they included ‘sedition’ and misuse of public funds, and the prisoners showed no signs of remorse.[....]
The exiled Junts leader and 130th president of Catalonia, Carles Puigdemont, criticised the Spanish state for releasing the prisoners over three years late and said no one should be ‘sold’ that the pardon would solve the political problem. The party vice-president, Elsa Artadi, also affirmed this would not be a ‘turning point’ in the Catalan conflict, claiming the Spanish government was seeking to mask its own violations of rights against the independence movement. [...]
On Monday of last week, a resolution by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe urged that the prisoners be released and that Spain ‘consider dropping extradition proceedings against Catalan politicians living abroad’. An aggressive response followed from the judiciary in Spain, leading some to ask: are the pardons a step towards peace, or a red herring in the face of increasing international condemnation of the Spanish judiciary?
The Atlantic: Moral Perfection Can Wait
Over the past six years, he has compiled an admirable policy record, but this has been overshadowed by a number of political and ethical scandals. Trudeau got into an entirely unnecessary turf battle with his own attorney general over a criminal prosecution involving corruption at a major Canadian company. (The prime minister was found to have broken conflict-of-interest rules, his second violation of ethics laws.) During the 2019 election, photos of Trudeau in blackface surfaced. His Liberal Party lost seats in Parliament and the popular vote. It still managed to hold on to power, but not by much. The outcome this time around could be worse. Whether the Liberal Party hangs on to government comes down to whether progressives rally around Trudeau, abandon him for less flashy alternatives on the left, or, disenchanted, stay home entirely. [...]
These questions are not abstract; they carry serious consequences. If the other side wins, then all our cherished progressive policies go out the window. At the same time, we cannot be completely amoral, the way, for example, many supporters of Donald Trump are—evangelical voters and country-club Republicans alike who looked past Trump’s financial and moral shortcomings because he promised to appoint conservative Supreme Court justices or cut taxes for the wealthy. A line has to be drawn somewhere. Progressives must demand integrity from our leaders—especially on issues such as diversity, respect for women, and corruption. [...]
One common occurrence on the left is the search for infallibility in our politicians. We want ideological purity and an unimpeachable record clear of misdeeds. In the run-up to the 2020 U.S. presidential election, Barack Obama warned progressives about “circular firing squads,” in which people who agreed on most issues took morbid pleasure in pummeling one another. This is perhaps the greatest failing of the modern left: We seek moral perfection in a world of politics where compromise is the cost of doing business. Run afoul of progressive dogma or say the wrong thing, and one is liable to get canceled.
CityLab: A Park-Building Revolution Is Transforming a Russian City
Six years after Fishman-Bekmambetova’s arrival, a massive initiative often referred to as a “green revolution” has dramatically reshaped this city 450 miles east of Moscow. Tatarstan’s Public Space Development Program, launched by Fishman-Bekmambetova and Tatarstan President Rustam Minnikhanov, has created or upgraded more than 420 projects throughout the republic, including parks, walkways, gardens and other kinds of landscaped areas. [...]
The most ambitious project in the works for Fishman-Bekmambetova’s team is the Kazanska River Strategy, a plan for a 22-kilometer stretch of urban river and 68 kilometers of embankment running the entire length of Kazan; it’s one of the largest landscape projects in Russia.
The effort has garnered much international attention: In 2019, Kazan hosted the World Urban Parks conference; that same year, the Aga Khan Foundation awarded Tatarstan’s public space development program its prestigious Architecture Award. But according to Fishman-Bekmambetova, the team’s most meaningful achievement has been to democratize the design process. The Tatarstan initiative adopted a process known as participatory environmental design, a discipline pioneered by U.S. architect Henry Sanoff. Each project is preceded by extensive public meetings and surveys, even though this kind of outreach can delay projects and result in time-consuming revisions.
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