The Los Angeles Review of Books: Salvaging the Future

Sherryl Vint’s 2015 Paradoxa issue, The Futures Industry, moves this vital conversation forward in a noteworthy way. Vint proposes that the future has become a site of crisis, both in the sense that real devastation looms on the horizon (as a consequence of climate change and economic instability) and also in the sense that we seem to have collectively lost the ability to imagine futures that offer plausible alternatives to the seemingly unstoppable trajectory of the apocalyptic present. Vint’s introduction to the issue contrasts the film Tomorrowland (2015) against artist-activist Banksy’s satirical Dismaland Bemusement Park (a dystopian anti–theme park that was open for one month in Somerset, England, in 2015): if Tomorrowland offers a strained nostalgia for seemingly innocent 1950s visions of the future, Dismaland bitterly exposes the exploitative corporate fantasies and totalitarian inclinations of the industry-oriented future imaginings of Disney’s Tomorrowland and the World’s Fairs that inspired it. [...]

O’Connell’s essay exemplifies the kind of work that Slavoj Žižek calls for in First as Tragedy, Then as Farce (2009) when he suggests that, in order to challenge the seemingly unshakable future unfolding before us, we must “mobilize ourselves to perform the act which will change destiny itself and thereby insert a new possibility into the past.” If the future seems locked into a dismal trajectory, it is because our sense of the past is fixed and static: the present seems to be the inevitable product of a singular history just as the future seems to be the unwavering continuation of the apocalyptic present. In order to disrupt the paralysis of such totalizing inevitability, we need to view the past as a multitude of alternate possibilities rather than remaining locked into an unshakable historical determinism. According to O’Connell, fantastic postcolonial trains insert new potentialities into the past in a way that forces us to “reconsider the narrative of history’s triumphant resolution in the present moment as capitalist realist closure.” These narratives suggest that there are, and always have been, alternatives.

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Slate: Is America Really in an Anti-Establishment Rage?

And there’s evidence to back the claim that we’re living in the “year of the outsider.” More than 78 percent of Americans disapprove of Congress; nearly 65 percent say the country is on the wrong track; and upward of 47 percent of registered voters say they would consider a “generic third-party nominee.” Together, that is a clear vote of no confidence in our political system. [...]

The evidence for confusion is strong. The same people who disapprove of Congress will readily re-elect most members to the House and Senate, as they have in almost every election year in modern memory. The same Americans who say the country is on the wrong track also approve of President Obama’s performance 50 percent to 45 percent. Earlier this year, in a survey on public attitudes by ABC News and the Washington Post, just 24 percent of Americans described themselves as “angry” about the federal government, the lowest total in five years. Forty-seven percent said they were dissatisfied, which is similarly low compared with previous surveys. [...]

In practice, all of this means there’s no actual constituency for an independent candidacy or third-party movement since these frustrations lie at cross-purposes with each other. Anxious white Americans—Trump supporters—won’t sign on to a social-democratic agenda if it includes racial justice. (Which, given the role of nonwhites in sustaining left politics, it has to.) In turn, insecure millennials and older nonwhites won’t join a campaign devoted to restoring white dominance.

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Reuters: Far-right parties winning over some Jewish voters, top rabbi warns

"Not only from the Freedom Party in Austria but also from the side of, for example, the National Front in France ... and also (Geert) Wilders in Holland, they all seem to want us Jews to say they are acceptable," Goldschmidt said. [...]

He also condemned what he said was the tendency of far-right parties to conflate ordinary Muslims with Islamist militants."

(The) moderate Muslim is our natural ally. They are as much the victims of radical Islamism as we Jews. It is the populism, the generalization, which is dangerous and destructive.

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The Atlantic: America’s Profound Gender Anxiety

But why did bathrooms come next? These bills seem to be about something slightly different. They’re not objections to what people do—having gay sex, for example, or getting married to a person of the same sex. They’re objections to what people are, which isn’t tied to any particular act. It doesn’t really matter who transgender people have sex with, or if they have sex at all. What matters is their status: If a person is designated a boy or girl at birth, the objectors say, that’s what determines his or her gender for life. [...]

The two motivations—conviction and bigotry—are difficult to tease apart. Particularly in the United States, a country that remains more religious that its Western peers, faith and culture are in a feedback loop, complementing, responding, and reacting to one another. This is especially true when it comes to trans people in public bathrooms. Wisdom from the Bible can be brought to bear on any question, but on this issue, the ideas at stake are foundational. They are part of “the way of reading the Bible, going back to Genesis” said R. Marie Griffith, a professor of religion and politics at Washington University in St. Louis. “There’s this belief that God created man, and out of man, he created woman. And these are really crystal-clear categories. There’s something very deep and fundamental about that for the Christians who have … a way of thinking about the Bible as the word of God.” [...]

But more broadly, this is also a question about gender roles. In a recent PRRI / The Atlantic poll, 42 percent of Americans said they believe society is becoming “too soft and feminine.” Thirty-nine percent said they believe society is better off “when men and women stick to the jobs and tasks they are naturally suited for,” including 44 percent of Republicans and 58 percent of white evangelical Protestants. These numbers suggest nervousness about fluid gender identities—and that America isn’t even close to a consensus that men and women should choose the way they act.

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The School of Life: How Romanticism Ruined Love

The set of ideas we can call Romanticism is responsible for making our relationships extremely difficult. We shouldn’t give up on love; we should just recognise that it’s a skill, not an emotion.