It was so hot that the huge electronic temperature display (which serves as a ubiquitous selfie backdrop) went on the fritz. Parts of the blocky digital display malfunctioned, resulting in numbers even higher than the actual mind-melting high on what turned out to be a landmark day.
As reported in the Guardian (Wed 19 Aug 2020) by Bob Henson:
54.4C
An automated weather station at the visitor center recorded a preliminary high of 129.9F (54.4C) at 3.41pm PDT on Sunday. Even for heat-favored landscapes such as Death Valley, it is remarkable for temperatures to inch into such territory so late in the summer, when the sun is considerably lower in the sky than at the summer solstice in late June. According to weather records researcher Maximiliano Herrera, the previous global record high for August is 127.9F (53.3C), recorded in Mitribah, Kuwait, in 2011.
In late July (Mon 27 Jul 2020) Ban Ki-moon contributed to the Guardian:
I’m bewildered that Trump would imperil America by abandoning the Paris agreement
The world needs America’s leadership – walking away will do nothing to stop the consequences of climate change
The Paris agreement to tackle climate change is an extraordinary opportunity. In a remarkable display of unity, almost every nation on Earth has agreed to make critical changes that will help humanity avoid disaster. By aiming to limit global warming to 1.5C, it represents the world’s best chance of adapting to a crisis that threatens our planet’s very existence. But Donald Trump is walking away. This decision is politically shortsighted, scientifically wrong and morally irresponsible. By leaving the Paris agreement, he is undermining his country’s future. Every single day, we see the effects of climate change across the US. From catastrophic forest fires in California to rising sea levels in Miami and devastating flooding in Texas, these changes are a real and present danger. Our climate is visibly changing and the consequences will be disastrous for everyone. Despite this, the president is closing his eyes to reality. He is turning away from the only opportunity to save humanity from the effects of rising temperatures. Far from making America great again, his decision leaves it isolated – as everyone else comes together to face this great challenge. President Trump’s stance is all the more bewildering because climate change does not respect borders. This crisis will not bypass America because he chooses to ignore it. Fires will burn just as wildly and rising seas continue to threaten coastal cities. No country is an island and America cannot pull up the drawbridge to escape a crisis enveloping the whole world. Walking away will also do nothing to stop the consequences of climate change arriving on America’s doorstep. According to the World Bank, the effects of rising temperatures could force 1.4 million people to abandon their homes in Mexico and Central America, where one-third of all jobs remain linked to agriculture. Many of these climate refugees will head to the US. Tackling climate change is an international problem that needs an international solution. The Paris agreement is the result of decades of careful work and a solution that will benefit everyone – including America – long-term. We need a low-carbon strategy for everything from food and water systems to transport plans and we must design climate resilience into our infrastructure. By investing in climate-adaptation strategies now, we can protect against the worst impacts of the risks and dangers that lie ahead. A Global Commission on Adaptation report found that investing $1.8tn globally in adaptation by 2030 could yield $7.1tn in net benefits. Planning now and prospering, rather than delaying and paying for the consequences later, will sort the winners from the losers in this crisis response. There is a brutal irony in that the world at large is finally waking up to the climate crisis as President Trump ignores the science. The EU is creating a Green Deal for a more sustainable economy and China is greening its infrastructure spending as leaders across the globe realise that we are running out of options. Without the Paris agreement, America will start sliding backwards just as everyone else accelerates. History does not look kindly on leaders who do not lead when disaster threatens. There is a moral bankruptcy in looking away in a time of crisis, which resonates down the decades. This is all the more poignant as, across America, we can see many local efforts to try to plug the gap in the country’s climate strategy. Many Americans understand what their leader does not: we are running out of time to try to stem disaster, and their very lives may be under threat. In Boston, city leaders have launched Climate Ready Boston to help create a more resilient future by redesigning buildings and waterfront parks, and elevating pathways. In Miami, the Miami Forever Bond includes nearly $200m for climate-change adaptation, countering sea-level rise through measures such as planting mangroves along the waterfront and raising sea walls. Politicians from across the US political divide can also see what is coming – and what is necessary to avert disaster – from Republicans such as Miami’s mayor, Francis Suarez, to the Democrats, who have presented a Green New Deal. But this international crisis cannot be solved by local action, important though that is. We need the US to show leadership and place the whole might of US innovation and expertise behind this most important of endeavors. President Trump has made a grave mistake in withdrawing from the Paris agreement at this critical juncture. His actions lessen America, a country that has always taken pride in doing the right thing, at the right time, and seized opportunities for technological and economic transformation. But it is not yet too late to find a way back and this is one error that can be undone. We can only hope that America recognises this before it is too late. Ban Ki-moon was the eighth secretary general of the United Nations and is chair of the Global Center on Adaptation.
"I wanted to capture the beauty and horror of the fire. But then these golfers turned up and got in the way of my picture".
In an interview with Tim Jonze for the Guardian (Wed 27 Sep 2017) Kristi McCluer explains how he took his best photograph:
I noticed the Eagle Creek fire when I was 14,000 feet in the air above Oregon in early September. I was preparing for my third skydive of the day and, through the plane door, I spotted a vertical plume of smoke that hadn’t been there on my previous jump. A lot of fires pop up at this time of year, so it wasn’t surprising – but I didn’t realise how big it would become or that it was Eagle Creek, which is one of my favourite trails to hike.
A couple of days later, after the fire had spread, I went to take photos. I ended up being redirected and found myself in the parking lot of a golf course that I didn’t know existed. I completely stumbled on this scene.
There was nobody on the green when I started shooting. I just wanted to capture the fire, which was both beautiful to look at and horrifying to think about. When the golfers turned up, they were in the way of my picture! But I realised it was a cool shot with them in it. It was their last hole of the day and, to me, the scene sums up how life goes on regardless. They might look as if they’re oblivious to this huge thing going on behind them but the picture is just 1/800th of a second in time. They were very concerned and talking about how terrible it was.
At a virtual live streaming Democratic Convention in live remarks from Burlington, Bernie Sanders warned that the “future of our democracy is at stake”.
“This president is not just a threat to our democracy, but by rejecting science, he has put our lives and health in jeopardy,”Sanders said, summarizing Trump’s handling of the pandemic, likening the president to the tyrannical Roman emperor:
“Nero fiddled while Rome burned. Trump golfs.”
While attention is focused on Trump's denial of climate change, and the emergency it presents to the peoples of the world, the United States is increasingly locked into confrontation with China, and facing the uncomfortable reality of a rising China. China's leadership is equally pre-occupied with maintaining its growing global power and influence with theBelt and Road Initiative, while maintaining economic prosperity and social stability at home, while remaining part of the Paris agreement process. For the whole world it is crucial that China as well as the United States, faces the challenge of mitigating global heating through the effective reduction of carbon emissions. However, the quality of leadership in China is being questioned, just as much as Trump is being challenged by Democrats in the United States.
The New York Times reported yesterday (Tue 18 August 2020) on the expulsion of Cai Xia from the Chinese Communist Party for criticizing the Chinese leadership.
This story for The New York Times by Chris Buckley was posted Aug. 18, 2020:
During her career teaching at the Communist Party’s top academy, Cai Xia cheered on signs that China’s leaders might ease their political grip, making her an uncommonly prominent voice for democratic change near the heart of the party.
Now Ms. Cai has turned her back on such hopes, and the party has turned against her. She has become the latest intellectual punished for challenging the hard-line policies of the current leader, Xi Jinping.
The Central Party School in Beijing, where Ms. Cai taught for 15 years until 2012, announced on Monday that she had been expelled from the Communist Party after she scathingly denounced both the party and Mr. Xi in recent speeches and essays.
“This party has become a political zombie,” she had said in a talk that circulated online last month, apparently spurring the party school to take action. “This system, fundamentally speaking, has to be jettisoned.”
In an interview from the United States, where she has lived since last year, Ms. Cai quoted from a copy of the party school’s internal decision that said she had “maliciously smeared the image of the party and the country, and rabidly insulted the party and state leader.”
“Cai Xia’s attitude has been vile,” the party school said, “and she showed not the slightest contrition for her erroneous statements.”
Ms. Cai returned fire, accusing Mr. Xi of undermining China’s prospects for peaceful democratization and recklessly alienating the United States and other powers.
Mr. Xi“bears a great deal of culpability,”Ms. Cai said during the long, sometimes tearful interview on Tuesday about her evolution from party insider to apostate. “But for one person to do ill over a long time, and for the whole party to not utter a word, that clearly shows that the party’s system and bodies have big problems.”
Ms. Cai, 67, is among a cluster of Chinese dissenters who have recently decried Mr. Xi’s policies, including his handling of the coronavirus outbreak and imposition of a national security law on Hong Kong.
Two of those critics, Xu Zhangrun and Ren Zhiqiang, already faced retribution last month. Mr. Xu, a law professor, was detained for a few days and dismissed from his post at Tsinghua University in Beijing. Mr. Ren, a once well-connected property developer, was expelled from the party, accused of corruption and put under criminal investigation after he derided Mr. Xi’s handling of the coronavirus crisis.
Incensed by the treatment of Mr. Xu and Mr. Ren, Ms. Cai has spoken out in their defense.
“They have persecuted Xu Zhangrun by ruining his reputation, humiliating his dignity, stripping him of his right to work and cutting off his livelihood,” she wrote in an essay published by Radio Free Asia last month. “This is openly intimidating all in the Chinese scholarly community, inside and outside the system.”
Such vocal critics are few in China, where censorship and political pressure have intensified under Mr. Xi. But bigger numbers of disgruntled liberals are quietly waiting for a crisis that could shake Mr. Xi’s power, said Deng Yuwen, a former editor at Study Times, a newspaper issued by the Central Party School. The academy trains rising officials in political doctrine, party history and other subjects.
“Based on my observations, a considerable number of reformists inside the party are despairing, like Cai Xia,”Mr. Deng said in a telephone interview from the United States, where he now lives. “But for the most part they put the blame on Xi Jinping and are waiting for some kind of error by Xi to reinvigorate reformist forces within the party.”
It could be a long wait. Not even the coronavirus, which spread after local officials held back information about early cases, appears to have badly hurt Mr. Xi’s standing.
Many Chinese people say they are pleased that their country is emerging from the pandemic relatively well compared with other countries that have struggled. Many also support the government’s imposition of the sweeping national security law on Hong Kong.
“No matter how Cai Xia defines freedom of speech, I think that as a retired party school professor, she should defend the leadership of the country by the party,”Hu Xijin, an editor in Beijing who often echoes party views, said in an online comment on Tuesday. “Now when the United States is aiming an offensive against the Chinese Communist Party, as a party member, she should not, objectively speaking, stand on the side of the attacker.”
In the interview, Ms. Cai argued that in the longer term, Mr. Xi’s policies would push China toward a political crisis by isolating the country and extinguishing domestic hopes for orderly economic and political relaxation.
She said that she supported the tough line that the Trump administration has taken against the Chinese government on trade and other issues, even if she had qualms about some of its tactics. And she maintained that China’s harsh measures to suppress the spread of the coronavirus had become a drive to spread surveillance into every corner of society.
After Mr. Xi abolished a term limit on the Chinese presidency in 2018, in effect opening the way for an extended stay in power, Ms. Cai told a party school official that such a move would hurt China’s international image, she said.
“I said, ‘You are forcing Western countries into a showdown with us,’” she recalled.
Ms. Cai was raised in a family steeped in Communist values in eastern China. For a decade, she was one of the most well-known scholars at the Central Party School.
Under Jiang Zemin, the leader who brought China into the World Trade Organization in 2001, Ms. Cai promoted Mr. Jiang’s opening of the party to more businesspeople and professionals. Then and later, she often appeared in the Chinese news media, arguing that the party could be a vehicle for steady political and economic liberalization.
In private, Ms. Cai said, she became increasingly frustrated with party leaders’ unwillingness to match economic changes with political ones. She was disheartened by the dour authoritarian ways of Mr. Jiang’s successor, Hu Jintao, then even more alarmed by the draconian turn of Mr. Xi, who took power in 2012, after Mr. Hu.
Re:LODE Radio considers this last section of The New York Times story, where Ms. Cai explains what finally broke her faith in the party, is significant.
Ms. Cai said that the incident that broke her waning faith in the party was not a great crisis, but the government’s handling of the death of Lei Yang, a Chinese environmentalist who died in police custody in 2016. The police accused him of hiring prostitutes, a claim that Ms. Cai and other supporters said was slander aimed at diluting public anger over his death.
“That incident left me totally disillusioned,” she said, pausing to choke back tears. “Their methods were despicable to an extreme that surpassed anything we could imagine.”
Ms. Cai faces daunting uncertainties in her new home in the United States. The party school cut off her pension and other retirement benefits, and she said she would probably be detained if she returned to China. But she said she felt relieved that now she could fully speak her mind.
“In my own mind, I’ve long wanted to resign from the party,” she said. “Now that they’ve expelled me, I’m really happy, because at last I’ve regained my freedom.”
According to the story published 4 years ago (May 18, 2016) by Manya Koetse for WHAT'S ON WEIBO:
Some netizens already call it one of the biggest controversies of the year.
Q. What's it like being an environmental activist in China?
Zhao Jiaxin and Howey Ou are trying to convince Beijing to take radical carbon-cutting action reportsMichael Standaert in Shenzen for the Guardian (Wed 18 Sep 2019). Michael Standaert writes:
One is a student engineer who became obsessed after watching an incendiary film about air pollution. The other is a 16-year-old who went on China’s first climate strike.
Zhao Jiaxin and Howey Ou are part of a small but growing minority of young Chinese determined to press their country towards more radical carbon-cutting action. The pair are also China’s sole winners of carbon neutral “green tickets” the UN is providing to 100 young people around the world.
China is the world’s leading carbon emitter. It generates 60% of its electricity from coal-fired power and coal consumption and carbon emissions have risen for two years in a row after a plateau between 2014 and 2016. Emissions are expected to rise again in the figures for this year.
Yet within the country, the positive half of the picture is more likely to be heard: how devoted the nation is to Xi Jinping’s goal of constructing an “ecological civilisation”, how China is a climate change leader compared with the US, and how much record-breaking renewable energy capacity it continues to install.
Howey does not think this is enough. She conducted a public climate strike in front of government offices in Guilin in southern China for several days in late May – Greta Thunberg called her a “true hero” – before the authorities said she had to stop because she did not have a permit.
The 16-year-old, who spends her spare time planting trees around her hometown, was nominated to travel to this week’s United Nations climate summit in New York by the youth activist group Earth Uprising and nearly had to back out of attending because her chaperone was worried she would not stick to the Chinese government script.
“People in China don’t know the situation and think the Chinese government is doing a lot and is great,” she said.
“The point is that people here can’t petition to protest and do something about the climate. Even if people want to change [things] they think activism in China will fail and the cost is too [high].”
In a country where the party line controls the climate debate to the extent that a general apathy infuses the broader public, Howey and Zhao are the sudden, fresh young faces of environmental activism.
There are some signs they are not alone. Young people and women living in cities are increasingly aware of global climate issues and China’s place at the centre of them, according to a recent study in the journal The China Quarterly.
“In China, the good news is that compared to the population, younger Chinese tend to be more concerned about climate change,” said Liu Xinsheng, the lead author of the report from Texas A&M University. “The bad news is that overall, average Chinese climate change concern is low relative to many countries around the world.”
Zhao’s passion for climate issues was triggered by the documentary Under the Dome, which he watched four years ago while studying engineering at Shanghai Jiao Tong University.
Under the Dome
The film inspired him to set up an NGO to raise awareness of the climate crisis on campus and create a platform disseminating information on the social media app WeChat.
“I found something I could do for society,”Zhao said of his awakening after seeing the film. “In my last year [at university] I felt that if I did not communicate, did not advocate about what I thought was true, then powerful [other ideas] would dominate society.”
Under the Dome, an examination of the policy failures and personal effects of air pollution in China, appeared online for several days in February and was viewed by as many as 300 million people before being banned.
It is unlikely there will be climate strikes in China on Friday like those being staged in the west. The country passed a law after the Tiananmen crackdown in 1989 that imposed strict conditions on public gatherings and forced groups to register with the police if they want to stage a protest.
Organisations connected to the government such as the China Youth Climate Action Network, founded in 2007, are one of the official routes young people can take to raise climate awareness. The group holds events and educational training to help raise awareness of climate issues among China’s young people.
Zheng Xiaowen, CYCAN’s executive director, said: “I don’t think student protests are a helpful solution to the problem in China. Because of the unique cultural and political circumstances, Chinese people tend to resort to more moderate ways to voice their concerns.
“We need to advocate actions against climate change in ways that best suit China. For us, the best way is to work with the government and help come up with plans to tackle those issues together.”
While small steps are being made, the lack of awareness of climate change in the country is alarming, Liu said, because China is the world’s leading greenhouse gas emitter and one of the countries that could be badly affected by extreme weather events and rising sea levels, with knock-on effects for the economy and health.
“China has top-down policymaking,”Liu said. “It is hard to imagine without public awareness and concern for climate issues that the government policies will be successful.”
No Chinese media outlets have signed up to a global pledge to increase coverage of the climate crisis in the week leading up to the UN summit on Friday, a pledge 250 media groups have agreed to including the Guardian and Bloomberg.
The inertia bothers Howey, but she believes there is hope: “It is frustrating to me, but I’m still alive and have the passion for change.”
Changing"business as usual" during the ending of democracy as we know it!
John Naughton reviews Democracy for Sale: Dark Money and Dirty Politics by Peter Geoghegan, the openDemocracy journalist, forthe Observer book of the week in the Observer New Review (Sun 16 Aug 2020).
The openDemocracy journalist delves into the web of power, money and data manipulation that is bringing our electoral system to its knees
As we try to face the future, we are usually fighting the last war, not the one that’s coming next. One of the most striking points the political philosopher David Runciman made in his seminal book How Democracy Ends was that democracies don’t fail backwards: they fail forward. That’s why those who see in the current difficulties of liberal democracies the stirrings of past monsters – Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, to name just three – are always looking in the wrong place. And if that’s true, the key question for us at this moment in history is: how might our current system fail? What will bring it down?
The answer, it turns out, has been hiding in plain sight for years. It has three components. The first is the massive concentration of corporate power and private wealth that’s been under way since the 1970s, together with a corresponding increase in inequality, social exclusion and polarisation in most western societies; the second is the astonishing penetration of “dark money” into democratic politics; and the third is the revolutionary transformation of the information ecosystem in which democratic politics is conducted – a transformation that has rendered the laws that supposedly regulated elections entirely irrelevant to modern conditions.
These threats to democracy have long been visible to anyone disposed to look for them. For example, Lawrence Lessig’sRepublic, Lost and Jane Mayer’sDark Money explained how a clique of billionaires has shaped and perverted American politics. And in the UK, Martin Moore’s landmark study Democracy Hacked showed how, in the space of just one election cycle, authoritarian governments, wealthy elites and fringe hackers figured out how to game elections, bypass democratic processes and turn social networks into battlefields.
The
digital age was supposed to be democratic, but under Google, Facebook
and Twitter it has become a quest for profit at any cost.
All of this is by way of sketching the background to Peter Geoghegan’s fine book. It’s a compulsively readable, carefully researched account of how a malignant combination of rightwing ideology, secretive money (much of it from the US) and weaponisation of social media have shaped contemporary British (and to a limited extent, European) politics. And it has been able to do this in what has turned out to be a regulatory vacuum – with laws, penalties and overseeing authorities that are no longer fit for purpose.
His account is structured both chronologically and thematically. He starts with the Brexit referendum and the various kinds of unsavoury practices that took place during that doomed plebiscite – from the various illegalities of Vote Leave, through Arron Banks’s lavish expenditure to the astonishing tale of the dark money funnelled through the Ulster DUP and a loophole in Northern Ireland’s electoral law. One of the most depressing parts of this narrative is the bland indifference of most mainstream UK media to these scandalous events. If it had not been for the openDemocracy website (for which Geoghegan works), much of this would never have seen the light of day.
The middle section of the book explores how dark money has amplified the growing influence of the American right on British politics. This is a story of ideology and finance – of how the long-term Hayekian, neoliberal project has played out on these shores. It’s a great case study in how ruling elites can be infected with policy ideas and programmes via those “second-hand traders in ideas” of whom Hayek spoke so eloquently: academics, thinktanks and media commentators. In that context, Geoghegan’s account of the genesis and growth of the European Research Group – the party within a party that did for Theresa May – is absolutely riveting. And again it leaves one wondering why there was so little media exploration of the origins and financing of that particular little cabal.
The final part of the book deals with the transformation of our information ecosystem: the ways in which the automated targeted-advertising machines of social media platforms have been weaponised by rightwing actors to deliver precisely calibrated messages to voters, in ways that are completely opaque to the general public, as well as to regulators.
Remainers will probably read Geoghegan’s account of this manoeuvring by Brexiters as further evidence that the Brexit vote was invalid. This seems to me implausible or at any rate undecidable. Geoghegan agrees. “Pro-Leave campaigns broke the law,” he writes, “but we cannot say with any certainty that the result would have been different if they had not. Instead, the referendum and its aftermath have revealed something far more fundamental and systemic. Namely, a broken political system that is ripe for exploitation again. And again. And again.”
And therein lies the significance of this remarkable book. The integrity and trustworthiness of elections is a fundamental requirement for a functioning democracy. The combination of unaccountable, unreported dark money and its use to create targeted (and contradictory) political messages for individuals and groups means that we have no way of knowing how free and fair our elections have become. Many of the abuses exposed by Geoghegan and other researchers are fixable with new laws and better-resourced regulators. The existential threat to liberal democracy comes from the fact that those who have successfully exploited some inadequacies of the current regulatory system – who include Boris Johnson and his current wingman, Cummings – have absolutely no incentive to fix the system from which they have benefited. And they won’t. Which could be how our particular version of democracy ends.
Fooling "some of the people all of the time"! Trump and Fox News at the Lincoln Memorial
Undoubtedly the most famous utterance ever attributed to Abraham Lincoln is:
“You can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.”
Early recollections place the saying in an 1858 speech Lincoln delivered in Clinton, Illinois. The first appeared in 1904 by E. E. Pierson, who remembered Lewis Campbell, a respected citizen of DeWitt County, telling him of the 1858 speeches that Lincoln and Douglas delivered in Clinton.
According to Campbell, Lincoln said:
“Judge Douglas cannot fool the people: you may fool people for a time; you can fool a part of the people all the time; but you can’t fool all the people all the time.”
People power?
In the dictatorship of Belarus, as many as 100,000 people attend biggest protest in country’s history in defiant and euphoric mood
We will win!
This demonstration in Belarus underlines the truth that;
"you cannot fool all the people all the time".
Shaun Walker in Minsk reports for the Guardian (Sun 16 Aug 2020) on the:
Looking out across the vast crowd, the protesters could not quite believe it. Was this really Belarus? How had their country changed so quickly?
A week ago in the same spot, riot police had used batons and rubber bullets to terrorise those protesting against Alexander Lukashenko’s rigged election victory. Yet despite thousands of arrests and the shocking violence meted out to so many of them, the mood in the country has turned from despair to resilience to euphoria as the week progressed. It culminated in the biggest demonstration in the country’s history on Sunday afternoon, with unofficial estimates putting the crowd at more than 100,000 people. It took place in a sweeping expanse of land near a second world war memorial, where people sang, danced, chanted and flashed each other victory signs in collective catharsis at the prospect of political change. One problem, however, remains for the protesters. Officially at least, Lukashenko is still president. He emerged on Sunday to give an angry, paranoid and in places threatening speech to supporters outside parliament, in which he made it clear he did not intend to back down without a fight. “If you destroy Lukashenko, destroy your first president, it will be the beginning of the end for you,” he said, mopping the sweat from his brow with a handkerchief as he addressed the crowd in the August sunshine. He has also raised the possibility of asking Russia the intervene militarily to quell the unrest. The speech sets up a crucial and nervous week ahead for Belarusians, as the protests take on what feels like irreversible momentum, but with Lukashenko still in control of the police and army. That is about all he does control, and his legitimacy has eroded more and more by the day. The protest coalition has broadened with remarkable speed over the past week, from a small segment of politically active opponents to encompass teachers, doctors and factory workers, many of whom have announced strikes. There have even been demands for change from state television staff, the regime’s loyal cheerleaders who have traditionally helped get Lukashenko’s message out to the public. The sheer scale of discontent has led many to doubt that either his entourage or the Kremlin will want to save him. In another sign of Lukashenko’s weakening grasp, the Belarusian ambassador to Slovakia, Igor Leshchenya, became the first serving diplomat to back the protesters. “I stand in solidarity with those who came out on the streets of Belarusian cities with peaceful marches so that their voice could be heard,” he said in a video released on Sunday. He said one of his daughter’s classmates had been badly beaten by police, and compared the events of the past week with the actions of Joseph Stalin’s NKVD, the secret police that tortured and executed hundreds of thousands of people in the 1930s.
At the rally on Sunday afternoon, the opposition politician Maria Kolesnikova called on the security forces, diplomats and state television workers to join the protests. “This is your last chance. Fight your fear like all of us did. We were all scared, but we fought our fear. Join us and we will support you.”
Kolesnikova is the only one of the three women leading the opposition campaign who has remained in the country. The candidate, Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, fled to neighbouring Lithuania the night after the vote, apparently after receiving threats to her family. Her husband remains in jail. She has promised fresh and free elections if installed as president.
The post-election protests have been largely leaderless, loosely organised by a number of popular channels on the Telegram messaging app. Even though Kolesnikova addressed the crowd on Sunday, there was no stage from which to do so. Only a few hundred people heard her, her voice carried by a small portable speaker.
“For the first time in 26 years, we feel like we live in a free European nation, and together we will win,” she said. “The more intensity with which we continue our protest, the quicker change will happen.” Lukashenko ruled out compromises at his rally, insisting that “we will die as a people, as a state, as a nation” if the vote is re-run. He claimed Nato soldiers were waiting at the western borders to take over the country.
His rally was a pale imitation of the protest movement, with many in attendance bussed in from the regions. According to an official tally, 65,000 took part, but the figure was as implausible as the 80% of the vote Lukashenko is claimed to have won.
There was some genuine support for the president on display. A group of middle-aged women shouted that the protesters were fascists and should be crushed, while hundreds of plainclothes security men wearing earpieces roamed the crowd.
Speeches by around a dozen angry warm-up speakers painted a picture of recent events that was a grotesque inversion of reality. Many blamed protesters rather than authorities for the violence, when in fact the protests have been almost exclusively peaceful. The systematic beating and torture of prisoners by riot police is likely to go down as some of the worst excesses by authorities in recent European history.
As Lukashenko has dug in, so the protesters have become more determined, but there still appears little appetite for violence or storming government buildings. It is clear, however, that they feel the time for dialogue has passed. Given the repeated shouts of “murderer” and “resign”, they are unlikely to be satisfied with anything less than fresh elections.
“Of course I always knew what kind of country I lived in, but I didn’t think the authorities could do anything so awful, and I didn’t think the people could do something so inspiring,” said Evgeny, a 32-year-old programmer who has protested for the last three days.
“I can’t even remember a time before Lukashenko. That moustache has been staring at me my whole life, and now I’ve had enough. We’ve all had enough. We need new elections.” As night fell, protesters continued the carnival atmosphere, flashing victory signs as they promenaded along Minsk’s main avenue and passing vehicles gave them honks of support. But a passing convoy of more than 50 military vehicles, apparently carrying riot police and other troops, was a reminder that a darker turn of events is still possible.
The red and the white . . .
. . . and the red and the green!
Supporters of Lukashenko will deck themselves out with red and green flags which have an embroidered pattern along one side.
This is the official flag of Belarus that was introduced in 1951, when Belarus won a seat at the UN despite still being part of the Soviet Union. Red was the colour of revolution and green was for nature and life, and they picked a folk ornament because the Soviets saw Belarus as a nation of peasants.
A flag symbolic of independence
The red-white flag has a longer history, introduced as the flag of the short-lived Belarusian National Republic in 1918. When Belarus won independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, it was readopted, but shortly after Lukashenko came to power in 1994, he held a referendum on returning to the old, Soviet flag in a slightly modified form, without hammer and sickle. Lukashenko’s propaganda focused entirely on the use of the red-white flag by Belarusian Nazi collaborators, ignoring the rest of its history, and displaying it became taboo.
The LODE Zone Line
Re:LODE Radio is reminded of other Red and White national flags to be found along the LODE Zone Line including England, Poland and Indonesia.
Flying Kites in Java to celebrate 75 years of independence from colonial rule
In Indonesia on Monday (August 17 2020) hundreds of kites coloured red and white were flown as part of festival celebrations to mark the country 75th anniversary of Independence.
The event shown in the video was initiated by the Yogyakarta Indonesian Kite Association, and held on Parangkusumo beach, Yogyakarta City, Yogyakarta Province, with an open invitation for citizen participation.
"We want to contribute as kite artists, interpreting and enlivening Indonesian independence in our way," said the administrator of the Yogyakarta Indonesian Kites Association, Aji Marutahara.
According to Aji, the red and white colours of the national flag decorating the kites were flown as a way to commemorate Indonesia's independence with events taking place simultaneously with kite activists from various other regions in Indonesia. As well as here on the south coast of Java at Bantul kite enthusiasts were flying their kites in Lampung on the island of Sumatra, and in the capital of Indonesia, Jakarta, on the north coast of Java, at Tulungagung and Surabayain East Java, and to the island of Bali.
Meanwhile . . .
Rizki Fachriansyah reporting for The Jakarta Post, Jakarta (Mon, August 17, 2020) writes:
President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo presided over a 75th Independence Day ceremony along with a handful of state officials and dignitaries at the Presidential Palace in Central Jakarta on Monday morning.
In stark contrast to previous Independence Day ceremonies, Monday’s commemoration was a relatively subdued affair as most of the event took place digitally due to concerns over COVID-19.
Jokowi – clad in traditional East Nusa Tenggara attire embroidered with the nunkòlo motif symbolizing national unity – was one of the few state officials who physically attended the flag-hoisting ceremony, along with First Lady Iriana and Vice President Ma’ruf Amin and his wife Wury Estu Handayani.
Other officials who were physically present at the event include Religious Affairs Minister Fachrul Razi and People’s Consultative Assembly Speaker Bambang Soesatyo.
Presidential Secretariat deputy head of protocol, press and media Bey Triadi Machmudin said the number of physical attendees was limited to 20 this year to minimize the risk of coronavirus contagion.
“There are usually hundreds of attendees, but now there are only 20 ceremony participants, as well as 14 [officials] on the stage of honor,”Bey said at the start of the live broadcast.
The broadcast of the flag-hoisting ceremony, which ran from 9 a.m. to 10:30 a.m., was preceded with pre-recorded clips of interviews with former presidents Megawati Soekarnoputri and Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono.
The commemoration also featured pre-recorded musical performances that paid tribute to the nation’s heroes.
In one video segment, singer Raisa performed the song “Indonesia Pusaka” against the backdrop of footage depicting a number of health workers on the frontline of the country’s ongoing battle against the COVID-19 pandemic.
Unlike past ceremonies, this year’s commemoration did not feature a complete line-up of the national flag-hoisting team, in compliance with the health protocols. The majority of invitees, including Megawati and former vice presidents Jusuf Kalla, Try Sutrisno and Boediono, witnessed the ceremony separately via video conference.
Several foreign officials – including the Dutch, Ukrainian, Thai and Nigerian ambassadors to Indonesia – also attended the video conference.
Just a few days before, on Friday 14 August 2020, President Joko "Jokowi" Widodo delivered his annual state of the nation address at the House of Representatives compound in Jakarta.
Budi Sutrisno reporting for The Jakarta Post (Fri, August 14, 2020) writes:
President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo has called on people to support development amid the health and economic crisis. “In 25 years we will usher in 100 years of independence as we become the Indonesia we aspire to be,” Jokowisaid in his state of the nation address on Friday during the People’s Consultative Assembly (MPR) annual session at the House of Representatives compound in Jakarta, held to commemorate Indonesia's 75th Independence Day, which falls on Monday.
Wearing traditional Sabu clothing from East Nusa Tenggara, he said the crisis could help push major transformation through the implementation of grand strategies and the resolution of fundamental problems. “Our current goal is not only to escape the pandemic but also to get through the crisis. We are taking measures to take a big leap by making the most of out of the ongoing crisis,”Jokowi said in his state of the nation address. He said this period should be used to help the “catch up”. Jokowi compared the economic crisis to a computer crash, where many countries had to face stagnation but had the chance to restart their systems.“All countries must undergo a brief shutdown, restart and reboot,” he said. With 75 years of independence, Jokowi said, Indonesia had emerged as an upper-middle-income country but the ongoing economic crisis was the worst in its history. In the first quarter, the economy grew 2.97 percent but contracted 5.32 percent in the second quarter. He compared the rates with those of developed countries, which had contracted more than 10 percent. Jokowi once again emphasized the need for swift action in providing social assistance for people and laidoff workers, while acknowledging the importance of loan restructuring and emergency capital assistance for small and medium enterprises. “It is not an easy task. The government must adjust its programs and carry out budget reallocations quickly,” the President said in his speech. Jokowi also asserted the importance of speed and accuracy in the health sector, especially in providing emergency facilities and medical equipment, enforcing health protocols and accelerating citizen repatriation processes. “We must undertake fundamental reforms in the way we work. Our readiness and speed are being tested,” he said. He also addressed the need for fundamental reforms in the health sector by strengthening the capacity of human resources and developing hospitals, health centers, as well as the medicine and medical equipment industry. “Resilience and capacity of our health service must be improved on a massive scale,” he said. During the address, Jokowi also expressed his appreciation to medical and health workers, as well as to community leaders, volunteers, journalists, national security personnel and civil servants. It's not just the future of the economy! It's the future of the planet!
Q. Why NO mention of corruption, vested interests involved in the wholesale destruction and degradation of the environment, or the threat to the Indonesian people facing global heating and a climate emergency?
A. Political Islam is why . . . This article for the Nikkei Asian Review gives shape to part of the story of how the capitalist status quo remains intact, despite huge social inequalities, because of the inherent ideologies of a conservative political Islam.
JAKARTA - Indonesia on Monday celebrated the 75th Independence Day since its founding at a sensitive juncture which sees the Muslim majority testing the country's commitment to pluralism.
In a largely virtual ceremony due to the coronavirus pandemic, President Joko "Jokowi" Widodo and First Lady Iriana sang the national anthem with a smattering of invitees just past 10 a.m., the exact moment the founding President Sukarno declared the nation's independence. Although one verse in the anthem declares "We all declare an Indonesia united as one," the developing culture war is threatening to overturn that message. Nadiem Makarim, the minister of education and culture, issued a public apology in late July to Nahdlatul Ulama and Muhammadiyah, the country's leading and second-biggest Islamic organizations, respectively, for not giving the two groups enough input into a teacher training program. "If we don't receive the support and participation from everyone, we will not be able to realize high-quality education,"Nadiem said in a video posted on the ministry's website. Nadiem, founder of the ride-hailing giant Gojek, has spearheaded an educational reform initiative calling for teachers to receive outside training from private-sector organizations. But the two Islamic groups have denounced the idea of private corporations receiving taxpayer money. Now the program is undergoing an overhaul, illustrating how Muslim interest groups have become heavily involved in national policy. Indonesia, a sprawling archipelago whose breadth is on par with the continental United States, is home to around 300 ethnic groups, each with its own history and culture. The country has been barely able to function harmoniously, thanks to a national language with simplified grammar and tones. Nevertheless, Indonesia's rapid economic growth earned it "upper-middle income" status by the World Bank in July. Muslims account for 90% of the population, making Indonesia the world's largest Muslim country. Religious minorities such as Protestants, Catholics, Hindus and Buddhists have enjoyed a high level of deference as well. But lately, Muslims have been flexing their clout. Under the autocratic regime of Suharto - Indonesia's second president, who came to power in 1968 - the government minimized the political influence of Muslims out of fear they would echo much of the Middle East and pull the country toward fundamentalism. After Suharto fell from grace in 1998, democratic norms began to displace military rule. It was only a matter of time before Islamic organizations began to aspire to the kind of authority that corresponds to their numbers. In February, Indonesia's broadcast authority issued a warning to a station that aired a program featuring wine made in Bali, saying alcohol is considered "haram" (forbidden) for Muslims. In rural areas, a plethora of small Islamic groups are actively exerting pressure. There have been around 200 instances between 2007 and 2018 where Christians faced interference with worship, or demonstrations against new church construction, according to Indonesian think tank Setara Institute. "The Islamification of society resembles less of a spiritual movement and more of a politicization of religion," said Wasisto Raharjo Jati, researcher at the Indonesian Institute of Sciences. Jakarta's governor race in 2017 exemplifies that phenomenon. Conservative Islamic groups characterized incumbent Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, a Christian with Chinese ancestry, as "anti-Muslim" during the campaign. He was eventually defeated by the Muslim candidate Anies Baswedan. "Social media has amplified divisions among the people," said Jati. Fake news in particular has complicated the discourse. Some postings, for example, allege that Widodo's ruling party has committed blasphemy against Islam by drawing close to an illegal Communist party. There are signs of deepening splits between religions and sects heading into the 2024 presidential election. Indonesia's electorate is very likely to be exposed to fake news since it has a high online presence. The average Indonesian spends 3 and a half hours per day on social media, according to surveys by Canada's Hootsuite Media and others - more than an hour longer than the global average. Widodo, a secular figure, has been working to maintain societal harmony and even appointed Prabowo Subianto, a 2019 presidential rival, as defense minister. The fact that Subianto was instrumental in blocking the 2017 reelection of Purnama, a Widodo ally, shows that the president is aware he cannot afford to ignore the growing Muslim interests. An article by Samir Amin is linked to in an article that can be found on the Re:LODE Cargo of Questions -Information Wrap for the cargo created at Pangandaran on the south coast of Java: Political Islam in the Service of Imperialism by Samir Amin
The article where this link is to be found considers modernity and the role of women in the democratisation of patriarchal society in Indonesia:
Two more articles to be found on the Information Wrap for Pangandaran consider both the political contradictions and the social tensions in a country as diverse as is Indonesia. In establishing a secular state on gaining independence 75 years ago, the Pancasila philosophy has not been able to sustain a united national identity amongst the diversity of communities with their own cultural histories and identity. Indonesia as modern society has been increasingly divided along religious lines, that mask regressive political ideologies, and echo the "divide and rule" tactics of Dutch hegemonic colonial administrations.
The Netherlands is the ex-colonial power of the Indonesian archipelago. The territories, boundaries and frontiers of Indonesia are an echo of the old colonial order, established by the Dutch government from 1800, and ending with the war of independence that took place following the Japanese occupation in World War II. This openDemocracy article runs with the subheading:
The small nation is depriving other countries of €22 billion a year.
Maarten Hietland writes for openDemocracy (19 August 2020):
The Covid-19 crisis has shown just how important publicly funded services are to our societies. This has been most visible in the healthcare sector, but widespread programs to financially support businesses also make up a substantial proportion of the total support given in high-income countries. These direct fiscal expenditures totaled almost 10% of GDP in Germany, the UK and the United States.
When
you give it some thought, it is highly remarkable that, in times of
business-driven market liberalization, enterprises are asking for
government support in times of need. This is especially the case for
companies that have been depleting governmental resources through tax
avoidance techniques. It is estimated
that each year about 40% of all multinationals’ profits are shifted to
tax havens. This shifting of profits has resulted in an annual reduction
of worldwide government revenue of $200 billion. UNCTAD calculated in 2015 that low-income countries lose about $100 billion each year through tax avoiding techniques.
There
are a number of countries that play a key role in the global structure
of profit shifting. One of the most important is the Netherlands. The
Netherlands is a relatively small country (with only about 17 million
inhabitants) and its geographical size is almost three times smaller
than the state of New York, but it’s ranked number one in terms of
incoming foreign direct investments. Its economy, aligned with its
fiscal policy, is traditionally structured
in such a way that Dutch companies can easily expand their businesses
abroad. Taxes, for example, on international capital flows, are
generally close to zero. This is not only the case for outward capital
flows, but also for incoming capital flows.
This has led to a
situation where non-Dutch companies structure their international
businesses via the Netherlands. They do this by using ‘letterbox
companies’ – so called because they are only registered there for tax
avoiding purposes and have no real economic presence (they, for example,
do not employ people). It was estimated that there are currently about 14,000
of these letterbox companies in the Netherlands, with assets on their
accounts worth more than €4,000 billion. Through the position of the
Netherlands, other countries lose about €22 billion per year.
Why would the Netherlands offer its tax system to mailbox companies that do not even pay taxes
in the Netherlands? An important reason is the employment it creates
for consultants, lawyers, tax advisors and accountants that secure the
incorporation of the letterbox companies in the Netherlands. They have a
strong and vested interest in this mailbox industry. A second reason is
the expectation by the Dutch government that some mailbox companies
will eventually change into real companies with real economic activities
in the Netherlands. They literally call this opportunistic expectation
the ‘nursery room idea’ or the euphemistic ‘swan cling to’ doctrine. It is unclear to what extent this expectation has actually been realized.
The
tax friendly environment of the Netherlands is inter alia created
through a network of Double Tax Agreements (DTAs). Its approximately100 DTAs
are popular amongst international investors, as they minimize the
rights to taxation that both parties can uphold over bilateral
investments. An important taxation right, for example,
is the withholding tax over outbound passive income payments, such as
dividends, interest and royalty payments. The Netherlands has been able
to bilaterally lower these withholding tax rates, sometimes even to
zero, in its tax treaties.
The Netherlands has been strongly criticized
for its unique position in international tax avoiding structures, as it
undermines the ability of other countries – especially developing
countries – to collect sufficient taxes.
The Netherlands sets out its tax treaty policy in a special ‘Memorandum on Tax Treaties’. The Memorandum was last altered in 2011, and a new version
was presented to the Dutch Parliament earlier this year. The
memorandum, among other things, stipulates its tax treaty policy in
relation to developing countries. In both the 2011 and the draft 2020
Memorandum it is stated that
the Netherlands will 'show understanding towards developing countries,
for instance, for requests for an expansion of the concept of ‘permanent
establishment’ or for relatively high withholding taxes’. It was
further detailed, in a Parliamentary debate,
that 'the Netherlands is prepared to agree to higher withholding taxes
than in relation to more developed countries, with the understanding
that the Netherlands wishes to achieve a result more or less equivalent
to that in the treaties of that developing country with comparable more
developed countries’.
Have these words been put to action by the Dutch government over the last decade? SOMO has released new research
into all tax treaties that the Netherlands (re)negotiated with
developing countries, following the 2011 Memorandum on Tax Treaties. In
total six tax treaties were (re)negotiated since 2011, with Ukraine,
Indonesia, Kenya, Zambia, Malawi and Ethiopia. For four out of these
six, the withholding tax rate was lower than the average OECD
withholding tax rate. It is not clear whether the Netherlands is, in all
circumstances, to be blamed for the low withholding tax rates – it
could be the case that the other treaty country pushed for the lower
withholding tax rate. However, based on the explanatory memorandums of
the tax treaties, the Netherlands did strive in multiple circumstances
for low(er) withholding tax rates.
At a time when public funds are
especially precious, our research shows that the Netherlands continues
to allocate very limited taxation rights to developing countries,
despite its promises. At the same time, it has maintained its
attractiveness for international investors by using tax treaties to help
them avoid taxation, accelerating the international race to the bottom
on tax. In a post-Covid world where everyone has access to quality
public services, countries must stop operating as tax havens so that
giant corporations can be made to pay their fair share.
Larry Elliott Economics editor of the Guardian reports on the Jubilee Debt Campaign revealing a sharp rise in the number of developing countries in debt crisis since 2018 (Sun 16 Aug 2020). He writes:
Developing nation debt has more than doubled in the past decade and left more than 50 countries facing a repayment crisis, according to a campaign group.
Data from the Jubilee Debt Campaign shows that even without taking full account of the impact of the coronavirus pandemic, there has been a sharp jump in the number of poor countries in debt distress since 2018.
Debt relief was provided for poor countries at the end of the 1990s and in the mid-2000s, but the JDC said external debt payments as a share of government revenue had more than doubled from 6.7% to 14.3% since 2010 and were at their highest level since 2001.
The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank have both warned of the risks of a new debt crisis and have been urging private sector creditors to join governments and multilateral creditors in coming up with a comprehensive relief package. More than 100 countries have sought help from the IMF since the crisis began.
The JDC said the number of countries in crisis had increased from 30 to 52 since 2018. The figures are likely to heighten concerns that many poor countries will find their debt burdens unpayable at a time when they are facing the quadruple blow of a global recession, weaker currencies, higher interest costs and a drop in remittances sent home from workers in developed nations.
Sarah-Jayne Clifton, the director of the Jubilee Debt Campaign, said: “Debt burdens were already taking much-needed money away from healthcare and social protection before the Covid-19 crisis hit, and the situation is rapidly deteriorating. Debt payments for poor countries are at the highest level in 20 years. We need urgent action to cancel payments, to reduce debt to a sustainable level, and to rein in irresponsible lending to stop debt crises coming back to haunt us every decade.”
The JDC said some of the data for its estimates of debt distress came from IMF and World Bank sources that did not yet take full account of the impact of the pandemic on government revenues and debt payment levels. The real figures were likely to be worse.
The campaign group said its new debt portal provided a more sophisticated analysis of debt levels and risks, including the threats of private sector debt crises in developed countries such as the UK and the US.
The JDC said its analysis included details of:
Country-by-country annual external government debt payments, as a percentage of government revenue.
The extent to which a whole country (public and private sector) was a net financial creditor or debtor to the rest of the world.
The size of a country’s private external debt.
How much a country was paying to and earning from the rest of the world each year (its current account balance).
IMF debt risk ratings.
“Together, these measures provide a more accurate picture of the debt situation of a country than the traditionally used measure of government debt as a percentage of GDP,” the JDC said.
“Government debt to GDP takes no account of the interest rate on the debt, the government revenue available to service debt, the period the debt is owed over, whether the debt payments involve money leaving the country concerned, and the scale of debt owed by the private sector of a country (as opposed to just the government/public sector).”
The analysis found that in addition to the 52 developing countries in debt crisis, 24 countries were at risk of both a public and private debt crisis, 32 were at risk of solely a private sector debt crisis, and seven were at risk of a public sector debt crisis.
Larry Elliott Economics editor for the Guardian reports on the warning given by David Malpass, head of the World Bank, of a new debt crisis among the poorer countries of the developing world, worse than the financial crisis of 2008 and for Latin America worse than the debt crisis of the 1980s (Wed 19 Aug 2020):
The head of the World Bank has called for a more ambitious debt relief plan for poor countries after warning that the Covid-19 recession is turning into a depression in the most challenged parts of the globe.
In an interview with the Guardian, David Malpass raised the prospect of the first systematic write-off of debts since the 2005 Gleneagles agreement as he said fresh Bank figures due out next month would show an extra 100 million people had been pushed into poverty by the crisis.
Poor countries had been worse hit by the economic fallout from Covid-19, Malpass added, and a growing debt crisis meant it was necessary to go beyond the repayment holidays offered by rich countries earlier this year.
“This is worse than the financial crisis of 2008 and for Latin America worse than the debt crisis of the 1980s,” the World Bank president said.
“The immediate problem is one of poverty. There are people on the brink. We have made progress in the last 20 years. Whole populations have come out of extreme poverty. The risk as the economic crisis takes hold is that people fall back into extreme poverty.”
Malpass added: “As the crisis hit, inequality has become very distinct. The stimulus in advanced countries has been targeted on advanced countries, to the extent that a major inequality problem has gotten worse. The recessions are even worse in the developing world than they are in advanced economies.”
Debt problems were intensifying, Malpass said, because while the gross domestic product of poor countries was going down, the amount they owed was not.
The World Bank president said he was pleased to see the G7 industrialised nations considering extending the debt repayment holidays due to end this year into 2021 but said a more radical approach was needed.
“Even before the pandemic we had noted debt distress in many countries. There has been a huge rise in the amount of debt in poor countries and across the developing world, in part caused by the hunt for yield.
“For countries that are heavily indebted we need to be looking at the stock of debt”, Malpass said. “Up until now we have been providing relief for debt service payments but then adding what hasn’t been paid on at the end.”
Malpass said the terms under which countries borrowed needed to be more transparent and said it was important that agreements included creditors that had so far not taken part in debt deals, such as private sector investors and China’s development bank.
“There is a risk of free riding, where private investors get paid in full, in part from the savings countries are getting from their official creditors. That’s not fair to the taxpayers of the countries providing development assistance and means poor countries don’t have the resources to deal with the humanitarian crisis”.
Malpass said the Bank had mobilised $160bn for loans and grants to relieve the immediate pressure on health systems, the increase in the number of children out of school, the loss of incomes for those working in the informal economy and the threat of hunger.
The full cost of boosting developing country infrastructure, improving health and education systems, and weaning poor nations off fossil fuels would run into trillions of dollars.
“The recession has turned into a depression for some countries”, Malpass said, adding: “This is the biggest crisis in decades but I’m fundamentally optimistic that people working together will find a way through it”.
The World Bank president said the prospect of people going hungry was “gravely concerning”, noting the threat to food security as the year progressed.
Decent harvests and food imports were currently keeping the threat of famine at bay, but Malpass said: “While there is no food shortage problem now if the situation continues it could become one”.
Malpass said it was a “huge tragedy” that the crisis had prevented many children in poor countries from going to school. “It is pretty clear. When children are out of school they lose some of what they have already learned”.
The reduced access to schools meant some countries were going backwards on education, he added, with knock-on effects on the physical protection of young girls for whom there was a heightened risk of being married at a young age.
World-as-Idea
For Re:LODE Radio this current "state of things" echoes the debt crisis of the late 1980's and early 1990's and an art project that informed the devising of the original LODE project. The Re:LODE blog page on Methods & Purposes has an article on this work Grace - World-as-Idea.
Larry Elliot's report on the World Bank's warning appeared in the Guardian print edition on the first page of the Financial sectiontogether with this shockingly contrasting story covering the Wall Street rise buoyed by a record high for the so-called lockdown winners in the US. Larry Elliot and Kalyeena Makortoff report (Tue 18 Aug 2020):
Wall Street’s rapid recovery from its Covid-19 slump has entered a new phase after a leading yardstick of American shares briefly hit a record high.
In early trading in New York the S&P 500, which measures the stock market valuation of the 500 leading US quoted companies, rose to 3,394.82, exceeding its previous high by a single point.
The remarkable turnaround means that shares have risen by 50% since their trough in late March, a period when countries around the world, including the US, were going into lockdown.
Since then, support from the US Federal Reserve has boosted stock market sentiment despite a steady stream of poor economic news, including a near-10% contraction in the American economy in the second quarter of 2020.
Much of the rise in the S&P 500 has been the result of the strong performance of a handful of high-profile companies such as Google, Amazon and Facebook, who have enjoyed a boom in demand during the lockdown.
Having at last broken above its previous peak after several near misses over the past week, the S&P fell back to 3,387 by afternoon in New York, up 0.3% on the day.
Neil Wilson chief, market analyst at Markets.Com in London, said: “My instinct is that this is too high, it looks massively overbought. I mean, it’s not sustainable looking at the earnings. I think it’s mainly the liquidity being pumped into the system. As we get closer to the [US presidential] election I’d expect more volatility and a pullback.”
David Madden, analyst at CMC Markets, said traders were weighing up looming risks against signs of a pick up in the US economy: “Traders on Wall Street are weighing up the tensions with China, as Beijing is likely to strike back in relation to Huawei. There is still no sign of a coronavirus relief package being agreed upon, and that is impacting sentiment too. The US building permits and housing starts for July were both 1.49 million. The readings topped forecasts and showed growth on the June reports. It is further proof the US economy is recovering.”
The news from Wall Street came as Norway’s sovereign wealth fund – the world’s biggest – made a £16bn loss in the first half of the year and warned that financial markets could face further volatility as the Covid pandemic was still out of control.
While investor confidence had been restored by “massive” state support packages, the deputy chief executive for the £895bn fund, Trond Grande, said financial markets were not reflecting the real economic impact of the virus, which he said was not under control “in any shape or form”.
He said: “We have already seen some sort of V-shaped recovery in the financial markets. I think there is a slight disconnect between the real economy and the financial markets.”
He also warned that there could be further market volatility, particularly if there was a surge in coronavirus cases later this year.
“We could be in for some turbulence this fall as things unfold and whether or not the coronavirus pandemic recedes, or gains some force,”Grande said, adding that the full impact on sectors such as travel and leisure was yet to be seen.
The fund’s deputy also noted that state support for national economies may not be sustainable long-term.
A further drop in share prices would cause further pain for the sovereign wealth fund, which was founded in 1996 and invests the country’s oil revenues abroad to shield its economy from market turmoil. The fund owns nearly 1.5% of all globally listed shares, with stakes in over 9,000 companies.
As the nations of the world are beset by the spectre of increasing inequality, while facing a health pandemic and an existential environmental crisis, the capitalist system "trundles" along regardless.
Measures, and measuring, such as indicated in the S&P 500 graph above, are as a rough measure of things, as is the Trundle Wheel, from which the verb "to trundle" and "trundling" derives, a measuring tool used in surveying.
This is a crisis . . .
Greta Thunberg, Luisa Neubauer, Anuna De Wever and Adélaïde Charlierpublished this Opinion piece for the Guardian Journal (Wed 19 Aug 2020) under the headline:
On Thursday 20 August, it will be exactly two years since the first school strike for the climate took place. Looking back, a lot has happened. Many millions have taken to the streets to join the decades-long fight for climate and environmental justice. And on 28 November 2019, the European parliament declared a “climate and environmental emergency”.
But over these past two years, the world has also emitted more than 80 gigatonnes of CO2. We have seen continuous natural disasters taking place across the globe: wildfires, heatwaves, flooding, hurricanes, storms, thawing of permafrost and collapsing of glaciers and whole ecosystems. Many lives and livelihoods have been lost. And this is only the very beginning.
Today, leaders all over the world are speaking of an “existential crisis”. The climate emergency is discussed on countless panels and summits. Commitments are being made, big speeches are given. Yet, when it comes to action we are still in a state of denial. The climate and ecological crisis has never once been treated as a crisis. The gap between what we need to do and what’s actually being done is widening by the minute. Effectively, we have lost another two crucial years to political inaction.
Last month, just ahead of the European council summit, we published an open letter with demands to EU and world leaders. Since then, more than 125,000 people have signed this letter. Tomorrow we will meet the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, and deliver the letter and demands, as well as the signatures.
We will tell Merkel that she must face up to the climate emergency – especially as Germany now holds the presidency of the European council. Europe has a responsibility to act. The EU and the United Kingdom are accountable for 22% of historic accumulative global emissions, second only to the United States. It is immoral that the countries that have done the least to cause the problem are suffering first and worst. The EU must act now, as it has signed up to do in the Paris agreement.
Our demands include halting all fossil fuel investments and subsidies, divesting from fossil fuels, making ecocide an international crime, designing policies that protect workers and the most vulnerable, safeguarding democracy and establishing annual, binding carbon budgets based on the best available science.
We understand the world is complicated and that what we are asking for may not be easy or may seem unrealistic. But it is much more unrealistic to believe that our societies would be able to survive the global heating we’re heading for – as well as other disastrous ecological consequences of today’s business as usual. We are inevitably going to have to fundamentally change, one way or another. The question is, will the changes be on our terms, or on nature’s terms?
In the Paris agreement, world leaders committed themselves to keeping the global average temperature rise to well below 2C, and aiming for 1.5C. Our demands demonstrate what that commitment means. Yet this is just the very minimum of what needs to be done to deliver on those promises.
So if leaders are not willing to do this, they’ll have to start explaining why they’re giving up on the Paris agreement. Giving up on their promises. Giving up on the people living in the most affected areas. Giving up on the chances of handing over a safe future for their children. Giving up without even trying.
Science doesn’t tell anyone what to do, it merely collects and presents verified information. It is up to us to study and connect the dots. When you read the IPCC SR1.5 report and the UNEP production gap report, as well as what leaders have actually signed up for in the Paris agreement, you see that the climate and ecological crisis can no longer be solved within today’s systems. Even a child can see that policies of today don’t add up with the current best available science.
We need to end the ongoing wrecking, exploitation and destruction of our life support systems and move towards a fully decarbonised economy that is centred on the wellbeing of all people, democracy and the natural world.
If we are to have a chance of staying below 1.5C of warming, our emissions need to immediately start reducing rapidly towards zero and then on to negative figures. That’s a fact. And since we don’t have all the technical solutions we need to achieve that, we have to work with what we have at hand today. And this has to include stopping doing certain things. That’s also a fact. However, it’s a fact that most people refuse to accept. Just the thought of being in a crisis that we cannot buy, build or invest our way out of seems to create some kind of collective mental short circuit.
This mix of ignorance, denial and unawareness is at the very heart of the problem. As it is now, we can have as many meetings and climate conferences as we want. They will not lead to sufficient changes, because the willingness to act and the level of awareness needed are still nowhere in sight. The only way forward is for society to start treating the crisis like a crisis.
We still have the future in our own hands. But time is rapidly slipping through our fingers. We can still avoid the worst consequences. But to do that, we have to face the climate emergency and change our ways. And that is the uncomfortable truth we cannot escape.
Greta Thunberg is a 17-year-old environmental campaigner from Sweden. This article was co-written with youth climate activists Luisa Neubauer from Germany, Anuna de Wever from Belgium, and Adélaïde Charlier from Belgium
Accompanying thisOpinion piece by Greta Thunberg, along with others in today's Guardian Journal, is an obituary on the French philosopher Bernard Stiegler. Stuart Jeffries, writing this obituary (Tue 18 Aug 2020) describes him as the:
French philosopher who denounced the tyranny of digital technology
According to Jeffries' obituary:
"He
wrote more than 30 books, the last of which, The Lesson of Greta
Thunberg, published in January, was devoted to the environmental
campaigner, whom he saw as a latter-day Antigone in her rage for
justice."
Bernard Stiegler, who has died suddenly aged 68, first robbed a bank in 1976, to pay off his overdraft. At the time, the school dropout and veteran of the May 1968 barricades was running a jazz cafe in Toulouse. “It went really well,” Stiegler recalled of his life of crime. “I got a taste for it and robbed three more.” He always worked alone. “It’s more efficient and we don’t need to share.”
The police caught Stiegler in the act during the fourth robbery and he was sentenced to five years in jail. “It could have been 15 but I had a very good lawyer.” He also had friends on the outside who kept him supplied with books, notably the philosopher Gérard Granel, a fellow jazz buff. But, sharing a prison cell with another inmate interfered with Stiegler’s studies, so he went on hunger strike for three weeks. “I wanted to let myself die.”
From this unpromising position, Stiegler went on to become one of the 21st century’s most bracing thinkers, one who denounced digital technology’s takeover by technocrats whom he called “the new barbarians”.
He wrote more than 30 books, the last of which, The Lesson of Greta Thunberg, published in January, was devoted to the environmental campaigner, whom he saw as a latter-day Antigone in her rage for justice.
While Antigone reckoned death to be inescapable but human souls would survive, he reflected, “Greta belongs to the ‘more than tragic’ world, the one that says everything will disappear, the entire universe.”
Stiegler was of a similar temperament. He came to think, as he put it in The Age of Disruption: Technology and Madness in Computational Capitalism (2019), that many young people, trapped in an entropic world from which there seems to be no escape, have been left “mad with sadness, mad with grief, mad with rage”. “To put it simply,” he told an interviewer from Libération, “there is a schism between the mobilised young people and the old people who do nothing.”
Bernard Stiegler speaks of his admiration of Greta Thunberg in an interview with the French magazine Marianne. The magazine is named after the eponymous Marianne, the national personification of the French Republic since the French Revolution, as a personification of liberty, equality, fraternity and reason, and a portrayal of the Goddess of Liberty. These semiotic overlaps, where and when they occur, as for instance between national symbolism and the present reality of Greta Thunberg's voice and presence, need to be charted, mainly to avoid the real issues becoming part of a process of distraction from distraction by distraction.
The lesson of Greta Thunberg . . .
Propos recueillis par Matthieu Giroux Publié le 12/02/2020
Article mis à jourLe 07.08.2020
The philosopher Bernard Stiegler died this Thursday August 6. We interviewed him a few months ago, on the occasion of the release of his penultimate book, "What do we call healing? The lesson of Greta Thunberg". The president of the Research and Innovation Institute (IRI) returned to the ecological emergency.
In What do we call healing? (The Links that Liberate), Bernard Stiegler asserted that Greta Thunberg jostled and shocked a "dissociety" that had become deeply immoral and irresponsible. He used the young Swede to offer a reflection on the ecological crisis.
Marianne : Can you explain the link you make between thinking and healing? Is this link already present in Heidegger, whose title you use?
Bernard Stiegler : The first to have established that thought as a way of healing is Heidegger in Being and Time (1927) when he made worry ( die Sorge ) a primordial disposition of Dasein. For Heidegger, to ask the question of being is necessarily to place it in a historical perspective where it is a question of looking after what remains to come from the past. In Time and Being (1962), Heidegger postulates that we must henceforth think of being in the light of modern technique ( Gestell ). The Gestell corresponds to the development of what is today called the technosphere. When asked these questions, Heidegger fifty years ahead, anticipating the ordeal of the Anthropocene, but removes the essential question of entropy theory formulated in the XIX th century which holds that the universe is working by an absolutely irreversible dissipation of energy, that all matter is energy which is doomed to dissipate.
This theory will result in the XX th century through the expansion of a universe that is not stable, and is evidenced by Hubble. Then Schrödinger argues that living things are characterized by their ability to limit entropy by retaining energy, keeping it from dissipating for a certain time. This point is today at the heart of the Anthropocene issue. The transformation of the biosphere into the technosphere considerably accelerates the production of entropy. We must now invent an industrial economy capable of producing negentropy - and of fighting against the growth of entropy.
Marianne : According to you, we are witnessing with Greta Thunberg an unprecedented reversal: it is now the children who are on the side of wisdom and responsibility while adults are on the side of childishness and whim. How do you explain this lack of benevolence on the part of adults towards future generations?
Bernard Stiegler : I had shown in Take care (2008) and in Telecommunications against democracy (2006) that the development of marketing, especially after the Second World War, rests on a structural infantilization of the masses and their "representatives". Marketing takes the place of parents, bypassing them and infantilizing them. However, one becomes an adult by taking care of children, for example by raising them, by becoming responsible for the younger generations. The entire consumerist economy, since the development of cultural industries (radio, television, cinema), is based on the infantilization and irresponsibility of parents. So much so that some, like the president of the association of friends of the Palais de Tokyo, called for the murder of Greta Thunberg on social networks. It is an extremely serious offense. It is an indication of absolute irresponsibility on the part of a person who has occupied very important functions, as banker then chief sponsor of contemporary art.
In my eyes, Greta Thunberg reformulates, on a totally different register, what Antigone expresses in Sophocles' famous play. Antigone defends the divine law against the law written by men who do not see that there are rules that cannot be transgressed - and which are said to be divine in this. I understand that Greta Thunberg can shock. Her uncompromising and therefore rigid attitude can give the impression that she is stubborn. On the contrary, I believe that she has principles and I thank her for being intractable, because by not letting herself be impressed by the media system which infantilized her ancestors, she has succeeded in mobilizing millions of young people, who recognize themselves in it. I think she is telling the truth in the way of what the Greeks called parrhesia. She is out of step with a system which, as everyone knows, is going into the wall. She is accused of all the evils because in reality it challenges us all by this position of absolute radicalism which forces us to take our place - not in front of it, but in terms of our responsibilities in the Anthropocene.
Marianne : You make a link between Kant's "sapere aude"("Dare to know!"), The Enlightenment motto, and "How dare you?" by Greta Thunberg. The Kantian imperative is therefore replaced by a question which is in reality an indictment. To what extent does Greta Thunberg invite us to think in order to heal the world?
Bernard Stiegler :Kant posited that the spirit of the Enlightenment was to allow and encourage everyone to cultivate their reason. However, the Enlightenment is the prerequisite leading to industrialization and modernization: it is the integration of mathematics and physics in economic production, which will generate the Anthropocene. The "How dare you?" by Greta Thunberg is a questioning of the Enlightenment. I am not an anti-modern, but I am not a modernist either. This questioning is the symptom of a very great crisis of knowledge. The question that organizes my book is: does science heal? Today, most citizens consider that science is no longer at our service, but at the service of shareholders' profit. This trend can be seen in the scientific policies of universities and large scientific establishments (CNRS, INSERM, etc.). As a scientist, you are judged today based on your ability to serve industrial groups in economic warfare. I admire the achievements of the industry, I work with engineers and industrialists, but they should not be in the driver's seat on these always short-term questions. Science and infinitely long-termist - radical, if you will.
Marianne :From a media point of view, Greta Thunberg was the subject in France of an "unworthy" and "ignominious" campaign, you say. How do you explain the attitude towards her of a Luc Ferry, a Laurent Alexandre or even a Michel Onfray? Knowing that Greta Thunberg is only saying one thing: listen to the scientists at the IPCC.
Bernard Stiegler :Usually, the commercial press is used to doing Hollywood, featuring good guys and bad guys. The roles then become more and more caricatured. We reduce Greta Thunberg to a caricature and we oppose him other caricatures who wallow shamefully in this show. The extraordinary aggressiveness towards her is proportional to the gravity of the accusation she launches. Some people feel deeply affected in their certainties and their way of life. Luc Ferry, who was able to write more or less worthy things in the past, is no more than a pitiful chronicler. Laurent Alexandre is a very ambiguous businessman, an expert in story-telling, who tries to penetrate transhumanist ideas in France, and he tries to kill Greta Thunberg, to feed on her - like the vultures eating Polinyce's body.
Marianne :More generally, what do you think of the theses of the "cornucopians", those who believe that technology will allow man to provide for his material needs eternally?
Bernard Stiegler :This theory is based on the views of Extropians, a movement founded by Max More, who believe that one can increase man indefinitely. They are named so because they claim that man is capable of eliminating entropy, which is totally unscientific. These people can make this talk because the entropy theory, which is essential, is still not taught in high school and college, which is scandalous. Why ? Because the current economy is based on the exploitation of entropy. Many people build on these questions a story-telling, a very high level marketing, such as Elon Musk who claimed a few years ago to set out to conquer the solar system and who is today in depression (without "ground segment" there is no interplanetary travel possible). Entropy is insurmountable, as is mortality. The biosphere imposes limits.
Marianne :You take a long look at an article by Jean-Baptiste Malet in Le Monde diplomatique which calls into question the reality of the Anthropocene era to prefer the thesis of the Capitalocene age. What is it that you find fault with this approach, which is largely based on the work of Jason Moore?
Bernard Stiegler :Jason Moore's Capitalocene thesis is very interesting, but I think it is irresponsibly exploited by Jean-Baptiste Malet when he concludes his article by saying that another collapse is possible, that of capitalism. We must listen to scientists, as Greta Thunberg says: 95% of the world scientific community recognizes itself in the work of the IPCC. What does the IPCC say? That a change of trajectory is necessary to avoid the shift , that is to say the moment when a chaotic fork appears and where we lose control. The scientific consensus estimates that the shift is around 2050, and that the condition to avoid it is to act immediately . That's what Thunberg says, and she's right.
What exactly do we mean by Anthropocene? A period in which man becomes a major disruptive power and therefore alone has the capacity to modify the major balances of the biosphere. To position oneself on this question, it is in my opinion essential to have studied the work of the biologist and mathematician Alfred Lotka who maintains since 1945 that man is a singular being in that he produces "exosomatic" organs. that is to say, artificial organs, and with these, it is disrupting the natural order.
To argue, as Malet does, that we are in the Capitalocene age and that it is enough to overthrow capitalism for things to improve, is to make a serious mistake. It's urgent. The fall of capitalism will not take place within the imposed timescales. And if the drop results in diets like the XXth century has known, it is not worth it! In reality, behind the Anthropocene, it is a fundamental questioning of the epistemology of all sciences that is being asked.
This book review by Leonid Bilmes of Bernard Stiegler's "The Age of Disruption" articulates just how relevant his work is to framing action now and in the near future in the context of the present climate crisis.
WHY IS POLITICAL HOPE becoming defunct in so many young people today? This is the question Bernard Stiegler poses in his new book, The Age of Disruption: Technology and Madness in Computational Capitalism. Early on, he quotes the words of a teenager whose nihilistic outlook, he claims, is representative of the zeitgeist of contemporary youth:
When I talk to young people of my generation […] they all say the same thing: we no longer have the dream of starting a family, of having children, or a trade, or ideals. […] All that is over and done with, because we’re sure that we will be the last generation, or one of the last, before the end.
These despairing words serve as a leitmotif to Stiegler’s fervent deconstruction of economic, political, and spiritual malaise. He dauntingly refers to the present’s “absence of epoch” — i.e., today’s lack of any significant political ethos. This “absence of epoch,” during a time of critical ecological changes, is why so many have been left disaffected, fast becoming (in Stiegler’s heavily italicized prose) “mad with sadness, mad with grief, mad with rage.”
Stiegler’s voice is by turns imperious, inveighing, confessional, and compassionate. His philosophical analysis — when the rhetorical wind in its sails slackens a bit — is intricate and brilliant, although grasping it requires some knowledge of the rhizomatic conceptual network that supports his argument, its tendrils often recognizable precisely by their italicization.
Stiegler’s origins as a philosopher perhaps explain his sense of urgency. In 1976, he tried to hold up a bank in Toulouse — his fourth bank robbery — only to be arrested, tried, and (thanks to a good lawyer) given a five-year prison sentence. It was during this incarceration that the erstwhile-jazz-café-owner-turned-bank-robber discovered philosophy, subjecting himself to a strict daily regimen of reading and writing (some of his notes from that period continue to feed into his books to this day). Following his release from prison, Stiegler, with the support of Jacques Derrida, began to teach philosophy. Thus was launched the improbable career of one of the most influential European philosophers of the 21st century.
Stiegler recounted his prison experience in his 2009 book Acting Out, and in Age of Disruption he extensively revisits this conversion narrative: an upward climb from physical and intellectual imprisonment toward liberation. Quoting a beautiful phrase from a letter by Malcolm X (who had a similar conversion experience), Stiegler observes that prison gave him the “gift of Time.” He describes a typical day of study in his cell: “In the morning I read, after a poem by Mallarmé, Husserl’s Logical Investigations, and, in the evening, Proust’s In Search of Lost Time.” The following morning, “after a cup of Ricoré chicory coffee and a Gauloises cigarette,” he would “prepare a synthesis” of what he’d read the day before. It was this monastic, autodidactic program that enabled Stiegler to reach perhaps his most crucial insight — the discovery that “reading [is] an interpretation by the reader of his or her own memory through the interpretation of the text that he or she had read.”
That’s a simple enough idea on the surface, but it conceals depths of implications. To understand why, we need to consider Stiegler’s theorization of technics. In his ongoing project Technics and Time (1994–), Stiegler lays the foundations for all the philosophical books he has produced. He posits that technics (technology conceived in the broadest terms, encompassing writing, art, clothing, tools, and machines) is co-originary with Homo sapiens: what distinguishes our species from other life forms is our reliance on constructed prostheses for survival. Drawing on the work of paleoanthropologist André Leroi-Gourhan and historian of technology Bertrand Gille, Stiegler argues that tools are the material embodiments of past experience. Building on this insight, and incorporating the perspectives of Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida, as well as the views of influential but little-known French philosopher Gilbert Simondon, Stiegler claims that technics plays a constitutive role in the formation of subjectivity, opening up — and, if badly used, also closing down — horizons of possibility for individual and collective realization.
The role of technics in human life is cemented by what Stiegler calls “tertiary” memory. Here we return to the intimate kinship between the interpretation of a text and an interpretation of one’s own memory, Stiegler’s major insight from his time in prison. Technics, which makes these forms of interpretation possible in the first place, acts as a “third” memory for human beings because it encodes the past experience of others, and thus always remains external to the subject. Nonhuman life-forms have access to two kinds of memories: “primary memory,” or genetic information inscribed in the DNA code, and “secondary memory,” which is the acquired memory of an organism with a sufficiently complex nervous system. While secondary memory accumulates over an organism’s lifespan, it disappears with the death of the individual. Human beings, uniquely among higher life-forms, are prosthetic organisms that pass on their accumulated experience by means of exosomatic or “tertiary” memory, in the form of tools (especially written language).
So how does all of this relate to our present politico-economic malaise? Stiegler believes that digital technology, in the hands of technocrats whom he calls “the new barbarians,” now threatens to dominate our tertiary memory, leading to a historically unprecedented “proletarianization” of the human mind. For Stiegler, the stakes today are much higher than they were for Marx, from whom this term is derived: proletarianization is no longer a threat posed to physical labor but to the human spirit itself. This threat is realized as a collective loss of hope.
A key text for Stiegler is, predictably, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), which has long remained the flagship of critical theory. Adorno and Horkheimer anticipated a rise in cultural “barbarism,” spearheaded by Hollywood cinema and the so-called “culture industry.” Today, billions of people are reliant on information technology that reduces culture to bite-sized chunks (the thought-span of a Tweet), and which is used primarily for marketing purposes by a monopoly of tech giants. Stiegler believes that such a situation threatens to dissolve the social bonds that embed individuals in collective forms of life. Most worrying of all, social networks are becoming the main source of cultural memory for many people today; Facebook’s “Post a Memory” feature, for instance, is one superficial manifestation of the deeper long-term impact on subjectivity and identity.
The Age of Disruption attempts to unearth the historical and philosophical roots of the current politico-economic sickness. Drawing on Peter Sloterdijk’s In the World Interior of Capital (2013), Stiegler argues that the risk-taking ethos of modern capitalism has created a generalized spirit of “disinhibition” that is a threat to law, morality, and governance. It is, in essence, a secular nihilism that Sloterdijk found powerfully expressed in the “rational madness” of Raskolnikov in Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, who is willing to sacrifice others in the pursuit of his own greatness. Closer to home, we can glimpse the same overweening sociopathy in the likes of Bernie Madoff, Jordan Belfort, and the crews of speculators who gave us the 2008 global market meltdown. This nihilistic disinhibition is exacerbated by a second form of secular madness Stiegler traces: the conviction that rationality essentially consists of mathematical calculation. Ever since Descartes and Leibniz, European civilization has been driven by a dream of a mathesis universalis, the achievement of a hypothetical system of thought and language modeled solely on mathematics. If this dream sounds like ripe material for dystopian fiction, it is, for Stiegler, our very own present.
The above summary cannot do full justice to Stiegler’s painstaking deconstruction of the roots of “computational capitalism” — a phrase he uses to join these two interrelated forms of rationalized madness. Stiegler firmly believes that a distinction must always be upheld between “authentic thinking” and “computational cognitivism” and that today’s crisis lies in confusing the latter for the former: we have entrusted our rationality to computational technologies that now dominate everyday life, which is increasingly dependent on glowing screens driven by algorithmic anticipations of their users’ preferences and even writing habits (e.g., the repugnantly named “predictive text” feature that awaits typed-in characters to regurgitate stock phrases). Stiegler insists, however, that authentic thinking and calculative thinking are not mutually exclusive; indeed, mathematical rationality is one of our major prosthetic extensions. But the catastrophe of the digital age is that the global economy, powered by computational “reason” and driven by profit, is foreclosing the horizon of independent reflection for the majority of our species, in so far as we remain unaware that our thinking is so often being constricted by lines of code intended to anticipate, and actively shape, consciousness itself. As Stiegler’s translator, the philosopher and filmmaker Daniel Ross, puts it, our so-called “post-truth” age is one “where calculation becomes so hegemonic as to threaten the possibility of thinking itself.” [1]
One should not be misled into thinking that Stiegler is a philosophical Luddite who seeks to do away with digital technology. Far from it: the digital, like any technology, is double-edged, and is useful so long as it remains merely a tool. While his book does not propose practical solutions (Stiegler promises to address some of these in a future work), it does seek to inspire a collective realization of the extent to which future memory is currently being shaped by algorithmically determined and profit-driven information flow. Stiegler asks us to consider how much of our lives we wish to delegate to market-tailored computational rationality.
Atypically for a writer of contemporary philosophy, Stiegler does not shirk from sharing his personal struggles: obsessions with death, suicidal impulses, fears of madness. In this regard, his style closely resembles the heavily italicized prose of Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard. The following passage is from the opening of Bernhard’s 1982 novel, Wittgenstein’s Nephew (trans. David McLintock):
In 1967, one of the indefatigable nursing sisters in the Hermann Pavilion on the Baumgartnerhöhe placed on my bed a copy of my newly published book Gargoyles […] but I had not the strength to pick it up, having just come round from a general anesthesia lasting several hours, during which the doctors had cut open my neck and removed a fist-sized tumor from my thorax. […] I developed a moonlike face, just as the doctors had intended. During the ward round they would comment on my moon face in their witty fashion, which made even me laugh, although they had told me themselves that I had only weeks, or at best months, to live.
And the following is one of several confessional admissions grafted onto the rhizomatic network of Stiegler’s philosophical argument:
At the beginning of August [2014], finding myself increasingly obsessed by death, that is, by what I projected as being my death, and by the latter as my deliverance, waking up every night haunted by this suicidal urge, I called, somewhat at random, this clinic where I had received treatment. I asked for urgent help, seeming, so I thought, to be suffering from some kind of early dementia …
Although the Bernhard passage comes from a novel, albeit an autobiographical one, the comparison is suggestive. Stiegler confesses to having tried and failed to write fiction during the first months of his incarceration, producing “countless pages now lost, to tell a story that never took any form other than the same fruitless effort to write.” A sentence like this would be right at home in a Bernhard novel, and had Stiegler been successful as a novelist, he might well have written the sort of tortured monologue of obsessive phrases and motifs at which Bernhard excelled. Indeed, Stiegler is drawn toward this kind of frantic repetitiveness even in his philosophical exposition: the Arabic invocation, “Inshallah,” is used several times, and words and phrases such as “absence of epoch,” “madness,” “barbarians,” et cetera, recur almost like chants. But this comparison also signals a key difference in intention: while both writers often turn to thoughts of death and endings, Stiegler, despite his proclivity for portentous clauses in italics, remains committed to emerging out of (in his words) “the mortiferous energy of despair that we are accumulating everywhere.” The same cannot be said of Bernhard, whose outlook was willfully mortiferous, as he might have put it.
Despite his urgent talk of apocalypse, chaos, and epochal endings, despite the rampant italics of philosophical admonishment, his arguments are enunciated by a humane and compassionate voice. As he confesses, he often dictates his thoughts while cycling in the countryside, and his wife, Caroline Stiegler, subsequently transcribes the recordings (I can only assume all those italics are audible). Stiegler’s traversal of the philosophical genealogies of Western rationality and madness, and his urge to rethink their metastable composition in an all-too-rational digital world devoted to the algorithmic reduction of all aspects of existence, allows the presently unhoped-for to at least become thinkable. What Stiegler hopes for most of all is to get his readers to “dream again” — to become politically hopeful (without the scare quotes). The last words may be left to Heraclitus: “One who does not hope for the un-hoped for will not find it: it is undiscoverable so long as it is inaccessible.”
[1] Ross has translated several of Stiegler’s more recent books, and his introduction to an earlier collection of essays, The Neganthropocene (2018), is outstandingly lucid and highly recommended for readers wishing to get a firmer grasp of the context and philosophical lineage of Stiegler’s thought. It is freely available through the Open Humanities Press. His engrossing documentary, The Ister (2004), co-directed with David Barison, features extensive interviews with Stiegler introducing his key philosophical ideas.
Speaking truth to power In 2020 "THE YEAR OF TRUTH" it is worth quoting again from the Marianne interview with Bernard Stiegler(see above)where he says of Greta Thunberg: "I think she is telling the truth in the way of what the Greeks called parrhesia. She is out of step with a system which, as everyone knows, is going into the wall. She is accused of all the evils because in reality it challenges us all by this position of absolute radicalism which forces us to take our place - not in front of it, but in terms of our responsibilities in the Anthropocene.
In rhetoric,parrhesia is a figure of speech described as: "to speak candidly or to ask forgiveness for so speaking". Parrhesia has a particular value and quality in the work and thinking of Michel Foucault. This Ancient Greek word has three different forms, as related by Michel Foucault. Parrhesia is a noun, meaning "free speech". Parrhesiazomai is a verb, meaning "to use parrhesia". Parrhesiastes is a noun, meaning one who uses parrhesia, for example "one who speaks the truth to power". The term parrhesia is borrowed from the Greek παρρησία parrhēsía(πᾶν "all" and ῥῆσις "utterance, speech") meaning literally "to speak everything" and by extension "to speak freely", "to speak boldly", or "boldness". The term first appears in Greek literature, when used by Euripides, and may be found in ancient Greek texts from the end of the fifth century B.C. until the fifth century A.D. It implies not only freedom of speech, but the obligation to speak the truth for the common good, even at personal risk.
Parrhesia was a fundamental component of the democracy of Classical Athens. In assemblies and the courts Athenians were free to say almost anything, and in the theatre, playwrights such as Aristophanes made full use of the right to ridicule whomever they chose. Elsewhere there were limits to what might be said; freedom to discuss politics, morals, religion, or to criticize people would depend on context: by whom it was made, and when, and how, and where.
If one was seen as immoral, or held views that went contrary to popular opinion, then there were great risks involved in making use of such an unbridled freedom of speech, as Socrates found out when he was sentenced to death for not adoring deities worshiped by the Athenians and for corrupting the young.
Michel Foucault developed the concept of parrhesia as a mode of discourse in which one speaks openly and truthfully about one's opinions and ideas without the use of rhetoric, manipulation, or generalization. Foucault's use of parrhesia, he tells us, is troubled by our modern day Cartesian model of evidential necessity. For Descartes, truth is the same as the undeniable. Whatever can be doubted must be, and, thus, speech that is not examined or criticized does not necessarily have a valid relation to truth.
There are several conditions upon which the traditional Ancient Greek notion of parrhesia relies. One who uses parrhesia is only recognized as doing so if holding a credible relationship to the truth, if one serves as critic to either oneself or popular opinion or culture, if the revelation of this truth places one in a position of danger and one persists in speaking the truth, nevertheless, as one feels it is a moral, social, and/or political obligation. Further, in a public situation, a user of parrhesia must be in a social position less empowered than those to whom this truth is revealed.
Foucault (1983) sums up the Ancient Greek concept of parrhesia as such:
So you see, the parrhesiastes is someone who takes a risk. Of course, this risk is not always a risk of life. When, for example, you see a friend doing something wrong and you risk incurring his anger by telling him he is wrong, you are acting as a parrhesiastes. In such a case, you do not risk your life, but you may hurt him by your remarks, and your friendship may consequently suffer for it. If, in a political debate, an orator risks losing his popularity because his opinions are contrary to the majority's opinion, or his opinions may usher in a political scandal, he uses parrhesia. Parrhesia, then, is linked to courage in the face of danger: it demands the courage to speak the truth in spite of some danger. And in its extreme form, telling the truth takes place in the "game" of life or death.
and
To summarize the foregoing, parrhesia is a kind of verbal activity where the speaker has a specific relation to truth through frankness, a certain relationship to his own life through danger, a certain type of relation to himself or other people through criticism (self-criticism or criticism of other people), and a specific relation to moral law through freedom and duty. More precisely, parrhesia is a verbal activity in which a speaker expresses his personal relationship to truth, and risks his life because he recognizes truth-telling as a duty to improve or help other people (as well as himself). In parrhesia, the speaker uses his freedom and chooses frankness instead of persuasion, truth instead of falsehood or silence, the risk of death instead of life and security, criticism instead of flattery, and moral duty instead of self-interest and moral apathy.
Foucault (1984) sums up that:
The Parrhesiastes is the person who says everything. Thus, as an example, in his discourse "On the Embassy," Demosthenes says: It is necessary to speak with parrhesia, without holding back at anything without concealing anything. Similarly, in the "First Philippic," he takes up exactly the same term and says: I will tell you what I think without concealing anything.
Bernard Stiegler says; “reading [is] an interpretation by the reader of his or her own memory through the interpretation of the text that he or she had read.”
For Re:LODE Radio this revelation, or discovery, of Bernard Stiegler, and quoted extensively in relation to his work applies to the information that frames the LODE Zone Line. Re:LODE Radio and Re:LODE Cargo of Questions are intended to create a psycho-geographical space for both the reader and the writer (along with the righter of wrongs), the looker and the listener, and speaker too. In this vein, in this way, along this LODE Line, we return, in the footsteps of others, to Death Valley:
Editor’s Note:Michel Foucault (born Paul-Michel Foucault in 1926) was one of the central thinkers of the latter half of the twentieth century. Neither a traditional philosopher nor a trained historian, Foucault examined the intersection of truth and history through the specific historical dynamics of power.
In France, Foucault was a major figure in structuralist thinking of the 1960s and in the years that followed. However, in the United States, especially in popular culture, Foucault is often thought of as an inciter of the “French theory” movement that swept through American universities in the 1970s and 1980s. Often controversial, Foucault’s analyses of the uses of power in society, as well as his concerns with sexuality, bodies, and norms have been pivotal in the development of contemporary feminist and queer theory.
One early follower of Foucault’s thinking was Simeon Wade, assistant professor of history at Claremont Graduate School. A native of Texas, Wade moved to California in 1972 after earning his Ph.D. in the intellectual history of Western civilization from Harvard in 1970. In 1975, Foucault was invited to California to teach a seminar at the University of California, Berkeley. Following a lecture, Wade and his partner, musician Michael Stoneman, invited Foucault to accompany them on a road trip to Death Valley. After some persuasion, Foucault agreed. The memorable trip occurred two weeks later. This interview was conducted by Heather Dundas on 27 May 2017, and has been edited for length, clarity, and historical accuracy.
Boom: What can you tell us about the above photo?
Simeon Wade: I snapped the above photo with my Leica camera, June 1975. The photograph features the Panamint Mountains, the salt flats of Death Valley, and the frozen dunes at Zabriskie Point. In the foreground, two figures: Michel Foucault, in the white turtleneck, his priestly attire, and Michael Stoneman, who was my life partner.
Boom: How did you end up in Death Valley with Michel Foucault?
Simeon Wade: I was performing an experiment. I wanted to see [how] one of the greatest minds in history would be affected by an experience he had never had before: imbibing a suitable dose of clinical LSD in a desert setting of great magnificence, and then adding to that various kinds of entertainment. We were in Death Valley for two days and one night. And this is one of the spots we visited during this trip.
50 years on . . .
Revisiting Zabriskie Point in Death Valley 50 years on from the making of Zabriskie Point, the title of the 1970 film directed by Michelangelo Antonionithe echoes between then and now, of the Black Panthers and the Black Lives Matter movement, of the psycho-pathological denial of systemic racism, social injustice, inequality, police brutality and the suppression of dissent.
. . . the temperature itself has become a warning to the whole world of the future habitability of the planet for human survival!
In a room at a university campus in 1970, white and black students argue about an impending student strike. Kathleen Cleaver, a member of the Black Panthers and wife of Eldridge Cleaver, appears in a documentary-like student meeting scene at the opening of the film.
The character Mark leaves the meeting after saying he is "willing to die, but not of boredom" for the cause, which draws criticism from the young white radicals.
Mark goes to a bloody campus confrontation between students and police. Some students are tear-gassed and at least one is shot. As Mark reaches for a gun in his boot, a Los Angeles policeman is seen being fatally shot, although it is unclear by whom.
The atmosphere of police oppression that Antonioni achieves in this first part of the film is redolent of the events that had previously taken place the year before at UC Berkeley with the student protests associated with the campaign to create Peoples Park. In particular the event that came to be known as "Bloody Thursday" (May 15, 1969) when Alameda County Sheriff's deputies used shotguns to fire at people sitting on the roof at the Telegraph Repertory Cinema. James Rector was visiting friends in Berkeley and watching from the roof of Granma Books when he was shot by police; he died on May 19. The Alamada County Coroner's report listed cause of death as "shock and hemorrhage due to multiple shotgun wounds and perforation of the aorta." The buckshot is the same size as a .38 caliber bullet.
Governor Reagan conceded that Rector was probably shot by police but justified the bearing of firearms, saying that "it's very naive to assume that you should send anyone into that kind of conflict with a flyswatter. He's got to have an appropriate weapon." The University of California Police Department (UCPD) said Rector threw steel rebar down onto the police; however, Time magazine claimed that Rector was a bystander, not a protester. Carpenter Alan Blanchard was permanently blinded by a load of birdshot fired directly into his face.
At least 128 Berkeley residents were admitted to local hospitals for head trauma, shotgun wounds, and other serious injuries inflicted by police. The actual number of seriously wounded was likely much higher, because many of the injured did not seek treatment at local hospitals to avoid being arrested. Local medical students and interns organized volunteer mobile first-aid teams to help protesters and bystanders injured by buckshot, nightsticks, or tear gas. One local hospital reported two students wounded with large caliber rifles as well.
News reports at the time of the shooting indicated that 50 were injured, including five police officers. Some local hospital logs indicate that 19 police officers or Alameda County Sheriff's deputies were treated for minor injuries; none were hospitalized.
In an address before the California Council of Growers on April 7, 1970, almost a year after "Bloody Thursday" and the death of James Rector, Governor Reagan defended his decision to use the California National Guard to quell Berkeley protests:
"If it takes a bloodbath, let's get it over with. No more appeasement."
Berkeley Tribe editors decided to issue this quote in large type on the cover of its next edition.
Mark flees the campus and rides a city bus to suburban Hawthorne, California where, after failing to buy a sandwich on credit from a local blue-collar delicatessen, he walks to Hawthorne Municipal Airport, steals a small Cessna 210 aircraft and flies into the desert.
Meanwhile, the character Daria, is driving across the desert towards Phoenix in a 1950s-era Buick automobile to meet her boss Lee, who may or may not also be her lover. Along the way Daria is searching for a man who works with "emotionally disturbed" children from Los Angeles. She finds the young boys near a roadhouse in the Mojave desert but they tease, taunt, and grab at her, asking for "a piece of ass", to which she asks in reply, "Are you sure you'd know what to do with it?"
Daria leaves them quickly and drives away in her car. Later, while filling the Buick's radiator with water, she is seen from the air by Mark flying above in the stolen Cessna aircraft. He buzzes her car, in an echo of Hitchcock's North by Northwest cropduster scene, and then flies very low over her as she lies face down in the sand. He throws a T-shirt out of the window of the aircraft for her to pick up. Daria's emotions quickly transition from being understandably upset and confused, to curiousity and she ends up smiling by the end of this sequence.
Mark and Daria then meet at the desert shack of an old man, where Mark asks her for a lift so he can buy gasoline for the aircraft. The two then drive to Zabriskie Point, where they make love. Meanwhile the landscape of geological formations seems to come alive in an hallucinatory orgy.
The scene was filmed with dust-covered and highly choreographed actors from The Open Theatre. In a campaign of political harassment, the United States Department of Justice investigated whether this violated the Mann Act – which forbade the taking of women across state lines for sexual purposes – however, no sex was filmed and no state lines were crossed, given that Death Valley is in California. State officials in Sacramento, no doubt with the blessing of California Governor Ronald Reagan, were also ready to charge Antonioni with "immoral conduct, prostitution or debauchery" if he staged an actual orgy. FBI officials investigated the film because of Antonioni's political views, and officials in Oakland, California accused the director of staging a real riot for a scene early in the film. Returning to the stolen aircraft, Mark and Daria paint it with politically-charged slogans and psychedelic colours. Daria pleads with Mark to travel with her and leave the aircraft but Mark is intent on returning and taking the risks that it involves. He flies back to Los Angeles and lands the plane at the airport in Hawthorne. The police, accompanied by some radio and television reporters, are waiting for him, and patrol cars chase the aircraft down the runway. Instead of stopping, Mark tries to turn the taxiing aircraft around across the grass but is shot to death by one of the policemen. Daria learns about Mark's death on the car radio. She drives to Lee's lavish desert home, set high on a rock outcropping near Phoenix, Arizona, where she sees three affluent women sunning themselves and chatting by the swimming pool. She grieves for Mark by drenching herself in the house's architectural waterfall. Lee is deeply immersed in a business meeting having to do with the complex and financially risky Sunny Dunes development. Taking a break, he spots Daria in the house and happily greets her. She goes downstairs alone and finds the guest room that has been set aside for her but after briefly opening the door, she shuts it again. Seeing a young Native American housekeeper in the hallway, Daria leaves silently. She drives off but stops to get out of the car and look back at the house, her own imagination seeing it, and the contents of a luxuriously furnished and high maintenance materialist consumer lifestyle, repeatedly blown apart, floating in billowing clouds of orange flame, while household items seem to float in space. This cinematic choreography of destruction, rendered in high definition slow motion photography, is transformed by Pink Floyd's experimental musical score. Daria leaves this way of life and its materialism and drives into the sunset.
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