The Guardian: How violent American vigilantes at the border led to Trump’s wall

The border before Trump was no idyll. Conflict grew especially acute in California in the early 1970s. As San Diego’s sprawl began to push against agricultural fields, racist attacks on migrants increased. Vigilantes drove around the back roads of the greater San Diego area, shooting at Mexicans from the flatbeds of their pickups; dozens of bodies were found in shallow graves. Anti-migrant violence was fuelled by angry veterans returning from Vietnam, who carried out what they called “beaner raids” to break up migrant camps. Snipers took aim at Mexicans coming over the border. Led by a 27-year-old David Duke, the KKK set up a “border watch” in 1977 at California’s San Ysidro point of entry, finding much support among border patrol agents. Other KKK groups set up similar patrols in south Texas, placing leaflets with a printed skull and crossbones on the doorsteps of Latino residents, warning “aliens” and the federal government to fear the klan. Around this time, agents reported finding pitfall traps, modelled on the punji traps Vietnamese troops would set for US soldiers, in the swampy Tijuana estuary, an area of the border vigilantes began calling Little ’Nam. [...]

Separating migrant families was not official government policy in those decades. But border patrol agents left to their own devices regularly took children from parents, threatening that they would be separated “for ever” unless one of them confessed that they had entered the country illegally. Mothers especially, an agent said, “would always break”. Once a confession was extracted, children might be placed in foster care or left to languish in federal jails. Ten-year-old Sylvia Alvarado, separated from her grandmother as they crossed into Texas, was kept in a small cinderblock cell for more than three months. In California, 13-year-old Julia Pérez, threatened with being arrested and denied food, broke down and told her interrogator that she was Mexican, even though she was a US citizen. The border patrol released Pérez into Mexico with no money or way to contact her US family. [...]

In neighbourhoods filled with undocumented residents, the patrol operated with the latitude of an occupying army. Between 1985 and 1990, federal agents shot 40 migrants around San Diego alone, killing 22 of them. On 18 April 1986, patroller Edward Cole was beating 14-year-old Eduardo Carrillo Estrada on the US side of the border’s chain-link fence when he stopped and shot Eduardo’s younger brother, Humberto, in the back. Humberto was standing on the other side of the fence, on Mexican soil. A court ruled that Cole, who had previous incidents of shooting through the fence at Mexicans, had reason to fear for his life from Humberto and used justifiable force. [...]

But the occupations did go wrong. Bush and his neoconservative advisers had launched what has now become the most costly war in the nation’s history, on the heels of pushing through one of the largest tax cuts in the nation’s history. Yet news coming in from Baghdad, Fallujah, Basra, Anbar province, Bagram and elsewhere began to suggest that Bush had created an epic disaster. Photographs from Abu Ghraib prison showing US personnel cheerfully taunting and torturing Iraqis circulated widely, followed by reports of other forms of cruelty inflicted on prisoners by US troops. Many people were coming to realise that the war was not just illegal in conception but deceptive in its justification, immoral in execution, and corrupt in its administration. [...]

As the power of Ice and the border patrol grew, its impunity continued unabated. Since 2003, patrollers have killed at least 97 people, including six children. Few agents were prosecuted. According to a report by the ACLU, young girls have been physically abused and threatened with rape, while unaccompanied children apprehended by the border patrol experienced “physical and psychological abuse, unsanitary and inhumane living conditions, isolation from family members, extended period of detention, and denial of access to legal medical service”. It’s difficult to process this litany of abuse. The horrors blend into one another, as if the closing of the frontier has brought about a collapse of a sense of time. The violence that had been associated with moving outward in the world, which gave the illusion of leaving problems behind, now just accumulates. “We slash their bottles and drain their water into the dry earth,” writes a border patroller, describing what he and his coworkers did when they came upon a stash of supplies tucked away by hiding migrants. “We dump their backpacks and pile their food and clothes to be crushed and pissed on and stepped over, strewn across the desert and set ablaze.”

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99 Percent Invisible: Palaces for the People

Over the course of his life, Carnegie helped to fund more than 2,500 libraries around the world—about 1,700 of which were in the United States. He called greatest of them “palaces for the people.” The great Carnegie libraries had high ceilings, big windows, and spacious rooms where a person could read, think, and achieve something that they felt proud of. Although it should be noted that these palaces were not always for everyone. Many of the great Carnegie libraries remained racially segregated throughout the early 20th century, and they later became battlegrounds in the civil rights movement. [...]

Klinenberg started spending time in the neighborhoods, and what he observed was that the places that had low death rates turned out to have a robust social infrastructure. They had sidewalks and streets that were well taken care of. They had neighborhood libraries and community organizations, grocery stores, shops, and cafes that drew people out of their home and into public life. What that meant was that on a daily basis, people got to know each other pretty well and used the social infrastructure to socialize. When this heat wave happened in Chicago, neighborhood residents knew who was likely to be sick and who should have been outside but wasn’t. This meant they knew whose door to knock on if they needed help. [...]

Having spent a lot of time thinking about the power of social infrastructure and physical places, Klinenberg asked himself this question: what would have happened if we had responded to broken windows not by sending in so many police officers, but instead by fixing the windows?

It turns out, someone at the University of Pennsylvania had been asking a similar question. This person teamed up with the city of Philadelphia which has tens of thousands of abandoned properties and empty lots. The Pennsylvania Horticultural Society started an exciting social science experiment, and for more than a decade have been making simple interventions to randomly selected blocks. If there was an abandoned house they would board up the building to prevent squatters or potential drug dealers from using the property, and mowed and maintained the yard.

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Failed Architecture: Speer in Qatar or: How Architects Stopped Caring and Learned to Love the Client

Albert Speer is one of the most infamous architects in history. During his time working for the Nazi Party he was responsible for designing the Reich Chancellery and the Zeppelinfeld Stadium in which the Nuremberg rallies took place, as well as being in charge of Germany’s war production during the Second World War and having responsibility for the plan to reconstruct Berlin as Germania. Yet by emphasising his detachment from the general conditions in which he was working, he was able to avoid the death sentence after the war.

While his is an extreme example, it offers a compelling jumping off point to explore the wider issue of an architect’s responsibility for the wider system that they work in. Moving from mid-20th Century Germany to the present day, this episode explores the specific role certain architects have played in developing the stadiums and infrastructure for the 2022 Qatar World Cup. 

Here, gross violations of human rights and international labour law throw up serious questions about the moral ramifications of designing projects in such a country. How can architects balance the benefit of bringing a smooth, shiny new project against the human cost required to produce it?

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Nautilus Magazine: How Designers Engineer Luck Into Video Games

Fairness is the unspoken promise of most video games. Controlled by an omniscient and omnipotent designer, a video game has the capacity to be ultimately just, and players expect that it will be so. (Designers also have an incentive to be even-handed: A game that always beats you is a game you’ll soon stop playing.) And yet, when video games truly play by the rules, the player can feel cheated. Sid Meier, the designer of the computer game Civilization, in which players steer a nation through history, politics, and warfare, quickly learned to modify the game’s odds in order to redress this psychological wrinkle. Extensive play-testing revealed that a player who was told that he had a 33 percent chance of success in a battle but then failed to defeat his opponent three times in a row would become irate and incredulous. (In Civilization, you can replay the same battle over and over until you win, albeit incurring costs with every loss.) So Meier altered the game to more closely match human cognitive biases; if your odds of winning a battle were 1 in 3, the game guaranteed that you’d win on the third attempt—a misrepresentation of true probability that nevertheless gave the illusion of fairness. Call it the Lucky Paradox: Lucky is fun, but too lucky is unreal. The resulting, on-going negotiation among game players and designers must count as one of our most abstract collective negotiations. [...]

Olaf Haraldsson, an 11th-century Norwegian king, once wagered a kingdom in a faith-testing game of dice. Olaf was locked in a territorial dispute with the king of Sweden over the island of Hising; eventually the two agreed to settle the matter with a dice throw. The Swedish king rolled two sixes, the highest possible score, and said there was no point in continuing the game. Olaf insisted on taking his throw; a recent convert to Christianity, he was certain that God would steer the dice in his favor. His faith was vindicated with double sixes. The men continued to take turns throwing their dice, twelve after twelve. The matter was finally settled when, during Olaf’s final throw, one of the dice split in two, to show both a six and a one, winning him the kingdom on an unprecedentedly lucky 13.[...]

“As soon as the player becomes aware of any sort of pseudo-randomness, it risks undermining the joy of getting lucky,” said Paul Sottosanti, a designer at Riot Games, publisher of League of Legends, the world’s most-played online game. Games in which you’re given seemingly random rewards often employ a device known as a “pity timer,” Sottosanti explained, which guarantees that something seemingly fortunate will happen to you after a sustained period of misfortune—anything from 10 minutes to an hour, depending on the game. In World of Warcraft, every time players defeat a foe, they hope to receive a “Legendary”—one of the game’s highly powerful weapons. Legendaries have an infinitesimally small chance of being “dropped,” but are also on a pity timer. “Fatigue can set in where a player is just waiting for the pity timer to kick in,” Sottosanti said. “The primary emotion they feel upon finally finding a Legendary is often not joy but relief, perhaps tinged with sadness.”[...]

Natasha Schüll is an associate professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University, and the author of Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas. When a player feels favored by luck, she said, “you can pin it to certain neurotransmitters spiking, and you know dopamine is released. Even the compulsive search and hunt for recreating that sense of euphoria is driven by the reward center in the brain.” Dopamine’s power to turn us into luck-chasers can be seen most vividly in the effects of some drugs used to treat Parkinson’s disease, which, in flooding the brain with dopamine, have been shown to turn patients into gambling addicts.  

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The Conversation: We need to stop conflating Islam with terrorism

As a New Zealander academic, my work deals with questions related to Islam and multiculturalism. In the past, I have argued both that Wahhabism – the Sunni fundamentalist form of Islam practised in Saudi Arabia – is not compatible with liberal democratic values, unlike some other Islamic schools of thought.

As Muslims in the West come under attack, it is essential to understand and distinguish between these different kinds of Islamic thought and how the West responds to them. W⁠h⁠i⁠l⁠e⁠ ⁠t⁠h⁠e⁠r⁠e⁠ ⁠i⁠s⁠ ⁠a⁠ ⁠p⁠r⁠o⁠b⁠l⁠e⁠m⁠ ⁠a⁠t⁠ ⁠t⁠h⁠e⁠ ⁠g⁠l⁠o⁠b⁠a⁠l⁠ ⁠l⁠e⁠v⁠e⁠l⁠ ⁠w⁠i⁠t⁠h⁠ ⁠e⁠x⁠t⁠r⁠e⁠m⁠e⁠ ⁠S⁠u⁠n⁠n⁠i⁠ ⁠m⁠i⁠l⁠i⁠t⁠a⁠n⁠c⁠y⁠,⁠ the fact is this is a⁠ ⁠m⁠i⁠n⁠o⁠r⁠i⁠t⁠y⁠ ⁠p⁠h⁠e⁠n⁠o⁠m⁠e⁠n⁠o⁠n⁠ ⁠w⁠i⁠t⁠h⁠i⁠n⁠ ⁠I⁠s⁠l⁠a⁠m⁠ – and one that ⁠i⁠s⁠ ⁠m⁠o⁠r⁠e⁠ ⁠o⁠f⁠ ⁠a⁠ ⁠t⁠h⁠r⁠e⁠a⁠t⁠ ⁠t⁠o⁠ ⁠M⁠u⁠s⁠l⁠i⁠m⁠s⁠ ⁠i⁠n⁠ ⁠t⁠h⁠e⁠ ⁠M⁠i⁠d⁠d⁠l⁠e⁠ ⁠E⁠a⁠s⁠t⁠ ⁠t⁠h⁠a⁠n⁠ it is ⁠t⁠o⁠ ⁠W⁠e⁠s⁠t⁠e⁠r⁠n⁠ ⁠n⁠a⁠t⁠i⁠o⁠n⁠s⁠.⁠[...]

By conflating Wahhabism and mainstream Islam, the far-right is creating and reinforcing the strength of its own enemy. Alienating and harassing Muslims in the West runs the risk of radicalising some of them. And making the argument that Islam is incompatible with democracy and human rights suggest that the Wahhabi reading of Islam is in fact the correct one.  [...]

Historically, right-wing policy makers in some Western nations have reinforced the economic and military power of Wahhabi ideologues by creating alliances with proponents of the doctrine in places such as Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan. Even Israel (usually considered as a bastion of democratic values in the Middle East) is now cosying up to the Wahhabi kingdom because of their mutual fear of Iran.  

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